Decolonising the Mind Quotes

“Prescription of the correct cure is dependent on a rigorous analysis of the reality.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature

“The present predicaments of Africa are often not a matter of personal choice: they arise from a historical situation. Their solutions are not so much a matter of personal decision as that of a fundamental social transformation of the structures of our societies starting with a real break with imperialism and its internal ruling allies. Imperialism and its comprador alliances in Africa can never develop the continent.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature

“Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people's experience in history.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature

“The bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature

“It is the final triumph of a system of domination when the dominated start singing its virtues.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature

“How does a writer, a novelist, shock his readers by telling them that these are neo-slaves when they themselves, the neo-slaves, are openly announcing the fact on the rooftops? How do you shock your readers by pointing out that these are mass murderers, looters, robbers, thieves, when they, the perpetrators of these anti-people crimes, aren’t even attempting to hide the fact? When in some cases they are actually and proudly celebrating their massacre of children, and the theft and robbery of the nation? How do you satirise their utterances and claims when their own words beat all fictional exaggerations?”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature

“Language as communication has three aspects or elements. There first what Karl Marx once called the language of real life, the element basic to the whole notion of language, its origins and development: that is, the relations people enter into with one another in the labour process, the links they necessarily establish among themselves in the act of a people, a community of human beings, producing wealth or means of life like food, clothing, houses. A human community really starts its historical being as a community of co-operation in production through the division of labour; the simplest is between man, woman and child within a household; the more complex divisions are between branches of production such as those who are sole hunters, sole gatherers of fruits or sole workers in metal. Then there are the most complex divisions such as those in modern factories where a single product, say a shirt or a shoe, is the result of many hands and minds. Production is co-operation, is communication, is language, is expression of a relation between human beings and it is specifically human.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature

“The biggest weapon wielded and daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature

“Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature

“It seems it is the fate of Africa to have her destiny always decided around conference tables in the metropolises of the western world”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature

“No man or woman can choose their biological nationality. The conflicts between peoples cannot be explained in terms of that which is fixed (the invariables). Otherwise the problems between any two peoples would always be the same at all times and places; and further, there would never be any solution to social conflicts except through a change in that which is permanently fixed, for example through genetic or biological transformation of the actors.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature

“This is what this book on the politics of language in African literature has really been about: national, democratic and human liberation. The call for rediscovery and the resumption of our language is a call for a regenerative reconnection with the millions of revolutionary tongues in Africa and the world over demanding liberation. It is a call for the rediscovery of the real language of humankind: the language of struggle. It is the universal language underlying all speech and words of our history. Struggle. Struggle makes history. Struggle makes us. In struggle is our history, our language and our being. That struggle beings wherever we are; in whatever we do: then we become part of those millions whom Martin Carter once saw sleeping not to dream but dreaming to change the world.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature