10 ISSUE VI
JUNE 2025
JUNE 2025
Accidental Theorist: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
What would a Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o theory of international affairs look like?
By Sean Jacobs
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who passed away on May 25, 2025, was widely regarded as a G.O.A.T. of African literature—or simply literature, period. Many believe he should have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, a view shared by fans and critics alike.
What sets Ngũgĩ apart was his unwavering commitment to writing in an African language, but also his political activism, both in Kenya and as part of a broader decolonization project. While several prominent African writers—such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—have spoken passionately about the importance of African languages and the value of translation, they have largely continued to write in colonial languages, especially English and French.
His shift began after a pivotal moment at a PEN conference in New York City in 1966, when Italian writer Ignazio Silone insulted African languages, dismissing them as primitive, saying Italian was not like “one of these Bantu languages with one or two words in their vocabulary.” Ngũgĩ publicly challenged him. (Footnote: Pablo Neruda, who was on stage with Silone, declared his solidarity with Ngũgĩ.)
By the late 1970s, he made a decisive turn: he would creatively write primarily in his mother tongue, Gikuyu. That moment marked the culmination of his long intellectual and political journey. From then on, Ngũgĩ wrote novels and plays in Gikuyu, and then translated into English himself. (However, he still wrote his nonfiction and critical essays primarily in English.)
What is often footnoted is that Ngũgĩ came to this decision while imprisoned by Kenya’s one party state and even wrote one of his novels in prison. At the time, Kenya had become a pro-Western, very violent dictatorship, persecuting or disappearing its local critics, which confirms that like with his language politics, Ngũgĩ actually lived what he professed.
Which is why his point about how language and knowledge systems perpetuate global inequalities, resonated so much: “The biggest weapon wielded and daily unleashed by imperialism against [our] collective defiance is the cultural bomb … It is the final triumph of a system of domination when the dominated start singing its virtues.”
Like others in this series already (Diego Maradona, Kendrick Lamar, Viv Richards, Fernanda Torres and Juninho Pernambucano), Ngũgĩ never proposed a formal theory of international relations. However, his language politics reflect deep engagement with global power structures, which he termed “globalectics.” As he wrote: “After [Karl] Marx released me from a one-dimensional view of reality, I could now go back to texts I had already read and find a whole world I had not seen earlier. In the London working-class poor of [novelist Charles] Dickens’s world I found echoes of the colonial world, making it easier for me later to understand [poet and politician Aime] Césaire when he talked of the European bourgeoisie as having simultaneously created the problem of the colonial subject abroad and that of the working class at home.”
Decolonizing the mind, for Ngũgĩ, meant reclaiming indigenous languages, histories, and identities. This demands political, economic, cultural, and intellectual independence, highlighting that neocolonial local elites are equally responsible as former colonizers for hindering development in the Global South. As he wrote, “The present predicaments of Africa are often not a matter of personal choice: they arise from a historical situation. Their solutions are not so much a matter of personal decision as that of a fundamental social transformation of the structures of our societies starting with a real break with imperialism and its internal ruling allies. Imperialism and its comprador alliances in Africa can never develop the continent.”
Sean Jacobs is a professor and director of the Graduate Program in International affairs at The New School.