Decolonising the Mind Thiongo

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Decolonising the Mind

By Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

The biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against the collective

defiance (of the oppressed) is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate apeople’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.it makes them see their past as a

wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them distance themselves from that wasteland. It

makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance,

with other people’s languages rather than their own. It makes them identify with that which is

decadent and reactionary, all those forces which would stop their own springs of life. Amidst this

wasteland that it has created, imperialism presents itself as the cure and demands that the

dependent sing hymns of praise.

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The choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a people’s definition of

themselves in relation to their natural and social environment, indeed in relation to the entire

universe.

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What is African Literature?

The debate which followed was animated: Was it literature about Africa or about eh African

experience? What about a non-African who wrote about Africa? What if an African set his work inGreenland? Or were African languages the criteria? What about French and English which had

become African languages? What is a European wrote about Europe in African language? The real

issue to be addressed is the domination of our languages and cultures by those of the imperialist

Europe. The question was never seriously asked: did what we wrote qualify as African literature? The

whole area of literature and audience and hence language as a determinant of both the national and

class audience did not really figure: the debate was more about the subject matter and the racial

origins and geographical habitation of the writer.

English was considered to be the natural language of literary and political mediation between

African people, a common language, even a unifying force against the divisive tendencies inherent inthe multiplicity of African languages.

Achebe describes centrality of English language in literary production by calling it “fatalistic logic of

the unassailable position of English in our literature”. African writers writing in English accepts this

fatalistic logic. They are guided by it and the only question that preoccupied them was how best to

make English carry the weight of African experience. This is nothing but hassle to enrich the foreign

tongue at the expense of mother tongue. Why not enrich the mothertongue?



How did we arrive at this acceptance of “fatalistic logic..” in our culture and p olitics? How did we,

the African writers, come to be so feeble towards the claims of our languages on us and so

aggressive on our claims on English (ie Africanising English etc.), the language of our colonization?

The answer is the psychological violence inflicted in the classroom. The bullet was the means of

physical subjugation, the language (taught at English school) was the means of spiritual subjugation.

Before going to colonial school, Gikuyu was Thiongo’s sole language. He learnt ethics and lessons of

morality through the evening story tellings, stories shared while working on fields. Stories which

inculcated in him values of co-operation and community spirit. He also became familiar with the

music and nuances of his language because “the language of our evening teach-ins, the language of

our immediate and wider community and the language of our work in the fields were one”.

At school his language of education was different from his language of culture. Anyone who was

caught speaking in Gikuyu at school was punished severely, made to carry a metal plate round his

neck “I am a donkey” or “I am stupid”. Attitude to English was the exact opposite; any achievement

in spoken or written English was highly rewarded. Proficiency in English was necessary to move

ahead in upper grades and university. (The same was the practice in IPS / IAS exams. English

literature was to be mastered to qualify for the diplomate’s power.)

Even literary education was determined by dominant language. Read English literature instead of

Gikuyu orature. “Thus language and literature were taking us further and further from ourselves to

other selves, from our world to other worlds.” What this did to Kenyan children? Before that some

theory.

Any language has a dual character; it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture. For

Indians English is just a means o communication but for Britons it is a carrier of their culture and

history.

Language as communication

Language as communication has three aspects. (1) What Marx called the language of real life, the

element basic to the whole notion of language, its origins and development: that is, the relations

people enter into with one another in the labour process, the links they necessarily establish among

themselves in the act of a people, a community of human beings, producing wealth or means of life

like food, clothing and housing. A human community really starts its historical being as a community

of co-operation in production through the division of labour i.e. between a man, woman and child in

a household. Production is co-operation, is communication, is language, is expression of a relation

between human beings and it is specifically human. (2) Second aspect is speech and it imitates the

language of real life, that is communication in production. The hand with tools mediate between

humans and nature and forms the language of real life, similarly spoken words mediate between

human beings and form the language of speech.(3) Third aspect is the written sign. Written word

imitates the spoken word. Where the first two aspects of language as communication through the



hand and spoken word historically evolved more or less simultaneously, the written aspect is much

later historical development.

In most societies, written and spoken languages are the same, both represent each other. In such a

society there is a broad harmony for the child between the three aspects of language as

communication. His interaction with nature and with other men is expressed in written and spoken

symbols which are both a result of that double interaction and a reflection of it. The association of

the child’s sensibility is with the language of his experience of life.

But there is more to it; communication between human beings is also the basis and process of

evolving culture. In doing similar kinds of things and actions over and over again under similar

circumstances, certain patterns, moves, rhythms, habits, attitutdes, experiences and knowledge

emerge. Those experiences are handed over to next generation and they become a guide for its

action on themselves and nature. Gradually there is an accumulation values which in time becomes

self-evident truths governing their conception of right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly,

courageous and cowardly, generous and mean in their internal and external relations. Over a time,

this becomes a way of life with a distinctive culture and history. Culture embodies those moral,

ethical and aesthetic values, the set of spiritual eyeglasses through which they come to view

themselves and their place in the universe. Values are the basis of a people’s identity, their sense of

particularity as members of the human race. All this is carried by language. Thus language is the

collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history. Culture is indistinguishable from

language which makes possible its genesis, growth, banking, articulation and indeed its transmission

from one generation to the next.

Language as Culture

Language as culture has three important aspects. As seen above, culture is the product and

reflection of human beings communicating with one another in the very struggle to create wealth

and to control it. Culture reflects this history of the lived experience of mankind by forming pictures

of the world of nature and nurture. Thus the second aspect of language as culture is an image-

forming agent in the mind of the child. Our whole conception of ourselves as a people, individually

or collectively, is based on those pictures and images which many or may not correspond to the

actual reality of struggles with nature and nurture which produced them in the first place. But our

capacity to confront the world creatively is dependent upon how those images correspond or do not

correspond to that reality, how they distort or clarify the reality of that struggle. Language as culture

thus is mediating between me and my own self; between my own self and ourselves, between my

own self and other selves; between me and nature. Language is mediating in my very being. This

brings us to the third aspect. Culture transmits those images of the world and reality through a

spoken and written language, i.e. through a specific language. Written literature and orature are the

main means by which a particular language transmits the images of the world contained in the

culture it carries. Languae carries culture and culture carries, through orature and literature, values

by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world. How people perceive

themselves affects how they look at their culture, at their politics and at the social production

wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and other beings.

What colonial imposition of foreign language does to a child?



The real aim of colonialism was to control people’s wealth : they did it through military conquest.

But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised; the control of

how people perceive themselves and their relationship to the world. Controlling people’s culture is

to control their tools of self-definitions.

For colonialism this involved two aspects of the same process:

1. The destruction or deliberate devaluing of people’s culture and their srt, dances,

religions, history, geography, education, orature, literature etc.

2. A conscious elevation of the language of colonizer.

In case of language as communication, imposition of English breaks the harmony between the child

and the three aspects of language. Since English is the product and reflection of the “real language if

life” in Britain, it can never reflect of imitate the real life of Indian community. In this scenario,

learning becomes a cerebral activity and not an emotionally felt experience. The child whose

language of education is English, language of reading is English, language of conceptualization isEnglish (thought takes visible the form of English), his written language gets divorced from spoken

language at home. There is not the slightest relationship between child’s written world and the

world of his immediate environment in family and community. This results into the dissociation

sensibility of the child from his natural and social environment, i.e. colonial alienation. This

alienation becomes reinforced in the teaching of history, geography, music where bourgeois Europe

was always the centre of the universe.

This disassociation, divorce, alienation from immediate environment becomes clear when we look at

colonial language as a carrier of culture. Culture is a product of the history of a people which it in

turn reflects—the child is exposed to a culture that was product of a different external world. Hewas being made to stand outside himself to look at himself. Culture reflects the world in images

(those images are passed on through orature and literature) which make him see the world in a

certain way. English educated colonial child see his native world through the literary lens of English

(literature). It doesn’t matte that imported English literature carried the great humanist tradition of

the best in Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, Tolstoy, Gorky and Dickens. The location of this great

mirror of imagination (English Literature) was necessarily Europe and its history and culture and the

rest of the universe was seen from that centre.

And needless to say, the English literature didn’t have civil things to say about their colonies, its

people and culture. The racist, orientalist representation encountered in the works of Rider Haggard,Nicholas Monsarrat and giants of western political and intellectual establishment like HUME (the

Negro is naturally inferior to the whites), THOMAS JEFFERSON (…the blacks are inferior to the whites

on the endowments of the body and the mind…) or HEGEL with his Africa comparable to the land of

childhood groping in the dark. (The African is not part of humanity. Slavery is good for the African,

for his maturity. The Philosophy of History )The negative image of one’s native culture becomes

internalized and it affects one’s cultural and political choices even in ordinary living. (This bias

towards everything native reflects even in education where colonial institutions appoint the British

teachers for ELT as the Indian teachers might dilute the standanrds.)

African writers writing in English and African languages



20 years after Makerere Conference (1962), African lit in English was a huge success. This lit was

written by petty bourgeoise who studied at colonial schools and colleges. The rise of this lit reflected

the rise of this class ro political and economic dominance. However, petty bourgeoise in Africa was a

class with different strands.

1. Comprador bourgeoisie, an intermediary between bougeorise of western metropolis and

people of colony

2. Petty Bourgeoisie with nationalistic sentiments

Immediately before and after independence, the patriotic bourgeoisie explained Africa, its past and

dignified culture to the world. Though lacking roots in peasantry, this literature (post-<akarere)

helped petty bourgeoisie confront and critique the bigotry of Europe (negritude mould). The

literature drew it’s stamina and even form from peasantry; their proverbs, fables, stories, riddles,

wise sayings. But later when the comprador bourgeoisie assumed political ascendancy, it

strengthened its links with imperialism in a neo-colonial arrangement, this literature became more

and more critical, cynical, disillusioned, bitter and denunciatory in tone. It directed its ire against

post-independence betrayal of hope. Who was the audience for this sense of deception. The answer

was, not the comprador bourgeoisie, but the peasantry, working class, more generally the people.

To realize communication with this class, it searched for simpler forms, adopted more direct tone

and often a direct call for action. Even in terms of content, it no more looked upon Africa as

undifferentiated mass of blackness, but attempted class analysis and evaluation of neo-colonial

societies. But this search was still within the confines of English which didn’t allow them connect

with people.

Thus such writers neither could touch the masses nor could get along with the comprador

bourgeoisie whom they criticized. Result identity crisis, this lack of identity in its social and

psychological make-up as a class was reflected in lit it produced. They spoke as if the crisis was the

identity crisis of the society as a whole, as if lit in African languages before them never existed. The

practitioner of neo-African literature tried to get out of this dilemma by calling English an African

language and by trying to Africanize it while still ensuring that it’s recognizably English. In their works

they created English speaking African peasants and invested them with vacillating mentality, evasive

self-contemplation, existential anguished human condition and man-torn-between-two worlds-

facedness of the petty bourgeoisie.

Decolonising the Mind Thiongo

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