To accuse Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o of plagiarizing Joseph Conrad is not merely an error in literary judgment—it is a deep affront to both moral clarity and historical truth.
by 
By Professor Peter Ndiang’ui, Florida Gulf Coast University
I have read the works of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o for over four decades. Beyond merely reading, I have had the immense privilege of knowing him personally, of sharing conversations, intellectual debates, and reflections that deepened especially during the final years of his life. Every time I return to his writings, I rediscover fragments of myself, parts buried under decades of colonial education, cultural silencing, and distorted history. Ngũgĩ’s novels, essays, and plays have not only instructed or inspired me, they have restored me. His voice has decolonized my thinking, reaffirmed my dignity, and reminded me that African literature needs no imperial endorsement to be legitimate. It stands powerfully on its own, echoing with the voices of our ancestors and the dreams of our descendants.
By contrast, my exposure to Joseph Conrad was never by choice but by compulsion, assigned by syllabi, praised by imperialist-minded professors, and preserved by gatekeepers of the Western literary canon. Each encounter left me diminished. In Conrad’s universe, people like me are never protagonists, we are phantoms. We groan in the jungle, emerge as limbs in the mist, and loom as menacing silhouettes in the periphery of imperial conscience. We are not people, we are props in a European psychological theatre.
To accuse Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o of plagiarizing Joseph Conrad is not merely an error in literary judgment—it is a deep affront to both moral clarity and historical truth. It is to mistake rebellion for replication, to confuse resistance with imitation. It is, more insidiously, to reduce a revolutionary African voice to a derivative echo of the very imperialism he has spent a lifetime deconstructing. Can anyone seriously believe that a literary giant of African liberation such as Ngũgĩ would draw inspiration from the same Joseph Conrad who authored The Nigger of the Narcissus—a title so offensive that it hurts to reproduce it here? Or from the Conrad who rendered the Congo as the “Heart of Darkness,” a place emptied of civilization and meaning, except through the distorted lens of European despair?
Yes, both A Grain of Wheat (1967) and Under Western Eyes (1911) engage the theme of betrayal. But betrayal is not the intellectual property of any one author, it is a universal thread running through scripture, literature, and political history alike. Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss. Brutus struck down Caesar in the name of Rome. The question is not whether betrayal is used, but how it is treated, and to what end.
In Under Western Eyes, betrayal is inward, psychological, and existential. Razumov betrays his fellow revolutionary, Haldin, to the czarist police, not out of ideology, but out of fear and self-preservation. The story is filtered through a Western narrator who struggles to comprehend the Russian soul he claims to interpret. The betrayal lacks political clarity. It is abstract, melancholic, and ultimately detached from collective struggle.
In stark contrast, A Grain of Wheat presents betrayal as historical and communal, as an act with consequences rooted in the land and the liberation of a nation. Mugo, the central figure, is revered as a hero of the Mau Mau resistance, until it is revealed that he betrayed Kihika, a true martyr of the independence movement. This betrayal is not philosophical; it is real. It does not unfold in the recesses of the mind but within the crucible of national memory. It calls not for mere introspection, but for truth-telling, justice, and societal healing.
Ngũgĩ’s characters like Mugo, Karanja, Gikonyo, and Mumbi, are deeply entangled in the moral and emotional contradictions of postcolonial life. Their betrayals matter because they speak to actual lives and histories, to communities striving to reclaim their land and dignity. These are not symbolic acts; they are indictments of complicity under colonial rule and urgent calls for restoration.
This difference is not semantic, it is seismic.
For all his stylistic brilliance, Joseph Conrad remains a writer steeped in colonial ideology and racial arrogance. His so-called masterpiece, Heart of Darkness (1899), does not present Africa as a vibrant continent of nations and cultures, but as an unknowable void, a metaphor for European disintegration. Africans in the book are rendered voiceless and nameless. They are not characters; they are groaning shadows. Their suffering is observed, but never understood. They do not resist, they are not permitted to.
Chinua Achebe addressed this with unflinching clarity in his 1975 lecture, stating that “Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist.” Achebe’s critique was not a rhetorical flourish; it was a necessary correction. He called out the literary establishment for celebrating a narrative that systematically stripped Africans of their humanity. In Conrad’s fiction, Africans are not invisible, they are deliberately silenced.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has never hesitated to condemn this colonial gaze. In Globalectics (2012), he acknowledged Conrad’s narrative gifts but exposed the ethical blindness of his worldview. Conrad grieved over what imperialism did to the European soul while remaining indifferent—if not oblivious—to the agony of the colonized. His vision never looked beyond the imperial center.
Ngũgĩ’s entire body of work is an answer to that blindness. In Decolonising the Mind (1986), he argued that language is a site of power, a weapon of domination or a tool of liberation. His conscious decision to stop writing fiction in English and return to Gikuyu was not a retreat into tribalism; it was a strategic act of cultural and political defiance. To write in African languages is to assert the legitimacy of African thought and imagination on its own terms.
Ngũgĩ’s fiction like Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross, Matigari, Wizard of the Crow among many others is populated by workers, teachers, market women, students, and the marginalized, all of whom resist exploitation in both subtle and overt ways. His novels do not simply mourn colonialism, they challenge its lingering presence in post-independence societies. They are not elegies, they are manifestos.
He is not alone in this project. Writers such as Wole Soyinka, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Ayi Kwei Armah have all worked to dismantle the illusion of Western literary universality. They are not attempting to erase Western literature but to dethrone its monopoly. They are constructing a multipolar literary space where African voices speak not from the margins, but from the center.
To claim that Ngũgĩ plagiarized Conrad is to mistake defiance for dependence. It is to confuse the raised fist for the bowed head. It is not just inaccurate, it is insulting. It is a form of epistemic violence, one that attempts to collapse a lifetime of decolonial struggle into the shadow of the very empire he sought to overthrow.
Ngũgĩ is not the literary offspring of Conrad, he is his antithesis. He does not walk in Conrad’s footsteps, he erases them.
He does not borrow Conrad’s themes, he reclaims them and transforms them through the lens of African memory, resistance, and vision.
For those of us who have lived reading the works of both authors—Ngũgĩ with reverence, Conrad with resistance, this is not a matter of literary preference. It is a matter of cultural survival. When I read Conrad, I vanish. When I read Ngũgĩ, I return to life.
This is not a literary misunderstanding. It is a civilizational reckoning.
One wrote to mourn the twilight of empire. The other writes so that empire never rises again.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is not a footnote to Joseph Conrad. He is his defiant, enduring repudiation.
