Decolonizing the Minds (Ngugi Wa Thiong'o)

 

Decolonizing the Minds

-Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

 

Essay

About the Author:

Ngugi Wa Thiong’o is a Kenyan novelist, dramatist and essayist. He belongs to the group of committed writers who have steadily worked for the emancipation and upliftment of the peasant and worker communities of his country. He was born in January 5, 1938 at Limuru in Kiambu District, Kenya in a peasant family. He inherited from his father his belief in “Land and hard work”. At Gikuyu school, Ngugi became an arid reader of English literature. He was widely acquainted with contemporary African writings particularly Chinua Achebe’s and the Caribbean George Lamming’s. He was also involved in various activities as writer, editor and organizer. While pursuing Master’s in Leeds University, England, Ngugi sharpened his sensibilities about his own culture. On his return to Kenya, he started working for the upliftment of his people through his writings and organizations.

Introduction:

“Decolonising the Mind” by Ngugi is about his “theory of language” in which “language exists as culture” and “Language exists as communication”. Language as culture is the collective memory-bank of people’s existence in history. Culture is almost indistinguishable from the language that makes possible its genesis, growth, banking, articulation, and indeed its transmission from one generation to the next. Furthermore, in “Decolonising the Mind” Ngugi sees language, rather than history or culture, as the enabling condition of human consciousness.

English: A Cultural Bomb

Ngugi grapples with language as both an insidious tool for imperialism as well as a weapon of resistance, for colonized people: an imperialist tradition on one hand, and a resistance tradition on the other. He considers English in Africa as a “Cultural Bomb” that continues a process of wiping out colonial histories and identities. He argues that it leaves colonized nation “Wasteland of non-achievement” and leaves colonized people with the desire to “distance themselves from the wasteland”.

“Colonial Alienation” is like separating the body so that they are occupying two unrelated spheres in the same person. So Ngugi considers “Colonial alienation” ultimately an alienation from one’s self, identity, and heritage. In fact, such linguistic oppression is imperialism’s greatest threat to the nations of Africa.

Ngugi insists that while indigenous African language have been attacked by imperialism, they have survived largely because they are kept alive by the workers and peasant classes and he maintains that change will only happen, when the proletariat is empowered by their own language and culture.

The call for rediscovery and resumption of our language is a call for a Africa and the world over demanding liberation. It is the call for the rediscovery of the real language of human kind: the language of struggle. It is the universal language underlying all speech and words of our history. Struggle makes history. Struggle makes us. In our struggle is out history, our language and our being.

African Authors:

The role of the writer in a neo-colonial nation is inherently political. To write fiction in English is to “foster a neo-colonial mentality.” On the other hand, writing in African language is a blow to imperialism’s systematic oppression. He advocates for African writers to reconnect with their “revolutionary tradition” of anti-imperialism in Africa. When Ngugi chose to abandon English, he chose to enact out his own theory in practice.

Fanon and Marxist Influence:

When advocating African languages for writing, through decolonizing the minds, Ngugi has roots in Fanon’s thinking. At the same time, Ngugi remains sincerely committed to the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and it is important to note that many liberation movements in Africa have had Marxist roots. Through “Decolonising the Mind” Ngugi stores great faith in African “peasantry”. He credits them for they kept the native African language alive. It will be the empowerment of the lower classes alone that will be able to “bring about the resistance in African cultures” and ultimately uplift African nations from their neo-colonial conditions of oppression. In “Decolonising the Mind” while Ngugi runs with Fanon’s idea that a rejection of the colonizers’ linguistic and cultural forms is a pre-condition for achieving “true” freedom.

Autobiographical Elements:

The autobiographical impulse if “Decolonising the Mind” allows Ngugi to elegantly intertwine personal and national politics. The anecdotal perspective in “Decolonising the Mind” lends a certain accessibility to readers on political or theoretical issues that is missing from much of the typical post-colonialism. AS one critic puts it “Ngugi is a voice emanating from the heart of Africa and more than a voice, a person suffering the price of exile for exercising freedoms of people in the West and elsewhere taken for granted”.

Reception:

Gayatri Spivak, a fellow pioneer in postcolonial studies remarks that Ngugi was a “hero” at the time of the appearance of “Decolonising the Mind” which become the “Controversial Classic it remains to this day.” In fact, “Decolonising the Mind” was perfectly suited to its moment in African and relevant to neo-colonial struggles in other nations, and it was quickly adopted to the canon of postcolonial studies in language.

Ngugi’s Politics of Language:

Briefly in the 1980s, Ngugi made conference presentations in Gikuyu, published significant cultural essays in his mother tongue in the prestigious Yale Journal of Criticism. But he did not keep his promise to never again write in English. He returned to writing in English, “to his familiar role as a critic of imperial European languages writing in English” without any explanation.

Conclusion:

“Decolonising the Mind” provides an empathetic pedagogical framework, as some critiques have noted. One critic of Ngugi’s work who is also a second language teacher of English, notes that exposure to texts like Ngugi’s cultivates empathy for the experiences and cultural contexts of people learning English as second language and those most affected by the ‘globalization’ of English as an industry’.