Most of the obituaries that I’ve read so far about the great African writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o who died on May 28, 2025 at the age of 87 praise his many books but none has pointed out that he was a fearless critic of capitalism and neocolonialism.
I personally believe that’s the primary reason why he was never awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. He was also a critic of the destruction caused by European imperialism on African languages and culture.
Ngugi’s many excellent books include The River Between, Weep Not Child, and Detained. The one that stands out most to me is Decolonizing the Mind. Ngugi was dedicated, life-long, to contributing to the healing of the damages inflicted on the African mind by colonialism, imperialism, neocolonialism, and White Supremacy. Decolonizing the Mind is a critique of Eurocentrism and the damage inflicted on Africans and its enduring legacy.
Healing the legacies of Eurocentrism is foundational and prerequisite to African development. How can we develop when we don’t have a vision of the Africa we want to create in the post-colonial era?
Ngugi, Okot p’Bitek, Amilcar Cabral — author of Return to The Source — and other luminaries spoke of the importance of reconnecting to our African culture and history. Ngugi wrote the introduction to p’Bitek’s book Africa’s Cultural Revolution.
Fanon warned in Wretched of the Earth: “If we want to transform Africa into a new Europe, America into a new Europe, then let us entrust the destinies of our countries to Europeans. They will do a better job than the best of us. But if we want humanity to take one step forward, if we want to take it to another level than the one where Europe has placed it, then we must innovate, we must be pioneers.”
Yet, trying to recreate Africa into Europe is precisely what most of the African misruling class embarked on in the post-colonial era. They continued to ape Europe and Europeans. China has proven conclusively that you do not need to ape Europeans to develop. China which was once dominated, exploited, and invaded by Britain, the United States, and other nations is today a preeminent global power.
Unlike the African misrulers, the Chinese leadership embraced the country’s culture and history; it has not tried to run away from it. In 1960, China’s per capita income, going by World Bank data was $90, while Ghana’s was about $180, double that of China. Today, China’s per capita income is $12,615 or 5.6 times that of Ghana’s $2,260.3
Ngugi was a critic of the destruction caused by Western capitalism in Africa. He believed in class struggle. He denounced the African elite that served the interests of multinationals at the expense of their own citizens.
After the ruling class enclosed the land domestically in Britain and created the mass of impoverished peasants whose labor was exploited, they duplicated this model globally including in Kenya. Africans were displaced from their land and through taxation converted into wage laborers for imperialist European robbers who now became their landlords in what they called the White Highlands.
The land theft spawned the liberation struggle by the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA) in the 1950s whom the British demonized as the “Mau Mau.” The British and American press characterized the fighters as godless savages under the spell of witchcraft. The British created concentration camps where thousands of Kenyans died from torture and unleashed brutal scorched earth bombings in the forests where the fighters hid. The KLFA army leader, Dedan Kimathi, was captured and executed in 1957. Their sacrifices led to Kenya’s independence in 1963.
While most of the Kenyan elite shunned the KLFA, with their characteristic locks, Ngugi celebrated them in his writings and commentary in the post-colonial era.
When European nations divided up the African continent in 1884 at the Berlin Conference, they set up colonial regimes that imposed their dictatorships, usurping Africa’s indigenous governance systems. They also hijacked Africa’s autonomous economic systems. Africans became the source of cheap labor and for resources — mineral and agricultural — for Europe’s factories. Africans were also forced to become consumers of Europe’s manufactures.
These economic structures have never changed. There is not a single industrialized African country today. All of them continue to produce cheap raw materials for Europe’s factories — and for the United States, Japan and China — while consuming manufactures at tremendous costs.
This is the economic dependency — supervised by local agents of imperialism in the forms of African presidents — that Ngugi fought in Kenya and throughout Africa.
Unfortunately Kenya became the typical neocolonial state under President Jomo Kenyatta. Not surprisingly, the mentally-Europeanized Kenyan ruling class viewed Ngugi with suspicion or saw him as an outright enemy, especially as he embraced and celebrated the legacy of the KLFA in his writings. Ngugi worked to uplift the consciousness of the Kenyan masses through community theater. He championed African languages and starting in the late 1970s he himself wrote only in Gikuyu, his indigenous language. His works were subsequently translated.
The African ruling elite — and their foreign masters — live in fear of popular revolution. In Kenya the regime of President Moi, who succeeded Kenyatta, arrested and detained Ngugi on December 31, 1977 for more than a year in solitary confinement after he staged a community-based play I Will Marry When I Want that allowed people to see the failures of the ruling elite in delivering on the promises of Uhuru, which is the Kiswahili word for independence.
He wrote Detained, on pieces of toilet paper, and over time, enough material was smuggled out to produce the manuscript. After his release Ngugi lived most of the rest of his life outside Kenya, teaching mostly in American universities.
I first met Ngugi in person in the 1990s when he taught at New York University. I would go and chat with him in his office. I told him I enjoyed all his books. He asked which ones were my favorites. I must have been star-struck because I had a mental freeze and couldn’t recall a single title. Mercifully, he switched the topic to sports.
We continued to correspond after he moved to the West coast to teach in the University of California system. He even introduced me to his Kenyan publisher and although I concluded a book deal with them they were too slow in production and I moved on.
I also saw Ngugi during the summers whenever he came to New York City for a book reading at Revolution Books. I also had the honor of moderating a talk organized by Friends of the Congo, where Ngugi was the speaker, via Zoom, on October 24, 2020.
Ngugi now rests with the ancestors.
Aluta Continua.
Milton Allimadi is a PhD student in History at Howard University. He’s also working on The United States of Africa, a novel he plans to publish through kickstarter. A professor at CUNY and Columbia University, Allimadi is the author of The Hearts of Darkness: How White Writers Created the Racist Image of Africa, Manufacturing Hate: How Africa Was Demonised in Western Media, and ADWA: Empress Taytu & Emperor Menelik in Love & War.
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