A Introduction of Decolonization

Meeting Ngũgĩ and His Philosophy
By: Vivian Phillips

Before this class, I had never heard of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. After a long self-reflection, much to my shame, the only African writers I had read before were Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I grew up in a very Afro-centric household, go to a very Afro-centric church and prided myself into thinking that I had a very Afro-centric mindset overall. While I am aware that I was (and still am) conditioned to have a very colonial mindset due to being raised in America, I believed that it was a blind spot in my psyche that I, at least, had a firm grasp on.

Then why was this the first time I've heard of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o at the grown age of twenty-three? Ngũgĩ answered my question in the first chapter of his book Decolonizing the Mind, he wants to write his book in his local language, not English. On the surface level, I understood that language is a colonizer's tool. As a descendant of the enslaved Africans in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, English was a language that was forced down my ancestors' throat while their own language was labeled by the American legal system to be illegal. I understood that the stripping of languages from a people deprived them of their culture, privacy and imposed dependency on their colonizers. However, Ngũgĩ empathized how learning a language not only comes with the assimilation of the colonizer's mindset, morals, government, and justice system but the tragic loss of those very same things in your mother tongue.

There was a quote by Ngũgĩ that really stuck with me: "After the bullets and the gun, comes the chalk and the blackboard." This quote is refreshingly quaint in its ability to carry the allegory of psychological warfare and re-education. However, it also encompasses the blueprint of the greatest con that Western world ever pulled on Africa. This ability to bowdlerize the past violence (like shooting indigenous peoples of a land that you invaded with guns), and instead politely disguise current your psychological violence as a means of rehabilitation with the laws you put into place. 

After explaining the blueprint Ngũgĩ challenges the reader to see a decolonized Africa as a phoenix- rebirth. "Why shouldn't there be a Nigerian or West African English which. We can use to express our own ideas, thinking and philosophy in our own way? (23)"  We have no control over the fact that we are products of a colonialist system, but we do control over training our minds and actions to see ourselves as children of a neo-post-colonial era.