Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature

In Chapter 4, Ngũgĩ brings his preceding analyses to bear on his own experiences as a professor in Kenya and his involvement with the debate surrounding the restructuring of the English departments curriculum to focus on mainly African languages. Reflecting on the societal effect of a curriculum centered on literature written in English, Ngũgĩ writes, “In such a literature there were only two types of Africans: the good and the bad” (92). “Good Africans,” invariably characterized as strong and beautiful, those who helped European colonizers, either in a traditional colonial setting or a neocolonial setting. By contrast, “bad Africans” resist the influence of direct or indirect colonial hegemony and are always portrayed negatively. These false binaries of “good” and “bad” members of an oppressed class are common in the film and literature of many countries. These include the United States, where popular culture during the antebellum period, the Jim Crow Era, and the era of mass incarceration applied similar dichotomies to Black Americans to reinforce systems of oppression.

Meanwhile, the author was right to predict that the dynamics undergirding the “great Nairobi literature debate” would continue long after his book’s publication. In 2012, the pioneering Indian scholar of postcolonialism Gayatri Spivak spoke to the enduring timeliness of Ngũgĩ’s ideas and the intractable nature of what she calls the “language question.” (Spivak, Gayatri. “Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: In Praise of a Friend.” Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. New York: The Modern Language Association. 2012.) For Ngũgĩ’s part, he remains committed to preserving and promoting the use of African languages in African art, writing numerous other books on the subject in the 21st century, including Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing and Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance.