Quote by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: “Language carries culture, and culture carries the entire body of values by which we perceive ourselves.”

Language is not just a way to communicate — it is a container for a whole way of seeing. When you lose your language or are forced into another's, you absorb their categories, their assumptions, their values. Colonialism understood this, which is why language was always a target. Reclaiming language is reclaiming sight itself.

Decolonising the Mind was published in 1986, nine years after Ngũgĩ's imprisonment and shortly after he had gone into exile in the United Kingdom. Across Africa, the politics of language — which languages were taught in schools, which were used in literature, which carried prestige — were intensely contested in postcolonial states.

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.