DECOLONIZING LANGUAGE, and other revolutionary ideas

214pp., hardback, d.w., Allen Lane, London, 2025

ISBN: 9780241780978

In this collection of accessible and highly relevant essays, published posthumously, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o builds on his vast body of work on language and its formative role in shaping national culture, history, and identity, reaffirming the revolutionary power of African languages to fight back against the psychic and material impacts of colonialism.

"The 20 essays collected in the book rehearse positions first articulated in his earlier collections, Writers in Politics and Decolonizing the Mind; but the new book is notable for Ngũgĩ’s attention to the dangers that mother tongues face across the world, from colonial Ireland to Sami Norway, New Zealand and beyond. Read together, the essays resonate as a manifesto for the mother tongue both as 'the very heart of our being and existence' and the ultimate firewall against 'spiritual domination'. The mission of Decolonizing Language, the 'revolutionary idea' encapsulated in the book’s subtitle, is an incisive rejection of the notion that European 'languages are inherently global and best able to carry intelligence and universality' or that they function as the languages 'of power and normality'. On a more personal level, the book is Ngũgĩ’s last account of his displacement from his own native ground, an acknowledgement of the heavy burden that those who write and speak the language of the other have to carry. The arguments made in the book are exhilarating; reading them in the author’s absence is undeniably poignant." Simon Gikandi, The Guardian

Kenyan writer and academic Ngũgĩ’wa Thiong’o (1938-2025) was Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. His work includes the novels A Grain of Wheat, Petals of Blood, Wizard of the Crow and The Perfect Nine: the epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi; the plays The Black Hermit and The trial of Dedan Kimathi(with Micere Githae Mugo); In the House of the Interpreter, a memoir; and the non-fiction works Decolonising the Mind: the politics of language in African literature; Secure the Base: Making Africa visible in the globe and Homecoming, essays on African and Caribbean literature, culture and politics. In 2001, he received the prestigious Nonino International Prize for Literature.