American publishing company, The New Press, has released a new book by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o called “Decolonizing Language.”
“Decolonizing Language” includes essays and poems written between 2000 and 2019, with subjects ranging from language and education to such friends and heroes as Nelson Mandela, Nadine Gordimer and Chinua Achebe according to the publishing company.
Speaking to the Associated Press in an interview, the 87-year-old writer says that writers must “be the voice of the voiceless. They have to give voice to silence, especially the silence imposed on a people by an oppressive state.”’
In the same interview, he also spoke about Kenya and his concerns about language.
“I miss Kenya, because they gave me everything,” he says. “All of my writings are based in Kenya. … I owe my writing to Kenya. It’s very hard for me not to be able to return to my homeland.”
As one of the world’s most revered writers and a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o remains adamant that Africans reclaim their language and culture.
“In Kenya, even today, we have children and their parents who cannot speak their mother tongues, or the parents know their mother tongues and don’t want their children to know their mother tongue,” he said in his interview with AP Entertainment. “They are very happy when they speak English and even happier when their children don’t know their mother tongue. That’s why I call it mental colonisation.”
The topic remains at the centre of his new book; “this collection examines the enduring power of African languages in resisting both the psychic and material impacts of colonialism, past and present. These themes are elucidated through chapters on some contemporaries of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, including Chinua Achebe, Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo, and Wole Soyinka,” the synopsis reads.
The book is available to purchase on Amazon both as a Hardcover and E-Book for KSh. 3,359.21.
