Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: “Europe and the West must also be decolonised”

Summary

Writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argues that language, literature, and imagination are central to cultural identity and political freedom.

• African literature and language: Ngũgĩ distinguishes literature written by Africans in African languages from work written in European languages, which he calls “Europhone African literature.” He says language is part of a literature’s identity and argues that African-language writing should be recognized in its own right.
• Changing the literary center: While teaching at the University of Nairobi, Ngũgĩ and his colleagues challenged a curriculum that treated English or European literature as its center. They instead placed African literature at the center, with other literatures studied in relation to it.
• The influence of diaspora writing: His studies of Caribbean writers, including George Lamming, helped him connect African, Caribbean, and African American literature. He describes these connections as important to African writing on the continent.
• Writing in Kikuyu: After spending a year in a maximum-security prison in Kenya for writing a play in Kikuyu, his mother tongue, Ngũgĩ decided to write his creative work in Kikuyu. He wrote his first Kikuyu novel, Devil on the Cross, on toilet paper in prison. He says writing in Kikuyu helped sustain his connection to the world outside prison and later to Kenya during exile.
• Language rights and translation: Ngũgĩ argues that everyone has a right to their mother tongue and to produce ideas in it—even if only a few people speak that language. Translation can connect languages without requiring people to abandon their own. He sees a major problem in former colonies where most people speak local languages, but intellectual life and institutions of power operate mainly in European languages.
• Translation as connection: Ngũgĩ says he first wrote The Upright Revolution in Kikuyu; it was subsequently translated into 83 languages, many of them African. He presents this as an example of translation carrying work between languages and cultures.
• Understanding colonialism after independence: He credits Frantz Fanon with providing concepts for understanding the postcolonial period. Political independence, he says, does not necessarily bring economic or cultural independence, and class divisions can persist within newly independent countries.
• Decolonizing Europe and the West: Ngũgĩ argues that decolonization is relevant not only to Africa and formerly colonized societies but also to Europe and the West. He links European modernity and the development of several European cities to profits from slavery and colonial exploitation, and points to European expansion and occupation of land across other continents.
• Art and the power of imagination: Ngũgĩ says authoritarian governments suppress writers because literature and art help people imagine different futures. Art can challenge acceptance of present conditions and make alternative possibilities visible. He recommends reading literature from Africa, Asia, and Latin America to better understand the contemporary world and the possibilities its writers imagine.

Speakers and Sources Featured

• Speaker: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
• People and works referenced: Frantz Fanon; George Lamming; A Grain of Wheat, Petals of Blood, Weep Not, Child, The River Between, Devil on the Cross, and The Upright Revolution (first written in Kikuyu as Ituika Ria Murungaru)

No other speaker is identifiable in the subtitles.