Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature (James Currey, 1986), by the Kenyan novelist and post-colonial theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, is a collection of essays about language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity. The book, which advocates linguistic decolonization, is one of Ngũgĩ's best-known and most-cited non-fiction publications, helping to cement him as a preeminent voice theorizing the "language debate" in post-colonial studies.
Ngũgĩ describes the book as "a summary of some of the issues in which I have been passionately involved for the last twenty years of my practice in fiction, theatre, criticism, and in teaching of literature". Decolonising the Mind is split into four essays: "The Language of African Literature", "The Language of African Theatre", "The Language of African Fiction", and "The Quest for Relevance". Several of the book's chapters originated as lectures, and apparently this format gave Ngũgĩ "the chance to pull together in a connected and coherent form the main issues on the language question in literature." The book offers a distinctly anti-imperialist perspective on the "continuing debate ... about the destiny of Africa" and language's role in both combatting and perpetrating imperialism and the conditions of neocolonialism in African nations. The book is also Ngũgĩ's "farewell to English", and it addresses the "language problem" faced by African authors. Ngũgĩ focuses on questions about the African writer's linguistic medium (should one write in one's indigenous language, or a hegemonic language such as French or English?), the writer's intended audience, and the writer's purpose in writing.
Decolonising the Mind is a blend of autobiography, post-colonial theory, pedagogy, African history, and literary criticism. Ngũgĩ dedicated Decolonising the Mind "to all those who write in African languages, and to all those who over the years have maintained the dignity of the literature, culture, philosophy, and other treasures carried by African languages."
Background
The language debate in post-colonial studies Language is a central question in post-colonial studies. Many post-colonial scholars and writers detail the colonial practice of imposing the colonizer's languages onto the people they colonized, even forbidding the use of the colonized people's native tongue. They examine this practice as part of the systematic oppression of imperialism in neocolonial societies, and they investigate its ramifications on the psychological, physical, and cultural well-being of colonized people. In the context of post-colonial studies, language is a weapon and a site of intense neocolonial conflict.
Some post-colonial theorists advocate, if not a complete abandonment of the English language, at least a conscious and pronounced preference of indigenous languages as a literary or scholarly medium. Ngũgĩ sits firmly on this side of the debate. Others, however (Salman Rushdie, for example), see the practicality of utilizing hegemonic languages like English and French as too immediate to permit the abandonment of such languages. On this side of the argument, writers and activists see using the colonist languages as a practical alternative which they can employ to improve conditions of colonized peoples. For example, a colonist language can be used both to enhance international communication (e.g. people living in Djibouti, Cameroon, Morocco, Haiti, Cambodia, and France can all speak to one another in French). This side also views the subversive potential of the appropriation of a colonist language by an indigenous people; it is seen as a "counter to a colonial past through de-forming a 'standard' European tongue and re-forming it in new literary forms".”
As Jennifer Margulis, a scholar of post-colonial studies at Emory University, outlines, the issue of languages raises several polemical questions for consideration in the study of literary texts:
Thus, the question of whether or not to write in African languages is a serious one for the African writer, as Oliver Lovesey, a scholar of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, notes. In his book on Ngũgĩ and his work, Lovesey quotes Albert S. Gérard on this topic:
Ngũgĩ's contribution to the language debate is widely known and studied, and he has theorized on the topic extensively. He passionately advocates the overall development of African languages and their use in African literatures—in 1992 he founded the Gikuyu-language journal Mũtĩri, and continued to edit it until his passing—and he famously renounced writing in English. First, he committed to abandoning English in his fiction writing, and in a note on Decolonising the Mind, he bids a final "farewell" to English in all of his writings.
Imprisonment and exile In December 1977, following the production of the controversial play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), which he co-wrote with Ngugi wa Mirii, and the publication of his highly politicized novel Petals of Blood (1977), Ngũgĩ was imprisoned without trial or charges in Maximum Security Prison by the authoritarian Kenyan regime. The play was performed in his native tongue Gikuyu in an open-air theatre in Limuru, with actors who were peasants and workers in the village. Both Petals of Blood and Ngaahika Ndeenda were openly critical of neocolonial life in Kenya, and they garnered Ngũgĩ a reputation with the Kenyan regime as a political dissident. Ngũgĩ was denied employment at the University of Nairobi upon his release, and he was imprisoned again in 1981 and 1982. He published several works while he was shifted in and out of imprisonment: Caitaani Mũtharaba-inĩ (Devil on the Cross), which he had written on toilet paper in prison, and Writers in Politics in 1981, and Detained, an account of his experiences in prison, in 1982.
Upon his release from prison, Ngũgĩ continued to write and produce activist literature and theatre, and he remained critical of the situation in Kenya. Another play Ngũgĩ had helped write, Maitũ Njugĩna (Mother, Sing for Me), was suppressed by the government. Due to his writing about the injustices of the dictatorial government, Ngũgĩ and his family received threats of violence and death, and were forced to live in exile. Ngũgĩ lived out his exile in the United Kingdom (1982–1989) and in the United States (1989–2002). While he was in exile, the Kenyan regime continued to harass him, and attempted to get him expelled from England. The regime also continued to repress his literature in Kenya: from 1986 to 1996, Matigari could not be sold in Kenya, and the regime removed all of Ngũgĩ's work from all educational institutions. Only after Arap Moi was voted out of office, 22 years later, was it safe for Ngũgĩ and his family to return.
Ngũgĩ experienced acute repression, but he was also intensely creative during this earlier period of his exile. Between 1982 and 1984, he widened the scope of his writing and released three children's books in Gikuyu. He published Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Oppression in Neo-Colonial Kenya, a collection of essays about Kenya's hostile political atmosphere, in 1983. Decolonising the Mind and Matigari were both published in 1986.
In their book on Ngũgĩ and his works, David Cook and Michael Okenimkpe write that Ngũgĩ's works from 1979 onward reveal his renewed determination and mental resilience, and demonstrate that his prison ordeal "strengthened his will to continue the battle for social justice". The works of social and literary criticism Ngũgĩ published since his exile in 1982—Barrel of a Pen (1983), Decolonising the Mind (1986), and Moving the Centre: The Struggle of Cultural Freedom (1993)—are often studied together because they share an interest common themes like imperialism, culture, African languages, African literature, African theatre, education, and religion, and they each articulate his commitment to revolutionary socialist ideology. "Individually these volumes add new dimensions to his writing," Cook and Okenimkpe write, "and together they document a transition in his campaign towards rousing his countrymen to act in practical ways against exploitation and inequality."
Themes, ideas, and structures
Language and culture Central to Decolonising the Mind is Ngũgĩ's "theory of language", in which "language exists as culture" and "language exists as communication":
Communication between human beings propels the evolution of a culture, he argues, but language also carries the histories, values, and aesthetics of a culture along with it. As he puts it, "Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people's experience 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" (15).
Furthermore, in Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ sees language, rather than history or culture, as the enabling condition of human consciousness: "The choice of language and the use of language is central to a people's definition of themselves in relation to the entire universe. Hence language has always been at the heart of the two contending social forces in the Africa of the twentieth century" (4).
Imperialism
Imperialism can be said to over-arch nearly everything Ngũgĩ wrote in his exile writings, particularly Decolonising the Mind. He gives imperialism many definitions in his writings which typically implicate capitalism, as well, including: "the rule of consolidated finance capital" (Decolonising the Mind, 2); "the conquest and subjugation of the entire labour force of other countries by concentrated capital"; and so on. Cook paraphrases Ngũgĩ's understanding of imperialism as he articulates in his work: "Imperialism disrupts the entire fabric of the lives of its victims: in particular their culture, making them ashamed of their names, history, systems of belief, languages, lore, art dance, song, sculpture, even the colour of their skin. It thwarts all its victims' forms and means of survival, and furthermore it employs racism."
Imperialism and the "cultural bomb" These discussions intersect as Ngũgĩ grapples with language as both an insidious tool for imperialism as well as a weapon of resistance for colonized peoples. In his introduction, Ngũgĩ asserts, "The study of African realities has for too long been seen in terms of tribes" (1). This is problematic for Ngũgĩ, because this perspective ignores imperialism's historical and contemporary role in the problems in Africa. And so, Ngũgĩ proposes a different approach: "I shall look at the African realities as they are affected by the great struggle between the two mutually opposed forces in Africa today: an imperialist tradition on one hand, and a resistance tradition on the other" (2).
Ngũgĩ considers English in Africa a "cultural bomb" that continues a process of wiping out pre-colonial histories and identities: "The effect of the cultural bomb is to annihilate a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environments, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves" (3). He argues that it leaves colonized nations "wastelands of non-achievement", and leaves colonized peoples with the desire to "distance themselves from that wasteland" (3). He determines that "colonial alienation" is enacted by the "deliberate disassociation of the language of conceptualisation, of thinking, of formal education, of mental development, from the language of daily interaction in the home and in the community" (28).
In Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ considers "colonial alienation", ultimately an alienation from one's self, identity, and heritage, vis-à-vis linguistic oppression to be imperialism's greatest threat to the nations of Africa.