Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature

“If in these essays I criticise the Afro-European (or Euroafrican) choice of our linguistic praxis, it is not to take away from the talent and the genius of those who have written in English, French or Portuguese. On the contrary I am lamenting a neo-colonial situation which has meant the European bourgeoisie once again stealing our talents and geniuses as they have stolen our economies. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Europe stole art treasures from Africa to decorate their houses and museums; in the twentieth century Europe is stealing the treasures of the mind to enrich their languages and cultures. Africa needs back its economy, its politics, its culture, its languages and all its patriotic writers.” 

Ngũgĩ announces a crucial clarification for the subsequent chapters of the book. Although he criticizes writers who choose to write in a European as opposed to African language, he does not intend to emphasize supposed guilt on the part of any individual author. Rather, Ngũgĩ’s concern is that by continuing to write in European languages, African authors remain complicit in perpetuating European hegemony for all people of African descent. 

“I shall look at the African realities as they are affected by the great struggle between the two mutually opposed forces in Africa today: an imperialist tradition on one hand, and a resistance tradition on the other. The imperialist tradition in Africa is today maintained by the international bourgeoisie using the multinational and of course the flag-waving native ruling classes. [...]The resistance tradition is being carried out by the working people (the peasantry and the proletariat) aided by patriotic students, intellectuals (academic and non-academic), soldiers and other progressive elements of the petty middle class.”

Ngũgĩ provides the reader with the framework that unifies each of the chapters of the book. Regardless if the topic is literature, history, language, or theatre, Ngũgĩ always returns to the fact that the production of cultural objects involves the production of a whole way of viewing the world and one’s place within it. For Ngũgĩ, the only way in which we can truly understand African writing practices is in relationship to how their works were produced under conditions of two conflicting forces: the colonial and imperial powers of Europe and America on the one hand, and the revolutionary anti-colonial movements, on the other. 

“Imperialism is the rule of consolidated finance capital and since 1884 this monopolistic parasitic capital has affected and continues to affect the lives even of the peasants in the remotest corners of our countries. If you are in doubt, just count how many African countries have now been mortgaged to IMF—the new International Ministry of Finance as Julius Nyerere once called it. Who pays for the mortgage? Every single producer of real wealth (use value) in the country so mortgaged, which means every single worker and peasant. Imperialism is total: it has economic, political, military, cultural and psychological consequences for the people of the world today. It could even lead to holocaust.”

Ngũgĩ describes the economic relationships that former European colonial countries maintain with African countries after decolonization took place. The economic structure of colonial and later neo-colonial governments on the African continent were beholden to borrowing money from the International Monetary Fund to develop their countries whose own underdevelopment was due to the European colonization. For Ngũgĩ, the significance of the fact that African countries continue to rely on funding and aid from former colonial powers is indicative of the fact that even when colonial powers have physically removed themselves from a nation’s territory, they still remain in control by being the geopolitical bodies with control over access to necessary monetary resources to undo the damage and devastation done by colonial rule. 

“[T]he biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against the collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other peoples’ languages rather than their own

Ngũgĩ provides the reader with a very brief summary and preview of why he, as an African writer, is preoccupied with the question of language and how it relates to the history of oppression that formerly colonized peoples face. Language is an example of what he calls the “cultural bomb” because the replacement of Indigenous African languages with those of European colonial languages educates and cultivates a population whose cultural, historical, moral, and political reference points refer them towards a world that is completely foreign to themselves and their own history. It is for this reason that language as a cultural bomb plays a significant role in perpetuating colonial oppression: It leaves the Indigenous population in a condition where great works of art, science, and technology, along with the everyday reference points that constitute ‘culture’ are things that can only be read about and never experience. In turn, this has the lasting effect of falsely teaching the colonized population that their way of life is not that of a civilized people.

blackboard. The physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom. But where the former was visibly brutal, the latter was visibly gentle, a process best described in Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s novel Ambiguous Adventure where he talks of the methods of the colonial phase of imperialism as consisting of knowing how to kill with efficiency and to heal with the same act. On the Black Continent, one began to understand their real power resided not at all in the canons of the first morning but in what followed the cannons. Therefore behind the cannons was the new school.

This passage builds on the insights of the quote directly preceding this one while providing a larger historical context. Ngũgĩ’s reference to “Berlin of 1884” is to the Berlin Conference, which was one of the key meetings between European colonial powers where they came to an agreement among themselves, and without the input or consent of African peoples, to divide up the continent of Africa into distinct countries governed by different European nation-states—a moment that is sometimes referred to as the “scramble for Africa.” When Ngũgĩ refers to the bullet and the blackboard, he is referring to the manner by which colonial powers seized land, people, and territory across the African continent and then maintained that seizure. However, once the colonizers had won these initial battles, they set up institutions that would ensure that the colonized populations would be pacified.

“I remember one boy in my class of 1954 who had distinctions in all subjects except English, which he had failed. He was made to fail the entire exam. He went on to become a turn boy in a bus company. I who had only passes but a credit in English got a place at the Alliance High School, one of the most elitist institutions for Africans in colonial Kenya. The requirements for a place at the University, Makerere University College, were broadly the same: nobody could go on to wear the undergraduate red gown, no matter how brilliantly you had performed in all the other subjects unless they had a credit—not even a simple pass!—in English! Thus the most coveted place in the pyramid and in then system was only available to the holder of an English language credit card. English was the official vehicle and the magic formula to colonial elitedom.” 

Ngũgĩ details the concrete effects of colonization with respect to the imposition of English as the official language throughout everyday life. As Ngũgĩ described previously with respect to the subjective experience of the colonized subject having to educate themselves in a language whose world is not their own, this passage shows the larger structural effects and future impact that the colonial politics and use of language had on children at school. Language became a tool of oppression precisely because an individual's advance and upward mobility in society was bound to the degree to which they were able to master the language of their European counterparts. As seen here, it is not one’s merit that ultimately determines whether they are deserving of certain benefits and access to further education and improving their quality of life, but the degree to which they can prove that they have abandoned their African heritage.

“The real aim of colonialism was to control the people’s wealth; what they produced, how they produced it, and how it was distributed; to control, in other words, the entire realm of the language of real life. Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world. Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-identification in relationship to others.” 

Ngũgĩ reiterates the twofold nature of the violence of colonization. Colonialism proceeds, first, by seizing a people’s means of subsistence through force and violence—warfare, theft, pillage, mass murder—and then by inculcating the idea that any identification with one’s African heritage is a moral misstep, since it is the European and not the African or Asian who is civilized and technologically advanced. 

“Central to all these varieties of dramatic expression were songs, dance and occasional mime! Drama in pre-colonial Kenya was not, then, an isolated event: it was part and parcel of the rhythm of daily and seasonal life of the community. It was an activity among other activities, often drawing its energy from those other activities. It was also entertainment and the sense of involved enjoyment; it was moral instruction; and it was also a strict matter of life and death and communal survival. This drama was not performed in special buildings set aside for the purpose. It could take place anywhere.” 

Ngũgĩ reflects on the question of whether theatre and drama were simply colonial imports into the African continent or whether, in pre-colonial Africa, one can already find the existence of theatre and drama in Indigenous form. As Ngũgĩ highlights, drama and theatre already existed in pre-colonial Kenya in the Ituika ceremony. This ceremony was the embodiment of all the key elements of theatre: song, dance, and performativity or mime. Ngũgĩ concludes that establishing a theatre production company in the community was a way to reconnect with pre-colonial Kenya society, which was stunted by British colonization. 

“But it was imperialism that had stopped the free development of the national traditions of theatre rooted in the ritual and ceremonial practices of the peasantry. The real language of African theatre could only be found among the people—the peasantry in particular—in their life, history and struggles. Kamiriithu then was not an aberration, but an attempt at reconnection with the broke roots of African civilization and its traditions of theatre.” 

Ngũgĩ provides an answer as to what was to be the appropriate language of the revival of a truly African theatre. He believed the African languages had to serve as the basis of African theatre precisely because it was these languages that harbored within them the words and expressions that allowed African peoples to reconnect to their pre-colonial heritage.

“We called for a revolutionary theatre facing the consequent challenge: how to truly depict the masses in the only historically correct perspective: positively, heroically and as the true makers of history. We had gone on to define good theatre as that which was on the side of the people, ‘that which, without masking mistakes and weaknesses gives people courage and urges them to higher resolves in their struggle for total liberation’. But we never asked ourselves how this revolutionary theatre was going to urge people to higher resolves in a foreign language.” 

Ngũgĩ describes what he takes to be the nature of a revolutionary theatre production. Revolutionary theatre needed to overcome the typical alienation of audience from performance and allow the community to identify with the narratives displayed on stage. Moreover, revolutionary theatre needed to reconnect African peoples to their history, which is one of anti-colonial liberation struggle, and to show them that it is within their capacity to achieve the desired emancipation from imperial powers to which Africa, after decolonization, was still subject.

“Can an idea be killed? Can you destroy a revolutionary shrine itself enshrined in the revolutionary spirit of the people?”

Ngũgĩ summarizes the benefit of his time working with the local community, producing theatre performances. He views his imprisonment for this activity as a failed deterrent to cultivating a sense of confidence and revolutionary aspiration among the larger Kenyan population. Ngũgĩ explains that the government can imprison whomever they wish, but once the aspiration for real equality and emancipation takes root in the hearts and minds of everyday people, imprisoning various individuals becomes a fruitless endeavor for thwarting the liberation struggle.

“[T]he novel, at least in the form that reached us in Africa, is of bourgeois origins. It arose with the emergence of the European bourgeoisie into historical dominance through commerce and industry, with the development of the new technology of the printing press and hence commercial publishing and above all with the new climate of thought that the world was knowable through human experience. At long last the world of Ptolemy was being replaced by the world of Copernicus and Galileo; the world of alchemy by that of chemistry; that of magic and divine wills by that of experience in nature and in human affairs.” 

Ngũgĩ outlines the trajectory by which the European form of the novel made its way to Africa and transformed European society. What is significant in the European production of the novel was the fact that a whole new organization of the economic arrangement of European society had to come into existence prior to the novel reaching the shores of Africa. This is significant for the very reason that colonization was part and parcel of this new economic rearrangement . The same technological advances that were made by virtue of the theft of resources and labor on the African continent were also constitutive of the process by which the European novel came to be consumed by colonized African populations. Ngũgĩ’s statement that the novel was of “bourgeois” origins reflects this.

“The most crucial discoveries and technical breakthroughs that have changed the face of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries like the Spinning Jenny, the weaving loom, and the steam engine were all the products of the working class. All the earlier crucial discoveries like the wheel for irrigation, or the windmill or watermill, were the inventions of the peasantry. Again this is even more true of the arts. The most important breakthroughs in music, dance and literature have been borrowed from the peasantry. Even the games like football and athletics have come from ordinary people while all the others normally associated with the upper classes were refinements of those of the people. Nowhere is this more clear than in the area of languages.” 

Ngũgĩ responds to the idea that any attempt to produce a specifically African novel can never be achieved since the novel is particular to European society. As seen above, various discoveries and inventions be put to multiple uses and are thus not region specific; it turns out that those very discoveries and inventions are the products of the labor of multiple individuals and sometimes of the whole society. Any invention or discovery belongs to everyone involved in that labor process, no matter one’s rank or station in life. Moreover, a truly liberated society would be one in which the products and discoveries made belong to and are shared among the entire globe, and it is toward this end that the African novel is oriented.

“The whole point of a neo-colonial regime imprisoning a writer is, in addition to punishing him, to keep him away from the people, to cut off any and every contact and communication between him and the people. In my case the regime wanted to keep me away from the university and the village and if possible to break me.” 

Ngũgĩ reflects on the motivation a government may have for imprisoning someone who is a simple artist and professor. Based on Ngũgĩ’s experience and time in jail, he came to the realization that the main purpose of imprisoning artists and writers in a neo-colonial regime is to put a stop to those individuals in society who give voice to the frustrations and criticisms of the larger population, thereby contributing to an atmosphere of rebellion and revolt. It is for this reason that he, as an artist and writer, was put in prison.

“Within Africa as a whole there would be the foundation of a truly African sensibility in the written arts. This will also have the added effect of enhancing the art of translation which would be studied in schools and colleges [...] and this necessarily would mean more rigorous and committed study of African languages. Each thing will be feeding on every other thing, in a dialectical sense, to create a progressive movement in the African novel and literature. The future of the African novel is then dependent on a willing writer [...] a willing translator [...] a willing publisher [...] and finally [...] a willing and widening readership. But of all these other factors it is only the writer who is best placed to break through the vicious circle and create fiction in African languages. The writer of fiction can be and must be the pathfinder.” 

Ngũgĩ outlines an alternative world in which African languages are the primary medium through which African artists express themselves. That world would be enriched by its serious commitment to deepening the understanding of various African traditions regardless if one is from Europe or from the global South. African artists who make the explicit choice to write in their native tongue are part of this larger struggle toward a world that encourages real understanding among various different cultures.

“Instead, I shall attempt to sum up what we have so far been discussing by looking at what immediately underlies the politics of language in African literature; that is the search for a liberating perspective within which to see ourselves clearly in relationship to ourselves and to other selves in the universe. I shall call this ‘a quest for relevance’ and I want to look at it as far as it relates, not to just the writing of literature, but to the teaching of that literature in schools and universities and to the critical approaches.” 

Ngũgĩ summarizes the singular aim that guides the entire text. Whether it is with respect to theatre, the novel, or to the politics of language, Ngũgĩ’s writing and political organizing is geared toward the liberation of African peoples in the totality of their lives. This “quest for relevance” is a quest for the people to emancipate themselves by reconnecting with their heritage, which is a history of anti-colonial and anti-imperial resistance. Therefore, it is a quest for African peoples to become interested in themselves and to find the tools for this liberation within their own culture. 

“Do you know the story of the seven blind men who went to see an elephant? They used to have so many conflicting speculations as to the physical make-up of an elephant. Now at last they had a chance to touch and feel it. But each touched a different part of the animal: leg, ear, tusk, tail, side, trunk, belly and so they went home even more divided as to the physical nature, shape and size of an elephant. They obviously stood in different positions or physical bases, in their exploration of the elephant. Now the base need not be physical but also be philosophical, class or national. In this book I have pointed out that how we view ourselves, our environment even, is very much dependent on where we stand in relations to imperialism in its colonial and neo-colonial stages; that if we are to do anything about our individual and collective being today, then we have to coldly and consciously look at what imperialism has been doing to us and to our view of ourselves in the universe.”

Ngũgĩ relies on the metaphor of blind individuals trying to gain knowledge of what an elephant looks like. The lesson this image is that when we find ourselves in a position where we do not know what we are confronted with or what the future holds, we are obliged to establish a solid basis regarding our present reality. Just like the blind men who went to go see an elephant, Ngũgĩ found himself in the midst of a debate regarding the new orientation that his English department would take at the University, the consequences of which we see in the following passages below.

“A month later on 24 October 1968 three African lecturers and researchers at the University responded to Dr. Stewart’s proposals by calling for the abolition of the English Department as then constituted. They questioned the underlying assumption that the English tradition and the emergence of the modern west were the central root of Kenya’s and Africa’s consciousness and cultural heritage. They rejected the underlying notion that Africa was an extension of the West. Then followed the crucial rejoinder: Here then; is our main question: if there is a need for a ‘study of the historic continuity of a single culture’, why can’t this be African? Why can’t African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?”

This is a crucial scene from the fourth chapter, “The Quest for Relevance,” where a rather innocent proposal made by the dean to restructure the English Department transformed into a highly contentious debate over the future of African literature within the postcolonial university. The debate that ensued at the suggestion of the dean opened the space for Ngũgĩ to put into practice, at the institutional level, his theory on African peoples relationship to writing, an author's use of language, and the wider community that should be the artists’ intended audience.

“In order to see the significance of the debate and why it raised so much temper we have to put it in a historical context of the rise of English studies in Africa, of the kind of literature an African student was likely to encounter and the role of culture in the imperialist domination of Africa. English studies in schools and higher institutions of learning became systematised after the Second World War with the setting up of the overseas extensions of the University of London in Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Kenya and Tanzania [...] The syllabus of the English Department for instance meant a study of the history of English literature from Shakespeare, Spencer and Milton to James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards and the inevitable F. R. Leavis [...] How many seminars we spent on detecting this moral significance in every paragraph, in every word, even in Shakespeare’s commas and full stops?”

Ngũgĩ demonstrates the impact that English departments have upon their African students. By doing so, he implies the long-lasting benefits that could be had in restructuring the departments curriculum around African languages and authors who write in their native tongue. As seen here, students who go on to study English at the university level spend all of their time dissecting, interpreting, and reading major writers whose idiom and references points are foreign to the world of the formerly colonized subject. Implied in this education in the Western canon is the naive assumption that there must necessarily be some superior meaning and importance to be found in these texts as opposed to those written by Africans and in African languages, due to the time spent poring over the works of white European authors.

“But their literature, even at its most humane and universal, necessarily reflected the European experience of history: the world of its settings and the world it evoked would be more familiar to a child brought up in the same landscape than to one brought up outside, no matter how the latter might try to see Jane characters in the gossiping women of his rural African setting.” 

Ngũgĩ responds to those who may see the suggestion of switching from English to Indigenous African languages within the university as a step too far, or unnecessary and thus an overcorrection of the cultural effects of colonization. According to Ngũgĩ, even the best and most sympathetic European authors still produce literature from a thoroughly Western perspective and thus do not capture the lived, everyday reality of African peoples and African society. It is for this reason that even the most progressive European literature still remains limited in its ability to represent the virtuous aspirations and past struggles of African peoples to themselves. Thus, Ngũgĩ sides with those who want to center African languages within the university setting.

“Karen Blixen’s book Out of Africa falls within the same liberal mould: to her Africans are a special species of human beings endowed with a great spirituality and a mystical apprehension of reality or else with the instinct and vitality of animals, qualities which ‘we in Europe’ have lost.” 

Ngũgĩ selects Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa as a clear example of what he means by arguing that even the most sympathetic of European authors remain unable to represent the revolutionary spirit and past struggles of African peoples to themselves. For someone like Blixen, when she attempts to portray African people in her novel, the result is an image of other worldly people whose way of life is characterized by certain features that have atrophied in European culture.

“The good African was the one who co-operated with the European coloniser; particularly the African who helped the European coloniser in the occupation and subjugation of his own people and country. Such a character was portrayed as possessing qualities of strength, intelligence and beauty [...] The bad African character was the one who offered resistance to the foreign conquest and occupation of his country. Such a character was portrayed as being ugly, weak, cowardly and scheming. [...] African children who encountered literature in colonial schools and universities were thus experiencing the world as defined and reflected in the European experience of history. Their entire way of looking at the world, even the world of the immediate environment, was Eurocentric. Europe was the centre of the universe.” 

Ngũgĩ touches on the worst aspects of European literature taught at the time of the debates within his English department as a way of illustrating the various possible images to which African students were exposed. While qualitatively worse than Karen Blixen’s depiction of African peoples as the other-worldly mystic, the explicitly racist literature shared something in common with these sympathetic overtures by European writers: namely, the articulation of various images of African identity, none of which corresponded to the actual lived experience of African students. Whether he considers the best or the worst of European literature, Ngũgĩ identifies this shared quality as the absolute limit of the tradition as a whole.

“[T]he rejection of that principle in 1968 was therefore more than a rejection of a principle in a literary academic debate. It was questioning the underlying assumptions behind the entire system that we had inherited and had continued to run without basic questions about national perspective and relevance. The question is this: from what base do we look at the world?” 

Ngũgĩ summarizes the reasons for the debates and the overall outlook of the faculty in his English department. The debate that broke out amongst the English Department was not centered on whether the department should focus on literature written in African languages or European languages, particularly those written in English. Rather, the debate centered on how this integration and restructuring of the curriculum would put front and center literature written in African languages; a debate which Ngũgĩ summarizes in the single question: “[F]rom what base do we look at the world?”