Ngugi wa thiong the language of african literature pdf

To learn more, view our Privacy Policy. To browse Academia. Log in with Facebook Log in with Google. Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. In other words, Imperialism continues to control the economy, politics and cultures of Africa.

But on the other hand, and pitted against it, are the ceaseless struggles of African people to liberate their economy, politics and culture from that Euroamerican-based stranglehold and to usher in a new era of truly communal self-regulation and self-determination.

It is an ever-continuing struggle to seize back their creative initiative in history through a real control of all the means of communal self-definition in time and space.

Hence language has always been at the heart of the two contending social forces in the Africa of the twentieth century.

The contention started a hundred years ago when the capitalist powers of Europe sat in Berlin and carved an entire continent with a multiplicity of peoples, cultures and languages into different colonies. It seems to be the fate of Africa to have her destiny always decided around conference tables in the metropolises of the western world: her emergence from self-governing communities into colonies was decided in Berlin; her more recent transition into neo-colonies along the same boundaries was negotiated around the same tables in London, Paris, Brussels and Lisbon.

The Berlin-drawn division under which Africa is still living was obviously economic and political despite the claims of bible-wielding diplomats, but it was also cultural.

Berlin in saw the division of Africa according to the different languages of the European powers. African countries, as colonies and even today as neo-colonies, came to be defined and to define themselves in terms of the languages of Europe: English, French or Portuguese-speaking African countries. Unfortunately writers who should have been mapping paths out of that linguistic encirclement of their continent also came to be defined and to define themselves in terms of the languages of imperialist imposition.

Even at their most radical and pro-African, in their sentiments and articulation of problems they still took it as axiomatic that the renaissance of African cultures lay in the languages of Europe. I should know! The list of participants contained most of the names which have now become the subject of scholarly dissertations in universities all over the world. The establishment of the University of Ibadan in the s also played a crucial role.

It was at the time the only university in Nigeria, and it was affiliated to the University College, London. It therefore drew students from all parts of the country. Because of the diverse linguistic backgrounds of the students, they had to adopt English for interaction.

This further established English as the lingua franca in Nigeria. For instance, section 55 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria states that: The business of the National Assembly shall be conducted in English, and in Hausa, Ibo sic and Yoruba when adequate arrangements have been made therefor.

This establishes English as the language of political administration in post-independence Nigeria. Bamgbose identifies five dimensions of the influence of English in Nigeria: educational, political, cultural, sociolinguistic and linguistic.

The educational and political dimensions have been explained above. It is hard to separate a language from the culture of the people who speak them, since language is in the first place culturally transmitted. Not only has the English language settled in Nigeria, the English culture has also permeated and even dominated indigenous cultures. The sociolinguistic dimension of its influence — which is the concern of this paper — has to do with the role of English in giving rise to a community of bilinguals.

It has been shown in this paper that Nigeria has indigenous languages before English came. The prominence of English resulted thus in giving rise to the bilingual elite. Interestingly, Bamgbose notes that English as spoken in Nigeria has three strands. Broken English is the variety of English spoken by people who were hardly educated. It is deformed English which flagrantly flouts the rules of the English grammar. Pidgin English is a different type of English that is borne out of its contact with another language.

English serves as the lexifier, for it supplies most of the words; but the other language supplies the linguistic structure, and so is the substrate. What Bamgbose calls Victorian English is the high-sounding, convoluted usage of English by the elite of the nationalist period. This form of English stems from the inclusion of Latin words and far-fetched English words. A modern example of this type of English is offered in this Easter greeting ascribed to the politician, Patrick Obahiagbon, a former member of the House of Representatives famous for his use of convoluted English words: Beyond the fugacious razzmatazz of the moment, I seriously call attention to the rutilanting and coruscating modus vivendi sic of Master Jesus the Christ and I dare pontificate that save and until we viscerally emblematize the virtues of self-immolation, quintessential abnegation, eulogizeable simplicity, Christ-like humility and immerse ourselves in a platonic emotionalism of agape love and communalist service, we would have woefully failed in learning and imbibing the true meaning of Easter.

We must elevate this moment from a proscenium of joi de vivre into one of meditative transcendentalism. The third variant, School English, is the English taught at schools in colonial days. It is deliberately simplified, given that it was to be taught to speakers who were not used to it. This is largely the common form of English spoken in Nigeria today, although with a distinct Nigerian flavour. This variant has evolved into the form spoken and written nowadays, riddled with element from indigenous languages.

The incursion of English into Africa, he opines, was triggered by the attitude of the Victorian English society towards Africans, whom they believed were mentally inferior to and less human than Europeans. Africans were seen as being totally incapable of complex thinking and of attaining the grand accomplishments of Europe. Amidst this arose the question of educating Africans.

Booker Washington was one of those who furthered the latter idea. Their primary task being to preach the gospel to a spiritually dark Africa, they needed interpreters to reach their audience, who did not understand English, the language of the Bible and of the missionaries.

This necessitated that they educated some of the natives. This is the major motivation of the education arm of the missionary activities. Another thing the missionary had to do was to produce literature in the local languages of their audiences.

The next incursion into Africa was of colonialists. The presence of colonial interests in Africa modified the educational operations and policies of the missionaries, if we take the western Nigerian example for instance.

Initially, the missionaries educated western Nigerians in Yoruba, but the colonial government came with its need for messengers, clerks, civil servant and court interpreters. It was as a result of this that English became the language of instruction, so as to prepare Africans to take up the posts available to them in the colonial government.

If there is nothing in it you will come back. But if there is something there you will bring home my share. The world is like a Mask, dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place. My spirit tells me that those who do not befriend the white man today will be saying had we known tomorrow. Another factor that promoted English was the linguistic configuration of many African countries.

It all started with the amalgamations that happened across Africa. These amalgamations brought people of different cultures and languages together. This warranted that inter-ethnic communication be carried out through a foreign language. The agitation for self-governance brought several Africans from different ethnic groups together; they were fighting a common foe, and so they needed a common language to fight their common cause, in whatever form.

Literature is not to be left out in this, for English became the language of literature in Nigeria. Theirs was indeed what one might call literary nationalism. They did not just write for the sole sake of writing; they wrote to agitate for freedom — freedom of the mind.

They therefore had to write in English, in order to reach a lot of people. They wrote mainly not for Nigerians but for the outside world, and they admit that much. Achebe and Soyinka came out most forcefully. Although there were writers like J. Odunjo, D. Fagunwa and Adebayo Faleti who wrote in their indigenous languages, their works were not as widely read and taught in schools as the works of writers who wrote in English. This trend in literature has continued till today, and it further establishes English as the language of scholarly endeavours in Nigeria.

This was the situation in other parts of Africa, too. The Language Question in African Literature-in-English Among African writers, there has sprung a heated debate about what the language of African literature should be. Some African writers have taken English as their language of imagination and creativity; others have employed English only in order to reach a wider audience in an era where the world is seen as a global village that has accorded English a hegemonic status; and some still take English as a symbol of psychological domination that writers should do away with.

Achebe opines that the African writer can adopt English to express is imagination. This, he adds, takes pre-eminence over the need to reach a wider audience, since the principal aim of the writer is to express his mind. If on the other hand you ask: Can he ever learn to use it as a native speaker?

I should say, I hope not. It is neither necessary nor desirable for him to do so. The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost.

He should aim at fashioning an English which is at once universal and able to carry his experience. But his stance was that English should be employed by the African writer. Ngugi argues that the English language remains a relic of the colonial past, calling to mind the bitter experience many Africans went through in the hands of their colonial masters.

He sees English as an instrument of colonial masters left to complete the task they started. To him, since language embodies culture, the white man still seeks to foist his culture on unsuspecting Africans who are helping the propagation by employing English for literary creativity. He opines that neglecting indigenous African languages in the composition of literature places African languages at the risk of extinction.

He argues that Literature after all, sic is the exploitation of the possibilities of language. It is the African languages that are in crying need of this kind of development [of being used in composing African literature], not the overworked French or English.