Faced with the suffocating hegemony of the English language in his native Kenya, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o calls for “African writers…to do for [their] languages… what all writers in world history have done for their languages by meeting the challenge of creating a literature in them” (452). For, as he rightly asserts, the African languages shunted to the margins by English, French, and other colonial languages “have depths of philosophy and a wide range of ideas and experiences” that are unique to each particular language, yet these philosophies, ideas, and experiences are silenced due to the suppression or even erasure of those same languages (436). In claiming that “[l]anguage was the means of the spiritual subjugation” to which he and his fellow Kenyans were subjected in their schooling, he links himself to a long tradition of hegemonic colonial languages used as a form of control. This forceful imposition of English at the cost of his mother tongue is a violence with which Native Americans, for example, are quite familiar. In Latin America and Brazil, Spanish and Portuguese were wielded in the same manner. Ngũgĩ calls for his fellow African authors to reclaim their native languages in their writings to form new literatures that push back against colonialism and shout out in once-silenced tongues. He challenges his fellow African authors to use their native tongues to create literatures linked with “the struggles of peasants and workers in order to align themselves more closely with revolutionary causes.

Also revolutionary is Ngũgĩ’s reappropriation of the English language. When necessary, he writes in English but in such a manner to almost directly transcribe his own words in his native Gĩkũyũ into English. He thereby captures philosophies and subtleties of his mother tongue in a colonial language, repurposing an imperialist lexicon and imbuing it with revolutionary intent. This is a subversive gesture in that it challenges the ‘ownership’ of the English language. It is as if, by stretching the English language over the frame of his own, he is participating in both an act of defiance – pushing against colonialism by refusing to ‘play by the rules’ – while also furthering the reach of his particular worldview through the very tool of his colonizers.

In certain ways, English is an ideal vehicle for these revolutionary purposes. Ngũgĩ quotes Chinua Achebe, whose books have been read the world over, who remarks, “I feel the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience (436). But it will have to be a new English,” one alloyed with the revolutionary content of his native Igbo (ibid.). Similarly, Gabriel Okara, notes “[l]iving languages grow like living things, and English is far from a dead language” (ibid.). In comparison with Spanish and French, two colonial languages with similar reach, English is relatively receptive to changes and reappropriation: there is no official English Academy or a similar “institution for safe-guarding the purity of the… language” (444). One may think of Chicano literature, for example, in which Spanglish is featured prominently.

This does beg the question, however, of which is more revolutionary: turning the linguistic weapons of colonization against the colonizers as an act of resistance and reappropriation, or refusing to participate in that discourse entirely by reclaiming native languages in their totality?