gugi wa thiong'o loves dancing. He liked it more than anything else - even more than writing. Until the 1980s, his body slowed down with increasing renal failure, Ngugi would get up and start dancing, just thinking about music and not mind its sound. The rhythm flows through his feet in the way words flow through his hands and to the page.

This is how I always remember Ngugi - dancing. He died on May 28, at the age of 87, leaving not only Nobel worthy of literary heritage, but also a deep combination of innovative artifacts and harsh original criticisms that delightfully call on all of us to do better and work harder, as writers, activists, teachers and people-opinions to the colonial foundations that sustain all our societies. As for me, he pushed me to the deeper river to the Kakuma refugee camp, where so many free connections of vernacular and cultural make it possible for people to freely think and speak “from the heart” – which he always describes as the greatest gift of writing.

Ngugi has long been a chartered member of the African Literature Canon and has been Nobel's favorite when I first met him in 2005. Knowing him, I quickly made it clear that his writing was inseparable from his teachings, which in turn was one of Africa's most powerful public intellectuals.

Ngugi's cheerful and relentless smile and laughter masked a deep anger, reflecting the scars of his body and soul on his body and soul as his children, young men and adults were victimized by a continuous and deeply intertwined system of crime domination.

His deaf brother was killed by the British because he did not hear and obey the orders that soldiers stopped at the checkpoints, and Maomao's uprising split his other brothers into the relativity of colonial order in the last decade of British rule, making his basic reality and the basic reality of the division within him was the basic reality of permanent colonies, even connected after independence, to the point of connecting more and more independence.

More than half a century after these events, nothing aroused more anger from Nguji's animation than discussing the transition from the British to Kenyan rule, and colonialism did not leave with the British, but dig and strengthen its facts with the new, Kenyan rulers of Kenya.

When he became a writer and playwright, Nguji also became a radical, committed to using language to reconnect complex African identities – local, tribal, national and international metropolis – the British ruled “cultural bombs” have been “destroyed” over the past seventy years.

After his first game, the Black Hermit premiered in Kampala in 1962, and he was soon declared "speaking for the mainland" voice. Two years later, it was not his first novel that was crying, but also the first English novel by East African writers.

With his fame, Nguji decided to give up on English and began writing in his native Gikuyu.

(Re)Turning to his native language fundamentally changed his career and his life because his clear criticism of postcolonial rule connected with his fellow countrymen in his own language (rather than the national language of English or Swahili), which was too much for the new ruler in Kenya, so he would not tolerate a year, and therefore, his new ruler had a proper trial of 1977.

What Ngugi began to realize when Gikuyu wrote was the reality that neocolonialism was the main mechanism of postcolonial rule. This is not the standard "neocolonialism" used by anti-colonial radicals to describe the continued power of former colonial rulers after formal independence, but the willingness to adopt the colonial techniques and rule of the new independent leaders, many of whom like Jomo Kenyatta, who, like Jomo Kenyatta, suffered an untortured rule.

Therefore, true decolonization can only occur when people’s minds are freed from foreign control, which first requires, and perhaps most importantly, freedom to write in their native language.

Although few acknowledge, he often explains Nguji's concept of neocolonialism, which is due to the transformation of Kwame Nkrumah and other African anti-colonial intellectuals into political leaders, which foresee the prevalence of today's "decomposition and unity" and "Indigiential" and "Indigination" and "Indigeniinal" groups, and gradually formed among the groups of the academy.

Indeed, Ngugi has long been placed with Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the founding postcolonial thought and criticism. But he also said that he often took the respect of the brothers and sisters of Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad and admirer Joseph Conrad, who had similar comprehensive attention to language, even if, as it is said, his prose was written primarily in English rather than Arabic.

Because of the saying and Nguji, colonialism has not yet passed, but is still a reality of ongoing, inner and violent life - for the former, through increasingly violent, and ultimately annihilated settler colonialism, as the latter is due to the violence of successive governments.

Ngugi saw his connection in his shared experience of growing up under British rule. Since 2011, he explained to the recently published anthology of Egyptian prison books that “the expression of authority is at the heart of the colonial culture of silence and fear” and that undermining this authority and ending silence can only appear first through language.

It is said that the vortex of Arabic and English in mind, from childhood, created what he called "primitive instability" that could be completely calmed down when he was in Palestine, and he returned many times in the last decade of his life. For Ngugi, even though Gikuyu made him "imagine another world, flying to free flights, like the bird you see from the (prison) windows", he has not been able to go home for the last few years.

Nevertheless, from his home in Orange County, California, he would never get tired, urging students and young colleagues to “write dangerously” and use language to resist the oppressive order they find themselves. He would say that if you could write without fear, the bird would always fly.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own views and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.