African Literature and the Politics of the English Language

African Literature and the Politics of the English Language

Sanjeev Kumar Nath

The term “African Literature” itself is problematic. There has been a lot of debate about what constitutes African literature.

Is it literature written in Africa or about Africa or by African writers? Does the term include diasporic African writing? Is it literature written in African languages or can literature written in any language be considered African literature if it embodies African experience?

And then we mustn’t forget that Africa is not a country but a continent, and a continent with an astonishing variety of people, languages and cultures. If one were to point out the single most important characteristic of this vast land, it is diversity.

An astonishing array of geographical, ethnic, linguistic, cultural diversities characterise the continent. Africa covers 23 per cent of the world’s land area and 13 per cent of the population of the world live in it. The continent is made up of fifty-four different countries.

To look at the language scene in Africa is to be perplexed with sheer numbers. Experts do not agree about the number of languages spoken in Africa, with some of them contending that Africans speak more than 3000 languages. Scholars generally recognize four language families in Africa: Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan.

Of these, the Niger-Congo is the largest family, with more than half the people of Africa speaking these languages. Of the many branches of Niger-Congo, Bantu is a very important branch. Bantu languages are spoken by various groups in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.

Kwa is another important Niger-Congo branch. Kwa languages are spoken by the Yoruba of Nigeria and the Ashanti of Ghana. Swahili is taken to belong to the Niger-Congo branch, because its grammar and syntax are derived from Bantu sources, but its vocabulary contains a rich mix of Arabic, English, Portuguese and Persian words.

The Afro-Asiatic family of languages dominate in the north. Afro-Asiatic branches include Semitic, Cushitic, Chadic and Berber. Arabic, Amharic and Tigrinya are Semitic languages while Somali and Oromo are Cushitic. Hausa is a Chadic language while the Tuareg of the Sahara speak a Berber language.

Languages of the Nilo-Saharan family are now confined to a few languages in Central Sahara and the savanna of east Africa. Khoikhoi and San are the two existing languages of the Khoisan family.

Language in Africa, as in any other part of the world, is certainly a very important identity-marker, but we need to remember that it is not the only identity marker, and more importantly, the idea of classifying the African peoples according to their languages first came to Africa’s colonial rulers. They divided Africa into language zones and nations according to their convenience, and the divisions remained even after the end of colonial rule.

Administrators needed these divisions for installing chiefs and collecting taxes, and anthropologists and missionaries found it convenient to follow them. Identities which are now taken for granted, identities over which Africans have sometimes fought one another actually originated through the machinations of the colonisers.

In the debate on the choice of language for African writers, an indigenous African language is often taken to be the symbol of the unity of a group of people who speak that language. Actual events of history sometimes challenge the truth of such presuppositions.   One of the worst cases of ethnic violence that the world has ever seen was the Rwandan turmoil when millions of Tutsi and Hutu people lost their lives in ethnic clashes.

These tribes share a common language, and the only difference between them was in terms of their occupations. The Hutus were farmers while the Tutsis were cattle keepers. In fact, a Hutu could become a Tutsi and a Tutsi could become a Hutu through marriage or simply through a change of profession. The German colonial rulers and later the Belgians favoured the Tutsis in providing education and positions in the administration.

This sowed the seeds of hatred between the Hutus and the Tutsis, and after the country became independent in 1962 the differences only widened and the two groups now considered themselves as entirely different tribes.

Then in the 1994 genocide, some 1 million Tutsis were killed by their fellow countrymen, the Hutus. What greater example can be there to prove that language is not always a unifying factor, that in certain circumstances, it may not even be considered as an important identity marker for a people sharing a common destiny?

Also, the African language scene is very complex because of the inequalities among the languages in terms of the number of speakers. Swahili is the most widely used indigenous African language with some 50 million speakers followed by Hausa and Yoruba with more than 20 million speakers each. Then there are languages with just a few thousand speakers.

Thanks to the complex linguistic scenario they inhabit, most Africans are multi-lingual. The languages of the former colonial rulers, English, French and Portuguese serve as important lingua franca in most parts of Africa today.

In a broad sense, “African literature” would mean literatures written about Africa or African lived experience in the indigenous African languages and the European languages that have stayed back in Africa after the departure of the European rulers. Since most of us in India do not have adequate knowledge of African languages, or the European languages used in Africa, our point of entry into African Literature is through the English language.

In an article, “Relativism, Universalism, and the Language of African Literature” Alamin Mazrui discusses the manner in which linguistic relativism and linguistic universalism have contributed to the debate on the language of African literature. Relativists (like Chidi Maduka) have argued that languages structure people’s perceptions in culturally bound ways, and hence, non-African languages are not capable of conveying an African cultural-cognitive essence.

On the other hand, universalists have argued that European languages are good enough for conveying African experience. They hold that all languages are alike, and can be used for any purpose. Some relativists, in their enthusiasm about African languages, have sometimes endowed these languages with “a philosophical and creative potential” greater than that of European languages.

Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir are two experts who have contributed to the relativist argument. Their contribution to this debate is usually known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The person usually connected with the universalists, on the other hand Noam Chomsky, who stressed on the common features of language and played down the surface differences or idiosyncrasies of individual languages.

Coupled with this is the idea that the language instinct is an inherent human faculty. Chomsky’s thoughts on the issue seem to support one of the cherished ideals of the Enlightenment—common human identity. Although psycholinguists in general maintain that there is little hard evidence to prove any of these views, debates over language in Africa have witnessed people siding with one or the other of these hypotheses. 

One of the most important instances of the language debate was occasioned by a conference of African writers at Mekerere University, Kampala, in June 1962. The conference was rather pompously entitled “A Conference of African Writers of English Expression,” suggesting perhaps, the difficulty the writers found in describing themselves.

One of the strongest criticism of the activities of these writers came from the Nigerian critic Obiajunwa Wali who, in an article entitled ‘The Dead End of African Literature?’ accused these writers of neglecting their native languages and trying to create African literature in a foreign language. He said African literature can never be written in English or any other European language.

He considered the literature of the African writers writing in European languages as only “a minor appendage in the main stream of European literature.” Wali accused the writers of the conference with neglecting the writers of the Negritude movement and of ignoring the work of Amos Tutuola. He also said that this kind of literature i.e., literature written in a European language such as English, was without “blood and stamina.”

Obi Wali had made these charges in Transition 10, and in the very next issue of the magazine, Transition 11, several people wrote letters to the editor, protesting Wali’s views on the issue of the language of African literature. Among these was the long letter from Ezekiel Mphahlele who tried to shoot down all of Wali’s objections to African writers writing in English.

He said Wali was wrong in charging that these writers who had gathered in the conference had killed negritude, that they were simply not interested in poetry written with a cultural ideology or programme, that negritude wasn’t killed by anyone, but had killed itself.

He said the authors had not ignored Amos Tutuola, but had only maintained that his Palm Wine Drinkard was his best work, and that it was doubtful if he could produce anything valuable by overworking Yoruba mythology as he was doing in his later work.

Wali had argued that British writers like Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser chose to write in their mother tongue, English, although Greek and Latin were the cosmopolitan languages of their time, while African writers like Achebe chose to abandon their mother tongues. Mphahlele retorted by questioning Wali’s wisdom in comparing the African scene with the British scene of yore:

“There was no need to abandon English because these writers were not committed in a struggle against colonialism as we Africans are today. The English did not need to organize a variety of tribes speaking different languages against a colonial or fascist power. Latin and Greek were not spoken by the man in the street when Shakespeare and Milton wrote.

These languages were scholastic fossils.” Besides, Mphahlele noted that English and French in Africa had become common languages through which Africans were presenting a united front in the struggle against colonial rule. He also says that an African writer needs to be free to choose his medium without the Obi Walis predicting doom for his writing if he has begun writing in English.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who was a student at Makerere when the Conference of African Writers of English Expression was held, was highly impressed by Obi Wali’s arguments. He was well trained in English literature, and was beginning to write fiction in English. In fact, he had gone to the conference to meet Chinua Achebe and to show him the draft of his first novel, Petals of Blood.

He was impressed by Wali’s attack on the writers writing in English, and started thinking about the possibility of abandoning English as a medium for creative writing. Later, he was to take the decision not to write in English, and to present his ideas about the need for African writers to write in African languages. His ideas on the issue are actually more disciplined than Wali’s. Frequently, he invokes Frantz Fanon to provide a theoretical anchorage to his ideas on language.

He believed, after Fanon, that “a man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language”. He also calls for a complete rejection of the standards of the colonising culture, including its language. Ngugi, in his collection of essays called Decolonising the Mind (1986) builds up his argument for rejecting European languages by African writers.

At first his ideas were generally greeted with cynicism and contempt but gradually they began to be discussed and debated seriously. The reason that his ideas on language are being discussed seriously today is an indication of the fact that the phenomenon of English language imperialism has begun to be recognised by people across the once-colonised world and also other places.

Robert Phillipson, who wrote the influential book Linguistic Imperialism in 1992, is an Englishman who teaches in the Copenhagen Business School’s Department of English. Ngugi has worked as a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Irvine. Since 1982 he has been in exile in the US, briefly visiting Kenya in 2004.

                       Much of what he said in In Decolonising the Mind – the Politics of Language of African Literature consists of arguments already presented by Obi Wali, which is why some people consider Wali his mentor in this matter. What he adds to Wali’s argument is perhaps the Fanonian idea of language being a carrier of culture. Unless an African writer rejected an European language, he was encumbered by the cultural baggage of the coloniser’s language.

In Decolonising the Mind Ngugi maintained that “the domination of a people’s language by the languages of the colonising nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonised.” Ngugi also said that by choosing to write in Gikuyu, the language of Kenya’s peasants, he was establishing real contact with the people for whom his writing was meant.

Although Ngugi had been contemplating about ceasing to write in English for quite some time, the actual decision to do so was precipitated by political events. Ngugi was thrown into a maximum security prison without trial by the postcolonial state of Kenya after he collaborated with Ngugi wa Mirii to write a play, Ngaahika Ndenda (I’ll Marry When I Want) and to have the play performed with the help of villagers.

In prison, he decided never to write fiction in English again but in his native Gikuyu. The first result of that decision was Caitaani Muthrabaini (Devil on the Cross ) written on toilet paper in prison.

Wali and Ngugi both write with passion when they talk about African language and literature. In contrast, Chinua Achebe, although passionate about his use of English in his fiction, is generally taken to be a wise and sober voice in this debate. His attitude seems to be much more prudent and based on actuality.

In ‘The African Writer and the English Language’ which is his answer to Obi Wali’s ‘The Dead End of African Literature’, Achebe gives his reasons  for using the English language in his fiction. In this essay Achebe makes the interesting observation that he does not see African literature “as one unit but as a group of associated units—in fact the sum total of the national and the ethnic literatures of Africa.”

He further clarifies his point when he says that for Nigeria the national literature is written in English while the ethnic literatures are in languages such as Hausa, Ibo, Yoruba, Efik, Edo, Ijaw, etc.  Achebe warns against defining African literature “in terms which overlook the complexities of the African scene at the material time”.

He says that colonial rule disrupted many things in Africa, but it also did at least two good things for which the African should be thankful.

It created large political units such as Nigeria from numerous small, scattered political entities, and it gave Africans a few European languages with which they could communicate among themselves: “It gave them a language with which to talk to one another. If it failed to give them a song, it at least gave them a tongue, for sighing.”

It is said that once, when a bill seeking the confiscation of some private property was placed before the Roman senate, one of the distinguished senators, Cicero made an eloquent speech opposing the bill, and with his wonderful oratorical skills, was able to defeat the bill. Only later it transpired that had the bill passed that day, one of Cicero’s own houses would have been confiscated.

The Roman populace aptly came up with a phrase to describe the situation: Cicero pro domo sua : “Cicero on behalf of his own house”. Writers like Achebe defending his practice of writing in English and English teachers everywhere supporting Achebe and other writers like him are not, however, so many Ciceros because I think the reasons Achebe presents for his using English are sound enough to be acceptable to all.

Achebe sees the English language not entirely as something alien, but also as an advantage that history has thrust upon the once-colonised people, and he quite understands the sentiments of people like Wali and Ngugi whose attitude towards the language seems to be that of somewhat uncritical rejection:

“Those of us who have inherited the English language may not be in a position to appreciate the value of the inheritance. Or we may go on resenting it because it came as part of a package deal which included many other items of doubtful value and the positive atrocity of racial arrogance and prejudice, which may yet set the world on fire. But let us not in rejecting the evil throw out the good with it.”

Achebe rubbishes fears that no one can master a second language well enough to be able to create really good literature, and towards the conclusion of his essay gives an illustration from his own use of the English language in Arrow of God to point out how an African author can use English to serve his needs.

The language must not lose its character as a world language, and yet it should be adequately altered to convey the peculiar experience of the African. Ezeulu, the Chief Priest is telling one of his sons the reason for his sending him to church. These are the words Achebe gives to the Chief Priest:

“I want one of my sons to join these people and be my eyes there. If there is nothing in it you will come back. But if there is something there you will bring home my share. The world is like a Mask, dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place. My spirit tells me that those who do not befriend the white man today will be saying had we known tomorrow.”

Then Achebe shows another way of saying the same thing:

 “I am sending you as my representative among these people—just to be on the safe side in case the new religion develops. One has to move with the times or else one is left behind. I have a hunch that those who fail to come to terms with the white man may well regret their lack of foresight.”

The difference between the two passages illustrates what Achebe means by the use of English that is in character. He winds up by saying that it is largely a matter of instinct on the part of the writer, and that it also requires judgement.

I think the question whether a second language can be used effectively in creative writing is also answered by Achebe’s illustration. If one can write the kind of English that he has used to write Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, for instance, there can be no doubt about the suitability of English as a second language for being the medium of creative writing.

Perhaps Achebe’s attitude towards the English language comes closest to Ngugi’s when he says that “The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.” If he hasn’t rejected the language of the colonisers, he has chosen to make it submit it to his kind of use. The combative stance is unmistakable.

To the question whether Africans ought to write in English, Achebe asserts that there is no choice for him but to do so. He means to use the language that history has placed at his disposal.

To be fair to Ngugi, however, it must be conceded that the imperialistic thrust of the English language has been seen as a danger by many thinking people around the world. Mahatma Gandhi thought that the time and effort devoted to mastering English led to an Indian student’s neglecting or being weak in other subjects. In Europe, English is perceived by many as a threat to the languages and the cultures of the different nations of the European Community.

In a journal article  written in answer to the criticism of his famous book, Linguistic Imperialism, Robert Phillipson explains that linguistic imperialism is a subtype of linguicism which is a term coined “to draw parallels between hierarchisation on the basis of ‘race’ or ethnicity (racism, ethnicism), gender (sexism) and language (linguicism)” Phillipson, who is interested in linguistic human rights, says that “linguicism studies attempt to put the sociology of language and education into a form which furthers scrutiny of how language contributes to unequal access to societal and how linguistic hierarchies operate and are legitimised.”

                       Again, the fear of linguistic imperialism is not something that is restricted to erstwhile colonies of European powers. Within Europe today, member states of the European Union are worried about the increasing role English seems to be playing as a lingua franca.

Also, an increasing number of academic research papers in Europe are now being written in English irrespective of the first language of the writer. European Union members also resent frequent statements from their big cousin, the United States of America, that the European Union must adopt a single language as its lingua franca to facilitate communication.

Does America wish to secure its dominance over the EU by first bolstering the strength of the English language in the EU? Is the English language its ally in its imperialistic drive?

Why is America so nosy about the affairs of the EU? Is its suggestion for a lingua franca—English—for the EU simply an innocent suggestion about language or is it more than that? We may perhaps understand the situation through an African (Ibo) saying: ‘When a handshake has gone beyond the elbow, it is  not a handshake, but something else.’

Many of the fears of people who protest English hegemony are not imaginary fears. In many former colonies of the British all over the world English enjoys a privileged status, and first language attrition and even death are realities that users of various languages in these colonies have to take into account.

Again, while much is said about the positive aspects of English as a lingua franca within a nation like Nigeria or India, we must also not lose sight of the other side of the argument. Does English really promote intra-national bonhomie and understanding or does it facilitate the creation of elite groups within a nation? Is it a truly common medium of mutual communication or is it a lingua franca for an intra-national elite and an international elite?

                       The fear of linguistic dominance is understandable when one considers the actual language situation of the world. Gunilla Anderman and Margaret Rogers write that “Given the tendency for languages with small numbers of speakers to be nudged out by languages spoken by many, it is estimated that in a hundred years’ time about 3000 languages may have become extinct.

According to some estimates, there are about 6500 languages in the world about half of which are likely to cease to exist within that time period….This means that on average, every two weeks, somewhere in the world, a language becomes extinct. Since 96% of the world’s languages are spoken by only 4% of its people, it is hardly surprising that many of them may feel under threat.”

It has sometimes been alleged that imperialistic forces have tried to force English down people’s throat through programmes calculated to provide an advantage to English in comparison with other languages.

The Commonwealth Conference on ELT, held at University College, Mekerere, Uganda in 1961 was attended by delegates from 23 Commonwealth countries. The report of the conference, which decided the methodology of English language teaching in countries across the world, contained suggestions which seem to be the result of a master-servant or centre-periphery relationship between Britain and her colonies or former colonies:

• English is best taught monolingually
• The ideal teacher of English is a native teacher
• The earlier English is taught the better the results
• The more English is taught the better
• If other languages are used, standards in English will drop

These tenets of the Makerere Conference have been dutifully followed in teaching English in hosts of institutions across the Commonwealth countries.

Experts continue to debate the issue of linguistic imperialism and linguicism. While Robert Phillipson’s Linguistic Imperialism looks at issue such as linguicism and the rise of the ELT profession as a corollary to imperialism, others like Janina Brutt-Griffler in World English a Study of Its Development try to offer criticism against some of Phillipson’s arguments.

As we have seen, Ngugi’s position in regard to European languages in Africa and the indigenous languages is quite clear. It’s an outright rejection of the languages of the erstwhile colonisers and imperialists, and an uncritical acceptance of African language. We have also talked about how Achebe and others have criticised Ngugi on this point. Achebe happens to be an Igbo and the Igbos are, like the Yoruba or the Hausa, one of the largest ethnic groups in Nigeria.

Let us then also see what someone from one of the smaller groups have to say on the issue. The Ogonis are numerically insignificant in Nigeria and generally live farming and fishing. Let us see what Ken Saro-Wiwa, an Ogoni leader who had to embrace death in extremely tragic circumstances after he fought against the oppression of the Ogoni people by the postcolonial state in Nigeria, has to say on the topic of language use by African writers.

In an article, “The Language of African Writers: A Writer’s Testimony” Ken Saro-Wiwa gives reasons why English is a good medium for African literature. When Saro-Wiwa went to a primary school in 1947, he was taught in Khana, one of the three Ogoni languages for the first two years, but after that English became the medium of instruction with occasional story-telling sessions in Khana which he loved very much.

They read the Bible in Khana at church—invariably the Bible was the first and sometimes only book translated into many African languages—and spoke in Khana at home, but the language of learning was English. When Saro-Wiwa moved on to Government College, Umuahia, he was the only Ogoni boy in the whole school, with boys from other ethnic groups like Ibo, Ijaw and Ibibio filling up the institution.

English was the only language allowed in school, and Saro-Wiwa thanked God for that strict rule. Without this compulsory unifying factor, he would have been miserably alone in school with all other boys finding friends from their ethnic groups. Even in the school’s library, there were no books in other language except English, and according to Saro-Wiwa, the strict regime at school was what produced several writers, including Chinua Achebe, in a single generation.

Then he moved on to Ibadan University, and again English remained the means of communicating with others. He said that the very idea of Africa came to him only in school, for it (“Africa”) is not  an Ogoni concept, not an indigenous African idea. Then he talks about the civil war that tore Nigerian society apart. During the war,  Ken Saro-Wiwa chose to remain with Nigeria while Chinua Achebe, an Ibo, was with Biafra. This is what Saro-Wiwa says about his choice:

“Forced to choose between Nigeria and Biafra, I clung to the former because the arguments for Biafra were the same as the arguments for Nigeria. Simply put, Biafra was a mish-mash of peoples and cultures where the Igbo predominated oppressively just as Nigeria was a mish-mesh of peoples and cultures where the Hausa-Fulani, the Igbo and the Yoruba predominated oppressively.”

He goes on to say that colonialism is not only a matter of European dominance over Africans, but in African society there has always been such unequal relations, with one community or ethnic group dominating others. He says that the fact that Africans share “a common colour and or certain common beliefs or a common history of slavery and exploitation are not enough to just lump all Africa into one single pigeon hole”.

Ken Saro Wiwa also gives us a few figures. He says that writing in Khana, his mother tongue he would be able to speak to about 2 lac people most of whom don’t read or write, while writing in English he could speak to some 400 million people. He doesn’t feel guilty about using a language that history has forced on him and has made him capable of communicating with other people within and outside Africa.

For him, English is much like his biro pen or the banking system of his country or a computer none of which is an Ogoni invention. Also, he says that after all, his writing in English does not prevent him from writing in Khana, his mother tongue, too.

I’ve recounted all these arguments from this great leader from a numerically small group in Nigeria because the proponents of indigenous languages for African literature very often overlook the difficult circumstances in which a minority community person like Saro-Wiwa has to work.

One wonders what Ngui’s position vis-a-vis the English language would be if he were not born into a large speech community in Kenya, but into a really small speech community like Saro-Wiwa’s.  

A rejection of English could mean a regressive step in today’s world, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, for all his rhetoric against English, seems to be fully aware of this. Why else would he keep using English in meetings, conferences, interviews, and his polemical writings? Why would he ensure that every novel he writes in Gikuyu is translated into English?

However, at the same time we have to be aware that English language imperialism is a reality that the world has to face. No one can just say that there is no such thing as a programme to push English in and to push indigenous languages out. The programme exists, but in tackling this problem we must make rational, prudent decisions, not emotional ones.

Perhaps the correct thing would be to promote indigenous languages, to ensure better teaching, learning, in indigenous languages and to ensure improved literary and other activities in them, but at the same time also to learn English well. Even in a country like Japan, known for its pride in everything Japanese, English learning is picking up.

Despite protests by groups wanting the ouster of English, more and more people now see the benefits of learning English.

Some years ago, an Asiaweek article on protests in Japan over government attempts to make English a second official language concluded with these words: “Whether or not the Japanese make English a second official language, they should push for greater proficiency in it. At the same time, if they are worried about their own language, they need to improve its teaching, and support their own culture and literature. But teach the children both languages. They are going to inherit the world and they had better be ready to do so.”

Finally, this issue of the language of African Literature is of much relevance in our Indian context, too. Surely, Indian literature includes the literatures written in Indian languages and in English, too.

We need to consider if because of a certain perception of the “superiority” of English (because of various manifestations of English language imperialism), Indian literature written in English somehow has an edge over really good Indian literature written in Indian languages.

We need to respect our indigenous languages, promote speaking and writing in them, do all that is possible to support literatures in our Indian languages, but we also need to learn English well. English can also be used as a medium for translation so that different Indian linguistic groups can learn about one another’s literatures through English translations.

Bibliography

Achebe, Chinua. ‘The African Writer and the English Language’ in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart  Casebook edited by Isidore Okpewho. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Anderman, Gunilla and Margaret Rogers (ed). In and Out of English: For Better, For Worse? Clevendon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. 2005

Brutt-Griffler, Janina. World Enlgish a Study of Its Development. Multilingual Matters, 2002.

Master, Peter. “Positive and Negative Aspects of the Dominance of English” in TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 32, no.4 (Winter, 1998)

Mazrui, Alamin “Relativism, Universalism, and the Language of African Literature” in Research in African Literatures, Vol. 23, No.1. Spring 1992.

Mphahlele, Ezekiel and others “Polemics: The Dead End of African Literature”. Transition 11. November, 1963.

Phillipson, Robert. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford University Press, 1992.

Phillipson, Robert. “Realities and Myths of Linguistic Imperialism” in  Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Vol. 18, No, 3, 1997.

Saro-Wiwa, Ken. “The Language of African Writers: A Writer’s Testimony” in Research in African Literatures, Vol. 23 No. 1. Spring, 1992.

Thiong’o Ngugi wa. Decolonising the Mind : The Politics of Language in African Literature. Heinemann Educational, 1986.

Wali, Obiajunwa. “The Dead End of African Literature?” in Transition 10 (1963)

(Sanjeev Kumar Nath, English Department, Gauhati University, sanjeevnath21@gmail.com)

[Images from different sources]

Mahabahu.com is an Online Magazine with collection of premium Assamese and English articles and posts with cultural base and modern thinking.  You can send your articles to editor@mahabahu.com / editor@mahabahoo.com ( For Assamese article, Unicode font is necessary)