Ngũgĩ’s Ideas on Language: Relevant Here and Now

Ngũgĩ’s Ideas on Language: Relevant Here and Now

Sanjeev Kumar Nath

“The words of a dead man

Are modified in the guts of the living”

(From “In Memory of W B Yeats” by W H Auden)

With the passing away of Ngũgĩwa Thiong’o on Wednesday, 28 May, we lost one of the most influential African writers who alerted us to the dangers of succumbing to the many conspiracies and temptations of imperialism.

He warned us of the dangers of falling prey to linguistic imperialism, particularly English language imperialism, but few understood him well.

Many thought that Ngũgĩ was contradicting himself when he was calling for a rejection of the English language by African writers and was also translating his books into English.

Many thought he hated Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) because of their differences in opinion on the question of the language(s) of African literature, but Ngũgĩ has spoken a lot about his sincere respect for Achebe.

To understand Ngũgĩ’s stand on the medium of African literature, and by extension to appreciate his ideas on language, politics and power, it would be good to begin this discussion with reference to the conference in which he first met Achebe and other African writers writing in English.

Born at Kamirithu, Kenya on January 5, 1938, Ngugi was in his early twenties and an undergraduate student at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, when the Conference of African Writers of English Expression (1962) was held there.

In that conference, he gave the manuscript of his novel Weep Not, Child to Chinua Achebe, requesting him for his comments. In many interviews Ngũgĩ said that he was indebted to Achebe for going through the manuscript and offering many useful suggestions and comments.

However, young James Ngũgĩ (as he was known before he changed his name to Ngũgĩwa Thiong’o in 1977) was particularly attracted by what Nigerian critic Obi Wali said in that conference. Wali’s speech, later to be published as “The Dead End of African Literature?” in the journal Transition, was quite unambiguous in its sharp criticism of Africans writing in European languages.

Wali said that it was just not natural for an African literature to be written in a European language. Just as German Literature was written in German and French Literature was written in French, similarly truly African literatures can only be produced in African languages.

Wali said that an essentially African experience can only be related in an African language, and his strong criticism of the African authors writing in English and other languages amounted to charging them with betraying their mother tongues.

The young Ngũgĩwas absolutely convinced by Wali’s arguments, although at that point of time he was also beginning to establish himself as another African writer writing in English.

Another important influence on his ideas about language and literature was Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) whose writings—Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), L’An Cinq, de la Révolution Algérienne (A Dying Colonialism), Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth)—dealing with the psychopathology of colonialism, seriously engage with the question of the psychological problems the colonized using the language of the colonizer has to suffer.

Going further back, these ideas about the choice of language and its impact on the psyche can also be traced to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis put forward by American anthropological linguist Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941). Sapir and Whorf maintained that language is not just a neutral medium for communication, but it shapes our perceptions, attitudes and ideas in significant ways so that what language we choose to use can directly influence our ideas about the world.

Although the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is not accepted in its entirety by linguists today, there is very strong consensus on the assertion that language does influence our perception and understanding of things. Language does not always determine thought in a fundamental way, but it does influence our worldview.

Thus, although sometimes there are attempts at rejecting Ngũgĩ’sideas about language as unscientific and mere emotionalism, his ideas can be traced to well-researched “truth”s supported by modern cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. Moreover, the importance of the Mother Tongue in one’s education, particularly early education is a well-established fact backed by linguistic and educational research.

Many African writers writing in English and other European languages have opposed Ngũgĩ’sviews. They also criticized Obi Wali in the very next issue of Transition in which he had published “The Dead End of African Literature?”. Transition 10 contained Wali’s essay and Transition 11 contained articles by several prominent African writers, explaining why African literatures can be written in European languages.

They argued, for instance, that the context of literatures like German and French could not be compared with literature written by African writers because Germany and France had not suffered colonial rule, while Africa had suffered long under colonial rule.

In an essay called “The African Writer and the English Language” first published by Chinua Achebe in Transition in 1965, i.e., some three years after Obi Wali had begun the debate on the medium of African literature, Chinua Achebe provided some important arguments in support of his and many other African writers choosing to write in European languages.

Achebe said that while colonialism was indeed a bad thing, synonymous with many kinds of oppression of indigenous peoples, it also did two good things in Africa : i) it made large political units, the sovereign states out of a very large number of small ethnicities and communities, and 2) it brought large European languages like English,

French, German and Portuguese to Africa so that African communities that did not understand each other’s languages, could communicate in these European languages. Achebe said that instead of merely resenting the imposition of English on his country, Nigeria, by the British colonisers, he meant to make use of the language that he came to inherit with the colonial history of his people.

Nigeria is home to several hundred African languages, some large ones like Yoruba and Ibo, and some spoken by just a few thousand people. While these languages are not mutually intelligible to the different communities that use them, they can, if the learn English, (which has become the national language of Nigeria) understand one another.

We can perhaps appreciate Achebe’s argument better if we compare the Nigerian context with our own Indian context. India, like Africa, is home to many languages, but doesn’t have a national language. Hindi is the “Official Language of the Union”, and English the “Associate Official Language of the Union”, which, it was thought, would eventually be replaced by Hindi.

However, English continues to serve as the Associate Official Language of the Union and is unlikely to be ever entirely replaced by Hindi. There have been “angrezihatao” (“Throw English Away”) movements, mostly by North Indian politicians who sent their wards to posh English medium public schools, but there has been stiff resistance to what is seen as the imposition of Hindi, particularly in places like Tamil Nadu, and occasionally in the Northeast.

Hindi-belt politicians are quick to label such resistance as stupid, but anyone who has any idea of the richness of Tamil language and literature, for instance, will understand that it is not mere chauvinism that makes some Tamils resent attempts to impose Hindi on them. English, being a non-Indian language, is accepted as a “neutral” lingua franca by many Indians. 

Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941-1995) a Nigerian writer, journalist, activist, environmentalist, who belonged to the tiny Ogoni tribe of Nigeria, said that it was a blessing that English was the medium of the school he attended. He said that had Yoruba, or Ibo or any of the bigger Nigerian languages been the medium, he, as the only Ogoni boy in the entire school, would have been regularly bullied by the boys whose mother tongue was the medium.

Ken Saro-Wiwa would certainly appreciate what Achebe said about calls for rejecting English: that throwing English away simply because of the colonial past would be like throwing the baby away along with the bath water in the tub.

All this can make one think that Achebe rejected Ngugi’s arguments completely. But did he? In his second novel No Longer At Ease, Achebe shows how Obi, the protagonist felt ashamed at having to communicate in English with fellow Nigerians whose languages he did not know.

For Achebe, using English is a necessity imposed by historical circumstances, and he means to use it in his own way, but he is certainly not in awe of the English language in any manner. In fact, he writes about making the imperial language submit to his specific needs, instead of slavishly accepting English. If Ngũgĩ’s attitude towards English is best described by the word “rejection”, Achebe’s attitude can perhaps be described as “subversion”.

A nuanced understanding of this language debate that has lasted long in Africa is useful for appreciating our own relationship with this imperial language. Many small Indian languages (like other small languages in other parts of the world) are dead or dying because of wholesale acceptance of English by their speakers and accompanied neglect of their own languages.

Not for nothing is English called a cannibal language. (However, this is not only about English and other smaller languages. Any small language in contact with a dominant language is always in danger of extinction. Hindi also has been the cause of the neglect of many smaller languages, particularly in the north of India)

What Ngugi said about respecting our mother tongues is extremely relevant in the present scenario of dominant languages pushing smaller languages to extinction. We the Assamese are known for our pride in our language and culture, but it takes more than just pride to survive and thrive in an environment of intense competition.

According to Ethnologue data taking both First Language and Second Language users into account, English remains the largest language in the world, and Hindi the third largest and Bengali the seventh largest, and Assamese the 65^th. I don’t know why, but whenever I check these figures, I cannot help thinking of a large lake in which many carnivorous fish live—some huge, some smaller, some very small.

What would be the fate of the small fish if they swelled with pride about their own importance, and did not care a fig about who their neigbours were? Or, perhaps the better question to ask is : What strategies would the small fish have to adopt in order to survive and thrive in such an environment?

Sanjeev Kumar Nath,  sanjeevnath21@gmail.com

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