Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1986

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Preface-IntroductionChapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface Summary

In the Preface to Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o introduces the series of essays collected in this text. Largely written as a dedication to several individuals and communities at Auckland University, New Zealand, Ngũgĩ emphasizes that due to the nature of the subjects with which he is concerned—the politics of language, the histories of colonization and European imperialism of the continent of Africa—he was pleased that his residency at Auckland University coincided with the celebration of the Maori people and their culture. Making this connection with the Indigenous Maori people and his own Kenyan heritage, Ngũgĩ remarks that every work of art, including his own, is a collective effort, dependent on both explicit collaboration and the collective history and culture that informs it.

Given Ngũgĩ’s subject matter, he emphasizes that the following essays are “not dealing so much with the language policies as with the language practice of African writers” (xi). His intent is not to criticize the brilliant writing of Kenyans who choose to write in European languages but rather to characterize the broader infestation of European bourgeois influences in Kenyan art and culture as a form of neocolonialism that persists long after the United Kingdom formally withdrew from Kenya.

Ngũgĩ explains that by engaging with the practices of African writers relative to the language of their former colonizer, he hopes to show how certain literary and cultural practices can resist the ongoing effects of colonialism and European imperialism on the African continent.

Introduction Summary: “Towards the Universal Language of Struggle”

In Ngũgĩ’s Introduction to Decolonising the Mind, he provides the reasons why he intends to focus on the practices of African writers as opposed to the legal policies surrounding the official national language of formerly colonized African countries. In a phenomenon he calls the “cultural bomb,” the author describes how imperialist legacies “annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves” (3).

For Ngũgĩ, focusing on how African writers produce cultural works that resist European colonization encourages formerly colonized subjects to identify the language, spaces, and images of freedom and liberation elsewhere. As a result, students of Kenyan history can better understand the possibilities for the liberation of formerly colonized subjects around the world. Ngũgĩ quotes the Guyanese poet Martin Carter whose poem Wretched of the Earth asserts that subjects of recent colonization in Namibia, Chile, El Salvador, and elsewhere “do not sleep to dream, ‘but dream to change the world’” (4).

Preface-Introduction Analysis

In his Preface and Introduction, Ngũgĩ articulates what he calls the “cultural bomb” (3) and how this is seen in the colonial effects within African societies in general and Kenyan society in particular.

Despite the brevity of these opening pages of the text, it is here where Ngũgĩ argues for the importance of thinking through language and language use, especially because it seems to be such a trivial if not wholly unimportant aspect of social life. For Ngũgĩ, language is equally an issue when it comes to thinking through the liberation of formerly colonized peoples precisely because it is with these mundane and every day aspects of postcolonial life that the ideological hegemony held by Europe and the West is maintained and reproduced. How this has come to be is then seen in the subsequent chapters by the focus on theatre, fiction, literature, and the university curriculum.

To provide context for the author’s socio-linguistic study, it is instructive to consider briefly the history of the British occupation of Kenya. While a Portuguese presence on the Kenyan coast dates back to the late 15th century, Europeans only began to explore the territory’s interior in the mid-19th century. Eager to pursue new territory on which to farm coffee and other resources for European consumers, the British government claimed much of what is now Kenya, naming it the East Africa Protectorate in 1895. Tensions remained high between the British and the local Kenyans and also between the British and the thirty thousand Indians imported to work on a railway between the Kenyan coast and the British protectorate of Uganda. Nevertheless, acts of significant, organized resistance to British occupation remained rare.

That changed after World War II. During that conflict, Kenya became the site of an important military base for Great Britain, which enlisted 98,000 Kenyans to fight in the King’s African Rifles (KAR) regiment. Suddenly endowed with greater wealth, opportunity, and African pride, an emergent Kenyan middle class began to challenge the colonial status quo. These efforts culminated in the Mau Mau Uprising of 1952 to 1956, an armed resistance movement against the British colonial government. The British responded by killing an estimated 11,000 Mau Mau combatants and countless civilians. Moreover, the British forced upwards of 150,000 men, women, and children into concentration camps and other forms of incarceration, using rape, castration, and other forms of torture as intimidation tools.

Although the uprising was ultimately suppressed, the conflict proved to be an enormous strain on Britain’s national finances. The country also granted a number of concessions to native Kenyans, including a relaxation of restrictions on local coffee growers’ ability to profit off of their crops. This all paved the way for Kenya’s declaration as an independent republic in 1963.