The literary world is in mourning following the death late last month of Kenyan-born writer Ngūgī wa Thiong’o at the age of 87. Although I had long known of his battle with chronic kidney disease, which tethered him to a dialysis machine a couple of times a week, his passing still managed to feel like it crept in on tiptoe.

My first encounter with him – as it were – was when I was in my third year at high school. Our English teacher at the time, keen to ensure we acquired native-speaker proficiency in the Queen’s language, introduced us to the notion of “building up [our] English muscles”. This entailed reading as many “good” English novels as possible each month, noting every new word or idiomatic expression we encountered and paying attention to its usage.

A bodybuilder would not have those bulging muscles if he gave the gym a wide berth, he would intone with solemn gravity – a piece of advice and, at once, an instruction to be able to demonstrate the rate at which our English vocabulary was expanding.

Ngūgī’s books were among the works in the school library he identified as “good English novels”. The first I read was The River Between. I can still recite half the first page – about four decades later: “The two ridges lay side by side. One was Kameno, the other was Makuyu. Between them was a valley. It was called the valley of life. Behind Kameno and Makuyu were many more valleys and ridges . . .”

In no time, I had devoured his other masterpieces: the novels A Grain of Wheat, Devil on the Cross, Matigari, Petals of Blood and Weep Not, Child, as well as Dreams in a Time of War, his childhood memoir. Of course, his repertoire is much broader, and includes the seminal Decolonising the Mind, a collection of essays about language and its constructive role in national culture, history and identity.

Other favourites of mine in our modest school library were works by the likes of Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe, Senegal’s Ousmane Sembène and Ghana’s Ayi Kwei Armah. From South Africa, the teenage me enjoyed the fiction of Peter Abrahams, Bessie Head, Esʼkia Mphahlele and Alan Paton.

But I reckoned Ngūgī’s works to be easily the best. Little wonder you can hardly find anyone who studied literature in English at high school or university who did not encounter at least one of his works as a set text. That’s why, towards the end of his life, he became the perennial favourite to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He must have endured the rise and fall of expectation every October, when the laureates are announced.

Beginning his career as James Ngūgī, he reclaimed his cultural identity as Ngūgī wa Thiong’o, rejecting what he termed a Western-imposed name and switching to writing in Gikuyu, his mother tongue, often translating himself.

In his writing, Ngūgī was equally critical of British rule in his country and the postcolonial society that emerged after independence. He also explored the intersection of language, culture, history and identity.

Beyond being an acclaimed writer, he became a prominent prisoner of conscience when the Kenyan government jailed him for staging a play deemed critical of the government of then President Daniel arap Moi. He went into self-imposed exile in the UK in 1982 following a ban on theatre groups in his home country. He later moved to the US, where he taught comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine.

I’m a journalist today partly because of Ngūgī’s influence. During those halcyon days of “building up our English muscles”, I felt a strong need for a platform to flex those muscles. After a report I wrote on a soccer match involving our senior team was posted on the school notice board, that became my platform. Although, like youngsters of my generation, my love for soccer bordered on the fanatical, my playing prowess was negligible and I never made any of the school teams. But thanks to that initial report, there was always a seat for me on the school bus during every outing – I became the soccer reporter. After school, I turned to journalism, a choice made easier by the financial impossibility of pursuing my first love, engineering.

Rest in power, Mzee Ngūgī.