Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, a multiple Nobel Prize candidate, dies at 87.

Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o , a frequent candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature , died this Wednesday at the age of 87, after a career spanning more than six decades that has made him one of the most distinguished African and international authors .

"I am who I am because of him in many ways," said his son , Mukoma Wa Ngugi , also a writer. "I love him; I don't know what tomorrow will bring without him," he said on social media when announcing his father's death.

Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, one of the greatest African voices of the last century, has a wealth of acclaimed publications, ranging from novels such as The River Between Us (1965) and The Perfect Nine (2018)—which made him the first person nominated for the International Booker Prize as both a writer and a translator—to numerous short stories, essays such as Decolonizing the Mind (1986), and even plays.

It was on stage that his play I'll Marry Whenever I Want (1977) made him a target of persecution by former Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi (1979-2002) and a victim of his numerous human rights violations . In fact, it was during his long months of imprisonment without trial that he wrote, on toilet paper, his work The Devil on the Cross (1980), considered the first modern novel in Kikuyu, his mother tongue.

A champion of the struggle for minority languages , Ngugi wrote in English, Kenya's colonial language, until 1970, when he began writing in his native language and changed his Anglophone name, James Ngugi, to Ngugi Wa Thiong'o.

"There are two types of languages: those that marginalize and those that are marginalized," he explained in 2017 at the entrance to his lecture at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), using examples such as the American Indians, the Saami population in Norway, or the Japanese colonization of Korea.

"These are not isolated cases," but rather "there is always a linguistic imbalance at the base , which is not natural but rather caused by men," the author explained, lamenting that the imposed language is also associated with negative values ​​such as oppression and violence.