Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Alemayehu Gelagay belong to different countries and divergent histories—Kenya, scarred by colonial rupture, and Ethiopia, riven by internal contradiction and imperial amnesia. Yet both turn to literature not as an escape, but as a means of survival. Writing is the means by which fractured selves learn to speak. Though their books are not mirror images, they sing a similar song: each interrogates language, power and identity, and each offers a distinct yet convergent route into the African dilemma, one born of resistance to external imposition, the other of response to inner strife. 

Ngũgĩ’s early novels—Weep Not, Child, The River Between, A Grain of Wheat—depict colonial violence and the betrayals that followed independence. In The River Between the schism is first spiritual, then geographical: missionaries against traditionalists, memory against imposition. His decisive break, however, was linguistic. Abandoning English for Gĩkũyũ—first on stage in Ngaahika Ndeenda, then in fiction such as Devil on the Cross—Ngũgĩ returned not to nostalgia but to politics. For him language is a landscape of consciousness and a reservoir of identity; to reclaim it is to reclaim imagination itself. 

Re‑centring Gĩkũyũ was therefore an act of rupture—less rejection of English than restitution of narrative authority. 

“Language,” he writes, “is two‑faced: a means of communication and a bearer of culture. Master every tongue yet neglect your own, and you are enslaved.” Re‑centring Gĩkũyũ was therefore an act of rupture—less rejection of English than restitution of narrative authority. By reviving the idioms colonialism tried to silence, Ngũgĩ seeks to de‑conglomerate the mind, awakening indigenous modes of thought and expression. 

Alemayehu Gelagay writes from another vantage point—neither anti‑colonial epic nor flag‑waving nationalism. In የተጠላው እንዳልተጠላ (The Hated Did Not Remain Hated), his characters face quieter, more intimate violences: moral fatigue, internal contradictions and the subtle disorientations of contemporary Ethiopia. 

Amharic functions here in double registry—celebrated cultural medium yet complicit in Ethiopia’s imperial hierarchies. Amharic is the language of power, whereas Gĩkũyũ is the language of resistance. Alemayehu’s use of it is not resistance in the Ngũgĩan sense but an ambivalent inheritance: an attempt to negotiate, not escape, the double bind of the self. As Dr Tsedey Wondemu observes in መልክዐ ዓለማየሁ (Representing Alemayehu Gelagay), his fiction constructs heterotopic spaces—simultaneously real and fragmented. Cityscapes become characters in rapidly transforming, fractured urban worlds, where the ethically anguished, economically uprooted, and socially marginalised traverse shifting landscapes, as Ethiopia begins its transition from an imperial, feudal monarchy to a socialist republic. Collapse here is born not of empire but of internal dissolution, the imperative to modernise and modify ancient ways, a fraying of certainties more than sovereignties.  

Ethiopia is not unravelling; it has already unravelled, and the writer scours the ruins for fragments from which to rebuild. 

Thus, the key oppositions in Alemayehu’s work are not oppressor/­oppressed but self/­self, community/­memory, compassion/­cynicism. “The one we hate today may be mourned tomorrow,” Alemayehu writes. “Lives unfold in the interval between judgement and compassion.” His cartography charts the ethics of survival where coherence is frayed but not entirely broken. Ethiopia is not unravelling; it has already unravelled, and the writer scours the ruins for fragments from which to rebuild. 

This tension recalls the dialectic identified by Messay Kebede in “Africa’s Quest for a Philosophy of Decolonisation”: Africa must attain intellectual independence not only in answer to colonial wounding but through engagement with its own contradictions. Ngũgĩ aligns with this programme in his linguistic revolution; Alemayehu undertakes a parallel labour, dismantling values shaped by the modern nation‑state, capitalism and moral dislocation. 

Dialectically framed: Ngũgĩ asks how to decolonise minds embedded in alien speech; Alemayehu asks how to preserve dignity amid the interior breakdowns of modernity. Yet a third path emerges—neither naked return nor mere negotiation, but composition. The compositional self does not seek pristine restitution, nor does it solely adapt; it creates from fragments. Contradiction becomes material, not fault, and asks: what may be built with what remains? 

Harar, like the compositional self, embodies endurance through reframing, hybridity without surrendering meaning. 

This is no Hegelian synthesis but a poetics of continual becoming: not purity, but bricolage; not historical avoidance, but the use of history as raw material. Language becomes canvas as much as battleground. 

Consider Harar, the walled city of saints in eastern Ethiopia. Rather than imitate distant Islamic capitals, Harar composed its own sacred architecture: intimate mosques, alley‑way markets, scholarship in the local tongue. Its walls served not only defence but lyrical border, containing multiplicity while refusing erasure. Harar, like the compositional self, embodies endurance through reframing, hybridity without surrendering meaning. 

The compositional self-names its ancestors without being imprisoned by them; it may sleep in English and dream in Afaan Oromo, beat Amharic rhythms and commune in silence. Disloyal to borders—linguistic, cultural, political—it pays homage to and embraces creativity and meaning‑making. Decolonisation here is forward‑looking re‑imagination: the invention of sensibilities not pre‑destined by empire or modernity. If Ngũgĩ supplies the resistant voice and Alemayehu the reflective one, the compositional voice is breakage, collage, improvisation. 

In today’s Africa—politically fragmented yet digitally networked, globally visible yet locally silenced—the compositional self is necessity rather than choice. Heritage is commodified, diasporic voices reshape national narratives, and language is filtered through screens and code. Young people shoulder history via playlists, memes, borrowed words and inherited silences. Stories migrate through hashtags, mixtapes, multilingual SMS and constant movement. 

Within this flux, the compositional self is both survival tactic and prophecy: neither spotless break nor untainted tradition, but the dynamic space where mutation and memory intersect, where Harar meets Nairobi, exile meets home. It is how we write back, refuse erasure and dare to imagine otherwise. African philosophy must therefore do more than recall or reconcile it must produce—out of negation, scepticism and, above all, creative passion.