Kinshasa, May 29th, 2025 (CPA) – Tributes have been paid to Kenyan writer and thinker Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who died on Wednesday at the age of 87, for his literary contributions and efforts on behalf of Africa. Ngugi wa Thiong’o was honored on Thursday by writers from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
‘Ngugi Wa Thiong’o deserves great praise for his immense literary legacy. Thanks to the magic of translation, his books, most of which were written in Gikuyu, have been read all over the world and have had a huge audience’, said writer Yann Kheme. ‘(…) he has remained consistent in his ideological stances, which he has taken on board and asserted. And that is his greatest prize ever: to make his culture known, to sell it through his culture’, he added. Among his most vivid memories, he recalls, ‘I was a student when I discovered old Ngugi, thanks to the cooperation and cultural action department of the French embassy in the DRC, Sesam (…) Then my professor of African literature told me about his struggle and his presence at the Makerere Conference in 1962, and I got to know the man better through my personal research’.
For his part, Richard Ali, head of the Wallonie-Bruxelles library, suggested that the late Ngugi Wa Thiong’o was undoubtedly one of his teachers. ‘The death of another patriarch, a guide for me. I never hesitated to call him ‘master’ for my approach to writing in the national language, Lingala to be precise (…) Thank you for having paved the way. Thank you for inspiring us. Thank you for everything,’ he said. ‘One of the most brilliant thinkers of post-colonial Africa. While we are still mourning the loss of Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, another light is going out, leaving a huge void in the African intellectual landscape. Today, Africa has lost one of its most powerful voices, a man who devoted his life to liberating the African spirit’, lamented writer Gasmil Mvuyi.
Born in 1938 in a village north-west of Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, then under British occupation, James Thiong’o Ngugi was a post-colonial novelist and theorist. He was the author of a major essay published in 1986, ‘Decolonizing the Mind’, a veritable plea in favor of African languages and cultures, analyzing the violence and ‘mental enslavement’ represented by the imposition of European languages in colonial societies. In his novels and theatre, Ngugi Wa Thiongo develops a virulent critique of the post-independence bourgeoisie and the oppression of the African working classes. Influenced by Marxist thought and Franz Fanon, Ngugi was also a thinker on pan-Africanism and African emancipation. CPA/