6 ideas
Every language plays two roles at once: it is a tool of communication and a carrier of culture. As communication it has three layers: the language of real life (people's relations in labor and production), speech, and writing. As culture it holds a community's memory, values, and images of the world. For a native speaker the two roles line up, so the words that organize daily life are also the words that hold history and identity.
When a child is educated in a foreign language, the language of the classroom splits from the language of home and field. The child learns to see the world, including their own community, through images made elsewhere. This produces a colonial alienation in which one's own experience comes to seem distant, backward, or unreal.
In Ngũgĩ's colonial Kenyan school, a pupil caught speaking Gikuyu was caned or forced to wear a metal plate reading 'I AM STUPID' or 'I AM A DONKEY.' Children were rewarded for informing on classmates who used their mother tongue. English was made the gateway to success and exams, so skill in it became the measure of intelligence itself.
Military and economic conquest is secured by a 'cultural bomb' that destroys a people's belief in their names, languages, environment, heritage of struggle, unity, and capacities. People made to see their past as a wasteland of non-achievement will want to distance themselves from it and identify with the conqueror's culture. Read this way, language policy is a tool of domination, not just an administrative decision.
Ngũgĩ argues that African writers producing literature in English, French, or Portuguese are enriching European languages and building an 'Afro-European literature.' This literature speaks to an educated elite and foreign readers rather than to the peasants and workers whose lives it depicts. A national literature must be written in the languages of the people it claims to represent.
In 1977 Ngũgĩ co-wrote the Gikuyu play Ngaahika Ndeenda with villagers at the Kamiriithu community center, and peasants shaped the script and performed it. The Kenyan government shut the production down and detained Ngũgĩ without trial for a year. In prison he wrote a novel in Gikuyu on toilet paper, and he later said farewell to English as a vehicle for his writing.