Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature

For Ngũgĩ, the relation between language, culture, and the possibility of human freedom are inseparable. He writes that language is divided into three fundamental aspects which include non-verbal language relations, spoken language, and written language In colonial and neo-colonial Kenya, the Indigenous languages of a colonized peoples are replaced with that of the colonizer. In separating the people from their native speech and writing, the European oppressors were able to superimpose their own language. In turn, that language is better-suited to carry narratives that benefit European colonizers and, later, the neocolonial rulers who benefit from the social hierarchies already in place. One of these narratives is that of the “good” and “bad” African. Ngũgĩ argues that one of the consequences of this and other racist narratives is that African children are indoctrinated at an early age to celebrate the “good” pro-European African and to disavow the resistant “bad” African. Of these indoctrinated children, he adds, “Their entire way of looking at the world, even the world of the immediate environment, was Eurocentric. Europe was the centre of the universe” (93).

In the wake of Decolonising the Mind, an entire field emerged to study “linguicism,” acts of discrimination based on one’s language or speech patterns. Coined by the Finnish linguist Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, linguicism is defined as “ideologies and structures which are used to legitimate, effectuate, and reproduce unequal division of power and resources (both material and non-material) between groups which are defined on the basis of language.” (Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove and Robert Phillipson. “‘Mother Tongue’: The Theoretical and Sociopolitical Construction of a Concept.” Status and Function of Language and Language Varieties. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter & Co. 1989.) More recently, political scientist Gerald Roche published a 2019 research paper examining China’s language oppression against Tibet through the targeted and systematic erasure of the region’s minority languages. (Roche, Gerald. “Articulating language oppression: colonialism, coloniality and the erasure of Tibet’s minority languages.” Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 53, no. 5, 2019.) Thus, Ngũgĩ’s pioneering work in addressing language as a tool of oppression continues to influence modern thought across a number of cultural and geographic contexts.

The author encounters language discrimination and oppression in his personal life on numerous occasions. As a youth, he watches as a far more accomplished student’s employment opportunities dissipate because he doesn’t study English, while Ngũgĩ himself is rewarded for his English studies by earning a spot at a prestigious secondary school. Later, Ngũgĩ is imprisoned for producing plays that challenge the cultural and linguistic hegemony in Kenya in another instance of language-based oppression.