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<h2>Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Tyranny of Language</h2>
<div class="gmail-author">
<a href="https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/francis-wade/">Francis Wade</a> </div>
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<figure class="gmail-wp-caption gmail-aligncenter" style="display:inherit"><a href="https://cdn.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/kenya-school.jpg"><img class="gmail-size-full gmail-wp-image-63164" src="https://cdn.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/kenya-school.jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="1056"></a><figcaption class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><small>Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum Photos</small><div class="gmail-clearfix"></div>A boy writing on a blackboard in Lokichogio, Kenya, 2002</figcaption></figure>
<p>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 <em>Decolonising the Mind</em>,
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.”</p>
<p>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 African<em>ness</em> 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.” <em>Decolonising the Mind, </em>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.</p>
<p>The lectures that formed the basis of the book were
delivered in Auckland in 1984, during that year’s Maori Language Week. I
met with Ngũgĩ in May this year on his third trip to New Zealand, where
we were both speaking at the Auckland Writers Festival. Clear-eyed and
articulate at eighty, he recalled an encounter he had during those 1984
lectures that broadened his analysis of the relationship between
language and power. A Maori woman had approached him soon after he left
the podium. “You were not talking about Kenya,” she told him. “You were
talking about us Maori people.” All the examples he had given were taken
from Kenya or elsewhere in Africa, drawn from his teenage years in the
Alliance High School and the creeping realization in the decades
afterward of its insidious influence. “But she saw the Maori situation
in it,” he told me. “The condition for acquiring the glory of English
was the humiliation of African languages. This was the same in every
colonial situation—in New Zealand, too.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p><em>Decolonising the Mind</em> and his subsequent works, both fiction and nonfiction, set the Kenyan author apart as a forceful advocate of <em>full</em>
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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/08/books/why-i-choose-to-write-in-irish-the-corpse-that-sits-up-and-talks-back.html?mtrref=www.nytimes.com&gwh=B73A86CDD1C02758B7A9C2160BFC6A2C&gwt=pay">wrote</a> in the <em>New York Times</em> in 1995:</p>
<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>Language was a less easily discernible weapon of divide and rule:
wielded quietly, it helped create hierarchies within oppressed groups.
It marked the <em>truly</em> colonized—those who had shaken off their
old ways—as sophisticated, and left the rest to gaze upward at a
newly-minted elite who had once stood at their side. The process would,
Macaulay said, render this new class “by degrees fit vehicles for
conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.”</p>
<p>The now-infamous “Minute on Indian Education” that he circulated
offered a glimpse of the arrogance that underpinned Britain’s language
policies across its overseas protectorates. In speaking of the
“orientalists” among the colonial elite “distinguished by their
proficiency in the Eastern tongues,” he declared: “I have never found
one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European
library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>That same ethos guided cultural assimilation processes elsewhere in
the world. “Kill the Indian, and Save the Man,” a motto of the education
system designed in the late nineteenth century to “Americanize” Native
Americans, spoke to the same belief that non-Europeans needed first to
be de-nativized before they could become fully human.</p>
<p>It was only following his arrest and imprisonment in 1977, fourteen
years after Kenya won independence, that Ngũgĩ’s ideas about the
enduring effects of linguistic imperialism began to develop. Already a
well-known voice in African literature, he had staged a play that year
in Gĩkũyũ, and shortly after was sent to a maximum security prison. A
subsequent attempt in 1982 to resurrect his theatre group was thwarted
by police, and Ngũgĩ spent the next two decades in exile, first in
Britain and then the US. His play had been critical of the regime of
Jomo Kenyatta, also a Gĩkũyũ; it depicted the leadership as
inward-looking and elitist, far removed from the Kenyan peasantry whose
interests it claimed to champion, and responsible for the acute economic
inequalities that persisted long after independence. But, then again,
the books he’d written before in English had similarly taken aim at
postcolonial power-holders. Could it be that his crime, even long after
Kenya had returned to indigenous rule, was to shun the English language?
Had his jailers—among them, political leaders who had been the vanguard
in the anticolonial struggle—taken up the mantle of linguistic
authoritarianism from the same foreign power they had driven out? And
did his use of the vernacular threaten the leadership by speaking
directly to the masses not literate in English, thereby continuing the
anticolonial struggle, in effect, <em>après la lettre</em>?</p>
<figure class="gmail-wp-caption gmail-aligncenter" style="display:inherit"><a href="https://cdn.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/ngugi-2018.jpg"><img class="gmail-size-full gmail-wp-image-63165" src="https://cdn.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/ngugi-2018.jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="1067"></a><figcaption class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><small>Simone Padovani/Awakening/Getty Images</small><div class="gmail-clearfix"></div>Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Venice, Italy, April 5, 2018</figcaption></figure>
<p>“The African bourgeoisie that inherited the flag from the departing
colonial powers was created within the cultural womb of imperialism,”
Ngũgĩ wrote in <em>Moving the Centre: The Struggle For Cultural Freedoms</em>,
a collection of essays published in 1993. “So even after they inherited
the flag, their mental outlook, their attitudes toward their own
societies, toward their own history, toward their own languages, toward
everything national, tended to be foreign; they saw things through
eyeglasses given them by their European bourgeois mentors.”</p>
<p>Frantz Fanon, who died three years before Ngũgĩ published his first
book, had issued similar warnings. He foresaw, accurately, a bleak
future for societies in which a post-independence middle class, now in
power, had—through clientelism and the hoarding of wealth—widened the
socioeconomic fissures opened by the colonial project, and was thus in
the process becoming the native face of the imperial enterprise. “Seen
through its eyes, its mission has nothing to do with transforming the
nation,” Fanon wrote. “It consists, prosaically, of being the
transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though
camouflaged, which today puts on the masque of neo-colonialism.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>A momentum has developed to counter this: cultural theorists working in the postcolonial Asian setting, for example, are <a href="https://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/6214">advocating</a> a stronger field of <em>inter</em>-Asian
studies, while at the same time examining the many discreet ways in
which power imbalances between onetime colonizer and colonized are
quietly perpetuated today—through the <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520074514/siting-translation">act of literary translation</a>, for example. Propelling this <a href="https://www.academia.edu/14934670/Introduction_to_Genealogies_of_the_Asian_Present_Situating_Inter-Asia_Cultural_Studies">movement</a> is the belief that as long as the West continues to be a, if not <em>the</em>,
normative pole of comparison, decolonization will remain in a state of
arrest. In Ngũgĩ’s eyes, those validation efforts persist, while the
“transmission lines” that Fanon wrote of, whereby post-independence
governments serve as intermediaries between Western business interests
and exploitative local ventures, are still clearly intact. This speaks
to the durability of the psychological component of imperial conquest,
one that didn’t announce itself with cannon fire and could not be
repelled by force.</p>
<p>Movements across Africa and elsewhere have advocated a revival of
local languages in their countries’ literary output, while translation
projects have sought to both expand the non-English audience for African
writers, and to “return” African literature to its native soil. <a href="https://jaladaafrica.org/">Jalada Africa</a>
offers a publishing platform for pan-African authors, often translating
their work into a variety of languages, both English and vernacular
African. A Senegalese project, <a href="http://www.chinafrica.cn/Africa/201707/t20170714_800100380.html">Céytu</a>,
uses translation to counter the dominance of French-language books in a
country where the majority tongue, Wolof, has a rich oral, but not
written, culture. Some prominent writers, notably Salman Rushdie, have
argued however that the advantages of writing for a billions-strong
English-language audience outweigh the symbolic benefits of returning to
native languages whose readership is comparatively smaller. Only a
small proportion of African writers who have won international acclaim
for works in English have followed Ngũgĩ’s lead and returned to writing
in their mother tongues.</p>
<p>If, as Benedict Anderson wrote in <em>Imagined Communities</em>,
shared languages have a cohesive effect, whereby “pasts are restored,
fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed,” then what role has the
demise of native languages played in fueling the fragmentation of
societies in former colonies? The manipulation of language was only one
of a number of divide-and-rule strategies used by European powers across
their myriad possessions; others, such as the politicization of
ethnicity—through the creation of racial hierarchies by European race
scientists, and the subsequent privileging of particular groups over
others—have arguably contributed more directly to violent conflict
decades after the end of colonial rule.</p>
<p>But those strategies have always worked symbiotically, as part of a
package of control mechanisms. “To control a people’s culture,” Ngũgĩ
wrote, “is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to
others.” Those levers of control were once in the hands of white
administrators. Ngũgĩ’s vital contribution has been to illuminate, with
great regret, how they are now pulled by some of the very people who
once railed against that enterprise.</p>
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<br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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