Harare Review of Books

224 pp. Published May 6, 2025 by The New Press. Non-fiction.

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The great Ngũgĩ’s lifelong preoccupation was decolonisation. In 1968, he, Owuor Anyumba, and Taban Lo Liyong pushed for the renaming of the English Department at Nairobi University, which Ngũgĩ had joined in 1967, to decentre English as the focus and frame of literary studies there. This is also the focus of this final book, published in the same month Ngũgĩ passed away by The New Press.

The case Ngũgĩ makes for why it’s so critical that language be decolonised is compelling: “Language conquest, unlike the military form, wherein the victor must subdue the whole population directly, is cheaper and more effective: the conqueror has only to invest in capturing the minds of the elite, who will then spread submission to the rest of the population… Imperial educational policies were meant to create colonies of the mind, among the elite of the colonized,” and “even after independence, the intellectuals express themselves more fluently in the language of imperial conquest than in the languages from their own country… in every postcolonial situation.”

This book is divided into two sections, corresponding to a two-pronged message: decolonisation and pan-Africanism. In the first section, Ngũgĩ describes the damage caused to the African psyche by “the unequal power relationships between languages,” and he outlines a five-part framework for reversing this damage: decolonising education; decolonising the body of knowledge Africa draws from (echoing a modern decolonial refrain: “There are many ways of knowing.”); enslavement vs. empowerment, or what the modern African intellectual must be to resist neocolonialism; an acknowledgment of our own (African) languages as repositories of knowledge and cultural power; and, finally, understanding the role of the university today.

In the second section—titled “Voices of Prophecy”—Ngũgĩ celebrates political activists, writers, and a publisher: all have shared in shaping the continent’s political, social and cultural trajectory. It’s pan-Africanism: building bridges across the Continent, struggling together for political reform and social good, fighting for liberation, and helping society imagine futures. In the book’s final chapter, “The African Writer as a Prophet and Social Critic in Contemporary Times,” Ngũgĩ describes how Es’kia Mphahlele, the South African writer, founded, while in exile, the Chemchemi (meaning spring or fountain) Creative Centre in Nairobi to foster the development of young writers. (He had also been part of the legendary Mbari Writers and Artists Club in Ibadan, Nigeria.) Mphahlele spoke at a high school in western Kenya where, incredibly, a young Henry Chakava—the future publisher who changed African literature—listened attentively from a corner of the room.

Carol Hanish said the personal is political; Ngũgĩ’s life demonstrated that the writer’s work is necessarily political. In some ways, this book is, too, Ngũgĩ’s memoir of his life in exile. Speaking truth about the postcolonial situation in Kenya (similar to that in many other African countries) led to his effective banishment from his home country; the Kenyan government could not, however, prevent him from taking part in the public discourse through his writing.

Why aren’t there more journals and scientific papers in African languages? Some work has been done recently to translate parts of the Western canon into African languages (for example, Nyerere translated Shakespeare into Kiswahili, and Animal Farm has been translated into ChiShona)—but why, Ngũgĩ asks, do we not have literature in translation from one African language to another? He insists in the book that there are treasures buried in our own languages—indigenous knowledge of politics, economics and culture, the source of ways for us to “imagine and reimagine” ourselves in history. Ngũgĩ wanted us, therefore, to ensure our own languages stayed alive, participating in and contributing to our common humanity, and for intellectual production to also happen in African languages on the world stage. No language, he says in the book—referring to what he calls Europhone languages—should “grow on the graveyard of other languages.”

Coming as it did at the end of his life, this book feels like Ngũgĩ’s last cry, a last plea to us: “You would think that after liberation and independence, the new nations, at the very least, would dismantle that unequal power relationship. But that is precisely the power of the colonies of the mind: negativity toward self has become internalized as a way of looking at reality.”

For Ngũgĩ, decolonisation was a pan-African process of recovery. He lives on in these ideas, in the gift he has left us of his own intellectual production. We are always building on the work of those who came before us; now we must receive the baton from him.

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