On Wednesday May 28, a towering figure of world literature, Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o (photo), passed away. Frequently considered for the Nobel Prize, he left our world impoverished by his absence but forever enriched by his literary and political legacies. His ideas hold deep relevance to Mauritius, where our multilingual and multicultural reality remains nevertheless undergirded by burning hierarchies.

Born in 1938 to a large family in Kenya, Ngugi saw the light of day in a country trampled by British colonization. His own family was scattered across the political spectrum: some members were involved in the freedom struggles of the Land and Freedom Army (derogatorily termed “Mau Mau” by the British), while others actively supported and worked for the British colonial forces. Ngugi grew up at the intersection of these various force fields, and his later literary works would be deeply shaped by those early experiences. For example, his first published novel, “Weep Not, Child” (1964), is set against the backdrop of the struggles for freedom now known as the Mau Mau Uprising. “Weep Not, Child” is today widely accepted as the first English-language novel by an East African writer, a literary gem that illuminated the region on the anglophone literary map.

For Ngugi, then, the personal, political and literary were inextricably entwined, like colorful threads woven into the same tapestry. After Kenya gained independence, his writings did not only decry the horrors of colonialism, but also directly engaged with its afterlives, such as the corruption of the postcolonial elite, the injustices faced by women, and the violent ways in which English displaced local African languages. This latter realization, in particular, came to change the course of his trajectory: Despite his success writing in English, Ngugi later turned to his native language Gikuyu, eventually choosing to write exclusively in his mother tongue. In the 1970s, he co-authored and co-staged a play in this language, titled Ngaahika Ndeenda [I Will Marry When I Want], which directly engaged with the difficulties of life in post-independence Kenya. After playing for less than two months, the play was banned by the authorities, and Ngugi was incarcerated in a maximum security prison. But although his body was detained, his mind soared: he wrote the entirety of his first novel in Gikuyu on prison toilet paper. This novel was published in 1980, and its English translation, penned by the author himself, appeared two years later, with the title “Devil on the Cross.”

At the time, Ngugi’s choice to write in Gikuyu rather than English was bold, courageous, and deeply symbolic. All three adjectives still hold true of such a decision today. For Ngũgĩ, a language is not simply a “means of communication,” but also a “carrier of culture.” As such, he believed that African languages are uniquely suited to tell African stories, and African writers should not shy away from writing in African languages. This position starkly contrasted with that of other postcolonial African writers: for example, Algerian writer Kateb Yacine described the French language as a “butin de guerre,” while the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe underlined the “value of the inheritance” of English. Aware of such positions, Ngugi wondered: “How did we, as African writers, come to be so feeble towards the claims of our languages on us and so aggressive in our claims on other languages, particularly the languages of our colonization?”

Ngugi’s bold stances led him to spend many years in forced exile in the United Kingdom and later in the United States, where he taught at various prestigious institutions, eventually becoming Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). And yet, these years away from his country never dimmed the love he felt for it or its people, which continued to be the lifeforce of his work. To quote the writer himself, from an opinion piece published a decade earlier in The Guardian: “Despite decades of exile, I still feel the pull of my homeland... In 1982 I fled the Kenyan dictatorship’s threats on my life. But I can never forget the feelings of hope and of mutual care that I experienced in my childhood village.”

Deeply rooted in East Africa and pertinent across the globe, Ngugi’s thinking offers us an important lens through which to engage with our own reality as Mauritians. I wonder, for example, what Ngugi would think of our tendency, in 2025, to pit Kreol Morisien and Mauritian Bhojpuri one against the other, while (sub)consciously continuing to associate a mastery of French and English with intelligence or competence. I also wonder how he would interpret our silence regarding unequal land distribution, a direct relic of the colonial era. And I here use the possessive adjective “our” not as a presumption that all Mauritians think in a single monolithic way, which is obviously not the case, but rather as a way of underlining how we are all, as members of Mauritian society, somehow entangled within systems and thinking that desperately need to change.

Faced with these questions, perhaps Ngugi would repeat to us his famous words from 2018: “Resistance is the best way of keeping alive. It can take even the smallest form of saying no to injustice. If you really think you’re right, you stick to your beliefs, and they help you to survive.”