We need another Ngugi

(for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 1938–2025)

By Graciano Enwerem

WE need another Ngugi.
Another fist that pens with fire.
Another tongue that won’t retire
into silence,
just because the oppressor raised the volume.
We need another Ngugi.
Because our children speak in borrowed alphabets,
dream in foreign tongues,
and pray to gods whose skin reflects
the colonizer’s sun.
He wrote Weep Not, Child
but I weep now,
not just for the child—
but for the elder who spoke the truth until
his bones became proverbs.
I weep for a continent
that lost its fiercest griot,
a linguist of liberation,
a fighter with fountain pens for fists,
and books sharp enough to carve freedom
into the spines of the sleeping.
Ngugi.
The man who turned toilet paper in prison
into scripture—
writing Devil on the Cross
like Moses chiseling commandments
from cracked concrete.
He did not ask Pharaoh for freedom,
he wrote it.
Ink became uprising.
Language became war.
And every word he wrote was a bullet
aimed at the heart of colonial illusion.
They locked him in a cell—
but you cannot chain a mind
that learned how to walk barefoot
through barbed wire truth.
Ngugi made Petals of Blood bloom
from the bullet wounds of a bleeding people.
He gave us A Grain of Wheat,
and told us to plant revolution
deep into the red soil of our own names.
He whispered, “Don’t just wear your Africanness—
think it. Speak it. Live it.”
He saw the chains in our mouths
and broke them by saying:
“Your language is your liberation.”
He rejected the Queen’s English,
not out of hate,
but because he saw how pale it sounded
when spoken through the mouths of the enslaved—
while their mother tongues died
in silence like forgotten drums.
Ngugi said: “Let the drums speak again.”
Let the griots rise again.
Let the village elder’s wisdom
not be footnoted as folklore,
but studied like Shakespeare.
Let Kikuyu breathe like Latin
in every academy that dares to call itself wise.
Africa, we need another Ngugi.
Because our leaders now are still
matigari—armed with lies instead of hope,
still chasing peace with iron and smoke.
They sell the land to the highest bidder,
then blame the ancestors when the soil turns sour.
They eat with both hands,
while the people are fasting from justice.
We need pens mightier than their oil rigs.
We need a language that does not kneel
before IMF sermons.
Africa needs another Ngugi.
Another warrior in scholar’s robes.
Another exile who plants his home
into the hearts of every reader.
Another rebel who says:
“Let us decolonize the mind
before we digitize the soul.”
Another voice that tells us:
Afrocentric is not an aesthetic—
it is a compass. A call home.
A way of knowing that our roots
are not beneath us—
they are within us.
We need another Ngugi
in our classrooms,
where history still starts in Greece
and ends with empire.
We need another Ngugi
in our parliaments,
where corruption speaks all twenty-four official languages
but never utters justice.
We need another Ngugi
in our music,
in our sermons,
in our memes,
in our markets.
Let us not bury him in Kenya alone.
Let us bury him in every African mind
and resurrect him in every African mouth.
Let every child say:
“Ngaahika Ndeenda—I Will Marry When I Want,
but I will fight injustice now.”
Africa needs another Ngugi.
Africa needs a lot of Ngugi to wa Thiong’o.
May we be wombs for such men.
May we raise daughters
who speak like volcanoes.
May we not just quote him,
but become him.
Because Ngugi is not gone.
How can he be gone, when we are not yet bullets?
Africa, why shake spears,
When you can shoot the arrows of God.
Ngugi is a question.
And Africa—
you must answer.

©Graciano Enwerem