Ngugi wa Thiong’o departed the earth after 87 years of productive life of writing and popularising the African ways. He then disappointed his global followers, mainly Africans in the continent and the diaspora, by getting himself cremated in America, the headquarters of post-modern colonialism at times called globalisation. He inspired and disappointed, taught and de-taught, and in cremation he went against the very African ways that he had stressed on earth. He did not allow his global followers to mourn the African way. Prof Ngugi was, wrote City University of New York’s David Monda, “a man of many contradictions”.
In his effort to ‘decolonise the mind’, he mounted cultural battles to fight mental remnants of colonialism that lingered into postcolonial times. Although his cultural battles were initially small, their global consequences were huge because he dared to challenge the assumed goodness of paternalistic neo-colonialism which, to him, negated the heroism of Mau Mau warriors. He thus became a postmodern warrior not just of the Mau Mau, but also of African interests and values.
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Ngugi wa Thiong’o departed the earth after 87 years of productive life of writing and popularising the African ways. He then disappointed his global followers, mainly Africans in the continent and the diaspora, by getting himself cremated in America, the headquarters of post-modern colonialism at times called globalisation. He inspired and disappointed, taught and de-taught, and in cremation he went against the very African ways that he had stressed on earth. He did not allow his global followers to mourn the African way. Prof Ngugi was, wrote City University of New York’s David Monda, “a man of many contradictions”.
By Macharia Munene