Kenyan Writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o Passes Away at 87, Perennial Nobel Prize Contender

Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, a frequent contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, passed away this Wednesday at the age of 87. His career spanned over six decades, establishing him as one of the most distinguished African and international authors.

"I am who I am because of him in many ways," expressed his son Mukoma Wa Ngugi, also a writer. "I love him; I don't know what tomorrow holds without him," he shared on social media while announcing his father's death.

Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's prolific body of work, as one of the greatest African voices of the last century, includes acclaimed publications ranging from novels like 'The River Between' (1965) and 'The Perfect Nine' (2018) —which made him the first person nominated as both a writer and translator for the International Booker Prize— to numerous short stories, essays such as 'Decolonising the Mind' (1986), and even theatre.

It was on stage that his play 'I Will Marry When I Want' (1977) made him a target of persecution by former Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi (1979-2002) and a victim of numerous human rights violations. Indeed, during his long months of imprisonment without trial, he wrote 'Devil on the Cross' (1980) on toilet paper, considered the first modern novel in Kikuyu, his native language.

A champion of the fight for marginalised languages, Ngugi wrote in English, Kenya's colonial language, until 1970, when he began writing in his native tongue and changed his Anglophone name, James Ngugi, to Ngugi Wa Thiong'o.

"There are two types of languages: those that marginalise and those that are marginalised," he explained in 2017 at the start of his lecture at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), using examples such as Native Americans, the Saami population in Norway, or the Japanese colonisation of Korea.

"These are not isolated cases," he noted, "there is always a linguistic imbalance at the base, which is not natural but caused by humans," lamenting that the imposed language is also associated with negative values such as oppression and violence.