Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas
© 2025 by Ngu ~ gι ~ wa Thiong’o
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Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2025
Distributed by Two Rivers Distribution
ISBN 978-1-620-97932-7 (hc)
ISBN 978-1-620-97936-5 (ebook)
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Contents
Part One: Decolonizing Language
1. Decolonizing Education . 3
2. The Body of Knowledge . 15
3. Between Enslavement and Empowerment . 27
4. The Magic Fountain . 37
5. The Modern Patron: The Role of the University in a Global Community . 55
6. Makerere Dreams . 61
Part Two: Voices of Prophecy
7. Abdilatif Abdalla and the Voice of Prophecy . 79
8. Chinua Achebe: The Spirit Lives . 93
9. The Global Kenyan: A Tribute to Ali Mazrui . 97
10. Mazrui and Achebe: The Literary Artist and the Political Scientist . 103
11. Wole Soyinka: The Conscience of Africa . 111
12. Mı~cere Mu~go: In Kenyan History, Literature, and Thought . 117
13. Grace Ogot: My Literary Sister, Kenya’s Literary Star . 131
14. Nadine Gordimer: A Tribute from a Kindred Spirit . 135
15. The Three Js: Jomo, Jaramogi, and “James” . 143
16. Mandela Memories: An African Prometheus . 151
17. Mandela Comes Home . 159
18. Henry Chakava: A Model of Development in Africa . 167
19. Call Her Molara O: Pioneer in Dialectical African Feminism . 183
20. The African Writer as a Prophet and Social Critic in Contemporary Times . 199
Notes . 211
The African Writer as a Prophet and Social Critic in Contemporary Times
It was in 1963 that Es’kia Mphahlele, then still in exile from the apartheid regime, founded the Chemchemi Creative Center in Nairobi. Kenya was on the verge of independence, but at the time, it was still a settler colony, a mirror image of apartheid South Africa. Chemchemi is the Swahili name for a spring or a fountain. It was meant to be a place where Kenyan writers could meet, to do for Kenya what the Mbari Writers Club, another of his creations, had done for Nigeria. At the time, there were hardly any published Kenyan writers to speak of. My own novel Weep Not, Child, the first in East Africa, had yet to be published. There must have been skeptical glances when this exile from South Africa set up this fountain for Kenyan writers, but no skepticism would deflect him from his purpose. Where others saw East Africa as a literary desert, Mphahlele saw fertile soil to plant seeds that would green the desert. He organized seminars at the center to which he invited budding and would-be writers. Mphahlele was focused on the future. The young were that future.
Apart from the seminars and activities at the CCC in Nairobi, Mphahlele traveled widely, talking at several schools. I’m sure there were many who saw him as a latter-day Don Quixote, mistaking shadows for writers. Like Don Quixote, Mphahlele stayed the course, oozing optimism even when results did not seem to give cause for it. Among the schools he visited in 1963 was Kamusinga high school in western Kenya, far from Nairobi. Among the students who attended the talk that day was a boy who sat in a corner quietly. He did not ask any questions. The boy had lost his father and was being brought up by a single mother. Maybe he was thinking about the hardships at home, imagining probably not a life of literature, but how his life might have been different were his father still alive. This boy would later become Dr. Henry Chakava, the CEO of East African Educational Publishers, the publishing house that he has run since the 1970s, developing it from a tiny house into a major publishing enterprise that has published many Kenyan and other African writers.
Mphahlele was not just a dreamer, but also a battle-tested activist and organizer. I first met him in Kampala, Uganda, during the 1962 Conference of Writers of English Expression. I was then a second-year student of English at Makerere. Mphahlele was the chief organizer and the brain behind the gathering. The contingent from East Africa had not published much beyond the occasional short story, in my case, in a student journal, and yet Mphahlele invited us and accorded us the full status of writers. I am forever beholden to him for enabling me to meet so many writers, many of whom had already published substantial work—books, essays, articles, poems,
and short stories in significant literary journals and newspapers. Mphahlele built bridges among continental African writers, and a causeway between continental African writers and the African literary diaspora in the United States and the Caribbean. For me, he built stairs to the world of letters.
In a sense, Mphahlele has always been a bridge. The herdsboy from Maupaneng who became a scholar in Jo’burg would link the rural and the urban to produce one of the finest autobiographies, Down Second Avenue, which drew equally from his life and from his imagination in search of the truth of life in an oppressive social system. He deployed all the resources of a poet and a prose writer to meld historical fact and imaginative metaphor into lyrical tenderness. This would become his hallmark in his later works, for instance The Wanderers and Africa My Music, blurring the boundaries between writer, scholar, and educator, between writer and journalist, and between literary and social critic, as well as between genres— prose, poetry, and drama. It is not surprising that the author of the magnificent Down Second Avenue would also produce the groundbreaking work of literary criticism of the time The African Image, and later other collections of criticism, including Es’kia. As the fiction editor of Drum magazine in the 1950s, he was the link and mediating consciousness between the older generation of Krune Mqhayi, Wallet Vilakazi, the brothers Herbert and Rolfes Dhlomo, and Peter Abrahams, and the tough-minded urbanites Can Themba, Arthur Maimane, Lewis Nkosi, Bloke Modisane, Casey Motsisi, and Todd Matshikiza. The 1962 conference that linked South African writing to that of the African continent and Pan-Africanism
as a whole was a continuation of the bridge he himself had become. Even if he had stopped at Makerere, Mphahlele would still have made an indelible mark on the African literary scene and its intellectual production.
He did not stop at creating platforms for writers. He also fought for the recognition of their work, of African literature, in the academy. He followed up the success of the Makerere conference with another at Fourah Bay College in Freetown, Sierra Leone. This time the conference focused on the place of African literature in the university. Was he discouraged by finding no immediate takers to his ideas on the teaching of African literature in the academy? He did not show it, because at Chemchemi he pushed and eventually was allowed to teach the first-ever course on African literature at Nairobi. With his departure for Zambia in 1966, the course was considerably diminished so that it became a virtual nonentity.
When, in 1967, I returned to Kenya from Leeds and joined the English Department of Nairobi University, I was confronted with the old English syllabus that I had studied as an undergraduate at Makerere. The department seemed impervious to the winds of literary change blowing within the continent. I joined two other colleagues to call for the abolition of the English Department as then organized.
The resulting change from the English Department to the Literature Department rested squarely on what Mphahlele had done. The seeds he had planted had grown and borne fruit in new departments of literature all over the continent and produced intellectuals that could match any from anywhere. Among the earliest takers of the reorganized literature
syllabus was the boy who had once listened to Mphahlele speak to his class at Kamusinga, Dr. Henry Chakava.
Mphahlele was an intellectual activist who left a lasting mark on the production of Pan-African literature through the conferences he organized and the community centers he ran, like Chemchemi. Similarly, he left his mark through his campaigns for African literature in schools and colleges. His activism was deeply rooted in his commitment to education and the arts. He had already seen the arts play a role in his own life in the form of the stories and songs that nourished him as he contemplated the vastness of nature in the apparently endless plains and awe-inducing mountains and valleys. His activism was also based on his profound belief that the arts and artists had an indispensable role in society.
Mphahlele has written extensively about the role of literature and the writer in society. He believes that writers are both a mirror and the conscience of their society. They are the sensitive needle that registers the ugly and the beautiful, the negative and the positive, in all their interactions and their complexity. An excellent student of South African literary and intellectual history, Mphahelele was aware of the words of R.V. Selope Thema in an issue of the Chamber of Mines weekly newspaper for workers, Umteteli wa Bantu (Mouthpiece of the People), in March 1929:
The duty of Bantu writers and journalists, as that of writers and journalists of other races, is to call the attention of the leaders to the things that are detrimental to the interest and welfare of our people. A writer who does
not criticize and correct the mistakes of his people does not fulfill the purpose for which God endowed him with the power of the pen. A writer is a prophet, and his duty is not only to prophesy but also to rebuke, when necessary, the people for wrongdoing; to criticize, when occasion demands it, the conduct and methods of the leaders of his race, and point out the way of salvation.
The biblical prophets, for instance, would warn the rulers of their society about the wrath of God if they did not mend their ways. They spoke with anger precisely because they loved their society and wanted it to run with fairness and justice. Damnation was sure to descend on those rulers who would not hearken to the voice of the prophet. The prophet became the voice of the people.
This is still true in contemporary times. Writers have to be the voice of the voiceless. They have to give voice to silence, especially the silence imposed on a people by an oppressive state. The South African writer has played this role bravely and magnificently in the past, from Krune Mqhayi to Breyten Breytenbach. For their words alone, some of them have faced torture, exile, and death. Indeed, there were times when the South African writer, at home or in exile, was the most eloquent voice of the silenced. Some writers chose to engage in the very struggle they talked about in their books. They plunged into battle as actual fighters. Some died; others carried physical scars. History has seen many artists enter battle, like any other soldiers. When one talks about the role of the writer or the arts, we
are referring to what they do with their pens, their brushes, their voices. One is not necessarily a good writer, a good painter, or a good singer for being a good soldier in the fight for liberation or a physical activist in social struggle. The biblical prophets would probably have made poor combatants in a battlefield. That is why I think it is dangerous to judge writers in terms of the parties and ideologies of their allegiance. One is not a poor or a good writer because one is in this or that party, or in this or that trade union. But the words a writer utters in song or story do matter, although not because they effect immediate change. A novel, for instance, takes years to complete, publish, and circulate. Changes cannot wait for the novelist to complete the novel or the poet the epic. The revolution will not wait for an inspiring tale.
What, then, is the real role of the artist and the arts in society? It is the part that the arts play in the very survival of the human. The human body needs food, water, and air to be. That is obvious. All life needs food, water, and air. But human beings have an ethical dimension to their being. Humans don’t live to eat but eat to live. Humans make choices, moral and aesthetic, that create and cater to the spiritual dimension to their being. Many ethical systems in the form of religions and other ritual practices try to reflect and cater to this spirituality, to nourish the soul in the same way food nourishes the body. The body and the mind are essential to human existence.
However, there is one realm of our being without which there would be no difference between humans and the rest of nature. I am talking of the imagination. Imagination is central
to the survival of humans as humans. Architects must picture a building in their minds before they can build it. Without imagination, there would be no religions. We imagine God and Satan as embodiments of the oppositional ideals of good and evil. Worship and ceremony would be impossible without imagination. Humans can imagine journeys before they set out on them. Humans can imagine the past and the future. We can imagine different futures, endless different possibilities, and then make choices based on what we imagine. This capacity to imagine a different future is important in order to resist succumbing to apparently impossible situations. We have seen how an oppressive social system, or rulers in general, try to limit our imagination, to make people unable to imagine and therefore struggle for a different future. That we have arrived at the best of all possible worlds is the constant refrain of the dominant social forces in society. Without imagination, there would be no songs, poetry, fiction, and prophecy. Let us look at the three central constituents of a human being: the body, the soul, and the imagination. Humans make sure that they do not starve the body. They nourish it with enough healthy food where possible. Otherwise, the body shrivels, becomes weak. The same with spirituality. Humans nourish it with good ethical practices that ensure that they make good ethical choices and hold on to values that enhance their individual and collective lives. Religions, in the widest possible dimension of the term, cater to the spiritual to ensure that the “soul” does not shrivel because of bad advice, choices, and practices. They try to provide a healthy spiritual diet.
What about the imagination? What nourishes the imagination that is so central to our existence as humans? It is surely the arts. The imagination produces the food it needs for its nourishment, and this food is the arts. It is story, song, dance, sculpture, and painting. In his book on his sculptures, Pitika Ntuli says he started at the age of six when “I made my first sculpture with wire and discarded polish tins and my voice providing the revving sounds of the engine, hooting all the way to the shops.” His imagination created a vehicle that in turn expanded the boy’s imagination. His creation is a real vehicle in his imagination, and it empowers him.
Es’kia Mphahlele was very much aware of the centrality of imagination in society. He talked about the education of the imagination. “We invest words with the mystical power that can bring ramparts tumbling,” he wrote, invoking the memory of Joshua’s trumpet that brought down the walls of Jericho. “We speak with the tongues of prophets, priests, gurus,” he adds, invoking the memory of myriads of prophets of all cultures and creeds, who, like Kwegyir Aggrey, ask the eagle to find its inner power and fly.1
The primary role of the writer, or more broadly the artist, is to produce the healthiest material for the education of the imagination. Just as unhealthy food weakens the body and bad ethical choices diminish the spiritual, so also bad art can limit the imagination or direct it to unhealthy ends. That’s why the arts should not be a luxury in the school system. They should be central to it. Even engineers, architects, urban planners, teachers, and scientists thrive on a robust imagination that can find links between phenomena.
Es’kia Mphahlele inhabits several worlds. He was a writer who made other writers possible. His thinking and practice laid the grounds for the debates on the decolonization of literature and the formation of new kinds of literature departments. When we talk about the African writer as a prophet, an activist, and a social critic, we need go no further than the example of this man. In his life as an artist, educator, and activist, he truly embodies the voice of prophecy. Mphahlele started as a herdsboy listening and reciting stories. He became a teacher but was removed from teaching for his opposition to the Bantu Education Act, which extended apartheid throughout the educational system. He became a writer telling stories in In Corner B, published in 1967. The conditions in South Africa forced him into exile, to join the company of the Wanderers whom he talks about in his novel of the same title. For being an educator, a writer, and a defender of the arts, he was thrown out of the city into a wilderness that he would turn into a platform for his educational mission and literary prophecies. Prophets are driven. They never give up dreams. Wherever he now rests, Mphahlele is maybe looking at us, telling us of his dreams as composed by the poet Langston Hughes, whom Mphahlele brought to Makerere and with whom, as with other Black writers, he continued his literary conversations from his beginnings as a short story writer to his days at Denver and Jo’burg.
To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun, To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently, Dark like me—
That is my dream!
To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun.
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the day is done.
Rest at pale evening . . .
A tall, slim tree . . .
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.
Those dreams of freedom reunite us with the spirit of Mphahlele, the exile, who never stopped dreaming of home.
About the Author
One of the leading writers and scholars at work today, Ngu ~ gı ~ wa Thiong’o was born in Limuru, Kenya, in 1938. He is the author of A Grain of Wheat; Weep Not, Child; and Petals of Blood, as well as Birth of a Dream Weaver, Wrestling with the Devil, Minutes of Glory, and The Perfect Nine (all from The New Press). Currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California–Irvine, Ngu ~ gı ~ is the recipient of twelve honorary doctorates, among other awards, and has been nominated for the Man Booker International Prize.
