The George Padmore Institute is deeply saddened to hear of the death of acclaimed author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Ngũgĩ was a groundbreaking novelist, essayist, playwright, journalist, editor, translator, literary critic and social and political activist. His work has had a global reach that has, at times, been closely intertwined with the cultural and political activism of many of our founding Trustees, and he is remembered by all of us as a fierce intellectual and gifted writer, who was always generous with his time and support, friendship and solidarity.
Born in 1938 in Kenya, Ngũgĩ studied at the University of Leeds in the 1960s. He first met our late chair, John La Rose, during that period, when the Caribbean Artists Movement was just starting. In 1967 Ngũgĩ was appointed lecturer at Makerere University in Uganda. He was at the centre of the politics of English departments in Africa at that time, championing the change of name from ‘English’ to simply ‘Literature’ to reflect world literature, with African and literatures from the Global South at their centre.
In 1977 Ngũgĩ published his novel Petals of Blood, which painted a harsh picture of life in neo-colonial Kenya. Later that year he was arrested and held in detention for a year, ostensibly because of his work with the Kamiriithu Community Education and Cultural Centre. During his detention, John La Rose was active in the campaign to free him.
Ngũgĩ went into exile in 1982 and lived in London during most of that decade. He rekindled his friendship with John and they co-founded the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners in Kenya, with the inaugural meeting held in John’s sitting room in 1982. Meetings thereafter regularly took place in the back of New Beacon Bookshop. Other members of the organisation included GPI Trustee poet Linton Kwesi Johnson and the solicitor Yvonne Brown.
In 1983 New Beacon Books published Ngũgĩ’s campaigning book Barrel of a Pen: resistance to repression in neo-colonial Kenya. Ngũgĩ also supported many of the campaigns that John was in and said of him: ‘Rarely has anybody come into contact with him without being affected by his generous, searching, modern renaissance spirit’.
In 1984 Ngũgĩ co-directed his play The Trial of Dedan Kimathi with the Wazalendo Players, using the creative method developed by the Kamiriithu Centre, whereby interaction takes place between the audience and company in open rehearsals prior to the final production, to encourage people to actively take part in the direction of the play and the issues it raises. A rehearsal of the play by the Africa Centre Company was held in a local north London community centre for members of the Black Parents Movement, a campaigning organisation which included our current chair, Roxy Harris.
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Ngũgĩ’s 1986 book Decolonising the Mind was where he first announced his intention to stop writing in English, part of his decades-long postcolonial fight against the use of English in Africa and African literature. Linton Kwesi Johnson reviewed it for the magazine Race Today that year, stressing its importance. In 1987 Ngũgĩ opened the sixth International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books in London, also participating in a forum on Artistic Creativity and Social Change alongside Linton, African-American writer Ntozake Shange and Nicaraguan-Salvadoran author Claribel Alegría.
Ngũgĩ later moved to the USA and was the Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California Irvine. His other books include the novel The Wizard of the Crow, essays In the Name of the Mother: Reflections on Writers and Empire and his memoirs Dreams in a Time of War and In the House of the Interpreter. During that time, he often visited London, where the GPI and New Beacon Books held many events around his books.
In October 2013, in a series celebrating our late chair, Ngũgĩ gave the third John La Rose Memorial Lecture on ‘Resisting Metaphysical Empires: Language as a war zone’. In his introduction to that talk, Ngũgĩ said:
‘Let me say that coming to London always gives me or brings back a lot of memories. More so when I visit Beacon Books, as I remember coming here a long time ago when I was doing work, probably among the first … to do postgraduate work on Caribbean literature with the focus on George Lamming. The first place I went to was New Beacon Books. I met John La Rose here and he introduced me to so many Caribbean writers, including inviting me to become part of the founding of the Caribbean Artists Movement with Kamau Brathwaite and others. Now, I am sure if John was here – and he is still with us here – he would want us to remember before I speak, the recent massacre of innocent, unarmed people in Kenya, including the death of one of our really great African writers – Kofi Awoonor – who belonged to the same generation as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe. But he was more than that – he was a great dreamer, a Pan-Africanist. He worked with Kwame Nkrumah very closely … part of the pioneers of Kwame Nkrumah’s era.
Yesterday I went to the George Padmore Institute and New Beacon Books and it was incredible being in a place where you feel somebody is with you and not with you. That is how I felt when I was there. I was feeling “John La Rose is here and yet he is not here…”. So I took it that his spirit is there, was there, and it is here with us.
I want to start by thanking Sarah White [the GPI’s late secretary] and Sharmilla Beezmohun [GPI Trustee] and New Beacon Books, the GPI and all their team that have done so much to make my visit here such a joy. I do not think they realised it when they got me a place at Goodenough House that this happened to be also the place where I first lived when I found myself in exile way back, years ago.’
During that visit to the Institute, Ngũgĩ saw the two collections concerning Kenya held at the GPI: material from the work of the campaign to free him from detention at the end of the 1970s and from the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners in Kenya in the 1980s. It was fitting that he should see how his legacy will reach future generations through an organisation co-founded by his great friend, John La Rose.
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Now, to echo Ngũgĩ’s words, we at the GPI in London feel that Ngũgĩ ‘is here and yet he is not here’. We are confident that he will live on through his writing, through the connections he made and through his steadfast commitment to the ongoing struggle for equality and justice.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, born near Limuru, Kenya 5 January 1938, died in Georgia, USA 28 May 2025.
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