Decolonizing the Mind by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

I Read this text at my Graduation.

Decolonizing the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature (Heinemann Educational, 1986), by Kenyan novelist and post-colonial theorist Ngugi wa Thiong'o, is a collection of non-fiction essays about language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity. Ngugi describes the book as "a summary of some of the issues in which he have been passionately involved for the last twenty years of his practice in fiction, theatre, criticism, and in teaching of literature..." Decolonizing 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."  Ngugi focuses on questions about the African writer's linguistic medium (should one write in one's indigenous language, or a hegemonic language like French or English?), the writer's intended audience and the writer's purpose in writing.

Decolonizing the Mind is a meld of autobiography, post-colonial theory, pedagogy, African history, and literary criticism. Ngugi dedicated Decolonizing 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.

The study of the African realities has for too long been seen in terms of tribes. Whatever happens in Kenya, Uganda? Whatever erupts in Zaire, Nigeria, Liberia, Zambia is because of the traditional enmity between Tribes.

This misleading stock interpretation of the African realities has been popularized by the western media which likes to deflect people from seeing that imperialism is still the root cause of many problems in Africa. Unfortunately some African intellectuals have fallen victims — a few incurably so — to that scheme and they are unable to see the divide-and-rule colonial origins of explaining any differences of intellectual outlook or any political clashes in terms of the ethnic origins of the actors. No man or woman can choose their biological nationality. The conflicts between peoples cannot be explained in terms of that which is fixed (the invariables). Otherwise the problems between any two peoples would always be the same at all times and places; and further, there would never be any solution to social conflicts except through a change in that which is permanently fixed, for example through genetic or biological transformation of the actors.

He looked 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.

Central to Decolonizing the Mind is Ngugi’s "theory of language", in which "language exists as culture" and "language exists as communication":

Language as communication and as culture is then products of each other. Communication creates culture: culture is a means of communication. Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through presenter and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world. How people perceive themselves and affects how they look at their culture, at their places politics and at the social production of wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and to other beings. 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.

In this book Ngugi talks about the freedom for western finance capital and for the vast transnational monopolies under its umbrella to continue stealing from the countries and people of Latin America, Africa, Asia and Polynesia is today protected by conventional and nuclear weapons. Imperialism, led by the USA, presents the struggling peoples of the earth and all those calling for peace, democracy .and socialism with the ultimatum: accept theft or death.

The classes fighting against domination even in its neo-colonial stage and form have to confront this threat with the higher and more creative culture of resolute struggle. These classes have to manipulate even more confidently the weapons of the struggle contained in their cultures. They have to speak the united language of struggle contained in each of their languages. They must discover their various tongues to sing the song: ‘A people united can never be defeated’.