Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Tyranny of Language

This content has been archived. It may no longer be accurate or relevant.

From The New York Review of Books:

Thirty years after graduating from his missionary-run high school near Nairobi, the Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o had gained enough distance to reflect on the lasting effect of colonial education policy in Kenya. “Behind the cannon was the new school,” he wrote in Decolonising the Mind, the 1986 exposition on cultural imperialism in which he examined how the colonial classroom became a tool of psychological conquest in Africa and beyond. “Better than the cannon, it made the conquest permanent,” he wrote. “The cannon forces the body and the school fascinates the soul.”

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. A gun alone wouldn’t do the job; it needed, in Ngũgĩ’s words, to be “supplemented by the power of thought.” Decolonising the Mind, his attempt to examine how the mental space of colonized peoples came to be invaded and appropriated, is considered a seminal text on how language can be manipulated and pressed into the service of power.

. . . .

Long after he had left the Alliance High School, Ngũgĩ was struck by how little he and his cohort had noticed, let alone responded to, their socialization into a Western-oriented outlook. Nor had he appreciated what role the school played in conferring class markers in a community that before hadn’t known that stratification. The school and everything it taught—and refused to teach—was accepted, even venerated, by the community. “The language of power is English and that becomes internalized,” he explained. “You normalize the abnormal and the absurdities of colonialism, and turn them into a norm from which you operate. Then you don’t even think about it.”

Decolonising the Mind and his subsequent works, both fiction and nonfiction, set the Kenyan author apart as a forceful advocate of full decolonization—not only of the more visible political and economic sphere, but of the mind as well. He rued the fact that there were few African writers of international note producing work in their native languages, and accordingly struck out to publish only in Gĩkũyũ or Swahili. He believed that translation could be a bridge between cultures, but he also understood that each language, each dialect, had a distinct musicality that was lost in translation, and that would be forever lost were the language to die.

Others have echoed this lament. The Irish poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill has argued that contemporary Irish literature ought to rediscover its Gaelic origins. As she wrote in the New York Times in 1995:

Irish is a language of enormous elasticity and emotional sensitivity; of quick and hilarious banter and a welter of references both historical and mythological; it is an instrument of imaginative depth and scope, which has been tempered by the community for generations until it can pick up and sing out every hint of emotional modulation that can occur between people. Many international scholars rhapsodize that this speech of ragged peasants seems always on the point of bursting into poetry.

Yet the degradation of the vernacular in former colonies has had an impact on people far beyond the literary realm. Whether or not the British in Kenya truly believed in their civilizing discourse, the rise of English in place of the local tongue helped to deepen the colonial endeavor and fix its structures in place. That local languages were suppressed across all colonies, whether British or not, enabled the creation of a native class oriented toward their colonial overlords, and away from their own communities. In 1835, the influential Whig politician and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay argued that the British administration in India should stop supporting the publication of books in Sanskrit and Arabic. “We must at present do our best,” he wrote, “to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”

. . . .

Like many of his contemporaries, he felt there was much the British could offer their subjects, but little they could learn from them. The vernacular spoken, like those who spoke it, was vulgar and primitive, a ball and chain on the advancement of human civilization. “What we spend on the Arabic and Sanscrit [sic] Colleges is not merely a dead loss to the cause of truth,” he went on. “It is bounty-money paid to raise up champions of error.”

. . . .

Much of the thinking today about the enduring effects of colonial rule is imbued with a sense that many once-colonized nations still feel a need to validate themselves in relation to the West. Macaulay and his contemporaries saw Western values and achievements as a gold standard to which the rest of the world should aspire, and the architects of colonial language policies, in particular, developed their curricula of control in accordance with that standpoint. Secondary school literature syllabuses in many of the elite African schools still tend to be front-loaded with works in English, because the English canon is still held aloft as the ideal. African writing thus becomes an appendix, and little space is given to studying the oral traditions that were once the primary medium for communicating stories.

Link to the rest at The New York Review of Books

PG notes that, in recorded history, virtually every conquest of a group of people speaking one language by a group of people speaking another language results in a substantial impact of the language of the conquerors upon the language of the conquered.

When Christianity came to England in about 597, the language of the Church was Latin and it had a substantial impact on the Old English spoken by the Anglo-Saxons and the Celtic spoken in Ireland and Scotland. Old English had itself previously been influenced by Latin during the 400-year period when various parts of Britain were (off and on) occupied by Rome.

The Norman conquest of England in 1066 strongly affected the English language spoken then by injecting French words and linguistic conventions into English. For several generations, ownership of land and political power was concentrated among the Normans and descendants of the original English learned French or a patois of French and English to deal with those who held power. Thus the English that was imposed upon Great Britain’s colonies was filled with French-originated words and phrases.

PG doesn’t excuse the barbarities accompanying the conquest of various British (and French and Dutch) colonies in Africa, but the influence of the language of those European countries on the African colonial inhabitants is not something unique to modern Western nation-states.