Decolonizing the Mind: Ngugi's Linguistic Revolution

himself put to practice as Decolonizing the Mind was his last book in English. Ngugi himself earlier wrote in English, but now he mostly writes in Gikuyu. Keeping Fanon in consideration, Ngugi says that this way of writing makes writers most dangerous to colonial powers because they begin to speak to the people rather than trying to gain cultural credence in the colonizer’s language of a European tongue.
Ngugi tells of his boyhood in Kenya, of how he was taught in his native Gikuyu language at school when suddenly in 1952 the British authorities forced schools to teach in English instead. Proof that Europe forced its languages on Africa.
Most African literature is oral. It includes stories, riddles, proverbs and sayings. In Decolonizing the Mind (1986), Ngugi Wa Thiong'o discusses the importance of oral literature to his childhood. He says "I can vividly recall those evenings of storytelling around the fire side. It was mostly the grown ups telling the children but everybody was interested and involved. We children would retell the stories the following day to other children who worked in the fields."The stories main characters were usually animals. Ngugi said "Hare being small, weak, but full of innovative wit, was our hero. We identified with him as he struggled against the brutes of prey like lyon, leopard and hyena. His victories were our

Black identity and racial pride reached a pinnacle during the late sixties and early seventies. Black women writers who serve as metaphors of the cultural and social resistance of the Black women, include: Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Toni Cade Bambara. In 1983 Alice Walker's The Color Purple was the first novel by a Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize. Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is very concerned with the loss of oral histories, folktales, songs and ring rhymes, ofriddles, the dozens and all African traditions and the desire to bring them