Embracing renewal and lessons from life as we step into 2026

The year 2025 has been a tough one for the literary community in Kenya and Africa. It was the year when we lost some of the finest, globally renowned writers. We lost Ngugi wa Thiong’o on May 28, 2025. Ngugi, who died aged 87, championed a campaign for the decolonisation of the mind that reverberated across the world from the late 1950s.

The year opened on a sad note when we lost Kenyan author and columnist Rasna Warah on January 11, 2025. We also lost Meja Mwangi on December 11, 2025, the author of Kill Me Quick, Going Down River Road and ‘The Silent Song’, the short story that gives the title to the current short stories set-book for secondary schools in Kenya. Meja was easily Kenya’s most prolific writer, both quantitatively and qualitatively.  

We also lost Pamela Kola on November 24, 2025. Kola was a celebrated author of children’s books based on East African folklore and one of the earliest writers of children’s stories from Africa. We also lost David Mulwa on December 5, 2025, the author of We Come in Peace, Flee Mama Flee, Inheritance and Redemption.

Farther afield on the continent, we lost Kekelwa Noliya Nyaywa-Dall, a US-based author of Zambian extraction who gave us Hearthstones as part of a distinguished body of work. Kekelwa Nyaywa-Dall departed this life on June 3, 2025 at the age of 82. I was in touch with her just last year, in the course of my normal work. We were yet to complete what we had been working on when she stepped into what Dylan Thomas calls “the quiet night” in that famous poem titled Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night. This was too much for one year, coming after we had lost the founding father of African publishing, Dr Henry Chakava, in 2024.

But as some of these great writers have taught us, life in the African cosmos is an endless yet cyclical continuum. Our people never die, for when an old man closes his eyes a child cries after its first inhalation of the earth’s air. Now, children cry when they see something they remember did not end well, so the fact that they all cry could well be a confirmation that they were here before. For, in our world, the child is the parent of the parent. We name our children after our fathers, in an endless cycle that stretches into eternity.

In many African societies, you see names such as Kariuki or Muriuki in the Mt Kenya communities, which literally mean “one who brings back into life”. In West Africa, we have abiku children, who are believed to have reincarnated. You see an abiku child in Azaro in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, a mystical literary work that explores reincarnation in the literal sense. Azaro’s refusal to leave this human world despite the lure of spirits is perhaps the spirit of resilience we need to adorn as we step into a new year in a few days.

It is the spiritual regeneration and cultural transformation we crave as we, like the proverbial crow, go to the mountain to shed off our talons and beaks to start another cycle in our life journey. For our literature teaches us that we have always bounced back. In Amos Tutuola’s folkloric The Palm-Wine Drinkard, we see death rescinded and identities returning. We face cosmic challenges but we always, like Wariinga in Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross, overcome our victim mentality and come away ever more confident and self-aware.

The curve balls life throws our way become shadows and mirrors that illuminate the things we need to shed or work on to become better versions of ourselves.

So, if this holiday you had no money despite breaking your back at work, it is not just because you work for sadistic people. It could well be that you are being reminded that Njaanuary is just round the corner and life would be much easier if you stopped gobbling up every farthing you come across like our politicians have a notoriety of doing. It could also mean that you are trapped in what Albert Camus calls The Myth of Sisyphus, the man who was condemned to forever push a stone uphill, after which it rolls downhill and he repeats the process again every day of his life. Luckily for us, every time we roll a stone uphill, we emerge stronger.

As Ngugi himself teaches through Waiyaki in The River Between, we gather lessons even from our tormentors and shed some of our own practices that we no longer need in our coming days.

I remember as a young man a heated debate in these pages where The River Between was pilloried as glorifying outdated African practices. In the original book, there were references that raised eyebrows among mainly uncritical readers. That the book evolved into a school edition that even became a set book in secondary schools in Kenya, shorn of the seemingly atavistic practices, remains for me a testimony that the shadows we face can be transmuted into a force for good.

So, we may have lost some of the finest, but it also means that it is time we got more serious about identifying and nurturing new talent. Our publishers must stop using the curriculum pressure as an excuse to ignore a whole generation and the untapped talent it comes with. I know publishing is a business, but it is self-sabotage for them to continue imagining that the curriculum texts cash cow will be here forever. The truth is that it takes one policy decision to put a stop to their newfound comfort zone, after which they would have to face the reality that there is simply nothing to fall back on. Forget the much-vaunted backlist.

The legacy publishers know only too well that even when their salespeople market their cultural works, everyone from the bookseller to the head teacher wants to know what new works they have.

That said, it is not just as individuals that we must shed what we do not need as we head into 2026. At the community level, our people have believed that the death of one is the birth of another. It is this fact that Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka dramatises in Death and the King’s Horseman, where long-held ritual demands Elesin’s death to renew cosmic balance. In Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter, we see Ramatoulaye, a metaphor for the African woman, rebuilding her dignity and emotional identity through reflection and self-assertion. We need that going into 2026.