Rasta TimesCHAT ROOMArticles/ArchiveRaceAndHistory RootsWomen Trinicenter
Africa Speaks.com Africa Speaks HomepageAfrica Speaks.comAfrica Speaks.comAfrica Speaks.com
InteractiveLeslie VibesAyanna RootsRas TyehimbaTriniView.comGeneral Forums
*
Home
Help
Login
Register
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
March 28, 2024, 06:07:18 AM

Login with username, password and session length
Search:     Advanced search
25910 Posts in 9966 Topics by 982 Members Latest Member: - Ferguson Most online today: 64 (July 03, 2005, 06:25:30 PM)
+  Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum
|-+  ENTERTAINMENT/ ARTS/ LITERATURE
| |-+  Quotes (Moderators: Tyehimba, leslie)
| | |-+  Challenging Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism: Quotes by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
« previous next »
Pages: [1] Print
Author Topic: Challenging Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism: Quotes by Ngugi wa Thiong'o  (Read 38243 times)
Tyehimba
Moderator
*****
Posts: 1788

RastafariSpeaks


WWW
« on: July 14, 2008, 01:56:45 PM »

At the launching of Petals of Blood in July 1977, Ngugi
bluntly explains his motive for writing the book:

... I came to realize that Kenya was poor,
not because of anything internal, but
because the wealth produced by Kenyans
ended in developing the western world... .
Their aid, loans, and investment capital
that they gloat about are simply a chemical
catalyst that sets in motion the whole
process of expropriation of Kenya's wealth,
with, of course, a few leftovers for the
'lucky' few....
This was what I was trying to show in
Petals of Blood: that imperialism can never
develop our country or develop us, Kenyans.
In doing so, I was only trying to be
faithful to what Kenyan workers, peasants
and workers have always realized as shown
by their historical struggles since
1895.

In an interview with Anita Shreve in July 1977, Ngugi attacked the
capitalist system in Kenya which he saw as:
... the root cause of evil. Our economy is
dependent on international capitalism. And
capitalism can never bring about equality
of people. The exploitation of one group
by another is the very essence of
capitalism. The peasants and workers are
very much exploited in this country. They
get very low pay, very poor housing, and
unemployment effects them more than anyone
else. Now, women form the majority in this
category of peasants. Women are doubly
exploited and oppressed.

As an exile and activist Ngugi recently made it clear that
he had :
... no choice but that of aligning himself
with the people - their economic,
political, cultural struggle for
survival ... to rediscover the real language
of struggle in the actions and speeches of
the people; learn from their great heritage
in orature; and above all, learn from their
great optimism and faith in the capacity of
human beings to remake their world and
renew themselves.

Pulled from: http://ir.lib.sfu.ca/bitstream/1892/6636/1/b14966918.pdf

Ngugi:
First it has been the external factor of foreign invasion, occupation, and control, and
second, the internal factor of collaboration with the external threat. Whether under
Western slavery and the slave trade, under colonialism and today under neo-colonialism,
the two factors have interacted to the detriment of our being. The greedy Chief and other
elements bred by the new colonial overlords, collaborated with the main external
imperialist factor. The storm repeats itself, in a more painful way under neo-
colonialism.

Ngugi (2003):

    I wrote Weep Not, Child; A River Between; and A Grain of Wheat and published the three novels under the name James Ngugi.  James is the name which I acquired when I was baptized into Christianity in primary school, but later I came to reject the name because I Saw it as part of the colonial naming system when Africans were taken as slaves to America and were given the names of the plantation owners.  Say, when a slave was bought by Smith, that slave was renamed Smith.  This meant that they were the property of Smith or Brown and the same thing was later transferred to the colony.  It meant that if an African was baptized, as evidence of his new self or the new identity he was given an English name.  Not just a biblical, but a biblical and English name.  It was a symbolical replacing of one identity with another.  So the person who was once Ngugi is now James Ngugi, the one who was once owned by his people is now owned by the English, the one who was owned by an African naming system is now owned by an English naming system.  So when I realized that, I began to reject the name James and to reconnect myself to my African name which was given at birth, and that's Ngugi wa Thiong'o, meaning Ngugi, son of Thiong'o.

http://lbc.typepad.com/blog/2007/02/ngugi_wa_thiong.html
Logged
Tyehimba
Moderator
*****
Posts: 1788

RastafariSpeaks


WWW
« Reply #1 on: July 14, 2008, 02:10:10 PM »

Ngugi wa Thiong'o: still decolonising the mind

Last month, Kenya's most celebrated literary icon, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, gave a series of lectures entitled Re-Membering Africa at the University of Nairobi. This was a historic moment, marking Ngugi's first lecture in his homeland in nearly three decades, delivered at the very institution that stripped him of his professorship after he was detained without trial by the Jomo Kenyatta regime in 1977. It was this experience that eventually forced him to take the long road to self-imposed exile, first in Britain, then in the United States in 1982.

It has been nearly a quarter of a century since Ngugi left Kenya. In that time, various myths and misconceptions have grown up around him. Critics argue that his emphasis on promoting his native Gikuyu language is yet another manifestation of the tendency of Kenya's largest tribe, the Kikuyu, to impose their hegemony on the country. Others feel that his arguments are from the old school of literary discourse, not in tune with the reality of a globalising, increasingly English-speaking world. Why, many Kenyans wonder, is our prodigal son advocating the use of an African language that people in the country of its origin are themselves discarding in favour of either the lingua franca -- Kiswahili -- or English?

Well, because, according to Ngugi, language is more than just a means of communication; it is the essence of our being, the very core of our soul as an African people, "the medium of our memories, the link between space and time, the basis of our dreams".

Ngugi's insistence on using his mother tongue as the principal medium of his writing is not simply a reaction against Anglicisation; it is more about resurrecting the African soul from centuries of slavery and colonialism that left it spiritually empty, economically disenfranchised and politically marginalised. Ngugi believes that when you erase a people's language, you erase their memory. And people without memories are rudderless, unconnected to their own histories and culture, mimics who have placed their memories in a "psychic tomb" in the mistaken belief that if they master their coloniser's language, they will own it.

Since he began writing in the 1960s, Ngugi has always resisted colonial labels and Christian doctrine. In 1976, he changed his name from James Ngugi to Ngugi wa Thiong'o. He stopped writing in English in 1981 after the publication of the highly acclaimed social critique, Decolonising the Mind, which he described as "my farewell to English as a vehicle for any of my writings". Six years later, his novel, Matigari, written in Gikuyu, was published. His latest offering, Wizard of the Crow, or Murogi wa Kagogo, which he launched last month in Kenya, has been variously described as "a masterpiece", "the crowning glory of his life" and "an epic farce" that pokes fun at the excesses and idiocies of dictatorships in Africa.

Ngugi is convinced that by adopting foreign languages lock, stock and barrel, Africans are committing a "linguicide", which, in effect, has killed off their memories as a people, as a culture and as a society. Because erasure of memory is a condition for successful assimilation, the burial of African languages by Africans themselves ensured that the assimilation process into colonial culture was complete. Ngugi calls this phenomenon a "death wish" that occurs in societies which have never fully acknowledged their loss -- like a trauma victim who resorts to drugs to kill the pain.

Because post-colonial Africa has never properly buried slavery or colonialism, it is committing psychic suicide by producing an entire class of African bourgeoisie who view their own languages as "shameful", "inelegant", "incapable of expressing scientific or intellectual thought", and too crude to be exported to other lands. So they end up writing their stories in foreign languages, adding to the vast pool of literature written in English and French, rather than contributing to the growth of literature in African languages.

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.

As Ngugi departs for the University of California, where he is a distinguished professor of English and comparative literature, he leaves behind a bittersweet taste in the mouths of Kenyans like me, who feel that perhaps it is time for our native son to return home for good to help us understand what we did not understand when he left: that the battle for the survival of our languages, our culture and our memories is, in the final analysis, a battle for the survival of our souls.

http://www.mg.co.za/article/2007-02-07-ngugi-wa-thiongo-still-decolonising-the-mind
Logged
Pages: [1] Print 
« previous next »
Jump to:  

Powered by MySQL Powered by PHP Powered by SMF 1.1.21 | SMF © 2015, Simple Machines
Copyright © 2001-2005 AfricaSpeaks.com and RastafariSpeaks.com
Valid XHTML 1.0! Valid CSS!