Archive June 2, 2025

Russian air bases are targeted frequently by Ukraine-based drones.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o was a dancer. He adored it more than anything else, even more so than writing. Ngugi would get up and start dancing at the sound of music just as his body slowed as his body slowed as his body slowed as his body slowed down. His feet felt like words did, and he felt the rhythm of the page.

I’ll always be able to recall Ngugi dancing because of it. He passed away on May 28 at the age of 87, leaving behind a deeply innovative literary legacy and piercingly original criticism that joyfully calls on writers, activists, teachers, and people to work harder in opposition to colonial foundations that sustain all of our societies. He forepushed me to travel much further up the river to the Kakuma refugee camp, where he would always attribute his greatest gift, writing, being able to freely express his thoughts and opinions “from the heart.”

By the time I first met him in 2005, Ngugi had long been a cherished Nobel laureate and a founding member of the African literary canon. After getting to know him, it quickly became clear that his writing and teaching were inseparably linked to both of his political commitments and long service as one of Africa’s most powerful public figures.

Ngugi was a child, young man, and adult victimized by successive and deeply intertwined systems of criminalized rule, despite his cheerfulness and unwavering smile and laugh and unwavering smile.

His deaf brother’s murder, which the British killed because he refused to obey soldiers’ orders to stop at a checkpoint, and the Mau Mau revolt that divided his other brothers on opposing sides of the colonial order during the final ten years of British rule, gave him the fundamental reality that violence and divisiveness were the twin engines of permanent coloniality even after independence formally severed the connection to the metropole.

Nothing could stifle Ngugi’s enraged rage more than bringing up the transition from British to Kenyan rule and the fact that colonialism didn’t abandon the British but instead resisted the British’s attempts to reinvigorate itself with Kenya’s new, Kenyan rulers.

Ngugi, a writer and playwright, also developed a militant bent on reuniting the complex African identities that the “cultural bomb” of British rule had “annihilated” over the previous seven decades.

He was quickly recognized as a voice who “speaks for the Continent” after his first play, The Black Hermit, was first performed in Kampala in 1962. His first novel, Weep Not Child, and the first East African author’s work in English, was published two years later.

Ngugi decided to start writing in his native Gikuyu as he gained notoriety.

The (re)adoption of his native tongue significantly altered the course of both his career and his life because the ability of his lucid analysis of postcolonial rule to reach his fellow citizens in their own language (as opposed to English or Swahili), was too much for Kenya’s new rulers to tolerate. In 1977, he was imprisoned for a year without being tried.

Ngugi realized that neocolonialism was the primary mechanism of postcolonial rule when he began writing in Gikuyu, and even more so when he was imprisoned. Anti- and post-colonial activists didn’t use the standard “neocolonialism” to describe the continued dominance of former colonial rulers through other means after formal independence, but rather the willing adoption of colonial technologies and discourses of rule by newly independent leaders, many of whom, like Jomo Kenyatta, Ngugi liked to point out, themselves endured imprisonment and torture under British rule.

Thus, true decolonization could only occur when people’s minds were freed from foreign control, which required, perhaps most importantly, the right to write in one’s own language.

Ngugi’s theory of neocolonialism, which he would frequently credit with Kwame Nkrumah’s writings and other African anti-colonial intellectuals-turned-political leaders, was almost a generation ahead of the now-distant “decolonial” and “Indigenous” turns in the academy and progressive cultural production.

Indeed, Ngugi is regarded as the first generation of postcolonial criticism along with Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. However, he and Said shared a similar all-encompassing focus on language, even though Said wrote his prose primarily in English rather than Arabic, which he and Said frequently discussed as he frequently exchanged barbs and was a close friend of Polish-British author Joseph Conrad.

Colonianism was still a very real, visceral, and violently lived reality for Said and Ngugi thanks to settler colonialism, which had not yet passed, and which was ultimately annihilated by successive governments.

Ngugi and Said shared a common childhood experience under British rule, which he saw as a result. According to him, disrupting that authority and putting an end to the silence could only be done through language, as he stated in his afterword to a recently published collection of Egyptian prison writings from 2011’s anthology of colonial writings.

For Said, the Arabic and English worlds he’d known as being young had a “primal instability,” which he could fully unwind while living in Palestine, which he frequently visited throughout his life. Even as Gikuyu taught him to “imagine another world, a flight to freedom, like a bird you see from the]prison window,” Ngugi was unable to make a final trip home in his final years.

He would never tire of urging students and younger colleagues in Orange County, California, to “write dangerously” and to use language to oppose any oppressive order they found themselves in from his home. If you could write fearlessly, the bird would always take flight, he would say.

Russia and Ukraine have agreed to a new prisoner swap and the return of thousands of war dead during direct talks in Istanbul although little headway was made towards ending the war.

The delegations met on Monday at the Ottoman-era Ciragan Palace in the Turkish city, and officials confirmed that both sides will exchange prisoners of war and the remains of 6,000 soldiers killed in combat.

Negotiators from both sides confirmed they had reached a deal to swap all severely wounded soldiers as well as all captured fighters under the age of 25.

“We agreed to exchange all-for-all seriously wounded and seriously sick prisoners of war. The second category is young soldiers who are from 18 to 25 years old – all-for-all,” Ukraine’s lead negotiator and Defence Minister Rustem Umerov told reporters in Istanbul.

Russia’s lead negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, said the swap would involve “at least 1,000” on each side – topping the 1,000-for-1,000 POW exchange agreed at talks last month.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking from Vilnius, Lithuania, said the two parties “exchanged documents through the Turkish side” and Kyiv was preparing for the next group of captives to be released.

The Istanbul meeting marks the second direct dialogue in less than a month, but expectations were low. The talks on May 16 produced another major prisoner swap but failed to reach a ceasefire.

“The exchange of prisoners seems to be the diplomatic channel that actually works between Russia and Ukraine,” Al Jazeera correspondent Dmitry Medvedenko said, reporting from Istanbul.

“We’ve actually had exchanges of prisoners throughout this war, not in the numbers that have been happening as a result of these Istanbul talks,” Medvedenko added.

Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, said Kyiv also handed over a list of children it accuses Russia of abducting and demanded their return.

As for a truce, Russia and Ukraine remain sharply divided.

“The Russian side continued to reject the motion of an unconditional ceasefire,” Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergiy Kyslytsya told reporters after the talks.

Russia said it had offered a limited pause in fighting.

“We have proposed a specific ceasefire for two to three days in certain areas of the front line,” top negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said, adding this was needed to collect bodies of dead soldiers from the battlefield.

At the negotiating table, Russia presented a memorandum setting out the Kremlin’s terms for ending hostilities, the Ukrainian delegation said.

Umerov told reporters that Kyiv officials would need a week to review the document and decide on a response. Ukraine proposed further talks on a date between June 20 and June 30, he said.

After the talks, Russian state news agencies Tass and RIA Novosti published the text of the Russian memorandum, which suggested that Ukraine withdraw its forces from the four regions that Russia annexed in September 2022 but never fully captured as a condition for a ceasefire.

As an alternate way of reaching a truce, the memorandum presses Ukraine to halt its mobilisation efforts and freeze Western arms deliveries, conditions were suggested earlier by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The document also suggests that Ukraine stop any redeployment of forces and ban any military presence of third countries on its soil as conditions for halting hostilities.

The Russian document further proposes that Ukraine end martial law and hold elections, after which the two countries could sign a comprehensive peace treaty that would see Ukraine declare its neutral status, abandon its bid to join NATO, set limits on the size of its armed forces and recognize Russian as the country’s official language on par with Ukrainian.

Ukraine and the West have previously rejected all those demands from Moscow.

Ceasefire hopes remain elusive

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the talks “magnificent”.

“My greatest wish is to bring together Putin and Zelenskyy in Istanbul or Ankara and even add [United States President Donald] Trump along,” he said.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, who chaired the talks, said the world was watching closely. He acknowledged the two sides had discussed the conditions for a ceasefire but no tangible outcome was announced.

Oleksiy Goncharenko, a Ukrainian member of parliament, told Al Jazeera he was not very optimistic about talks in Istanbul.

“Russia clearly shows that they don’t want to end the war because Ukraine proposed a 30-days ceasefire in March, and the American and Europe proposition was the same, but only one country [Russia] refused,” Goncharenko said.

Meanwhile, Ukraine has ramped up its military efforts far beyond the front lines, claiming responsibility for drone attacks on Sunday that it said damaged or destroyed more than 40 Russian warplanes. The operation targeted airbases in three distant regions – the Arctic, Siberia and the Far East – thousands of kilometres from Ukraine.

“This brilliant operation will go down in history,” Zelenskyy said, calling the raids a turning point in Ukraine’s struggle.

Ukrainian officials said the attacks crippled nearly a third of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. Vasyl Maliuk, head of the Security Service of Ukraine, said the mission had taken more than a year to plan.

Zelenskyy said the setback for Russia’s military would increase pressure on Moscow to return to the negotiating table.

“Russia must feel the cost of its aggression. That is what will push it towards diplomacy,” he said during his visit to Lithuania, where he met leaders from NATO’s eastern flank and Nordic countries.

Ukraine’s air force, meanwhile, reported that Russia launched 472 drones on Sunday – the highest number since the start of its full-scale invasion in 2022 – aiming to exhaust Ukrainian air defences. Most of those drones targeted civilian areas, it said.

On Monday, Russian forces bombarded southern Ukraine’s Kherson region, killing three people and injuring 19, including two children. Separately, five people were killed and nine injured in attacks near Zaporizhzhia in the neighbouring Zaporizhia region.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence said its forces had intercepted 162 Ukrainian drones overnight across eight regions and Crimea while Ukraine said it shot down 52 out of 80 drones launched by Russia.