The end of colonization corresponded to the hope for a new morrow. In this respect, colonialism which led to the occupation of African territories and the downfall of African traditional culture drastically caused the erosion of African traditional ways of life. To solve this, the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa THIONG’O made a firm decision to revalorize his African traditional culture and values by writing most of his works in Gikuyu in order to end linguistic imperialism. This Kenyan scholar strives to decolonize the minds of millions of Africans who continue to promote the legacy of colonialism by writing and publishing in foreign languages. This work tends to demonstrate Ngugi’s conception of language issue and how the recognition of national languages participates to the downfall of Western culture and the promotion of African national languages especially Gikuyu. This study also allows us to understand the role played by local languages to strengthening African cultural identity and values.
Language as a means of communication is subjected to many definitions. According to Jean Jacques Rousseau, language is derived from emotion. For Emmanuel KANT, it is originated from logical thought. Moreover, linguists as Ferdinand de SAUSSURE and Noam CHOMSKY consider that philosophy is the study of language which is a system of communication. Language consists of a set of sounds and written symbols used by the people of a particular country or region. According to Ngugi [1], the revitalization of local languages is real impediment to colonial enslavement and overt oppression.
But writing in our languages per se-although a necessary first step in the correct direction-will not itself bring about a renaissance in African cultures if that literature does not carry the content of our people’s anti-imperialist struggles to liberate their productive forces from foreign control, the content of the need for unity among the workers and peasants of all the nationalities in their struggles to control the wealth they produced and to free it from internal and external parasites [1].
Oral or signed languages are ruled by phonological system known as morphemes combined to form sentences or phrases. But human language is based on productivity for its social convention. Language is acquired through social interaction but children when they are three can master the first function of language. The notion of language family is a group of language coming from the same ancestor. For instance, the Indo-European language is the most spoken language in Africa. We can name English, French, Portuguese, Afro-Asiatic family as Arabic and the Bantu languages including Swahili, Zulu and Shona.
Language as a set of speech norm is viewed as a vehicle of culture. Languages have their differences in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. They have evolved through writing and literacy and become more useful for humans. They facilitate distant communication and larger social interactions. With the revolution of written languages, multicultural barriers disappear and give way to cross-cultural influences. Writing started with the Bronze Age in the Neolithic period in the 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are viewed as the earliest writing.
Firstly, the emphasis will be laid on how colonialism led to the erosion of traditional values, culture of the colonized people. In fact, with the arrival of colonization, African languages were sent to the dustbins and replaced by European foreign languages, a situation which accentuated linguistic imperialism. Secondly, the focus will be put on the concept of language issue and how this linguistic diversity becomes a main preoccupation for most African writers but there is a real need for Ngugi to write in Gikuyu in an aim to revive local languages and promote African cultural identity in favor of the uneducated Kenyan workers and peasants.
The Impact of Colonialism on African Local Languages
Considered as a bank memory of people, language does not only justify the struggle for cultural freedom, it is a means of cultural revival and political freedom. Language as a means of communication allows its people to identify themselves and their place in history. Language and culture are inseparable and form a common unity as they carry one another. People without a language loose the beauty of their cultures. Therefore, they feel a broken heritage. In that effect the promotion of African languages is the easiest way for Ngugi to decolonize his mind as a dignified African and to get rid of centuries of enslavement and domination from the West as well as to fight against European stereotypes. This is also a means for Ngugi to gradually overthrow the imperialist tradition and its values for the promotion of a resistance tradition in which Africans can recognize themselves and their place in history and the universe. Many African intellectuals perceive language and culture as a tool and vehicle of national identity which admit their personality and attitude as Africans.
People without language and culture are bound to lose their dignity and finally acquire alien cultures that will increase their alienation from social environment. The intellectuals have become the political voices of their nations; showing new paths and perspectives for their people who have been trapped by the powerful weapons of imperialism. For that reason, politics and culture form a perfect and inseparable unity as Ngugi argues in his essay Moving the Center.
Cultural aspects cannot be in total isolation from the economic and political ones [2].
For that reason, Ngugi encourages the return to African languages as a means of cultural awareness when he perceives the acquisition of foreign languages as a continuation to the process of colonialism of the minds of African people and cultural dependence. In this respect, Ngugi advocates the revalorization of African languages as the authentic source of African culture when he says in Moving the Center.
If the African languages had all died African people would have had to define themselves in a language that had such a negative concept of Africa as its legacy [3].
As a progressive and socially engaged writer, Ngugi became an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience. He appealed to the African writers to abandon English; an alien language that is associated with decades of cultural, political and economic subjugation. Viewed as a spiritual domination for Ngugi, English serves as a cultural barrier for African people and their history. English language use is also a gateway to the promotion of Western culture considered as superior to the African local languages which are demeaning and savage in the eyes of the colonial master. The power of foreign languages was due to the effect of colonialism which governs the cultural life of the colonized as Ngugi asserts in Decolonizing the Mind.
Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonized, the control, through culture, of how people perceive themselves and their relationship to the world. Economic and political control can never to be complete or effective without mental control (…). For colonialism this involved two aspects of the same process: the destruction or the deliberate undervaluing of a people’s culture, their art, dances, religions, history, geography, education, orature and literature, and the conscious elevation of the language of the colonizer. The domination of a people’s language by the languages of the colonizing nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonized [4].
As a social critic, Ngugi analyses language in relation to culture. Ngugi’s approach of language is shared by Professor Obi WALI, a minority rights activist. As a Nigerian politician and a distinguished scholar, WALI was one of the defenders of African personality, but he was murdered in 1993. He usually defended the importance of native African languages that shape African personality and participated to the advancement and the authenticity of African writing. This critical concept of language by Obi WALI (1932-1993) began with his controversial essay The Dead End of African Literature (1963) in which he sees the useless vehicle of foreign languages as a means of advancing African culture when he affirmed5
The whole uncritical acceptance of English and French which are the inevitable medium for educated African writing is misdirected, and have no chance of advancing African literature and culture [5].
In his view, Obi Wali is followed by Professor Abiola IRELE, a visiting professor of African American studies at Harvard University in the USA. He was also a former graduate of the University of France, Sorbonne where he completed his PhD in French in 1966. Professor IRELE thinks that the African languages contain the classical era of African literature written in European languages is not a genuine and authentic African literature. In this respect, Mohamed Ismael of GARCE, the Somali poet of oral literature shares Ngugi’s view and accuses the African writers of committing treason against their own languages. This personal and cultural approach of language has raised many contentions among African literary critics.
Ngugi who sides with Obi WALI argues that African literature should be written in African languages that hold the dignity of masses and seem an easy means to fight against decades of neo-colonial rule. However, for many African intellectuals, Ngugi’s ideas seem controversial and illogical as Africa possesses a plenty of languages which make difficult literary understanding among multi-ethnic groups speaking thousands of dialects. National language writing will not favor a large audience; it can prevent foreigners especially those who develop stereotypes about Africa to continue their stereotypes. They will ignore fully the African traditional culture and religious customs through African writing. As a cultural and political weapon, Ngugi’s concept of national language writing promotes cultural decolonization in order to fight against years of cultural, political, economic and religious colonization. The victimization of the black race becomes a central issue in Ngugi’s works. The promotion of national languages seems an impediment to imperialist domination as Ngugi’s use of national languages is a way of fighting imperialism.
I believe that my writing in Gikuyu language, a Kenyan language, an African language, is part and parcel of the anti-imperialist struggles of Kenyan and African peoples [6].
Contrary to Ngugi’s view, Chinua ACHEBE believes that the European languages could carry the weight of his African experience. He considers the English language to be a way of communication he has chosen to express himself and convey a message destined to respond to centuries of denigration and prejudiced racism. In his essay Morning Yet on Creation Day, ACHEBE wants to get a broader audience through the portrayal of his people and their culture.
But for me there is no other choice. I have been given the language and I intend to use it [7].
Through the English language, Achebe is willing to convey the traditional aspects of Igbo culture and how the Igbo people were culturally, politically and religiously organized before the arrival of the white man. The use of the English language can be perceived by Achebe [7] as a cultural weapon and a response to Joseph CONRAD’s Heart of Darkness. In this sense, Achebe has contributed a lot to the recognition of African personality through the promotion of Nigerian cultural tradition.
However, Ngugi uses language as a medium of communication when he starts writing in English but he later strives to use his native tongue Gikuyu to address his masses as well as to put an end to cultural alienation which is perpetuated according to him by the imposition of foreign languages that favors the erosion of African culture. Ngugi calls for the African writers to join in the struggle for the promotion of local languages in order to make their voice heard beyond the confines of linguistic refinement in his essay Decolonizing the Mind.
African writers are bound by their calling to do for their languages what Spencer, Milton and Shakespeare did for English; what Pushkin and Tolstoy did for Russian; indeed what all writers in world history have done for their languages by meeting the challenges of creating a literature of them [8].
English scholars did their best to encourage the recognition of their languages to the detriment of local languages. They managed to do so through western education when only official languages such as English and French are transmitted by colonial masters to reach a high level of education starting from the primary and secondary levels.
The system of education in Kenya during the period of colonization had a structure of a pyramid: a broad primary base, a narrowing secondary middle and even narrower university apex. The imperial powers kept on focusing on English; nobody could be accepted at universities without passing the English exam. English was the official vehicle and the magic formula to colonial elitedom [9].
According to Ngugi, using the language of the colonizer requires the abandonment of our languages and its complete burial as well as the adoption of an alien world. This was the main objective behind imperialism and colonialism which primary motive was to turn people from their histories, languages and culture. Ngugi’s The Black Hermit, shows the influence of western languages through Christian education which contributes to the uprooting of the black folk. It is a story of a young man Remi, a university scholar who has acquired the colonizer’s language, religion and culture. But his exodus from rural area to the city living without his family, accentuated his loss as a black hermit. In this respect, Ngugi like the Nigerian author Cyprian EKWENSI uses the concept of migration to portray the inner transformation of the individual self. This migratory movement marks the erosion of traditional culture and acquisition of a new and alien one. It is significant to argue that colonial encounter in Africa creates many clashes within African societies.
Traditional culture rooted in rural area is contrasted with urban life and the deterioration of cultural ways. Feeling uncomfortable to stay in town, Remi goes back to his village but is still torn by the alienation of both cultures. In many novels by post-colonial writers, the contact of cultures which is especially caused by the clash between local and foreign culture, a situation which has far reaching consequences on the personality of the colonized.
This work also illustrates the ways in which identity and blackness are constructed. In this effect, FANON applies a psychoanalytic approach to explain the sense of dependency complex which paves the way for psychopathology. FANON argues that some literary productions such as films and books can cause the black child’s feeling of inferiority. Because in these literary productions, he argues, the hero who is a white folk is often identified with purity, civilization and courage. As a result of his blackness, the black child begins to develop a feeling of inferiority.
The neurotic structure of an individual is simply the elaboration, formation, the eruption within the ego of conflictual clashes arising in part out the environment and in part out of the purely personal way in which that individual reacts to these influences [10].
The sense of inferiority of black people develops individual neurotic symptoms as obsessive behavior; inferiority complexes are the result of a racist society. FANON develops the concept of racism which is prevalent in European societies. In this sense, some European societies are more racist than others which develop a different kind of racism.
The feeling of inferiority of the colonized is correlative to the European feeling of superiority. Let us have the courage to say it outright. It is the racist who creates his inferior [11].
Language Issue in Postcolonial Literature: The Revival of African Cultural Identity
The revalorization of national languages is a return to African past as it shows how African tradition is a hallmark of African culture and civilization. Gorgui DIENG’s A Leap out of the Dark is a perfect illustration of the revival of African culture. As a consequence, the characters in this novel are deeply rooted in African values but are open to the modern ways of life. The author believes that modern culture can impact positively on the mind of Moodu who is schooled but still respects his traditional ways. Wole SOYINKA, another Nigerian intellectual tries to follow the same path by revalorizing Nigerian past through the depiction of Yoruba traditional values and the religious beliefs of his community. SOYINKA’s play Death and the King’s Horseman reviews Yoruba social organization and how his people stick to the religious conventions of their society.
Achebe and Ahmadou Kourouma by means of English and French strive to claim their African roots by using Igbo and Soninke dialects to revalorize their local languages for African dignity. This indigenization of foreign languages is characteristic of cultural revival and quest for identity. KOUROUMA’s The Suns of Independence by means of an African dialect is the vehicle of African cultural realities.
Ngugi’s play I Will Marry When I Want was translated into Gikuyu as Ngaahika Ndeenda. Staged, the play addresses the misery of Kenyan peasants and workers who are victim of alienation and oppression under British colonial rule. Contrary to Ngugi who vilifies the use of English as a language of colonization, SAID shows the universal use of language as occupying the sphere of social, cultural and political interactions when he adds.
No one can deny the continuing of long tradition, sustained habitations, national languages and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human [12].
In addition, SAID considers English as lingua franca for metropolitan Britain. For SAID, the universal function of English language is recognized by Robert Phillinson as a means to serve neo-colonial power and maintain cultural influences in French-speaking countries. The use of English language is meant to maintain cultural domination of the colonized as well as its cultural enslavement which makes the conquered to ignore their past and the traditional conventions that lead to the specificity of African tradition. British council was established to promote British interests in response to the success of the fascist governments of Italy and Germany as using language teaching and higher education scholarship.
Ngugi has emerged as a leading advocate of African cultural identity by advocating the recognition of indigenous languages. Ngugi’s use of Gikuyu is an authentic expression of African unity and revalorization of cultural identity. Ngugi’s essay Decolonizing the Mind marks his farewell to English. He took a firm decision to write in Gikuyu after the performance of his play I Will Marry When I Want for which he was sent to jail on December 31, 1977 in Kenya. Ngugi remained in exile for the duration of Daniel Arap Moi’s leadership who was a Kenyan statesman and the longest serving president of Kenya from 1978 to 2002.
Ngugi remains an admired spokesman for indigenous culture and social justice. Writing in Gikuyu is a way of returning to African traditional sources in order to maintain the unity and African symbolism. For him, the use of foreign language will perpetuate the very alienation and exploitation his people have been fighting against for decades. In this respect, Ngugi appeals to the African writers to be aware of their roles as teachers. Because their task is to lead African people towards the path of guidance. The Kenyan scholar calls on the African intellectuals to join in the fight against long years of colonial pitfalls and fight for the authentic language of struggle for African survival.
Literature does not grow or develop in a vacuum; it is given impetus, shape, direction and even area of concern by social, political and economic forces in a particular society [13].
Rodney, a Marxist revolutionary, has also joined Ngugi’s ideology showing the social relationship between language and culture and how colonial education participated to mass exploitation, social oppression and the cultural subordination of the colonized. During the colonial period, the white man was clever as he found ways and means to create a rift among members of the same community. At that time, Christians had access to better education which made local people more dependent on Western lifestyles and manners. This situation generated hatred and suspicion among the educated and the uneducated who felt more exploited and humiliated by the colonial system of divide and rule as Rodney argues.
Education is crucial in any type of society for the preservation of the lives of its members and the maintenance of the social structure (…) The most crucial aspect of pre-colonial African education was its relevance to Africans in sharp contrast with that which was later introduced (…) The main purpose of colonial school system was to train Africans to participate in the domination and the exploitation of the continent as a whole (…) Colonial education was education for subordination, exploitation, the creation of mental confusion and the development of underdevelopment [14].
In an aim to return to the African past and fight against cultural enslavement, Ngugi strives to put an end to centuries of social, political and cultural enslavement. In this effect, Ngugi advocates a return to the cultural tradition of local languages. He needs the help and the understanding of most African intellectuals who are concerned about the vitality and the survival of their languages. They will join the struggle for true revalorization of African culture and its continuity in which all local languages form a genuine African literature that deserves its name and survival. This will permit the future generation of African writers and the colonized world to move to the center where our local languages could define its dynamism as Ngugi considers language as power which is the main source of spiritual alienation:
In my view, language was the most important vehicle through which that power fascinated and held the soul prisoner...The bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation (…) [15].
From another angle, Ngugi often made a connection between foreign languages and Christianity. He listed the two aspects of language use; the first aspect of language is an agent of communication and the second a carrier of history and culture in which both of them form a dialectical unity. In Ngugi’s mind, the European languages as English, French and Portuguese come to accentuate colonial and neo-colonial domination as they announce the arrival of the bible and the sword.
English as an alien and foreign language is destined to destroy the languages of the captives or colonized Africans which progressively affect their culture and traditional conventions of their society. Therefore, the suppression of the languages of the captive leads to the promotion of the language of the conquered or elected. So the educated Africans were doomed to suffer from linguistic alienation as they were discouraged from speaking their native languages. The American Palestinian theoretician Edward SAID also experienced the same linguistic domination. Before going to the USA, SAID attended the most prestigious school in Cairo, Victoria College where he had to study English.
In Ngugi’s ideology, the African intellectuals who are concerned with the destiny of their culture, have to move to the center occupied by foreign languages as English and French, the official languages of instruction, administration, commerce, trade, justice, and foreign communication. However, the return to African language can be a true conveyor of harmony and peace and a symbol of social and cultural justice. As an expression of common being and personality, the promotion of local languages is a vehicle for common unity and can gender solidarity among people who use the same language as Ngugi remarked.
In the same way, our different languages can, should and must express our common being. So we should let all our languages ring the unity of the people of the earth, of our common humanity, and above all of the people’s love for peace, equality, independence, and social justice [16].
Ngugi’s conception of language as cultural identity is directly connected to the political, economic and religious factors which form wholeness and are entirely related one another. For Ngugi, the whole system of education and Western institutions has often undermined the colonized. In this sense, Ngugi as a social critic has joined Walter RODNEY in his negative criticism of imperialism as a means of exploitation, humiliation and subjugation. The cultural factor can influence other factors.
The entire economic and political control is effectively facilitated by the cultural factor. In any case, economic and political control inevitably leads to cultural dominance and this in turn deepens that control. The maintenance, the management, manipulation and mobilization of the entire system of education, and language use, literature, religion, the media have always ensured for the oppressor nation power over the transmission of certain ideology, set of values, outlook, attitudes, feelings, and hence power over the whole era of consciousness [17].
As a social thinker and theoretician, Ngugi defends the Marxist ideology of class struggle and the social gap between the lower and upper class. In this respect, he often sides with the poor class who are the most oppressed, the most exploited and the most humiliated. This group represents the conquered class whose aspirations have faded in the eyes of the colonizer. In order to be the eyes and the ears of his community, Ngugi decides to resort to Kenyan national languages for the sake of cultural identity which raises the voice of the marginalized majority who are illiterate without any support. In his effort to defend the downtrodden, Ngugi through the promotion of African languages stands as the voice and upholder of African dignity.
My opting for English has already marked me as a writer in exile (…) The African writer is already set aside from people by his education and language(….) The nineties will see more writers trying to breakout the linguistic prison to seek their genuine roots in the languages and rhythms of life of the dispossessed majority [18].
Imperialism had completely changed the destiny of African people and led to their victimization during colonial rule. Women were most victimized; they were unable to play a significant role and participate to the decision-making of their communities. However, in post-independence period, women were given an important voice and social status which paved the way for their emancipation and empowerment. Language has always been a central issue in African literature. Africa has a multiplicity of languages and Nigeria alone has approximately 248 languages. During colonization, foreign languages were used as a cultural weapon to dominate the colonizer’s culture and tradition. Language of colonial school, and administration, French and English allowed the colonized to achieve a good position. Colonial languages served as a lingua franca in the mix of a multiplicity of local languages.
English, the language of the colonizer attained a great magnitude at the time of British imperialism. Colonizers imposed their languages onto people they colonized. They even forbade natives to speak their mother tongue. Colonized subjects were beaten for speaking native languages in colonial schools. Salman RUSHDIE is a British Indian novelist and essayist who is concerned with the history of India and Pakistan. He believes in the possibility of new English that can be a therapeutic act of resistance. In his essay, Imaginary Homelands, RUSHDIE argues:
One of the changes in the location of Anglophone writers of Indian descent has to do with attitudes towards the use of English. Many have referred to the argument about the appropriation of this language to Indian themes. And I hope all of us share the opinion that we can’t simply use the language the way the British did, that it needs remarking for own purposes. Those of us who do use English do so in spite of our ambiguity towards it, or perhaps because of that, perhaps because we can find in that linguistic struggle, a reflection of other struggles taking place in the real world, struggles between the cultures within ourselves and the influences at work upon our societies. To conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free [19].
The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin is a 1989 non-fiction book on post-colonialism. The title of the book refers to Salman RUSHDIE’s 1982 article The Empire Write Back with A Vengeance [20]which investigates the powerful forces acting on language in post-colonial period and shows how these texts constitute a radical critique of Euro-centric notions of literature and language.
Frantz FANON (1925-1961) was a psychoanalyst who was interested in analyzing the consequences of colonial oppression on the colonized. This Martinican-born scholar was mainly concerned with describing the imposition of colonial language. He theorizes about the relationship between language and power. FANON argues that when the colonized subject acquires another language, he adopts at the same time an alien culture which leads to the decimation his own culture. Black Skin, White Masks is a 1952 book by FANON who shares his own experience and analyses the effects of racism on the colonized.
Colonialism had drastic consequences on the political, economic, cultural and religious frameworks on the lives of the colonized nations of the world. As the main cause of the downfall of African national languages in the favor of European foreign culture, colonialism destroyed the colonizer’s culture, customs and values. For this reason, African intellectual writers like Ngugi wa Thiong’o uses his pen as a weapon to revalorize the acquision of national languages and encourage the African writers’ ability to write and publish in their national languages in a way to stop linguistic and cultural imperialism. This conception has brought out much more controversy in public debate as far as the diversity of African national languages is concerned. But Ngugi’s contribution to the revival of local languages paves the way for African national identity, culture and civilization. In fact, there is a real need for African writers to write both in national and foreign languages in order to beautify both African tradition and western civilization.
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