The colonial master were not only interested in making
students learn how to use English, but also intended to completely cut off
children from their mother tongues. This objective was achieved by employing
force, treachery and greed.
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“One of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught
speaking Gikuyu (a language in Kenya) in the vicinity of the school. The
culprit was given corporal punishment – three to five strokes of the case on
bare buttocks – or was made to carry a metal plate around the neck with inscriptions
such as I AM STUPID or I AM DONKEY. Sometimes the culprits were fined money
they could hardly afford. And how did the teachers catch the culprits? A button
was initially given to one pupil who was supposed to hand it over to whoever
was caught speaking his mother tongue. Whoever had the button at the end of the
day would sing who had given it to him and the ensuing process would bring out
all the culprits of the day. Thus children were turned into witch hunters and
the in process were being taught the lucrative vale of being traitor to one’s
immediate community. The attitude to English was the exact opposite: any achievement
in spoken or written English was highly rewarded; prized, prestige, applause;
the ticket to higher realms. English became the measure of intelligence and
ability in the arts, the sciences” and all other branches of learning. English
become the main determinant of a child’s progress up the ladder of formal
education.
Ngugi’s concludes with his observations:
“Economic and political control can never be complete or
effective without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control
their tools of self-definition in relationship to others. For colonialism this
involved two aspects of the same process: The destruction or the deliberate undervaluing
of a people’s culture, their art dances, religious, history, geography,
education, orature and literature, and the conscious elevation of the language
of the colonizer. The domination of a people’s language by the languages of colonizing
nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonized.
By Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a Kenyan writer
Excerpts from “Undiminished Quest for Decolonization” in ‘Swaraj
in Ideas’ book
