An Ode to the African Literary Titan

by Collins Nweke

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938–2025), one of Africa’s greatest literary minds and cultural visionaries, passed away today. His life’s work, across fiction, theatre, political essay, and linguistic activism, ignited generations, challenged empires, and gave voice to the silenced. In this ode, I reflect on his immortal legacy. Not as one who has died, but one who has transitioned into eternity.

The ink has not dried
not on the pages of Petals of Blood,
not in the margins of Decolonising the Mind,
not in the hearts of those who first found themselves
in your mother tongue.

Ngũgĩ, son of Gikuyu soil,
you did not merely author stories
you planted revolutions in syllables,
sharpened consciences with prose,
and made the pen a machete for the soul’s liberation.

Where others translated their hearts into foreign scripts,
you reversed Babel with courage
casting off colonial tongues
and choosing Gikuyu,
as one would choose to speak to God
in the language of their mother.

You taught us that language is not neutral,
that stories are not innocent,
and that to write is to resist
to breathe in captivity and still sing.

The prison could not silence you.
The exile could not erase you.
The critics could not define you.
You were, always, your own genre
a continent compressed into a single mind,
a library walking barefoot among villagers,
reading futures aloud in the marketplaces of the poor.

We read your fiction in our youth,
awed by Weep Not, Child
the sorrowed laughter of a betrayed generation.
We taught your truths in Omu in Igbuzo to young minds,
hoping they too would dream in African syntax,
think in ancestral rhythms,
and refuse to be ghosts in their own lands,

And we are greeted here and there with the outcomes.

Now they say you are gone.
But Ngũgĩ, those who write with eternity in their quills
do not die.

You have merely crossed over
into that sacred place where Achebe drums,
where Biko reasons,
where Sankara strategizes,
and Lumumba speaks unfiltered.

Your books stay open.
Your thoughts are still breathing.
Your mission unfinished but unstoppable.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o,
may your spirit now rest in the arms of ancestors
who understand the weight you carried
and the fire you lit.

And may we who remain,
scribble in your shadow,
write in your wake,
and live the truths you dared to name.

You are not gone.
You have merely become one with the story.