The legacy of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, alongside that of many African scholars, has profoundly shaped our perspectives of our language and culture in a post-colonial world. This blog is a homage: a tribute to these giants and the many others who have campaigned and advocated for African people, taken action, and inspired and uplifted African values and African culture.

As a young person, I did not live in the midst of Africa’s colonial regime. I got to live in a post-colonial world – a world that is digital, fast-paced, and technologically driven. And the works of people like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and what they stood for have served as an anchor for me, grounding me in my career journey.

Many people are not aware that the work we do at Lanfrica Labs takes huge inspiration from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. At the heart of our work is this powerful quote.

This quote deeply resonates with us and underscores the “why” behind the work we are doing at Lanfrica Labs.

Echoes of the Past in Today’s Digital Age

But first, let me lay some background. We live in a digital world that, in pertinent ways, echoes the divide Ngũgĩ describes in his book Decolonising the Mind. In the opening of his book, he describes how his native language, Gikuyu, served both as a means of communication and identity. But during colonization, that changed: the mother tongue as a means of identity was gradually stripped away, rendered irrelevant and invisible.

In today’s digital age, we live in a world where there is so much happening – lots of information to process, lots of things going on. And there’s this assumption that all is equal and fair in terms of visibility, attention, and importance. But I would like to draw a parallel: just as English was established as the standard of literary excellence during Ngũgĩ’s time, and languages that did not conform – like Gikuyu – were made less visible and less important, I see the same pattern playing out in the digital world today. There are standards of visibility. Standards that determine what is discoverable, what is given attention, what is discussed more, and what is discussed less.

For example, in the AI research space, innovations involving the English language is a standard of research excellence. Doing experiments in low-resource languages, especially African languages, is deemed less novel and less impactful if English is not included in some way. In some cases, even how well you write in English, and not the quality of your research, affects whether your paper gets accepted in “reputable”, “prestigious” conferences or not.

We live in a world where our public understanding is shaped mainly by what is given enough visibility (or attention). Therefore, many important efforts which do not make it to our “attention canvas” get left out…left out in our analysis, left out in citations, left out in our understanding.

AI in Africa, Lanfrica, and the legacy of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

The AI landscape is vast,  more diverse and interconnected than we imagine. There are so many things happening everyday; from upskilling in Rwanda, AI data centers in Kenya, application design in Uganda, policy discussions at UNGA, G20, to the growing momentum around AI Safety for Africa. And one thing that we take for granted or under-estimate its gravity, is that it’s hard to understand holistically the different efforts going on in African AI – how they connect, how they shape the landscape, especially the efforts coming from the not-so-popular communities or people – with our current information retrieval systems.

I, along with others, encountered this problem while working with the Masakhane community around 2020, while doing a lot of work to “put Africa on the NLP map”. We quickly discovered that, first of all, there were many more efforts underway, but it was tough to find and utilize them (termed the “discoverability” problem in this paper). There is dire need for an African approach to organizing the various African AI efforts, akin to how a library organizes the outputs of an institution, or historical narratives are organized in a museum.

Too often in Africa, when we identify a problem like this, we fall into a pattern: we wait. We wait for a Western/European organization to solve our problems. An external organization ends up doing the work and providing the output for us to consume. Or we wait for them to fund us or support us to solve the problem. And I was in that same predicament around 2020. Despite knowing it was an important problem I wanted to work on, I did not believe I had what it took. The different people I talked to, we all agreed it was indeed a problem, but it was not something many people wanted to work on. It was not lucrative enough, not big enough, not popular. It was also difficult to see the direct impact of this work (compared to building AI datasets, models, and applications).

The quote from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o shook me out of that paralysis and pushed me to ask myself: instead of waiting for the African Union or a big organization, what can I do to tackle this problem? How could I, with the skills and community around me, start chipping away at the problem?

That line of thinking led to the birth of Lanfrica. And that has pushed us all through, from 2020 down to now. Working with a very small team and limited funding, we have been investigating the problem slow and steady – like the tortoise in African folklore – towards addressing this foundational theme of improving visibility and understanding of African AI, even if major stakeholders do not yet see it as a priority.

On the Shoulders of African Giants

As I pen this piece in memory of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, I also honor the many African intellectuals and individuals who championed (and continue to champion) our African languages, cultures, and agency. Each generation inherits wisdom and inspiration from the previous one. We take their torch, add our own flame, and carry it forward.

A Collective Call to Action to Take Charge

If there is one important principle I take from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the African giants whose shoulders we stand on, it’s this: as Africans, we need to take charge. We need to believe in ourselves to solve our problems, make mistakes, work with others, uplift others, and rekindle our community-selves.

We don’t have to wait for funders, governments, policymakers or external organizations. Think what can I do right now? Think hard about the problem. Start with what you can do. Build a community around what you’re doing by communicating it, talking with people, and sharing in ever-growing spaces like Black in AI, AfricaNLP, Indaba, RAIL, etc., that recognize the value of African perspectives.

One of the beautiful things about Africa is our sense of community. When you start something meaningful, you’ll be surprised by how many people are willing to help. Share what you’re doing. Invite others to contribute ideas or effort. Even if it’s just moral support or spreading the word, you’ll find allies. Creating impact is a collective effort.

This is the principle I try to integrate into Lanfrica Labs and my career in general. This is a principle that I have also seen applied to different initiatives and has led to immense impact for African AI. Initiatives like Masakhane, Deep Learning Indaba, DSN, NaijaVoices, KenCorpus, SisionkeBiotik, AfriClimateAI, AI4D, EthioNLP, to mention but a few.

The work we do at Lanfrica is often unglamorous and doesn’t yield headline-grabbing results – just like no one likes to talk about the workers who lay the underground pipes that keep an entire city’s water flowing (shoutout to Jason Priem of OpenAlex for this analogy). But it’s foundational. We work diligently because we believe in the importance of what we’re doing: organizing and providing holistic visibility of the African contributions to AI that would otherwise remain scattered, invisible, and deemed irrelevant.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s call to African intellectuals to take charge of their languages and culture is not just about the colonial past. It is a living principle that guides us today, and every day. His life exemplified the impact of courageously standing up for one’s beliefs, and his legacy urges us to believe in ourselves. We have the agency, the responsibility, and the ability to shape our own future. We don’t have to wait. We can start now.

Ngũgĩ’s Legacy: A Literary and Ideological Perspective

An addendum by Prof. Gloria M. T Emezue

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s impact extends far beyond just the quote that inspired Lanfrica Labs. His work in the literary space represents a radical reimagining of what African literature could be. In the 1960s and 70s, he was at the center of a foundational debate: Should African writers write in African languages or European languages? While scholars like Chinua Achebe argued for writing in “domesticated English” in order to reach wider audiences, Ngũgĩ took a more radical stance – he began writing his novels first in Gikuyu, then translating them into English. By this singular action, he was able to prove that his words went beyond mere rhetoric. 

Ngũgĩ also pioneered Kenya’s traveling theater by taking performances directly to villages and towns across Kenya. For him, literature was not mere entertainment – it was an ideological tool to show people their power, to inspire them to resist and agitate for better things in life. This philosophy, deeply influenced by his understanding of how power operates through cultural institutions.

Beyond his creative work, Ngũgĩ, alongside great Nigerian scholars like Prof Ime Ikiddeh of blessed memories, was instrumental in transforming English department curricula across Africa. At the University of Calabar (UNICAL), for instance, the department shifted to “English and Literary Studies” with a focus on African Writers. This happened after Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o spent some time on sabbatical at the department. This work of decolonizing African education created space for African literature to be studied and valued in African institutions.

As we remember Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o during this time, there is no doubt that he, and most of his contemporaries in African literature, demonstrated what it meant to be unapologetically African, with unique stories that could be told and shared in African and other world languages. This remains his legacy for us all.