Notes for session 2

This Earth of Mankind, Pramoedya.

AY 22 S2

1. “Decolonising the mind”

Decolonising the Mind is Ngugi Thiongo’s contribution to the debate on the choice of language
in a post-colonial country. In this book he argues that Africa will be able to break free from the
clutches of (neo-)colonial control over its resources and culture only when the use of European
languages is replaced by native languages. In the section ‘The Language of African Literature’, Ngugi
discusses the way language is a carrier of culture and how the use of a foreign language alienates
an individual from his/her own culture. Ngugi explores how alienation from one’s native culture
is accompanied with a hatred for it, and a reverence for the coloniser’s culture. Decolonising the Mind is an
attempt to free the natives’ minds from the coloniser’s control by rejecting his language and
adopting one’s native language.

Ngugi is not promoting the use of African languages to the exclusion of others. On the
contrary, he believes multilingual societies are better placed to deal with the complexities of
this world. What he is against is the exclusive use of foreign languages on the continent, which
has, in effect, made many previously multilingual societies in Africa proficient in only one
language—and a foreign one (English or French) at that. He derides Kenyan parents for
discouraging their children from speaking in their mother tongues, which, he says, has resulted in
a linguistic famine in African societies. [Source: Various]

NGŨGĨ WA THIONGʼO. (1986). Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African
Literature. London, J. Currey.

2) Imagined Community

Benedict Anderson (1936–2015), in his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the

Origin and Spread of Nationalism (2nd edn., 1991, originally 1983) referred to the nation as an
imagined political community. It is imagined because: (a) the members never know or meet most
of their fellow-members, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion; (b) it
is limited because even the largest of them has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie
other nations; (c) it is sovereign because its members have the right to govern themselves; (d) it
is a community because the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship,
despite abiding social inequality between members. Anderson emphasized that the nation is
‘imagined’ not ‘imaginary’, that it does not imply fabrication and falsity but a process of cultural
or ideological construction and creativity. (Dict. Of Sociology)