Decolonizing Language by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o review – final words of literary giant
An exhilarating collection distills the late writer’s thinking on power, exile and the importance of the mother tongue
On 17 July 1979, the great Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o gave a speech in Nairobi in which he questioned the logic of an African literature in European languages. He had recently been released from prison, where he had been held after his critiques of corruption and inequality had touched a nerve among leaders of the recently independent nation. But his address provoked strong reactions for another reason: up until that moment, Ngũgĩ had been closely associated with the emergence of an African tradition of writing in English and acknowledged as a key figure in the rise of the novel as a major genre on the continent; his fictional work was often cited as an example of how English was being remade in formerly colonised societies. His early novels, from 1964’s Weep Not, Child onward, struck a chord with a global Anglophone audience partly because they echoed the English novelists he had read as a student at Makerere University College, the Ugandan branch of the University of London, and Leeds University, the seat of “Commonwealth” literary studies in the 1960s.
By the time of his speech, Ngũgĩ was a member of the literary establishment in Africa, a leading figure in world literature, and a leader in postcolonial thought. And while it is true that he had challenged what he saw as the hegemony of English in a 1968 manifesto, On the Abolition of the English Department, co-written with two of his colleagues at the University of Nairobi, Ngũgĩ assumed that the abolition of English did not mean dispensing with the colonial language. In fact, for most of the 1960s and 1970s he shared a belief, common among the postcolonial elite, that a literature in the ex-coloniser’s language could indeed be revolutionary. But now the novelist had decided to break away from English, to depart, as he put it, “from Anglo-Saxon literature in order to reconnect to the patriotic traditions of a national and culture literature rooted among the people”. He would henceforth write in his mother tongue, Gĩkũyũ (known to Swahili and English-speakers as Kikuyu).
