Decolonising the Mind by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Decolonising the Mind by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong

II: He gives a personal example of this dynamic, which is reminiscent of Fanon’s critique of the early stage of the native intellectual. Even at their most radical and pro-African position in their sentiments and articulation of problems they still took it as axiomatic that the renaissance of African cultures lay in the languages of Europe” (4-5). Ngugi puts language at the center of this contentious collision: “The choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to the natural and social environment, indeed in relation to the entire universe…writers who should have been mapping paths out of that linguistic encirclement of their continent also came to be defined and to define themselves in terms of the language of imperialist imposition. I: To discuss African literature, we need to understand the dual context of imperialism and resistance to imperialism, decolonization and self-determination.

Echoing Fanon, he claims that this amalgam makes writers most dangerous to colonial powers, when they begin to speak to the people rather than trying to gain cultural creedence in the colonizer’s language of a European tongue.īroken into nine sections, he discusses the power of writing in African languages and the crippling nature of continuing to write in Euro-American languages (call this Afro-European literature, not African literature) while trying to decolonize through a mixture of personal memoir and theoretical treatise: In this excerpt, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o makes the call to African writers to begin writing literature in their own languages, and to make sure that literature is connected to their people’s revolutionary struggles for liberation from their (neo)colonial contexts.

Decolonising the Mind by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o