Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has gone before us, but leaves behind a rich heritage of struggle for ‘the Wretched of the Earth’

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o will be remembered as an anti-colonial philosopher, a giant of decolonisation, and a revolutionary socialist as the news of his death breaks across the world. As the morbid symptoms of neoliberal capitalism, neocolonialism, and indeed genocide violently expose themselves, it’s hard not to mourn the loss of such an iconic figure in the struggle for freedom. However, wa Thiong’o left behind a wealth of intellectual armament and inspiring reading material that we must embrace as we continue our pursuit of a fairer, more democratic world, free from the shackles of imperialism and injustice.

wa Thiong’o wrote extensively on questions of language and culture in colonial contexts. His books Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature and Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms gained international acclaim amongst indigenous language communities across the world.

His thoughts on linguistic imperialism reverberated in my mind since I first read them in 2020. His articulation of “the bullet [being] the means of the physical subjugation, language [being] the means of the spiritual subjugation, along with his understanding of “cultural bombs”, gave me the impetus to re-Gaelicise my name and commit to a lifetime of struggle for transformative decolonisation.

“But the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other peoples’ languages rather than their own. It makes them identify with that which is decadent and reactionary, all those forces which would stop their own springs of life. It even plants serious doubts about the moral rightness of struggle. Possibilities of triumph or victory or seen as remote, ridiculous dreams.”

wa Thiong’o was also familiar with the Irish experience. Indeed, he often referred to the Gaels as an example when detailing the horrors of colonialism:

“It was astonishing to discover […] the centrality of the Irish experience to the colonial question, especially as it relates to language, culture and social memory. Ireland was England’s first colony, and it became a prototype for all other English colonies in Asia, Africa and America.”

He drew too on the historical records of Edmund Spenser – a British settler in Ireland during the 16th century – to analyse hunger as a genocidal weapon of war.

“Spenser, in his manual for colonizing the Irish, also recommends a scorched earth policy to induce famine. He had seen such a policy break resistance in Munster […] where […] ‘out of the very corner of the woods and glens they [the Irish] came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them. They looked anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves.’ (Spenser 1586). Two and a half centuries later, following the English-induced potato famine of 1846-1860, during which Irish people died in large numbers and many survivors were forced to emigrate to America, the weakened community that remained was unable to resist linguistic Anglicisation through new education policies that imposed English on the Irish.”

Our shared history of manufactured “famine” reminds the Irish-language movement – if ever we needed a reminder – of the need to stand up and act for the people of Gaza and Palestine, who remain under the belligerent siege of the most unholy trinity: the US, the West and the Zionist empire.

Indeed, Frantz Fanon, another giant of decolonial thought and praxis, advocated consistently for a rounded political consciousness in national liberation struggles: “If you really wish your county to avoid regression, […] a rapid step must be taken from national consciousness to political and social consciousness”, a call to action which An Dream Dearg answers in its daily activism.

Such international solidarity is an integral part of progressive decolonisation. wa Thiong’o himself subscribed to a similar school of thought too. He argued for a robust socio-economic analysis in language reclamation struggles, showcasing the need to forego reactionary insularity and instead address broader questions of power:

“Imperialism is total: it has economic, political, military and psychological consequences for the people of the world today.”

It is no surprise, therefore, that class consciousness is woven throughout his work on decolonisation. He reminded us, as did Lenin, that imperialism is the highest form of capitalism:

“The real aim of colonialism was to control the people’s wealth: what they produced, how they produced it, and how it was distributed […] Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship.”

As noted already, it was (and is) through the displacement of a nation’s indigenous language in favour of the colonial one that such control is executed. According to wa Thiong’o:

“Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world. How people perceive themselves affects how they look at their culture, at their politics and at the social production of wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and other beings. Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world.”

What does this mean for an Dream Dearg, the bottom-up language movement in Éirinn that is waging a decolonial struggle? It simply means that our language reclamation activism must be rooted in class consciousness and class struggle.

wa Thiong’o and Fanon were not the first revolutionaries to consider these challenges, however. Several generations of Irish republicans did so many decades before, from the time of James Connolly to Máirtín Ó Cadhain himself. Connolly’s extant writings remind us of our own rich tradition of class-conscious decolonisation, particularly in the following extract:

“The chief enemy of a Celtic revival today is the crushing force of capitalism which irresistibly destroys all national or racial characteristics, and by sheer stress of its economic   preponderance reduces a Galway or a Dublin, a Lithuania or a Warsaw to the level of a mere second-hand imitation of Manchester or Glasgow […] You cannot teach starving men Gaelic; and the treasury of our national literature will and must remain lost forever to the poor wage-slaves who are contended by our system of society to toil from early morning to late at night for a mere starvation wage.”

Let us reflect too on the words of Liam Mellows, who wrote:

“[that] the Irish Republic represents Independence and the struggle has a threefold significance. It is political, it is intellectual, it is economic. It is political in the sense that it means complete separation from England and the British Empire. It is intellectual in as much as it represents the cultural expression of the Gaelic mind and Gaelic civilisation and the removal of the impress of English speech and English thought upon the Irish character. It is economic because the wrestling of Ireland from the grip of English capitalism can leave no thinking Irishman with the desire to build up and perpetuate in this country an economic system that has its roots in foreign domination.”

In May 2025, a day after his death, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s work on decolonisation remains as important and pertinent as ever. His message carries particular urgency in the face of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and as international governmental inaction showcases the deficiencies of the global North’s ‘democracies’, which continue to ignore the people’s demands for practical and material solidarity. The working-class continue to face the sharp edge of neoliberal crises, Éire/Ireland remains dismembered and partitioned into two states, and the earth itself is on the brink of climate collapse as bourgeoisie oligarchs and billionaires continue their extractive practices in pursuit of infinite economic growth and profit.

But as wa Thiong’o demonstrated, there is another path. There is another way, and there is hope. We need only reclaim our indigenous languages as the first step in this arduous yet imperative journey of decolonisation:

“The classes fighting against imperialism even in its neo-colonial stage and form, have to confront this threat with the higher and more creative culture of resolute struggle. These classes have to wield even more firmly the weapons of the struggle contained in the cultures. They have to speak the united language of struggle contained in their cultures. They have to speak the united language of struggle contained in each of their languages. They must discover their various tongues to sing the song: ‘A people united can never be defeated’."

wa Thiong’o lived a life of struggle in which he consistently pursued collective freedom for the good of mankind. Let us in An Dream Dearg do the same.