Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature is a foundational text of postcolonial thought that has influenced scholars, writers, and intellectuals globally. Since its publication in 1986, the text has remained one of the most influential and incisive critiques of linguistic imperialism in the postcolony. Written at a moment when many African writers produced works in European languages, primarily English and French, the text presents language as a repository of culture, history, and power. Ngũgĩ argues that language is inseparable from culture and that culture is the product of a people’s history. Therefore, to write in a colonial language is not a neutral act; it is to write within the cultural and historical framework of the colonizer. Ngũgĩ criticizes African writers who produce literature in European languages and claims it is necessary for reaching a broader audience. He posits that this choice replicates colonial hierarchies and disconnects writers from their people. For Ngugi, reclaiming African languages for literature, education, and intellectual work is essential for decolonization. He announces his decision to write exclusively in Gikuyu, characterizing it as a form of resistance and an attempt to create literature grounded in the experiences and worldview of his people. Below is an overview of critical texts that engage with, extend, or challenge Ngugi’s seminal work.

Textual Precursors

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952).

Fanon’s pioneering insights into how colonial subjects internalize European languages set the psychic groundwork for Ngũgĩ’s later cultural critique. Fanon declares that “to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture” (Fanon 38). He shows how Black individuals  learn to see themselves through the European lens the moment they adopt French, producing a psychic split in which their native cultures become “invisible.” Ngũgĩ often cites Fanon’s insight that colonial language is not a neutral code but an instrument of psychic domination. Decolonizing the Mind’s core premise that writing in English or French constitutes a form of cultural subjugation echoes Fanon’s argument that language itself violates the colonized person’s sense of self.

Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (1975).

Chinua Achebe’s stance that English is not inherently “colonial” but can be made African through idiomatic usage formed one major counterpoint that Ngũgĩ engages directly in Decolonizing the Mind. Achebe defends African writers in the essay “The African Writer and the English Language,” arguing that English can be fashioned to create a genuinely African expression that still reaches global audiences. He writes:

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. (Achebe 1975, 82).

Ngũgĩ’s position, by contrast, is that no amount of Africanizing English can truly recover the epistemic frameworks indigenous languages carry. While Achebe argues for a “bilingual middle,” Ngũgĩ ultimately rejects compromise, insisting that the only way to break the dependency on the colonizer’s tongue is to write directly in one’s mother tongue. Achebe’s essay highlights the debate between pragmatic bilingualism and radical mother‐tongue reclamation that Ngũgĩ crystalized in 1986.

Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957).

Tunisian French writer Albert Memmi offers a sociological and psychological portrait of colonial relations. In The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957), Memmi captures how colonial subjects learn not only to speak the colonizer’s language but to think through it, stating that  “If he wants to obtain a job, make a place for himself, exist in the community and the world, he must first bow to the language of his masters” (Memmi 1957,151) He traces how education in French in North African schools trains students to measure reality according to European norms. Ngũgĩ adopts Memmi’s language when he writes that once an African student masters English or French, they inhabit a mental space estranged from their Indigenous community. Memmi’s psychological description of how language adoption fosters a cloak of values underpins Ngũgĩ’s cultural analysis of how English functions in Kenyan classrooms and publishing houses.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (early essays)

By the mid‐1970s, Ngũgĩ had formulated many of his arguments about “orature versus literature,” “intruder languages,” and “second‐hand vocabularies.” When he published Decolonizing the Mind in 1986, these earlier ideas provided both empirical examples (such as the Kamiriithu theatre and debates at Makerere University) and theoretical scaffolding (the concept of language as “the locus of cultural power”). Although Ngũgĩ’s readers often cite Fanon or Achebe as his antecedents, it is these mid‐1970s ideas that represent Ngũgĩ’s own intellectual gestation for going beyond the critique of English‐language fiction to a full‐blown decolonial program of Indigenous languages revival.

Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers, and the African Elite (1975).

Nigerian critic Chinweizu condemns African elites for perpetuating neo‐colonial structures, particularly through their continued use of English and their acceptance of Western cultural norms. He writes:

The ideological alliance between white predators and black collaborators is maintained chiefly through language … If Africans continue to use English as the exclusive language of politics, business, and scholarship, we become complicit in the hegemony of whiteness (Chinweizu 1975, 54).

Ngũgĩ’s argument draws from Chinweizu’s indictment of collaboration, particularly to support his argument that African governments, after independence, abandoned even token support for mother‐tongue schooling. Chinweizu’s attack on the African elite’s linguistic servitude may have influenced Ngũgĩ’s more sweeping claim that to write in English is to submit to neo‐colonial structures even decades after political independence.

Makerere University Literary Scene (Late 1950s–1960s)

In the late 1950s, Makerere University College (Uganda) became a hotbed for Anglophone African literature. Around 1962, the “Makerere Creative Writing Workshop” (led by David Cook and others) fostered authors like Rajat Neogy (editor of Transition journal), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Okot p’Bitek, and David Rubadiri. Although most works emerging from Makerere at that time were in English, championing a transnational “African modernism.” Ngũgĩ’s own first two novels (Weep Not, Child, 1964; A Grain of Wheat, 1967) were shaped by the anglophone environment of Makerere. However, by the late 1960s, Ngũgĩ began to question whether this “pan‐African English” actually served rural readers. Makerere’s prestige helped demonstrate both the power and the limits of English in forging an educated elite. By the time Ngũgĩ published Devil on the Cross (1980) in Gĩkũyũ, he had pivoted from Makerere’s anglophone ethos to a grassroots, Indigenous language orientation.

 Direct Engagements and Dialogues

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968).

Freire’s radical theory of education, rooted in the idea that true liberation can only occur when the oppressed participate actively in their education and become conscious of their conditions, aligns with Ngugi’s ideas about liberation. Decolonizing the Mind and Pedagogy of the Oppressed share a commitment to education as a tool for liberation and a critique of cultural imperialism. Both Ngugi and Freire believe:

  • Education is not neutral; it either liberates or domesticates.
  • The oppressed must be agents of their liberation.
  • Culture and knowledge must be reclaimed from colonial or elite control.

However, Freire’s analysis is class-oriented, while Ngũgĩ centers on the cultural specificity of colonial language politics in Africa. Moreover, Freire does not focus explicitly on linguistic imperialism, which is central to Ngũgĩ’s argument. That said, both Freire and Ngũgĩ believe that liberation begins with consciousness and the reclaiming of voice. For Freire, this means breaking the chains of silence in the classroom. For Ngũgĩ, it means breaking the chains of English in the African imagination. Both works are foundational in decolonial pedagogy and critical humanism.

Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (2001).

Mbembe offers a critical and philosophical rethinking of postcolonial Africa. He argues that the dominant narratives about Africa (colonial, nationalist, or postcolonial) have produced a distorted, essentialized, and reductive understanding of African subjectivity, politics, and temporality. He deconstructs these dominant representations and offers new frameworks for understanding African life, power, and identity. While Ngugi and Mbembe do not depart from the same disciplinary angle, they both seek to liberate African thought and being from the grip of colonial epistemologies. Both reject colonial epistemologies and seek to offer frameworks rooted in African lived experience. They are interested in how Africa is imagined, written, and disciplined through language (Ngũgĩ) or discourse and affect (Mbembe). Each, in their way, insists that liberation must involve rethinking the symbolic, imaginative, and psychic life of African peoples.

Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (2017).

In Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe posits that Black reason is a historical assemblage of ideas, discourses, and practices that invented “Blackness” as a category of difference and inferiority in the service of colonial capitalism and that this invention continues to structure global modernity. Although the Critique and Decolonising the Minds are two different projects, they share a commitment to decolonization as an intellectual, cultural, and existential project. Both texts are concerned with undoing colonial mentalities. Ngũgĩ looks to cultural-linguistic reclamation, and his project is reparative and restorative, aiming to build a culturally sovereign African identity through the reclamation of language and literature. Mbembe analyzes the metaphysical architecture of race itself, revealing the layered and recursive nature of racial construction without offering a clear program of return.

Nuanced Critiques and Extensions

Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992).

Appiah’s text credits Ngũgĩ’s linguistic turn as a principled rejection of colonial domination and a commitment to cultural authenticity. However, it critiques Ngũgĩ’s linguistic nationalism and advocates for a cosmopolitan approach to language and identity that embraces plurality. Appiah part ways with Ngũgĩ in his critique of what he sees as “linguistic essentialism” or “purism.” He argues that it is not necessarily alienating or inauthentic for African intellectuals to use European languages. He views language as a tool rather than the defining essence of cultural identity. Authenticity can be expressed in any language, and insisting on using only indigenous languages might create new exclusions. Appiah’s broader philosophical project champions a cosmopolitan vision of African identity, one that is open to global influences, not bound by cultural or linguistic purism, and comfortable with hybridity and plurality.

In contrast, Ngũgĩ emphasizes the rootedness of language in culture and thus insists that African literature and thought should emerge from indigenous languages rather than remaining dependent on the languages of colonization. Appiah demonstrates that cultural integrity is not about linguistic purity but rather about negotiating multiple influences without losing ethical grounding. While Appiah is sensitive to Ngũgĩ’s point about audience and accessibility—that writing in colonial languages often means speaking to elite or foreign audiences, not to the African masses—he counters that there are multiple audiences for African writers and intellectuals. Engaging in global discourse, particularly through English or French, can be a strategic way to challenge Western dominance from within. Ngũgĩ believes that African intellectuals have a moral and political obligation to use African languages to reconstruct African consciousness. Appiah, on his part, is more cautious about assigning that kind of obligation.

Simon Gikandi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o (2000).

Gikandi situates Ngũgĩ’s linguistic shift within broader historical contexts, illuminating its revolutionary promise and internal contradictions. He reads Ngugi’s linguistic turn as an unresolved but vital provocation within African literary and intellectual history. The contradictions do not invalidate the work. Instead, they reflect the complexity of negotiating cultural decolonization in a globalized intellectual space.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012).

Spivak’s work posits that aesthetic education is crucial for “training the imagination” in ways that can interrupt the dehumanizing effects of globalization. While she argues for aesthetic education as a means of cultivating the ethical imagination and resisting neoliberal instrumentalism, Ngugi advocates for the decolonization of education by restoring indigenous languages and literature to the center of the pedagogical process. For Ngugi, colonialism alienated Africans from their languages, cultures, and selves. Thus, decolonization requires linguistic and cultural reorientation. Spivak, on her part, reads globalization as a continuation of colonial patterns, displacing local knowledges and commodifying education. This interpretation resonates with Ngugi’s views that language is a site of resistance, and writing and teaching in African languages constitutes a path to cultural liberation. The reading depicts language as mediating access to the subaltern. However, Spivak’s epistemology is skeptical of essentialisms, including cultural nationalism. She emphasizes the limits of knowing the Other and urges a kind of critical and ethical listening cultivated through the humanities. Her emphasis is not on returning to the indigenous but on training the imagination to dwell in difference and opacity.

Moradewun Adejunmobi, Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local and Non-native Languages in West Africa (2004)

Adejunmobi’s work investigates the challenge of creating national culture and literature in a language that is not a lingua franca. She points out that it is the needs of a nation-state that determines the language or literary writing and that those who, like Ngugi, write in a language other than a lingua franca or the colonial language are not addressing a nation. Therefore, their literature is not national. She argues that the “local” is not necessarily tied to indigenous languages and that African writers using European languages are still able to produce literature that reflects, represents, and engages with African localities. Literature that originally speaks to an ethnic group can become accessible to a whole nation through translation into a national lingua franca that resonates with all people (and this is how Ngugi’s works have become national literature in Kenya).

Institutional and Historical Perspectives

Valentine Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (1988). Mudimbe critically analyzes Western epistemological frameworks shaping Africa’s representation, resonating with Ngũgĩ’s emphasis on reclaiming indigenous knowledge systems. See Oshindoro’s Mudimbe and the Invention of Africa.

Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (1996). Mamdani examines the colonial state’s legacy on African political identity, enhancing Ngũgĩ’s critique of colonial institutions, including educational and linguistic frameworks.

Contemporary Reflections, Revisions, and Synthesizing Scholarship

In The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity, and Ownership (2018),  Mukoma wa Ngugi critically engages with his father’s legacy, historicizing the linguistic debates and expanding the canon beyond English- and French-language African literature. Apollo Obonyo Amoko’s Postcolonialism in the Wake of the Nairobi Revolution: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Idea of African Literature (2023) historicizes Ngũgĩ’s interventions at the University of Nairobi, assessing the legacy and limitations of his revolutionary proposals for language and literature. He shows how Ngũgĩ’s insistence on decolonizing African literature by foregrounding African languages and cultures posed a radical challenge to the postcolonial literary and academic establishment.

In Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Drama and the Kamiriithu Popular Theater Experiment (2007), Gichingiri Ndigirigi examines the Kamiriithu community theater initiative, highlighting its significance and limitations within Kenya’s socio-political landscape. Ndigirigi argues that while the Kamiriithu theater project was effective in engaging local audiences and fostering a sense of cultural identity, it ultimately fell short of achieving its broader revolutionary aims. Ndigirigi highlights the tension between Ngũgĩ’s ideological objectives and the practical outcomes of the theater experiment. Despite Ngũgĩ’s efforts to create a participatory and empowering theatrical experience, Ndigirigi points out that the plays were heavily influenced by Ngũgĩ’s Marxist perspectives, which may not have fully resonated with the diverse audience comprising different gender, class, and ethnic backgrounds.

 New Directions and Global Contexts

Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (2011). Mignolo extends decolonial critique globally, engaging with Ngũgĩ’s arguments on language and culture within broader global power structures. In Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (2014), Santos advocates for epistemological pluralism, aligning with Ngũgĩ’s call for diverse knowledge systems and linguistic traditions in global dialogues. Ngũgĩ’s last publication before he passed on May 28, 2025, Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas (2025), revisits the idea of decolonization from a different perspective. Ngugi argues that colonialism and its afterlives devalued African bodies and minds to justify exploitation, erase African achievements, and implant a worldview in which all knowledge and technology seem to come from the West. Ngũgĩ reclaims the African body as the foundation of human knowledge and innovation, challenging centuries of colonial and postcolonial erasure. He argues that the path to African revival lies in re-centering African bodies, languages, and imaginations in education, production, and storytelling. From this grounded knowledge, we can grow a truly decolonized, innovative, and accountable Africa.