Decolonising The Mind Essay

Referring to the Orientalists of his day, he said, I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.

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Macaulaya member of the Supreme Council of Indiaobserved that Indian languages contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are, moreover, so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them.

He admitted that he did not know any Indian languages but insisted that he had nevertheless reached a correct estimate of their value.

As Ngugi wa Thiongo Kenyan novelist, professor, and author of has pointed out, Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control.

To control a peoples culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others.

The domination of a peoples language by the language of the colonizing nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonized. A great debate ensued in 1830s Britain on the choice of an official language of colonial administration and education.

Decolonising The Mind Essay Social Media Plan For Small Business

Making the winning case for English over Sanskrit, Persian, and all other local languages, Thomas B.Nor is it a mere tool for describing the world as it truly isno language can be said to describe the world as it truly is.To use a languageany languageis to interpret the world in a particular way.It had evolved to convey different ideas of self, individual, community, nature, time, beauty, loyalty, respect, kinship terms, humor, idioms, gender roles, animals, and so much else from a particular ontology.Moreover, it was alien to the language-world of Ngugi’s daily life in Kenya—of the streets, boyhood fights, swear words, commerce, labor, family, love, food, festivals, geography, plants, and more.Not only that, his own language was ‘associated in his impressionable mind with low status, humiliation, corporal punishment, slow-footed intelligence’ and worse.Ngugi wrote that if the bullet was the means of physical subjugation, language was the means of spiritual subjugation of the African child, resulting ‘in the dissociation of the sensibility of that child from his natural and social environment, what we might call colonial alienation.’ [7] What then to make of literature written in European languages by Africans?Indeed, it was even worse: One of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking [Gikuyu] in the vicinity of the school.The culprit was given corporal punishment three to five strokes of the cane on bare buttocks or was made to carry a metal plate around his neck with inscriptions such as .The modern era of European colonialism began in the Americas with bands of adventurers seeking El Dorado.Their early intrusions evolved into predatory monopolies like the East India Company and European states exerting direct control over the economic and political life of the colonies.