About a week after Ngugi wa Thiong’o died, a university teacher asked me to do a talk on the great man. I declined. Because everything that is important about him can be found on the internet, both reliable and unreliable information. But we can talk about the great changes he deliberately made in his life. Such as changing his name from James Ngugi to Ngugi wa Thiong’o in 1970. Such as deciding very firmly to stop writing in English and beginning to use his native Gikuyu to write his later novels. Wikipedia tells an interesting point. In 1962, Ngugi gave Chinua Achebe the manuscripts of his novels, The River Between and Weep Not, Child to read. Both were soon after published in the Heinemann African Writers’ series. I believe Ngugi was more well known for his novel, A Grain of Wheat published in 1967 which exposed the ‘complexities of colonialism’ and the struggle for Kenyan independence. Ngugi was the recipient of numerous literary awards. In 2009, he was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and again in 2021, his book, Perfect Nine was longlisted for the International Booker prize. Besides winning literary prizes more than once every year, Ngugi was honoured by several universities with honorary degrees. Again, the list is on the internet. It was during his time as a professor in the University of Nairobi that the department of English literature was abolished and African languages and literatures prioritised. The factor in Ngugi’s long and productive life that is relevant to an indigenous society like ours is his theory, ‘Decolonising the mind.’ Powerfully and ground breakingly he put forward the idea that the domination of the English language in colonised communities was a colonisation of the mind, a mental colonisation. He had noted this in his long life of living through the Mau Mau revolution and the brutal years of colonisation by Britain when the colonising power effected very successfully, the colonisation of language and thereby, the colonising of thought processes and education. He witnessed more than a generation of Kenyans who had become monolingual and no longer spoke their native language, and were unaware of the danger that would cause. For Ngugi, the only way to make his people sit up and listen was to do something as dramatic as stopping to write in the coloniser’s language, English, and reverting to write in Gikuyu. His play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I will marry when I want) was later translated to English. But Ngugi’s concern was a real one, and even in our own circles, we see the same loss of language, especially the loss of the mother tongue, where it is easier for children to pick up English from the tv and internet and screen time. So the great African writer has a message that is very relevant to us in our day.
In 2023, he was asked his opinion about ‘Kenyan English’ and ‘Nigerian English’, and whether they were now local languages. Ngugi sternly replied: "It's like the enslaved being happy that theirs is a local version of enslavement. English is not an African language. French is not. Spanish is not. Kenyan or Nigerian English is nonsense. That's an example of normalised abnormality. The colonised trying to claim the coloniser's language is a sign of the success of enslavement… if you know all the languages of the world, and you don’t know your mother tongue, that’s enslavement, mental enslavement. But if you know your mother tongue, and add other languages, that is empowerment.’ Very wise and powerful words from a man who had gone full circle where language was concerned. In 2017, Ngugi attended a small festival in Lillehammer. He was still exhorting younger writers to write in their native languages, and not in English. It was one of his life missions. Understandably. Because the connection to our cultures can become disconnected when we distance ourselves from our languages. The uniqueness of our languages is that they carry our cultures, since culture can be expressed only through language. To never learn our own language is to never live our culture. What a terrible loss. In today’s world, Ngugi might appear a bit extreme because English is here to stay. But he has made points that are still relevant if we want to consider them carefully.
