NGUGI WA THIONG’O: Teach me to be me

Is this an accident?

The question brings me to a fourth story. It takes place in the colonial era. It involves a Kenyan called Mbiyu Koinange, who had studied at Alliance High School in Kenya, then Virginia Hampton Institute in the USA, and finally graduated from Columbia University, USA, with a master’s degree in education. He returned to Kenya in 1938. His father, so proud of him and his achievements, wanted to build him a stone house. The son pleaded with his father, Let us use these stones to lay the foundation of Gĩthũngũri Teachers College, the first institute of higher learning ever in colonial Kenya.

Koinange’s vision of a higher institute of education was inspired by the vision of self-reliance that Booker T. Washington advocated. Washington was himself a graduate of Virginia Hampton Institute and the founder of Tuskegee Institute. His social vision may have been suspect, but his economic vision earned respect and inspired Koinange. Gĩthũngũri was built by ordinary Kenyan men and women, not the colonial state.

We Kenyans can do it, said the Kenyans. We shall not let you do it, said the colonial state

The college was designed to produce teachers for the independent schools run by Africans. The Karĩng’a and independent school movement was itself a phenomenon, inspired by the Garveyite call for self-reliance (derived also from Washington) and the slogan “Africa for the African, at home and abroad.” Whenever the committee leaders of any of the schools met, the first order of business was to take out of their pockets whatever they could afford to part with and put it on the table. Gĩthũngũri was built on the same principle: ordinary men and women giving whatever they could, small or big. In short, the founders of Gĩthũngũri and the entire independent school movement dared to dream what had not been dreamt before. We Kenyans can do it, said the Kenyans. We shall not let you do it, said the colonial state.

In 1952, the state closed Gĩthũngũri and all independent African schools. It also banned all African-language newspapers, sending some of the editors to prison and forcing others into exile. It hauled African-language poets like Gakaara wa Wanjaũ and Stanley Kagĩka into concentration camps. Does that sound familiar? But to crown the humiliation, the colonial state turned Gĩthũngũri into a prison where Soldiers of the Land and Freedom, which the state renamed the Mau Mau, were hanged. The symbol of Kenyan African self-reliance had to be turned into one of shame, humiliation, and defeat.

The closure of these Kenya-centered African-run educational institutions was followed by the systematic production of an English-speaking elite, but one deracinated from African languages. And that was how, after 1952, it came about that no matter how brilliantly one was doing in mathematics, physics, chemistry, history—no matter if one answered all the questions in the English language—one could not go on to the next class without passing English. English became equated with education, universal knowledge, and brilliance. The Ominde Commission on Education, set up by the newly independent African government of Kenya in 1964, nationalized this mindset by calling for the eradication of African languages as a means of education from pre-elementary to university, and requiring their replacement by English.

It is not as if the colonial authorities stumbled upon these policies that produced an anti-Kenyan, anti-African mindset in the Kenyan and the African. In his book `How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’, Walter Rodney quotes Pierre Foncin, a founder of the Alliance Française, as stating, at the beginning of the twentieth century, that it was “necessary to attach the colonies to the metropole by a very solid psychological bond, against the day when their progressive emancipation ends in a form of federation as is probable—that they be and they remain French in language, thought and spirit.”

When African languages became outlawed in the educational institutions, their speakers were turned into criminals to be hunted down. Children caught speaking African languages in schools were made to carry smelly skins in their pockets, or simply carry placards reading I am stupid. Animals are tamed in the same way: associate the undesired behavior with pain and the desired behavior with pleasure. Later, obeisance to this system of rewards and punishments is passed on to the offspring as normal behavior, so that the sound of English makes us salivate with desire and the sound of an African word makes us dry up with disgust.

Njonjo and his English accent were not an accident, nor were his acts those of a lone wolf. The fact is that there is a Njonjo in the minds of the educated African middle class. Njonjoism is still the problem of Africa. Europe gave Africa the resources of its accent; Africa gave Europe access to the resources of the continent. It is true that the sword won Europe the right of access—but the accent sealed conquest by ensuring acquiescence from a section of the conquered.

I was very pleased to see, on my most recent visit last year, that the University of Nairobi is making things: Royal Satima mineral water, and the university yogurt. I ate their yogurt, drank their water, both made in Kenya, and it felt good. In Germany, where I traveled to receive my tenth honorary doctorate, the team from Moi University gave me the gift of cloth they had produced. It was the best gift I have had in years: a shirt made in Kenya from a cloth made in Kenya. What if government agencies put in orders with these nascent Kenya-owned industries? What if Njonjo said, Make me another airplane?

That’s the way it should be. The answer is already within us. My friends, let’s go the way of Nairobi University and Moi University in making things. But why stop at cloth, yogurt, and bottling mineral waters? Why not bicycles? Why not electric cars? Why not airplanes, why not our own defense weapons? Nations have no permanent friends, only permanent interests. The one you depend on today to arm you may want to disarm you tomorrow. The one who feeds you today may withdraw his food tomorrow. Every nation has a right to first feed itself, clothe itself, house itself, and defend itself. It must have those capacities, at the very least.

Let us strive for independence, originality, and excellence, and not dependance, imitation, and begging. This has to become our culture, has to inform how we look at Kenya and Africa, the choices we make at academies and economies, at planning and even assessing what we send out and what we receive. It has to be a way of life, part of our character as a nation, who we are as Kenyans. Let us banish the culture of dependence, imitation, and begging.

When African languages became outlawed in the educational institutions, their speakers were turned into criminals to be hunted down. Children caught speaking African languages in schools were made to carry smelly skins in their pockets, or simply carry placards reading I am stupid.

An imitator is always a follower and is driven by lack of faith in self, which begins with language. If you know all the languages of the world and you don’t know your mother tongue or that of your culture, that is enslavement. If you know your mother tongue or the language of your culture and add all the languages of the world to it, that is empowerment.

We should learn from those who ran independent African schools and built Gĩthũngũri Teachers College. They took from their pockets and gave to the public good and welfare. Today we take from the collective table for the private good and welfare. For them, leadership was a public trust. For us today, political office is a private trust. Even though they were under colonial rule, they looked at Kenya as Kenyans and wanted to rescue their Kenya from the marauding outsider. Any time we view Kenya with the eyes of an outsider, we are betraying a vision fought for with the blood of the ordinary men and women of Kenya.

At the symposium to celebrate fifty years since the publication of my novel `Weep Not Child’, I saw a performance group reenact that history of sacrifice, a major theme in the book. The images they created with their bodies registered the pain and the pride of struggle. They dramatised the aesthetic of resistance. And they sang: Teach me to be me. If you teach me to be me then you will see me. If you teach me to be me I will be free, or are you afraid of a free me?

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Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a novelist, playwright, and theorist of postcolonial literature and Distinguished Professor of the Departments of Comparative Literature and English at the University of California, Irvine. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages.