Take away our language and we will forget who we are: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and the language of conquest

The Guardian

12-08-2025

In the 1930s, it was common for British missionaries to change the names of African school pupils to biblical names. The change wasn't 'just for school' – it was intended to be for ever. So Ngũgĩ became James and my father, Mohamed, became Moses. While many students retained their new names throughout their lives, Ngũgĩ and my father changed theirs back, though you can still find early editions of Ngũgĩ's first book, Weep Not, Child, under the name of 'James Ngugi'. With the novel, Ngũgĩ established himself as a writer and later, by reclaiming his Kikuyu identity as an activist, began a process of decolonisation that he would explore in one of his most famous nonfiction works, Decolonising the Mind (1986), which challenged the dominance of European languages in African education and literature. Ngũgĩ worked throughout his life to promote the decolonisation of language, writing and publishing his books in Kikuyu and only later translating them himself into English.
Ngũgĩ was a campaigner against the legacy of colonialism, but first and foremost a Marxist. Studying at the University of Leeds in the 1960s, he witnessed first-hand the brutality of the police towards striking white miners and realised that economic exploitation was a class issue and not a purely racial one. He endured exile, imprisonment, physical assault and harassment by the postcolonial Kenyan authorities and yet never stopped writing and publishing, even penning one of his works, Devil on the Cross (originally titled Caitaani mũtharaba-Inĩ), on prison toilet paper. Detained for his involvement with community theatre groups, Ngũgĩ noted that as long as he wrote in English, the authorities ignored him. Only when he began to write politically critical plays in Kikuyu, and ordinary working people could understand them, was he arrested.
Ngũgĩ was one of the grandfathers of African literature, and his courage made him beloved of a generation of writers. At the 2015 Pen World Voices festival, Ngũgĩ opted to stay in the same hotel as the other African writers, while others of his stature chose loftier accommodation. Here, the likes of Lola Shoneyin, Alain Mabanckou, the late Binyavanga Wainaina, Taiye Selasi, Ngũgĩ's son Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ and me fetched the cups of tea he drank all day long, found a pen he needed or hailed a taxi on his behalf. One evening I helped organise an after-dinner party in a local bar. Ngũgĩ went to bed early, set an alarm, rose and joined us in the bar. He wanted tea, but the bar didn't serve it. So someone ran out and fetched him one. In May this year, Ngũgĩ was apparently dancing with some of his students at the University of California, Irvine, to mark the end of the semester on the Friday before his death, at the age of 87. Aminatta Forna
Since the publication of my book Decolonising the Mind in 1986, I have seen, over the years, increasing global interest in issues of decolonisation and the unequal power relationships between languages. In 2018, the same issues took me to Limerick in Munster, Ireland, for a conference celebrating 125 years since the foundation of the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge), in 1893.
The league was dedicated to the revival of Gaelic, or Irish, which by then, in its own country, had become subordinate to the dominant English. Despite many efforts, including official government support for its revival, Irish is still subordinate to English. More Irish speak and use English than they do Irish. Some of the most iconic Irish writers, such as WB Yeats and James Joyce, wrote in English, and they are studied as part of the canon of English literature. I cannot conceive of an English department anywhere in the world, including Britain itself, which didn't teach courses in these writers of Irish origin. They have become some of the greatest contributors to English literature.
This unequal power relationship between the two languages in favour of the English was not always the case. The early English settlers in Ireland, Munster in particular, gravitated toward Irish because, by all accounts, in the beginnings of English settlement – particularly between the 13th and 16th centuries – the Irish language was the more endowed in classical learning. Naturally, those early settlers were drawn to the more vibrant Irish tongue. Their gravitation made sense: Irish was the majority tongue, spoken by those among whom the English planters had settled.
London acted, and beginning with the 1366 Statutes of Kilkenny, it passed edicts aimed at protecting the English language against the subversive encroachment of Irish or Gaelic, reinforcing by law the use of English while literally criminalising Irish. Among other things, the Kilkenny statutes threatened to confiscate any lands of any English or any Irish living among them who would use 'Irish among themselves, contrary to the ordnance'. These policies were given a literary and philosophical rationale by none other than the poet Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene and himself a settler in Munster. In his pamphlet A View of the Present State of Irelande, published in 1596, he argued that language and naming systems were the best means of bringing about the erasure of Irish memory: 'It hath ever been the use of the conqueror to despise the language of the conquered, and to force him by all means to learn his.'
The marginal status of Irish in its own land did not come about by some kind of natural evolution. The decline of Irish in its own land was brought about through conscious political acts and educational policies.
Ireland, it has been observed, was England's first settler colony. It became a kind of laboratory for other English settler colonies that followed. And what was true for Ireland and other English colonies was equally so for other colonial systems, whether Spanish, French or Portuguese, or the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. It is also true in the case of domestic colonialism, such as the Norwegian suppression of the language of Sami people. The suppression of the languages of the dominated and the elevation of the language of conquest and domination were integral to the education system that accompanied conquest and colonial occupation.
Linguistic suppression was not undertaken for the aesthetic joy of doing so. Spenser was clear that the colonisation of the Irish language and naming system would make the Irish forget who they were, weaken their resistance, and therefore make it easier for the English to conquer and subdue them. Language conquest, unlike the military form, is cheaper and more effective: the conqueror has only to invest in capturing the minds of the elite, who will then spread submission to the rest of the population. The elite become part of the linguistic army of the conqueror.
Because of its centrality in the making of modern Britain, India became, even more than Ireland, a social laboratory, whose results were later exported to other colonies in Asia and Africa. Thomas Babington Macaulay, as a member of the Supreme Council of India from 1834 to 1838, helped reform the colony's education system as well as draw up its penal code; both activities have a special significance. In his famous 1835 Minutes on Indian Education, Macaulay advocated the replacement of Sanskrit and Persian with English as the language of education in order to form a class of 'interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect'.
Macaulay saw this new language education as bringing about a 'civilised state in which the values and standards are to be the values and standards of Britain, in which every one, whatever his origins, has an interest and a part'. A century later, Macaulay's words would be repeated in colonial Kenya by the then British governor, Sir Philip Mitchell. He outlined a policy for English language dominance in African education which he saw as a moral crusade to supplement the armed crusade against the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, a liberation army the British called the Mau Mau.
In 1879, Capt Richard Henry Pratt founded the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he devised his own variant of the method for Native American children, less than 20 miles across the scenic Susquehanna River from the steps of the state capitol in Harrisburg. In 1892, he summed up the philosophy behind the boarding school: 'Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.' His education programme followed the same colonial pattern: uproot a few from their mother tongue, which is spoken by most of their people, mould them anew in the language of conquest, and then unleash them on the governed masses.
In his book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney quotes Pierre Foncin, a founder of the Alliance Française, an institution specifically created in 1883 for the propagation of the national language in the colonies and abroad, as being very clear about the goal of the mission. It was 'necessary to attach the colonies to the metropole by a very solid psychological bond against the day when their progressive emancipation ends in a form of federation, as is probable – that they be and they remain French in language, thought and spirit'.
The goal was very clear. Imperial educational policies were meant to create colonies of the mind, among the elite of the colonised. The success of these policies is undeniable. A variation of the Irish situation, where even after independence, the intellectuals express themselves more fluently in the language of imperial conquest than in the languages from their own country, is present in every postcolonial situation. In the case of Africa, you even hear the identity of the continent being described in terms of Europhonity: anglophone, francophone and lusophone, mainly.
Even where the elite are nationalistic and assertive of their independence, they find it easier to express their outrage and hopes in the languages of imperial conquest. Ninety per cent of the moneys allocated for language education goes to pamper imperial languages. Ninety per cent of the population still speaks African languages anyway. Some governments even view African languages as enemies of progress. They believe that imperial languages are really the gateway to global modernity.
Under normal circumstances, it would sound odd to hear that French literature can only be written in Japanese, or English literature in IsiZulu, so that when you meet a French writer who writes in French, you look at them in surprise: why on earth are you writing in French? Or an English writer writing in English: why are you not writing in Zulu? And yet this absurdity is expected of African writers and writers from those formerly colonised.
How did this absurdity come about? It is not that some languages are more 'of language' than others. And under any circumstances, to know more languages can only empower the person. But this was not the case in colonial contexts or any context in which there is a dominating and dominated. It was never a case of adding a new language to what one already had. For the colonial conqueror, it was not enough to introduce an additional language to any community. Imperial languages had to be planted on the graveyard of the languages of the dominated. The death of African languages gave life to European languages. In order for the imperial language to be, the language of the colonised had to cease to be. Amnesia for African languages; anamnesis for European languages.
These two conditions are not inherent in the character of the languages involved. They are mental conditions consciously brought about by how the imperial languages were imposed. In Decolonising the Mind, I have talked about the corporal punishment meted out to African children caught speaking an African language at school, children who were then made to carry a placard around the neck proclaiming their stupidity. In some cases, the culprit was made to swallow filth, thus associating African languages with criminality, pain and filth.
This was not just in Africa.
In his 2015 testimony to the Waitangi Tribunal about his experiences of school in New Zealand, Dover Samuels, a Māori politician, tells a similar story. Caught speaking Māori in the school, he said: 'You'd be hauled out in front of the rest of the class and told to bend over. You'd bend over and he'd stand back and give you, what they called it then, six of the best. On many occasions, not only did it leave bruises behind on my thighs but drew blood.'
The Sami people in Norway went through a similar experience in the period between 1870 and 1970 – what they call the brutal century – in an attempt to turn them into fluent Norwegian-language speakers. Violence against native languages is the running theme in the spread of English in Ireland, and in Scotland and Wales. In Wales, those who spoke Welsh in the school compound were made to stand in front of the class, with a placard reading WELSH NOT hanging from their neck. Violence was central in creating the psychological bond of language, culture and thought: colonies of the mind. You would think that after liberation and independence, the new nations, at the very least, would dismantle that unequal power relationship. But that is precisely the power of the colonies of the mind: negativity toward self has become internalised as a way of looking at reality.
It is a classic case of conditioning you will find in manuals of behavioural psychology. Conditioning is a system of reward and punishment: punishment for undesired behaviour and reward for the desired behaviour. It is often used in various degrees of intensity in bringing up children or taming animals. The undesired behaviour becomes associated with punishment, and hence pain; the desired behaviour with reward, and hence pleasure. The object of conditioning, a child or an animal, comes to automatically avoid the space of pain, the forbidden behaviour, and gravitate toward the space of pleasure, the required behaviour. In the case of learning, one became the recipient of glory for excelling in the language of conquest, but the recipient of a gory mess for uttering even a single word in one's mother tongue. One's mother tongue became the space of pain, to be avoided, and the conquering language became the space of pleasure, to be desired.
The trauma experienced by the first generation of the conditioned can be passed on as normal behaviour that needs no explanation or justification; the later generations may not even understand why they associate pain with native languages and pleasure with foreign languages and cultures. The elite and educational planners of the formerly colonised societies assume that European (imperial) languages are inherently global and best able to carry intelligence and universality. That assumption may also explain why criminalising African languages continues to this day, now administered and enforced by African educationalists who don't see the irony of what they are doing: an African punishing another African for speaking an African language, by order of an African government.
The trauma initially wrought by the colonial education system is thus passed on, inherited. Abnormality becomes normalised. The colony of the mind prevents meaningful, nationally empowering innovations in education. Control by the coloniser of the colonised is inherent in the inequality of the education system. Education may become a process of mystifying the cognitive process and even knowledge.
Here we need to make a distinction between education and knowledge. Knowledge is a question of continuously adding to what we already know in a dialectical play of mutual impact and illumination. The normal cognitive process starts from the known and heads toward the unknown. Every new step makes more of the unknown known and therefore adds to what is already known. The new known enriches the already known, and so on, in a continuous journey of making dialectically related connections. Knowledge of the world begins where one is.
Education, on the other hand, is a mode of conditioning people to make them into, and function in, a given society. It may involve transference of knowledge, but it is conditioned knowledge, branded by the world outlook of the educator and the education system. A careful study of the colonial process, as a particular instance of the dominant and the dominated, the master and the servant, can be useful in thinking about balanced and inclusive education. Colonial education was never balanced or inclusive.
The colonial process was always a negation of the normal cognitive process. Imperial Europe – its names, its geography, its history, its knowledge – was always seen as the starting point of the educational journey of the colonised. In short, colonisation, in the area of education, was always predicated on the negation of the colonised space as the starting point of knowledge. In the area of language, it meant a negation of native languages as valid sources of knowledge or as means of intellectual and artistic inquiry. The lack of roots in our base creates a state of permanent uncertainty about our relationship to where we are, to our abilities, even to our achievements.
Decolonisation must be at the heart of any balanced and inclusive education. Both the formerly colonising and the formerly colonised are affected by a system that has shaped the globe over the last 400 years. Knowledge starts wherever we are. Our languages are valid sources of knowledge. We all love the stars, but we don't have to migrate to Europe, physically or metaphorically, in order to reach them.
In the case of languages, we have to reject the commonly held wisdom that the problem in any one country or the world is the existence of many languages and cultures, and even religions. The problem is their relationship in terms of hierarchy. My language is higher in the hierarchy than yours. My culture is higher than yours. Or my language is global; yours is local. And in order for you to know my language, you must first give up yours. The view that my god is more of a god than your god is very ungodly. This view leads some people to see their own language as inherently more of a language than other languages and therefore to insist that they themselves must be ranked higher in knowledge and power. This is what I call linguistic feudalism.
All languages, large and small, have a lot to contribute to our common humanity if freed from linguistic feudalism. Education policies should be devised on the basis that all languages are treasuries of history, beauty and possibility. They have something to give to one another if their relationship is that of the give-and-take of a network. Even if one of the languages emerges as the language of communication across many languages, it should not be so on the basis of its assumed inherent nationality or globality, but on the basis of need and necessity. And even then, it should not grow on the graveyard of other languages.
Balanced and inclusive education calls for a new slogan: network, not hierarchy. We have to understand that all languages, big and small, have a common language: it is called translation.
Education should never lead to linguistic and cultural self-isolation. I want to connect to the world, but that doesn't mean I have to negate my starting base. I want to connect to the world from wherever I am. I believe that the goal of education is knowledge that empowers, that shows our real connections to the world, but from our base. From our base, we explore the world: from the world, we bring back that which enriches our base.
That, it seems to me, is the real challenge in organising knowledge and transmitting it in an inclusive and balanced education system in the world today. We have to reject the notion that splendour is not splendour unless it springs from squalor. Palaces are not palaces unless erected on prisons. My millions are not millions unless mined from a million poor. For me to be, others must cease to be. Education must convey knowledge that empowers us to imagine more inclusive palaces, where my being enables your being and yours enables mine.
Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (Penguin Books, £20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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