Honor Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o by guarding free expression

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

One of Kenya’s most famous freedom writers Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (87) died on Wednesday 28 May. As tributes from diverse quarters flood our timelines, I found myself reflecting on his relevance for our lives today.

By the time I first met Ngũgĩ in 1986, he had been writing in English and Kikuyu for twenty years. Through Matigari ma Njiruungi and Detained: A Writers Prison Diary, I clearly saw what my immediate family and friends were too frightened to discuss. Kenya was an authoritarian state run on colonial fumes. Inequalities and ethnic divisions were intentionally catalysed. Women were relegated to second class citizens and beaten, often. Independent thinking and political dissent were dangerous. Those in power relied on police boots, barbed wire, white wigs and gowns.

The Nairobi University debates (1970s), Kamiriithu Community Education Centre (1976), detention without trial, adoption by Amnesty International as a Prisoner of Conscience (1978) and exile (1982) had made Ngũgĩ legendary by the time we met. The first impression however, honestly, was a bit of an anti-climax.

As I waited to receive the guest speaker for my university's Pan African Society, I failed to recognize him, and he walked right past me. Failing to look carefully at the grass, we often miss the most beautiful and rebellious of wildflowers. Ngũgĩ also taught me that day, the word “intellectual” was not reserved for the academics alone, all people regardless of their identity can be intellectuals.

Though Ngũgĩ spent much of his later life in Europe and America, he remained a committed Pan-Africanist and anti-capitalist rooted in the power of ordinary people, African languages, popular theatre and storytelling. He didn’t receive a Nobel Prize, but over 36 written works for both adults and children have earned him 30 international awards and 13 honorary doctorates. Last year, 60 self-organised community-based events celebrated the spirit of Kamiirithu and his legacy of freedom-writing across 21 Kenyan counties and the Kenyan US based diaspora.

Ngũgĩ was on my mind Thursday as Amnesty International, Okoa Uchumi Alliance, and Coca-Cola opposed renewed efforts in the Finance Bill (2025) to grant KRA access to citizens’ and corporate data before the National Assembly Finance Committee. Elsewhere, Hon Marianne Kaitany’s Kenya Information and Communication Amendment Bill (2025) seeks to compel internet service providers to surrender 36 million internet users’ identities, dates of birth, physical addresses and surfing habits to the Communications Authority of Kenya.

Ngũgĩ might have pushed our arguments even further. Mass surveillance of our thoughts, consumer choices and political inclination are the first step to controlling how we freely think and act. Using generative artificial intelligence and algorithms, both states and corporates are already affecting our minds and behaviour on a mass scale. Opening this door, is the step towards mental slavery.

As Ngũgĩ’s passing continues to attract tributes from diverse voices, cognitive psychologists would remind us, human beings are wired by neuroplasticity. We tend to blur differences between ourselves and those who make fundamentally different life-choices from us when they die. While we can welcome all tributes, let’s honour rather than pay lip-service to his legacy.

For a start, could our state officers and MPs stop trying to slip through mischievous unconstitutional data breach laws? Could “Echoes of War” be the last play, the state tries to supress? Could those four independent film producers have charges dropped against them and their filming equipment returned? Could we read arrest warrants against police officers and their commanders for committing serious crimes of abductions and killings of young protesters? Could we rename the MacMillan Library and other places of intellectual debate in Ngũgĩ’s name?

Let’s not honor Ngũgĩ, and give state agencies, foreign corporates and states unfettered access to the most personal of our thoughts, consumer choices and political conscience. Ngũgĩ wrote on prison toilet paper for the intellectual freedom we enjoy today. Let us find an ounce of his creativity and courage to protect his gains. As he would urge, let us “sleep not to dream, but dream to change our world”.

This opinion was also published in the Saturday Standard, 31 May 2025.