102 AFRICAN STUDIES REVIEW

enue and expenditure, 1899-1933. The end notes are extensive, demonstrating careful and
thorough research and documentation. The bibliography, ten pages in length, is first rate
in primary and secondary sources. A helpful glossary, easily readable print, and a fine
index further contribute to the volume's worth. One full page black and white map is
present. The reader will appreciate the twenty-one clear illustrations.

Erving E. Beauregard
University of Dayton

Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Litera-
ture. London: James Currey; Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya; Portsmouth, N. H.: Heine-
mann; Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1986. 114 pp. $10.00. Paper.

Ngugi's is a many splendored book. It is the personal testimony of an author who

has fought a long battle of his own to undo the colonization of his mind. At the same
time the book presents a historical analysis of imperialism and underdevelopment; and of
the use of language as an instrument of subversion of personal identities and cultures of
the colonized peoples in the process of colonization. It is also a book on the historical
development of orature and literature in Africa. Finally, it is an essay in literary theory
and criticism on the role of the artist in society. While Ngugi writes about Africa, his
analysis applies to all of the Third World.
He begins with a personal statement: "In 1977 I published Petals of Blood and said
farewell to the English language as a vehicle of my writing of plays, novels and short
stories... . However, I continued writing explanatory prose in English... . This book,
Decolonising the Mind is my farewell to English as a vehicle for any of my writings.
From now on it is Gikuyu and Kiswahili all the way."
The intense feeling and passion that permeates the book does not in any way blind
the argument about the colonization of the mind which is laid with clarity and cogency.
The story is told how the colonizer came armed with the Bible and the gun. The speakers
of local languages were made to feel ashamed of their own languages and where necessary
were ordered to renounce their mother tongues under threat of corporal punishment. The
missionaries committed their lives in saving the indigenous peoples from the barbarism
of their own languages. However, to do this, they themselves became masters of African
languages, reducing them to writing and authoring the first ever dictionaries and grammars
in these languages. They talked of the colonies being oral cultures and yet put the Chris-
tian Bible in unlimited quantities in even the tiniest African language.
The language of the colonizer became the language of education and culture, and of
institutions of governance. Thereby, the colonized were denied "control of their tool of
self-definition." They were disassociated from their history-carried-in-language; and they
are disallowed a role in making their own history in the present. There was an
"epistemological break" that made reflection on their own lives impossible which lead to
the dulling of sensibilities and to the loss of creativity. The colonized were disinherited
from their present as well as the future since science and technology codified in a foreign
 Book Reviews 103

tongue were no more than magic to the speakers of mother tongues.

In the beginning, many of the African writers, as did writers in other parts of the
Third World, accepted the thralldom of metropolitan languages. They sought a
"renaissance of the African cultures...in the languages of Europe." They let their songs
be stolen and willingly continued to enrich the languages of the colonizer instead of en-
riching their own languages and cultures. The colonizers continued with the exploitation
of Third World talents as they had earlier carried out the exploitation of the Third World
economies.
Ngugi analyzes the baneful effects of imperialism as an avowed Marxist. While ac-
cepting the necessary role of patriotic bourgeoisie in the development of literature in local
languages of Africa, he accuses comprador bourgeoisie in the newly independent countries
of complicity with imperialism. This position has sent the "Bretch of Africa" into exile
from his homeland in Kenya.
Ngugi asserts that the content of writing in Africa today has to be anti-imperialist
and the only language is the language of struggle. This language of struggle has to be a
vernacular language of Africa; in his own case it will now be either Gikuyu or Kiswahili.
He invites the African writer to write in his own language; and to build upon his own
tradition of oral literature. Ngugi well understands the progressive role of literacy in Afri-
ca. Clearly, he is not suggesting that the writer in Africa write only for the bourgeoisie
howsoever patriotic it might be. Widespread literacy is thus seen by Ngugi as the neces-
sary part of the "awakening" in Africa. The writer must be able to talk directly to work-
ers and peasants.
The road ahead for Ngugi and all other writers in Africa is difficult. The subversion
of imperialism by writing in local languages will not be easy in a continent that is said
to speak in many thousand tongues. The awakening of the people through literacy will
take time in a land which has the highest percentages of illiteracy in the world. One must
wish Ngugi well in his own personal quest for the decolonization of the mind and in the
decolonization of the minds of the peoples in Africa and other parts of the Third World.
However, one must not underestimate the contradictions in Ngugi's taking the oath of.
never writing in English and writing in Gikuyu or Kiswahili all the way. Writing for his
people at home in exile from home, writing about his people without directly experienc-
ing their realities in daily social, emotional and imaginative encounters, will not be easy.
The well of creativity can run dry in the wasteland of contradictions. As a Kenyan friend
of mine suggested, writing in mother tongues in his part of the world may have contrib-
uted to the aggravation of tribal feelings and to ethnic chauvinism. I, for one, am con-
vinced that the risk is worth taking.

H. S. Bhola
Indiana University