African Baobab: Prof. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
By Writer JaGucha
Prof. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has laid down his pen.
Yesterday, Africa lost one of its boldest literary warriors, and the world grew quieter in the absence of his voice. But even in death, Ngũgĩ does not disappear—he multiplies. His words remain woven into our conscience, his ideas inscribed in the marrow of our struggles, his legacy growing in the soil he so patiently turned with truth, language, and resistance.
He began with ink-stained fingers and a fire in his chest—young James Ngugi, scribbling against the grain of empire. From dusty classrooms to international stages, from Kamĩrĩĩthũ to Kamĩtĩ, he lived and wrote with an unwavering defiance, imagining a Kenya—and an Africa—that could speak, think, and liberate itself in its own words.
He taught us that language is not neutral. That to write in Gĩkũyũ was not a retreat, but an uprising. That memory and history do not live in colonial archives, but in the tongues of grandmothers, in the riddles of children, in the stories we were once told to forget.
And even when exiled, even when imprisoned, Ngũgĩ never surrendered the fight. His novels—Weep Not, Child, The River Between, A Grain of Wheat, Devil on the Cross, and so many others—were not just books. They were blueprints for intellectual resistance—lighthouses for those of us trying to find our way home through a storm of erasure.
Yesterday, a baobab fell. But even as we mourn, we also plant.
Because Ngũgĩ was never just one man.
He was a multitude. A library. A vision. A beginning.
Now, it is our turn to grow.
We must grow in the soil he tilled.
Grow stories that heal and unsettle.
Grow languages that liberate our tongues and our minds.
Grow courage that remembers him, not with silence, but with action.
Go well, Prof. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o—living griot turned ancestor, revolutionary Sower of words. You have gone to join the ancestral council of thought, where Achebe, Biko, and Sankara await. But your voice stays here with us, and it will not be silenced.
Your tribute grows with every page we write.
Writer JaGucha
African Baobab: Prof. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
