I guess I am supposed to say something about Professor Ngugi's influence upon my field of political theory. I will speak prospectively, instead, about the influence I hope he has some day.
I.
In 1893, Friedrich
Engels addressed the Italian readership of the newly-translated Communist Manifesto. “The close of the
feudal Middle Ages,” he wrote, “and the opening of the modern capitalist era
are marked by a colossal figure: an Italian, Dante, both the last poet of the
Middle Ages and the first poet of modern times. Today, as in 1300, a new historical
era is approaching. Will Italy give us the new Dante, who will mark the hour of
the birth of this new, proletarian era?”
Engels had a
remarkable historical sense, but his guess was far off in this case. Dante,
possessing all the wealth of the imperial, Latin tradition, left behind that
language of popes and emperors and wealthy elites in order to write his
greatest works in the vernacular dialect of Tuscany, a region torn by civil
wars and invasions. In so doing, he helped to set the path taken by the European
renaissance, and helped to create Italian literature.
It is impossible
that an Italian could perform this role again, for the modern era has also been
the era of European colonialism and imperialism, which have subjugated the
peoples of the world. Italy was hardly one of the foremost colonial powers,
but, even so, there is no way that any author writing in any European language could
signal the postcolonial rebirth of the globe, the renaissance of the invaded
and colonized cultures of the global proletariat.
Engels did not
live long enough to see the beginnings of the postcolonial transformation. He did
not foresee that the watershed moment of cultural rebirth would be when authors
of the colonized peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas abandoned the
English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese of the conquerors and colonial
administrators in order to tell their stories again in the “vulgar” tongues of
the people. He did not foresee that the new Dante might write in Gĩkũyũ.
II.
The relationship
of language and conquest, language and domination, has been at the center of
Ngugi’s political theory and political practice. If Dante was primarily
concerned to insist upon and demonstrate the eloquence of the common tongue, Ngugi has been concerned to demonstrate
its power. The “civilizing” mission
of the colonial powers has always entailed spreading the masters’ word. To be
civilized is to be cultured, to be cultured is to be educated, and to be
educated is to learn to read and write and speak the language of civilization
and culture – the language of the powerful.
This resonates
here, in Québec. And “here” is also unceded Kanien’kehá:ka land, where it
resonates again.
An old article
from The Spectator can give us the
flavor of history. In the midst of curious incomprehension at the phenomenon of
Quebecois nationalism, the author notes that, while Montreal was (in 1963) 65%
francophone, “only 22% of its economic activity” was run by members of the
francophone majority. “Among the more uncouth of the members of the richer
race,” he continues, “an exceptionally offensive phrase is not infrequently
heard … when a French-speaker is brutally told to ‘talk white.’”
Bosses can no
longer issue this command to workers in Québec, thankfully. But this does not
mean that the compulsion to use the language of the powerful disappeared. When
the conquerors control the wealth, they don’t have to command explicitly the
use of their tongue. Speaking the language of the powerful just makes economic
sense, as they say. Thus, forty years after the Charter of the French Language,
pressure is mounting on Québec to improve and expand English-language
education, and de facto anglophone
workplaces are on the rise. The imperative is no longer a personal command. It
issues from “the way things are.”
Marx called this
sort of phenomenon “the fetishism of commodities.” In a society in which goods
and services move to the music of market-prices, our “social movement has for
[us] the form of a movement of things, and instead of us controlling this
movement, [we] are controlled by it.” We bow, of necessity, to the impersonal
power of prices. Is our labor-power worth more if we speak English? Then we
must speak English. No one has to tell us to do so. We don’t need a weatherman
to know which way the wind blows.
But the wind blows
bitter for the smaller communities of the world. Its howling drowns out the
small voices of history. The extinction of languages has, by most accounts,
accelerated to the point that 60-80% of the languages spoken in the world today
will likely not be spoken by any children within a century. The French fact in
Québec is not endangered to this extent. The language of the Mohawk people is
much more precarious.
There is an irony
of history here, though, and a lesson. Kanien’kehá was probably in a more
precarious position in the mid- to late-‘70s. Over the prior half-century, most
Mohawk families, impelled by their integration into the anglophone labor
market, had come to speak English at home. The passage of Bill 101 in 1977
posed an existential crisis for the language, since it introduced new
restrictions on instruction in languages other than French. The response among
the Mohawk community in Kahnawà:ke was to establish an immersion program for
young children.
In other words, it
took a political threat to the language to provoke a political effort to
safeguard and strengthen it. The open, avowed enemy is easy to recognize. Being
easily recognized, it is easily emblazoned on the banners of political
resistance. The economic threat is harder to counter, since it seems to operate
from nowhere and everywhere all at once. Because the domination of the market
is impersonal, it may not evoke the protest that a law or a command evokes.
III.
The project Ngugi
has called “decolonizing the mind” is not an idealist “revolution in the mind.”
Decolonizing the mind is a political and material project. It means
decolonizing the hand, decolonizing the tongue, decolonizing the classroom, and
– thereby – decolonizing the imagination. It means destroying the colonial and
collaborationist project of mastering the world by mastering the masters’
language.
Ngugi is best
known for his work decolonizing literature, orature, and theatre. But
decolonizing the mind is also a political practice of theory, and a practice of
political theory. Ngugi noted long ago that, while the anticolonial and
postcolonial intellectuals “were busy haranguing the ruling circles in a
language” – English – “which
automatically excluded the participation of the peasantry and the working
class,” “the most reactionary African politician, the one who believes in
selling Africa to Europe, is often a master of African languages,” and “the
European missionary believed too much in his mission of conquest not to
communicate it in the language most readily available to the people.”
This is still a
problem everywhere. The most sincere devotees of universal liberation couch
their arguments in language that is incomprehensible outside the seminar rooms
of elite universities, or address themselves – plaintively or legalistically –
to those who hold the levers of government. This is not an argument for “dumbing theory down,” or for forgetting that
“common sense” is often common nonsense. But Ngugi provokes me to wonder what
is gained by speaking the language of power, and what is lost.
Do we believe
enough in the mission of emancipation to communicate it in the language most readily
available to the people? As Ngugi insists, the alternative to sharing and
enriching the common tongue is abandoning it to the most reactionary forces.
