Ngugi wa Thiong'o Quotes on Politics
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Decolonising the Mind (1986) presses its analysis of the colonial cognitive predicament into a corresponding political programme: the persistence of European languages as the languages of education and of high culture in post-independence Africa is itself a continuing structural feature of the colonial relation, and the recovery of African political autonomy requires the corresponding recovery of African languages as the proper media of African intellectual life. The companion essays in Moving the Centre (1993) and the late Globalectics (2012) extend the framework to a planetary politics of literary and cultural decentering, with the consequent challenge to the metropolitan canons and the institutional structures that sustain them.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Ngugi wa Thiong'o:
“Language is not just a tool of communication; it is also a carrier of culture.”
-
Attributed to Ngugi wa Thiong'o:
“The biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism is the cultural bomb.”
-
Attributed to Ngugi wa Thiong'o:
“The African writer must reclaim the African languages.”
-
Attributed to Ngugi wa Thiong'o:
“Decolonization is not an event; it is a long re-membering of what was torn.”
-
Attributed to Ngugi wa Thiong'o:
“The harvest of speaking is reading; the harvest of reading is more speaking.”
-
“As long as he did not know the truth, he could interpret the story in the only way that gave him hope: the coming of black rule would not mean, could never mean the end of white power.”
Wikiquote