Quote by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: “The biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism is the cultural bomb.”

Military conquest can be resisted, but cultural colonisation attacks something harder to defend: the way a people understand themselves. When colonised people start believing in the superiority of the coloniser's language, history, and values, they colonise themselves. Culture is the weapon because it operates invisibly from the inside.

Ngũgĩ published Decolonising the Mind in 1986 as his final work in English. Africa was dealing with the structural legacies of colonialism including debt dependency, post-independence autocracy, and the continued dominance of European languages in education and government. His argument was that mental decolonisation was as necessary as political independence.

Kenyan novelist, playwright, and cultural theorist who abandoned the English language in 1977 to write exclusively in Gĩkũyũ, his mother tongue, and Swahili. His 1986 work Decolonising the Mind is a landmark text on language and colonial power. He was imprisoned in 1977 by the Kenyan government for co-writing a play in Gĩkũyũ.