On Ngugi wa Thiong'o : Erik Esbjörnsson: His choice of language formed a school for a generation of African writers
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Cornelius Hamelberg
May 30, 2025, 7:03:14 AMMay 30
to USA Africa Dialogue Series
https://www.dn.se/kultur/erik-esbjornsson-hans-sprakval-bildade-skola-for-en-generation-av-afrikanska-forfattare/
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Ngugi wa Thiong'o abandoned English early on to write his works in his native Kikuyu. His critique of the role of language in colonial oppression would form a school for a generation of African writers. But today his doctrine is being abandoned by his followers.
This is a commentary text. The writer is responsible for the analysis and positions in the text.TextErik EsbjornssonSaveShare
Trump's lies and relativizations are part of a pattern and a clear example of how language is used "to prolong the effect of past injustices," said the Ghanaian president, who in the next paragraph quoted Ngugi's reasoning about control over language as a "cheaper and more effective" form of colonialism.
Ngugi often returned to this topic and wrote in 1981, in the essay collection “The Decolonization of Consciousness”, that “the night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard. The physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom”.That was why ten years earlier he had first changed his English-sounding first name, James, and later completely switched to writing everything in his native language, Kikuyu .
The Senegalese author Boubacar Boris Diop made the same linguistic journey in the 1990s, abandoning French in favor of Wolof , and told DN almost ten years ago that "in the future, books published in French and English will be seen as a parenthesis in African literary history."
It is too early to be a hindsight, but there is much evidence that Ngugi and Diop will be the ones to be left behind. Partly, it is a matter of purely economic and practical conditions that limit publication in smaller languages. Partly, the distance to the colonial trauma has grown.
And in the time that has passed since decolonization in the 1960s, English has also evolved. Sometimes to the point that it is no longer recognizable, as in the hybrid languages Sheng in Kenya and Pidgin in West Africa.
“I wish I could write in Yoruba but I can't,” said British author Taiye Selasi, who is of Ghanaian-Nigerian descent, when she once participated in a literary festival in Nairobi.
She continued:– At the same time, English is no longer theirs , it is just as much our language. It is about massaging English and shaping it into your own. When I use English, I do it in a way that no British person would use the language.Nuruddin Farah, from Somalia, was directly critical of Ngugi's line on the same occasion:– When he writes in Kikuyu, only a small group of people can understand what he writes. And when you write in your own language, you tend to become very introverted and backward-looking instead of forward-looking, he told DN.
Last fall, Abdulrazak Gurnah, who, contrary to repeated odds, received the Nobel Prize that Ngugi was never awarded, sighed when DN brought up the subject during his visit to Johannesburg. The discussion has been going on since the first writers' conference at Makerere University in Uganda in 1962 , he noted.– And they are still talking about things that were discussed in 1962. My response to this is that no one is obliged to write. Whoever decides to write, let them write in whatever language they want. Period. I am quite happy using English, Swahili and German – no matter what, I use the languages that are available to me.
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Erik Esbjörnsson: His choice of language formed a school for a generation of African writersPublished 07:00Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o during a visit to Sweden. Photo: Carl Bredberg
Ngugi wa Thiong'o abandoned English early on to write his works in his native Kikuyu. His critique of the role of language in colonial oppression would form a school for a generation of African writers. But today his doctrine is being abandoned by his followers.
This is a commentary text. The writer is responsible for the analysis and positions in the text.TextErik EsbjornssonSaveShare
On Wednesday, the same day that Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o passed away at the age of 87, Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama wrote a powerful op-ed in The Guardian in which he defended his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa after the battle with Donald Trump in the White House.
Trump's lies and relativizations are part of a pattern and a clear example of how language is used "to prolong the effect of past injustices," said the Ghanaian president, who in the next paragraph quoted Ngugi's reasoning about control over language as a "cheaper and more effective" form of colonialism.
Ngugi often returned to this topic and wrote in 1981, in the essay collection “The Decolonization of Consciousness”, that “the night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard. The physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom”.That was why ten years earlier he had first changed his English-sounding first name, James, and later completely switched to writing everything in his native language, Kikuyu .
The Senegalese author Boubacar Boris Diop made the same linguistic journey in the 1990s, abandoning French in favor of Wolof , and told DN almost ten years ago that "in the future, books published in French and English will be seen as a parenthesis in African literary history."
It is too early to be a hindsight, but there is much evidence that Ngugi and Diop will be the ones to be left behind. Partly, it is a matter of purely economic and practical conditions that limit publication in smaller languages. Partly, the distance to the colonial trauma has grown.
And in the time that has passed since decolonization in the 1960s, English has also evolved. Sometimes to the point that it is no longer recognizable, as in the hybrid languages Sheng in Kenya and Pidgin in West Africa.
“I wish I could write in Yoruba but I can't,” said British author Taiye Selasi, who is of Ghanaian-Nigerian descent, when she once participated in a literary festival in Nairobi.
She continued:– At the same time, English is no longer theirs , it is just as much our language. It is about massaging English and shaping it into your own. When I use English, I do it in a way that no British person would use the language.Nuruddin Farah, from Somalia, was directly critical of Ngugi's line on the same occasion:– When he writes in Kikuyu, only a small group of people can understand what he writes. And when you write in your own language, you tend to become very introverted and backward-looking instead of forward-looking, he told DN.
Last fall, Abdulrazak Gurnah, who, contrary to repeated odds, received the Nobel Prize that Ngugi was never awarded, sighed when DN brought up the subject during his visit to Johannesburg. The discussion has been going on since the first writers' conference at Makerere University in Uganda in 1962 , he noted.– And they are still talking about things that were discussed in 1962. My response to this is that no one is obliged to write. Whoever decides to write, let them write in whatever language they want. Period. I am quite happy using English, Swahili and German – no matter what, I use the languages that are available to me.
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