Ngugi’s reflections on a decolonisation agenda
HAD the privilege of listening to Professor Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s public lecture at Wits University last week under the theme “Secure the base, decolonise the mind”.
Ngugi is considered the founding father of decolonisation discourse. He is radical in thought and in action and all this can be traced back to his early years as a student activist and academic.
History has it on record that when there was a student protest at Nairobi University back in 1968, which led to many ring-leaders being expelled, Ngugi had apparently taken this struggle so much to heart that he resigned from the English Department in protest.
Unfortunately we can never talk about decolonisation without looking into the colonisation of Africa by the Western countries.
When the Western countries invaded Africa as colonisers, they had only one intention – to plunder African people of their wealth and cultural heritage.
It is against this background that Ngugi posed a striking question during his address: “After 50 years, have we regained our cultural and intellectual independence that we lost to colonisation?”
In fact, Adisa Ajamu calls this “intellectual colonialism”.
The truth about people who are cut off from their heritage and culture is that they become more easily manipulated and controlled than the people who are not. And, in the process, they lose a significant part of their culture and heritage, including its character.
Frantz Fanon argues that decolonisation can be described precisely by the words, “the last shall be first and the first last”, and that it must be an act of putting into practice these words.
IFanon goes on to suggest that, if the last shall be first, this will never happen without a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists.
The reality that we can deduce from this is that, in order to realise a complete decolonised society, apart from clarity and unity in purpose, we must also be willing to bare the brunt of the consequences for embarking on such a programme of action.
With the West successfully colonising Africa, its heritage and culture, this paved the way to a successfully colonised African mind.
The Western world views and lifestyle choices started to become a norm among African people, hence Ngugi’s observation that the West “gave us their accents in exchange for our resources”, among other things.
The nicety and feel of sounding white and aspiring to whiteness became our overnight obsession as opposed to embarking on a revolutionised process of transforming Africa, its people and mind into a purposeful continent.
The founding father of decolonisation was quick to remind the audience that, in fact, “Africa has been the eternal donor to the world but because of the colonised mind, we’ve been made to believe that it is us who actually need the aid”.
In South Africa the decolonisation programme has largely been driven by university students under the banner of the #Feesmustfall movement. They have realised the miseducation of the African child in our institutions of higher learning has led to the imprisonment of the African child in white belief systems and knowledge bases.
The students have realised this effectively restricts their range of thought as the education system effectively draws from the Western traditional norms.
Be that as it may, these African students have lost patience with sitting in a mental prison, that is, a colonised university curriculum that has only one set of lenses, European lenses.
It should be everyone’s duty in the country and African continent to play a critical role in deepening the decolonisation agenda of the African mind and university curriculum.
Ngugi’s overall message on how we should secure the base and decolonise the African mind resonates with every thinking person in our country.
Lastly, all freedom-seeking Africans must take a firm stance and fight the colonial thinking that is ravaging their minds.
Young people, academics, the political elite and society must be galvanised to be part of the revolution and help inculcate the noble idea of a progressive, decolonised African mind. This is the ideal that Ngugi wa Thiong’o lived all his life for. By so doing, we will be honouring him while he’s still alive!
Wonci is a finance professional within the financial services sector.