By Professor Peter Ndiang’ui

For a long time, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o invited me, nudged me, dared me to write in Gikuyu, the
language of my mother. Not once, not twice, but with the persistence of someone who knows
what is at stake: the soul of a people, the rhythm of memory, the dignity of naming the world in
one’s own tongue.
Each time, I danced around his challenge with a tact sharpened by years of colonial schooling.
“It is difficult,” I told him. “There is something I cannot explain, something that holds me back.”
He kept quiet for a moment, as if seeing straight through my words to the wound beneath.

“That something,” he said, “is fear. I know it well. I met it face to face in the 1970s, and I still carry its scars.”
Still unwilling to confront my fear, I shifted the goalposts. “ I am busy now but I will write in my
language when the time is right.” He smiled with the kind of patience reserved for elders and
tricksters. “That time will never come,” he said, “unless you create it.”
But I remained stubborn. I had grown fluent in postponement, articulate in avoidance, eloquent
in delay. Until last week.
He did not argue. He did not push. Instead, he reached into the hidden chamber of every man’s
vulnerability, love.
You are lucky,” he began, with the casual menace of a man who is about to dismantle your life’s
defense mechanisms. He looked at a photo we had taken with him and my wife.

“Your wife—she is rare. A blessing.”
I puffed up like a rooster. “Absolutely,” I said, already bracing for the next compliment. He then
turned to a different praise – “you are such a good writer Nding’uri, I really like your style of
writing”. Lacking for the right words to respond to such a praise coming from the world’s
greatest writer, I simply said “thank you”.
“Have you ever written your Nyarari a poem?” he asked, cocking his head.
“Of course!” I said, proudly. “Back when I was courting her and she was doing an oscar-worthy
hard-to-get performance of indifference.”
“Perfect,” he said. “Then take a pen.”
That’s when I panicked. My hands remembered how to write in English. But my heart, the
traitor, started murmuring things in my mother tongue. Things I had not said out loud in years.

He dictated three lines. Just enough bait for the trap. Then he paused, “Now you continue. From
the heart. Speak to your Nyarari. In your language. She deserves your truest voice.”
And just like that, something old and stubborn cracked inside me—not an explosion, but the
groan of a colonial chain loosening. I began. Slowly. Clumsily. Like a toddler trying to walk on
ancestral legs. But the words came.
When I finished, flushed with the kind of pride usually reserved for marathon runners and
repentant prodigals, I read it aloud to him. He listened, no interruptions, no smirks. Just the
stillness of someone witnessing a resurrection. Then, with all the grace of a seasoned editor, he
leaned in.
“You cannot say ‘death will separate you.’ That’s lazy,” he said. “Death does not win in love.
You are better than that.”
Then came the line about never having seen a woman like her. Ngũgĩ narrowed his eyes, grinned
like a fox, and asked, “Kai ucaragia?”- Are you still looking?
We laughed—not just at the joke, but at the absurdity of how long I had run from my linguistic
home while convincing myself I had arrived.
Then his face settled into something deeper. “This,” “this is what it means to begin freeing
yourself from the bondage of English. I am proud of you. Now you are a true Nding’uri—a
warrior of our language, our people.”
He urged me to read the poem to my wife. To share it. To publish it if she allowed me. “Let
others see what becomes possible when you stop running from yourself,” he said. “Tell them
your struggle. You might just hand someone the key to their own prison.”
Then he reminded me of his famous credo: “If you know all the languages of the world but not
your mother tongue, you are a slave.”
Ngũgĩ did not just free me. He tricked me into picking the lock from the inside.
Ngũgĩ did not only inspire me. He outwitted me. And in doing so, he returned me to myself. I
have been sad at the loss these last few days but when I recalled this conversation last week, I
felt good. I listened to his message when he was checking on how my wife reacted.

I smiled from inside.
So here I am, sharing the poem that came disguised as a compliment, carrying the weight of a
dare, and ended in my emancipation.

I will carry this gift with gratitude and a touch of mischief. I will treasure his mischievous grin
attached here as he checked on my wife’s reaction after I read the poem to her – she told me not
to include her deep emotions and the way she hugged me.