Decolonising the Mind by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Decolonising the Mind by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong

You wind up either serving a foreign culture and its interests or, at best, sinking into bitterness and despair. Your people are cut off from you, robbed of your work and talent as you become part of a neocolonial culture.You are cut off from your people, which means you cannot help them break their chains, overthrow the neocolonial order and free everyone.Your mother tongue, your people, their culture, all become a point of shame for you.

You become “torn between two worlds”. You see yourself through the eyes of others.

Higher education is not just science and mathematics but also literature and philosophy and art – and therefore a certain way of looking at the world. The trouble is, many Africans grew up as children in their mother tongue but received their higher education in a colonial language. It shapes how you look at the world and yourself. It ties you to your people, it becomes part of who you are. It becomes the storehouse of its images, ideas, wisdom, experience and history.

Language as culture: Language expresses and carries the culture of a people.

Language used to work together and get things done.

Language as communication: This is the “pass the salt” level of language.

That this point is even debated in Africa shows just how screwed up Africa has become by Europe and America. In most of the world writers write in their mother tongue.

He used to write in English, but now he mostly writes in Gikuyu. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a Kenyan writer, says that African writers should write in their mother tongues, not in the old colonial languages of English, French and Portuguese. The following is mainly based on the first chapter of Ngugi’s “Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature” (1986):

Decolonising the Mind by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o