The tyranny of language as Ngugi wa Thiong'o sees it

Kenya's best known novelist, Ngugi wa Thiong'o has not written a novel in English in decades. Even though his bestselling novels can be found worldwide in tens of languages (including English of course,) he made a revolutionary decision to only write in Kikuyu - his native tongue. Having grown up in colonial times when the use of English was considered part of the civilizing instruments to improve Africans, he saw the power that language had in cutting one from their own culture. After that, he always wrote in Kikuyu and had his books translated, but he refused to write in his colonizer's language. 

As a Kenyan, a writer and a pan-Africanist, I greatly admire Ngugi wa Thiong'o. A particular Ngugi quote really resonated with me when I chose to drop my colonial name over a decade back "Language, any language, has a dual character: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture." He reflects on the importance that language plays especially in the case of an oppressed people. 

The Alliance High School, which Ngũgĩ attended, was built in the 1920s and is now one of Kenya’s top-ranking schools. Like so many of the institutions that foreigners “gifted” to the colonies, it was seen by its founding patrons as a benevolent, civilizing instrument for Africans. It instructed in English; children who spoke in the local Gĩkũyũ tongue were beaten. English was the language of power, rationality, and intelligence; Gĩkũyũ, which Ngũgĩ would write in again only decades later, signified backwardness—an Africanness that, for the good of its carriers, had to be exorcized. 

Ngugi's lessons on decolonizing the mind remain as relevant today as they first were when he wrote them decades back. As an African woman who finds herself at the intersection of various cultures, I have a firm belief that every culture has its good and bad elements, and Africanness is not synonymous with backwardness.