File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2000/postcolonial.0007, message 47


From: "Eric Dickens" <eric.dickens-AT-wxs.nl>
Subject: Ngugi Wa Thiong'o (http://ultrix.ramapo.edu/global/thiongo.html)
Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2000 14:35:43 +0200


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"To decolonize our minds we must not see our own experiences as little islands that are not connected with other processes."











A nation's literature is a product of many individuals in a society, an embodiment of that people's way of looking at the world. Literature makes the reader see how that nation or those people have defined themselves historically in their internal relation of all the parts that contribute to its wholeness. We can see these linkages if we relate to the totality of the activities and experiences of that community's struggle to live.

Literature also takes sides in societies that are divided. A writer who comes from a particular class, gender, race and nation is a social product of eating, drinking, learning, loving, hating. And he has developed a certain attitude to all these activities in support or opposition. A writer tries to persuade his readers not only to view a certain reality but also from a certain angle of vision. Writing is not just pure presentation but also imparts attitudes. And that attitude is often conditioned by our own experience of history. Sometimes we might think we are just presenting facts but often those facts are shaped by our own experiences. As teachers we may need to look at our own experiences as affecting the knowledge we are trying to impart.










The bases of all human societies is, of course, nature. Man detaches himself from myth with a consciousness aimed at finding strategies and tactics for survival. In the process of wrestling with nature and with one another, our own powers are awakened. The making of tools is a product of our awakened powers. Tools help man to handle the laws of nature. With production exchange and consumption, living becomes a social process. In the process of acting on an external environment and changing it, human beings create a social environment.

In one sense it is a community of economic relations. But it is also a community of power relations. The community develops political structures to regulate the economic sphere. By doing the same things in certain ways, we live in a shared language, space and time. The community evolves into one of character relations. The community develops forms of education , laws, religion, literature, arts: the intellectual, moral, and ideological forces that nourish the entire community and give it its distinctive mark in a particular historical phase. The community's structural values is the basis of its world outlook. It is the basis of how its people see themselves and their place in the universe. It is those values that are the basis of people's individual and collective images of self, their identity. It is not a mechanical process how people look at themselves. Their values, their images of self can and will affect their political and economic relations and ultimately their relationships with nature. It is a process with everything acting on one another to produce the ever changing complexity of the society. The crucial thing here is that language and literature embody aesthetic values, and we will see that even questions about these aesthetics are connected to our relationship with our environment.










Many people know me as the writer of novels and plays, but I also write for children. My writing for children in an African language was precisely an attempt at decolonization of the mind and at encouraging appreciation of different cultures. In a sense the story that I first wrote for children also tells my own story as well as so many African people, particularly those who went through the school system in the colonial era. It concerns one central character who comes from a poor family in Kenya in the fifties, and he attends a school which is mostly attended by children in the more wealthy middle class sector in the colonial era, that is, the sons and daughters of chiefs, colonial policemen, say the educated and generally better off section of the population.

The boy does not know English very well, and he is not particularly well dressed because he comes from a poor family. Whenever he goes to school, the teacher tries to humiliate him particularly over the question of language, saying sarcastically: "When will you learn how to speak English? When hyenas grow horns?" The other students burst out laughing. The teacher continues to criticize the boy for not wanting to learn about the rivers mountains trees and lakes in Europe but first about the animals and trees in his country.

But the main point of the story is that eventually when the students are on a journey to the city and they loose their teachers and other adults. The students find themselves in a big forest, where they have no money, or any other means of surviving. Now it is the boy with his knowledge of what is local and his knowledge of the languages around him who is able to guide them out of the forest and back to society.

In a way this is my own story, as well as so many African people who went through the colonial schools and so on. And one can say individually and collectively many struggle as African intellectuals to decolonize not only their own minds but the community for whom they are writing.










African languages must not be seen in isolation from other processes. To decolonize our own minds we must not see our own experiences as little islands that are not connected with other processes, nor can we see the domination of world history by the West as if the West were not affected by what happens in Africa. Usually when we learn about Africa it is as events that happen "out there." We study Africa as a curiosity not seeing that the worlds are in fact inter- connected.

In my novel, The River Between, two communities live on two ridges facing one another. From time immemorial, the two communities have always quarreled or warred. Between the two communities flows a river. The river divides them, but it also in a way unites them. They both depend on the same river for their waters of life. Depending on the starting point, the border is both the beginning and outer edge. The key lies in whether members of both communities see the river as a boundary or as a bridge connecting them. A connection is clearly there, but they would have to educate themselves to see the links that bind them. They need teachers who can point out the links and who can also point out that the identity of the river lies in its constant renewal, movement and change.

One of the inherent traditions of western education of the last 400 years has been one of putting things in categories resulting in an incapacity to see the links that bind the various categories. We are trained not to see connections between phenomenon. East becomes East and the West is West, and never the twain shall meet. But when we look at this is it really true? Even in a world which is round?

Nothing exemplifies this attitude better than our approaches to questions of art. Literature is often taught as if it has nothing to do with other realms. Yet, literature results from acts of men and women in society, a product their intellectual and imaginative activity. The very act of writing is a social act: writing about somebody for somebody. Writing reflects a community wrestling with its environment to make it yield the means of life. Literature is a result of the human's wrestling with nature and with one another.





Early one morning in 1976, a woman from kamiruthu village came to my house and she went straight to the point: "We hear you have a lot of education and that you write books. Why don't you and others of your kind give some of that education to the village?" Would I be willing to be part of a group effort to bring a youth center in the village back to life? That was how I came to join others in what later was to be called Kamiruthu Community Education and Cultural Centre.

The use of English as my literary medium or expression, particularly in theater and the novel, had always disturbed me. It was Kamiruthu which forced me to turn to my native language Gikuyu and to break with my part. The question of audience settled the problem of language choice, and the language choice settled the question of audience.

The play, Ngaahika Ndeenda, involved the local workers in the village in telling the story of a community. It drew on the history of the struggle for land and freedom, particularly the year 1952, when the Kimaathi-led armed struggle started and the British colonial regimes suspended all civil liberties by imposing a state of emergency.

In the theater that I was used to in school and colleges, the actors rehearsed in secrecy and then sprung their finished perfection on an unsuspecting audience who were of course surprised. Such a theater is part of the general bourgeois education system which practices education as a process of weakening people, of making them feel they cannot do this or that. In other words education as a means of mystifying knowledge and hence reality. Education, far from giving people the confidence in their ability and capacities to overcome obstacles or to become masters of the laws governing external nature as human beings, tends to make them feel their inadequacies, and their ability to do anything about the conditions governing their lives.

The Kamiruthu practice was part of education as a process of demystifying knowledge and hence reality. People could see how the actors evolved from the time they could hardly move their legs or say their lines to a time when they could talk and move about the stage as if they were born talking those lines. Some people in fact were recruited into acting after they had shown how such and such a character should be portrayed. Perfection was thus shown to be a process, a historical social process.

I went to jail in 1978. What happened is that the Kenyan government did not like very much the people speaking about their own problems in a play. When I came from prison, I continued to work in the community, but after the second play was stopped, the theater was razed to the ground. I left Kenya for England in 1982.






-------
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, living in exile from Kenya, is the author of many books and plays, including Decolonizing the Mind, Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross, and many others. He was jailed in 1976 by the Kenyan government because of his writings, and after his release in 1978, he left Kenya in 1982. He is a Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University.

HTML VERSION:

The Global Education Project: Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
 
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

"To decolonize our minds we must not see our own experiences as little islands that are not connected with other processes."



Perspective Consciousness


A nation's literature is a product of many individuals in a society, an embodiment of that people's way of looking at the world. Literature makes the reader see how that nation or those people have defined themselves historically in their internal relation of all the parts that contribute to its wholeness. We can see these linkages if we relate to the totality of the activities and experiences of that community's struggle to live.

Literature also takes sides in societies that are divided. A writer who comes from a particular class, gender, race and nation is a social product of eating, drinking, learning, loving, hating. And he has developed a certain attitude to all these activities in support or opposition. A writer tries to persuade his readers not only to view a certain reality but also from a certain angle of vision. Writing is not just pure presentation but also imparts attitudes. And that attitude is often conditioned by our own experience of history. Sometimes we might think we are just presenting facts but often those facts are shaped by our own experiences. As teachers we may need to look at our own experiences as affecting the knowledge we are trying to impart.


State of the Planet Awareness


The bases of all human societies is, of course, nature. Man detaches himself from myth with a consciousness aimed at finding strategies and tactics for survival. In the process of wrestling with nature and with one another, our own powers are awakened. The making of tools is a product of our awakened powers. Tools help man to handle the laws of nature. With production exchange and consumption, living becomes a social process. In the process of acting on an external environment and changing it, human beings create a social environment.

In one sense it is a community of economic relations. But it is also a community of power relations. The community develops political structures to regulate the economic sphere. By doing the same things in certain ways, we live in a shared language, space and time. The community evolves into one of character relations. The community develops forms of education , laws, religion, literature, arts: the intellectual, moral, and ideological forces that nourish the entire community and give it its distinctive mark in a particular historical phase. The community's structural values is the basis of its world outlook. It is the basis of how its people see themselves and their place in the universe. It is those values that are the basis of people's individual and collective images of self, their identity. It is not a mechanical process how people look at themselves. Their values, their images of self can and will affect their political and economic relations and ultimately their relationships with nature. It is a process with everything acting on one another to produce the ever changing complexity of the society. The crucial thing here is that language and literature embody aesthetic values, and we will see that even questions about these aesthetics are connected to our relationship with our environment.


Awareness of Other Cultures


Image of a scene from one of Thiong'o's plays.Many people know me as the writer of novels and plays, but I also write for children. My writing for children in an African language was precisely an attempt at decolonization of the mind and at encouraging appreciation of different cultures. In a sense the story that I first wrote for children also tells my own story as well as so many African people, particularly those who went through the school system in the colonial era. It concerns one central character who comes from a poor family in Kenya in the fifties, and he attends a school which is mostly attended by children in the more wealthy middle class sector in the colonial era, that is, the sons and daughters of chiefs, colonial policemen, say the educated and generally better off section of the population.

The boy does not know English very well, and he is not particularly well dressed because he comes from a poor family. Whenever he goes to school, the teacher tries to humiliate him particularly over the question of language, saying sarcastically: "When will you learn how to speak English? When hyenas grow horns?" The other students burst out laughing. The teacher continues to criticize the boy for not wanting to learn about the rivers mountains trees and lakes in Europe but first about the animals and trees in his country.

But the main point of the story is that eventually when the students are on a journey to the city and they loose their teachers and other adults. The students find themselves in a big forest, where they have no money, or any other means of surviving. Now it is the boy with his knowledge of what is local and his knowledge of the languages around him who is able to guide them out of the forest and back to society.

In a way this is my own story, as well as so many African people who went through the colonial schools and so on. And one can say individually and collectively many struggle as African intellectuals to decolonize not only their own minds but the community for whom they are writing.


Awareness of the Interconnectedness of the Planet


African languages must not be seen in isolation from other processes. To decolonize our own minds we must not see our own experiences as little islands that are not connected with other processes, nor can we see the domination of world history by the West as if the West were not affected by what happens in Africa. Usually when we learn about Africa it is as events that happen "out there." We study Africa as a curiosity not seeing that the worlds are in fact inter- connected.

In my novel, The River Between, two communities live on two ridges facing one another. From time immemorial, the two communities have always quarreled or warred. Between the two communities flows a river. The river divides them, but it also in a way unites them. They both depend on the same river for their waters of life. Depending on the starting point, the border is both the beginning and outer edge. The key lies in whether members of both communities see the river as a boundary or as a bridge connecting them. A connection is clearly there, but they would have to educate themselves to see the links that bind them. They need teachers who can point out the links and who can also point out that the identity of the river lies in its constant renewal, movement and change.

One of the inherent traditions of western education of the last 400 years has been one of putting things in categories resulting in an incapacity to see the links that bind the various categories. We are trained not to see connections between phenomenon. East becomes East and the West is West, and never the twain shall meet. But when we look at this is it really true? Even in a world which is round?

Nothing exemplifies this attitude better than our approaches to questions of art. Literature is often taught as if it has nothing to do with other realms. Yet, literature results from acts of men and women in society, a product their intellectual and imaginative activity. The very act of writing is a social act: writing about somebody for somebody. Writing reflects a community wrestling with its environment to make it yield the means of life. Literature is a result of the human's wrestling with nature and with one another.


Action
Early one morning in 1976, a woman from kamiruthu village came to my house and she went straight to the point: "We hear you have a lot of education and that you write books. Why don't you and others of your kind give some of that education to the village?" Would I be willing to be part of a group effort to bring a youth center in the village back to life? That was how I came to join others in what later was to be called Kamiruthu Community Education and Cultural Centre.

The use of English as my literary medium or expression, particularly in theater and the novel, had always disturbed me. It was Kamiruthu which forced me to turn to my native language Gikuyu and to break with my part. The question of audience settled the problem of language choice, and the language choice settled the question of audience.

The play, Ngaahika Ndeenda, involved the local workers in the village in telling the story of a community. It drew on the history of the struggle for land and freedom, particularly the year 1952, when the Kimaathi-led armed struggle started and the British colonial regimes suspended all civil liberties by imposing a state of emergency.

In the theater that I was used to in school and colleges, the actors rehearsed in secrecy and then sprung their finished perfection on an unsuspecting audience who were of course surprised. Such a theater is part of the general bourgeois education system which practices education as a process of weakening people, of making them feel they cannot do this or that. In other words education as a means of mystifying knowledge and hence reality. Education, far from giving people the confidence in their ability and capacities to overcome obstacles or to become masters of the laws governing external nature as human beings, tends to make them feel their inadequacies, and their ability to do anything about the conditions governing their lives.

The Kamiruthu practice was part of education as a process of demystifying knowledge and hence reality. People could see how the actors evolved from the time they could hardly move their legs or say their lines to a time when they could talk and move about the stage as if they were born talking those lines. Some people in fact were recruited into acting after they had shown how such and such a character should be portrayed. Perfection was thus shown to be a process, a historical social process.

I went to jail in 1978. What happened is that the Kenyan government did not like very much the people speaking about their own problems in a play. When I came from prison, I continued to work in the community, but after the second play was stopped, the theater was razed to the ground. I left Kenya for England in 1982.



Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, living in exile from Kenya, is the author of many books and plays, including Decolonizing the Mind, Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross, and many others. He was jailed in 1976 by the Kenyan government because of his writings, and after his release in 1978, he left Kenya in 1982. He is a Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

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