Postal address: ILU, Uppsala University, Box 2136, SE-750 02 Uppsala,
Sweden
Visiting address: Seminarieg. 1
Phone: +46 18 4712439 (office), +46 18 359030 (residence)
Doctoral student at Department of English, Uppsala University, Sweden
Presentation of PhD thesis work in progress:
The legacy of colonial subjugation coupled with the imposition of European languages on educational and governmental institutions in the colonised world has provoked an acute postcolonial awareness of language as a technology of power. The colonial experience has also entailed an extensive exploration of the interrelation between language, self, and culture. The complexity of this trinity notion of identity and the social, psychic, and political aspects of language have given rise to controversy among African writers regarding the employment of a colonial tongue as the language of African literature. The postcolonial writers have been drawn between the language of wider communication (the colonial language) and the language of the writer's immediate African environment, which also is the only functioning medium of communication between the writer and the majority of his or her ethnolinguistic community. The choice has also involved the question of pan-African identity and communication.
One important hallmark of the postcolonial African language debate is the Conference of African Writers of English Expression, held at Makerere in June 1962. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who at that time still was an undergraduate student and had only written a few stories, attended the conference and came eventually to find an ally in its most radical speaker Obiajunwa (Obi) Wali, the staunch advocate of African literature in African languages. In 1977 Ngugi wa Thiong'o said farewell to English as his literary medium and began to publish in his native language Gikuyu. Writers like Wole Soyinka, Gabriel O'kara, and Chinua Achebe, on the other hand, have continued writing in an appropriated English, with the aim of "fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry ... peculiar experience." [footnote 1]
When approached in relation to the colonial language and in terms of reciprocity and non-reciprocity, the strategies of the mentioned writers stand out as two mutually opposing positions. However, we need also to consider the underlying consensus out of which the mentioned strategies seem to emanate, namely their shared conviction that language constructs and is constructed by culture. Such an approach brings out for example Chinua Achebe's artistic elaboration of two unequally constrained languages and Ngugi's final abandonment of English as two complementary strategies of postcolonial cultural resistance; One sounding (through the African tongue in handy) the indigenous voices of the silenced majority of non-English speaking Africans, the other demonstrating the struggle of "European educated" African writers and other academicians against "unwary acceptance of heterogeneity." [footnote 2]
The present study will deal will Ngugi's literary and extra-literary works but focus on his english fiction.The following issues will be covered: (1) Ngugi's literary employment of the linguistic phenomenon of lexical codeswitching and culture- /place-specifique images, historical events, indigeneous myths, and Christian symbols; (2) The fictional development of ethnolinguistic consciousness and self/other- related awareness, and the influence of these two knowledges on the flow of attention, affect, memory, and perception in Ngugi's english literary works. The presentation will also deal with the following issues: (3) The Gikuyu phase of Ngugi's literary career; (4) Ngugi's essays on culture and the politics of language. (5) Ngugi's literary contributions and his postulations about language and cultural identity will finally be discussed in relation to points made by Ayo Bamgbose and others on education and language policy in Sub-Saharan African nations.
Footnotes:
1. Chinua Achebe. Morning Yet on Creation Day (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1976) 77, 82. See also:Carol Sicherman, Ngugi wa Thiong’o: The Making of a Rebel. A source book in Kenyan Literature and Resistance (London: Hans Zell Publishers, 1990) 29.
2. Lloyd. Fernando Cultures in Conflict:Essays on Literature and the English Language in South East Asia (Singapore: Graham Brash, 1986) 7.
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