Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Kenyan author and dissident who became a giant of modern literature, dies at 87

By  Hillel Italie

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the revered Kenyan man of letters and voice of dissent who in dozens of fiction and nonfiction books traced his country’s history from British imperialism to home-ruled tyranny and challenged not only the stories told but the language used to tell them, died Wednesday at 87.

Derek Warker, publicist for Ngũgĩ’s U.S. publisher The New Press, confirmed the death to The Associated Press. Further details were not immediately available, though Ngũgĩ was receiving kidney dialysis treatments.

Whether through novels such as “The Wizard of the Crow” and “Petals of Blood,” memoirs such as “Birth of a Dream Weaver” or the landmark critique “Decolonizing the Mind,” Ngũgĩ embodied the very heights of the artist’s calling — as a truth teller and explorer of myth, as a breaker of rules and steward of culture.

He was a perennial candidate for the Nobel literature prize and a long-term artist in exile,