There are three facets to the colonial project: a practice, a body of knowledge, and mental engineering. The third is the result of colonialism as text, for such a text bolsters the minds behind colonizing practices and is simultaneously a prison house for the minds of the colonized. The battle between the colonial text and its dialectical opposite, the anti-colonial text, is central to decolonization. Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit) and Achebe (Things Fall Apart) are shown to exemplify this struggle.

The colonial project has three interrelated facets. It is at once a practice; a body of knowledge; and a technology for mind change, or simply mental engineering. Decolonization is necessarily a negation of the three-in-one character of the colonial process, to produce a third possibility: independence, liberation and social justice. Colonialism as mind-engineering results from colonialism as practice and text but it also aids them. Mind-engineering is directly the result of colonialism as text, for the colonial text is simultaneously a (...) boost to the minds behind colonizing practices and a prison house for the mind of the colonized. The battle between the colonial text and its dialectical opposite, the anti-colonial text, is central to the entire process of decolonization. Achebe and Hegel exemplify this. (shrink)

The question is this: we as African writers have always complained about the neo-colonial economic and political relationship to Euro-America. Right. But by our continuing to write in foreign languages, paying homage to them, are we not on the cultural level continuing that neo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit? What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?

Contemporary African philosophy in indigenous African languages and English translation.

En mettant en question l’utilisation par les colonisés de la langue des colonisateurs et en appelant au retour aux langues africaines, l’écrivain kényan Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o a produit sans doute la critique la plus radicale et la plus audacieuse qui soit, de la colonisation de l’esprit. Cet article le met en conversation avec Karl Marx dans l'esprit de la pensée de Jane Anna Gordon sur la créolisation de la théorie politique.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is known for his principled criticism of colonialism, advocacy of the importance of indigenous languages, and concern with the role of culture and literature in forming the foundation of a truly national sensibility.Globalecticsadds interpretations of Fanon, Hegel, and the Marxian legacy. It provides an opportunity to assess Ngũgĩ’s analysis of colonialism and national liberation.

It is dwelling that allows mortals to initiate themselves in time and space. As such, dwelling constitutes the event of being. In his essay “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Martin Heidegger stipulates that dwelling can only be achieved through harmonious relations among the constituents, earth, sky, mortals and gods, of the “fourfold.” Heidegger writes, “To preserve the fourfold, to save the earth, to receive the sky, to await the divinities, to initiate mortals – this fourfold preserving is the simple essence of dwelling.” (...) Initiating themselves in time and space is the great difficulty that the residents of Ilmorog, the remote village in postcolonial Kenya in which Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel Petals of Blood is set, experience; in Petals of Blood, dwelling is what defines mortals’ being. (shrink)

El escritor keniata Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o a través de su libro Descolonizar la mente (1986) ha invitado a sus colegas de origen africano a abandonar las lenguas europeas, recuperando las africanas en su gesto escriturístico. La intención de este ensayo estriba en leer este libro desde la reflexión elaborada por varios filósofos del lenguaje y pensadores decoloniales, para cuestionarnos por los alcances que tiene el lenguaje mismo para la colonización y descolonización de conciencias, para el establecimiento violento de centrismos euronorteamericanos (...) o para su dislocamiento en pos de la reafirmación poscolonial de los valores africanos. Existen diferentes medios por los cuales se predispone el pensamiento lingüísticamente; el Occidente imperialista se ha encargado de entronizarse como canon único de razonamiento. ¿Será posible, entonces, asumir una contra-postura mediante la lengua? (shrink)

The challenges of building community based on a common identity that also respects differences has two different kinds of chasms to cross. There is the division of ethnic groups, and there is also the generational gap. Given recent problems of ethnic violence that broke out during the December 2007 elections, can contemporary Kenyans build community, coming to common understanding with others on issues such as value and identity? This is not a new problem. It has often been expressed as the (...) need to develop a common Kenyan “national culture.” After a survey including Okot p’Bitek, Frantz Fanon, Bethwell Ogot and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s contribution to the topic in the context of the 1960s and 70s, I will then go on to discuss the contribution of Kenyan Philosophy professor Henry Odera Oruka, who was greatly influenced by the ongoing discussions regarding national culture when he began his sage philosophy project – a project he clearly described as being able to play a role in the creation of Kenyan national culture. I explore some of Odera Oruka’s unpublished work on this topic. Chaungo Barasa has continued this project. I move on to survey how current academics in Kenya are working to describe and forge national values as a meaningful alternative to Kenyan government ongoing endeavors to promote culture as a tourist commodity. (shrink)

In his book, Wizard of the Crow ( 2007 ), the renowned Kenyan novelist, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, expresses the view that a successful society is only guaranteed when women issues are well settled. In light of post-colonial Africa and the era of COVID-19, African women – like the biblical Miriam, the co-liberator with Moses and Aaron (Mi 6:4) – are seen as Nyawiras (plural for Nyawira, the hardworking woman), as their critical role in preserving the family and society is (...) evident. While relying on a critical review of wa Thiong’o’s works and in engaging a selected religio-cultural literature, the article seeks to explore the role of African women [ Nyawiras ] in societal sustenance. With postcolonial Africa encountering a hotchpotch of challenges, are Nyawiras the best suited persons to deconstruct the status quo and eventually reconstruct the ‘sick’ society under greedy-grabbing male-leaders of nation-states (Aburirias) that have lost their moral compasses? Are women best suited to bring back sanity; and have they crossed the Rubicon in the 21st century? In drawing from diverse examples from Africa and beyond, the research article will be significant in helping the modern African society understand the myriad of problems they are facing in the local and global scene, and eventually appraise women’s heroine roles. Contribution: This research uses a multi-disciplinary approach and engages a dialogue between African literature and Africa’s religio-cultural discourses in order to better understand the complex situation facing Africa. (shrink)

This piece takes a close look at the contributions of two very important thinkers whose works have, on the whole, framed the deployment of what I call the decolonizing trope in contemporary African philosophy: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Kwasi Wiredu. I argue that, in light of current discussions in African life and politics and current trends in African philosophical discourse dominated by this trope, it may be time to, at least, rethink, if not abandon, the trope. The viability of a (...) conceptual decolonization in philosophy may have been oversold; the trope may give a false impression of the complexity of the situation it is designed to help attenuate; and it may be having deleterious consequences on discourse and its progress even if they are unintended. (shrink)

Given that Enlightenment rationality developed in Europe as European nations aggressively claimed other parts of the world for their own enrichment, scholars have made rationality the subject of postcolonial critique, questioning its universality and objectivity. In _On Reason_, the late philosopher Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze demonstrates that rationality, and by extension philosophy, need not be renounced as manifestations or tools of Western imperialism. Examining reason in connection to the politics of difference—the cluster of issues known variously as cultural diversity, political correctness, (...) the culture wars, and identity politics—Eze expounds a rigorous argument that reason is produced through and because of difference. In so doing, he preserves reason as a human property while at the same time showing that it cannot be thought outside the realities of cultural diversity. Advocating rationality in a multicultural world, he proposes new ways of affirming both identity and difference. Eze draws on an extraordinary command of Western philosophical thought and a deep knowledge of African philosophy and cultural traditions. He explores models of rationality in the thought of philosophers from Aristotle, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes to Noam Chomsky, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Jacques Derrida, and he considers portrayals of reason in the work of the African thinkers and novelists Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Wole Soyinka. Eze reflects on contemporary thought about genetics, race, and postcolonial historiography as well as on the interplay between reason and unreason in the hearings of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He contends that while rationality may have a foundational formality, any understanding of its foundation and form is dynamic, always based in historical and cultural circumstances. (shrink)

This far-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink postcolonial theory's discussion of the nation and nationalism brings the problems of the postcolonial condition to bear on the philosophy of freedom. Closely identified with totalitarianism and fundamentalism, the nation-state has a tainted history of coercion, ethnic violence, and even, as in ultranationalist Nazi Germany, genocide. Most contemporary theorists are therefore skeptical, if not altogether dismissive, of the idea of the nation and the related metaphor of the political body as an organism. Going (...) against orthodoxy, Pheng Cheah retraces the universal-rationalist foundations and progressive origins of political organicism in the work of Kant and its development in philosophers in the German tradition such as Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. Cheah argues that the widespread association of freedom with the self-generating dynamism of life and culture's power of transcendence is the most important legacy of this tradition. Addressing this legacy's manifestations in Fanon and Cabral's theories of anticolonial struggle and contemporary anticolonial literature, including the Buru Quartet by Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's nationalist novels, Cheah suggests that the profound difficulties of achieving freedom in the postcolonial world indicate the need to reconceptualize freedom in terms of the figure of the specter rather than the living organism. (shrink)

The relationship that exists between the state and her citizens has been described by Jean Jacques Rousseau as “a social contract.” In this contractual agreement, citizens are bound to respect state authority while the state, in turn, has the bounden duty to protect her citizens and guide them in their aspirations. In fact, any state that does not perform this duty is guilty of violating the fundamental rights of her citizens. This, however, is not the case in most postcolonial societies (...) where the citizens see the state as an aggressive apparatus against their wellbeing because the state is not fulfilling its own part of the social contract, which requires them to protect the citizens and guide them in their aspirations. This unfortunate situation has laid the foundation for protest and anti-establishment writings in post-colonial societies – especially in Africa. Since literature, as a semiotic resource, is coterminous with its socio-political context, this attitude of the state has drawn inimical criticism from key postcolonial African writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Mongo Beti, and Nadine Gordimer. Using Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel and John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Across the Mongolo, this essay shows the relationship between state-terrorism and the traumatic conditions of the citizens in contemporary Africa. From the perspective of trauma theory, the essay defends the premise that the postcolonial subjects/characters, in the novels under study, are traumatized and depressed because of their continuous victimization by the state. Due to this state-imposed terror and hardship, the citizens are forced to indulge in political agitation, radicalism and violence in response to their destitute and impoverished conditions. (shrink)

With an eye on how post-colonial novels by authors Chinua Achebe and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o address aesthetic and environmental problems that preceded the Modern period, the intent of this essay is to emphasize how their fiction connects readers with a pre-industrial, premodern, and, strangely enough, radically new ways of thinking about books and the living world beyond them. To this end, the essay looks at this non-western literature through the lens of ecologist Aldo Leopold’s land-based ideas regarding epistemology, ethics, (...) and ecology. (shrink)

According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in the pluralistic world in which we now live, there cannot be an overarching and vertical universal (universel de surplomb) anymore: we have now to find paths, methods, towards what he called, by contrast, a “lateral universality” (universalité latérale). When we consider the human tongues in their de facto plurality, none of them being by essence the language of the universal, that of philosophy and logos, we can see that one meaning of what is called “lateral (...) universal” is translation. It could be said then, somehow, that, “translation is the language of languages” as the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o wrote. The significance of translation as a method or path towards the “lateral universal” is the notion to be explored in this contribution. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the tribulations and the futures of radical national literary culture as a vehicle of freedom in the postcolonial South within the general context of the vicissitudes of the postcolonial nation-state in contemporary neocolonial globalisation. In philosophical modernity, culture is regarded as the means to overcome finitude and the realm where the ideal of human freedom can be incarnated. Consequently, the modern idea of freedom culminates in a politics of culture. Culture supplies the ontological paradigm for different models (...) of modern political community and even the idea of the political itself in the philosophical cosmopolitanism of Kant and the philosophical nationalisms of Fichte and Hegel. Although Marx presents his materialist cosmopolitanism as an inversion of Hegel's idealist nationalism, the same philosopheme of culture informs his idea of the proletarian world community. This is made evident by the persistence of the national question in Marxism. Insofar as it grants primacy to culture in the struggle against colonial and neocolonial economic and political domination, the project of Third World revolutionary national culture has its conceptual origins in the modern philosopheme of culture. However, the vicissitudes of these projects in neocolonial globalisation as exemplified by the work and lives of Pramoedya Ananta Toer of Indonesia and Ngugi Wa Thiong'o of Kenya cast doubt on the viability of this philosopheme of culture. The inability of revolutionary national culture to transcend the neocolonial forces of domination, death and destruction unleashed by global capital suggests that culture qua incarnational work is plagued by various forms of haunting that are internal to its structure. Hence, instead of regarding postcolonial national culture as the incarnation of human freedom, we ought to understand it as being essentially constituted by spectral negotiations with global capital. It is only from this vantage point that we can better grasp how it in turn haunts and destabilises neocolonial hegemony. (shrink)

By coincidence, it seems, the critical vocabulary and concerns that came to be known as postcolonial theory and methodology rose to be a dominant school of inquiry in the Anglo-American academy in the same years that the Soviet Union collapsed (notwithstanding that key theoretical texts by Frantz Fanon and others predated this moment by decades). Yet, oddly, postcolonialist terms were seldom applied to postsocialist and post-Soviet cases until the 2000s, and they have become more broadly utilized in these territories only (...) in the past decade. Further, it must be admitted that few results of these applications of postcolonial tools to postsocialist cases have made much of a mark among broader circles of postcolonial scholars and thinkers. Djagalov's book may help to correct this situation. Rather than work in the mode of “application”—applying a postcolonial framework to yet one more case—Djagalov reconstructs the history of a century of socialist anti-imperialism, as it was expressed in global cultural institutions and networks, and in so doing discovers the ignored or forgotten genealogy that links contemporary postcolonial thought to writers, activists, and theoreticians of the socialist world.Djagalov's book toggles between, on the one hand, chapters of institutional history that chronicle the global cultural institutions (such as the Afro-Asian Writers Association, the Tashkent Film Festival, and the Lotus Prize) that connected the Soviet Union with decolonizing countries and, on the other hand, chapters of synthetic cultural criticism that articulate typological analyses of common narrative forms that circulated in the fiction and film of the socialist world—recurring varieties of “solidarity narratives,” as Djagalov calls them. His work reveals how central the state-socialist political imaginary was for writers and filmmakers ranging from Nâzım Hikmet to Ngūgī wa Thiong'o, and how prominent their itineraries through Soviet institutions and networks were in their biographies. Ngūgī, for instance, finished his 1977 novel Petals of Blood during a residency in the Soviet Writers House in Yalta.In recovering the lost continent of anti-imperial socialist globality that bridged the “second” and “third worlds,” Djagalov has demonstrated not how postcolonial terms can be applied to postsocialist cases but how postcolonial theory and method are themselves postsocialist phenomena. Djagalov does not attempt to rectify the state-socialist prehistory of postcolonial thought with a critique of Soviet imperial habits or of the postcolonial contexts of contemporary Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. At least, though, the challenges of thinking “postcolonial” and “postsocialist” together have now become clearer. From Internationalism to Postcolonialism leaves us with new research problems: what, for example, does it mean to be a postcolony of an anti-imperial empire? (shrink)

National unity is important in Kenya, since ethnic divisions have sometimes become deadly. The imposed Coalition government and the recent new Constitution in 2010 were attempts to overcome division. But cultural divisions among the generations are just as much of a challenge as ethnic divisions, as the youth sometimes sideline the practices and worldviews of their elders, leaving people to wonder what binds people to each other as Kenyans? The idea of “national culture” has its pitfalls, bit seems necessary nevertheless, (...) as explained by Frantz Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Okot ‘Bitek, and H. Odera Oruka. This article explores how ideas of “Kenyanness” have developed since Kenyan independence and the rejection of colonized mentality and education. Odera Oruka’s advocacy of “Sage Philosophy” as a project to pull Kenyans together, and more recent academics’ attempts to encourage civic education by articulating core Kenyan values are explored in depth. These scholarly and artistic efforts at describing or encouraging common identity are contrasted to efforts by the Ministry of Culture to construct (and “sell”) Kenya culture to tourists as a commodity. (shrink)

Pour édifier une communauté à partir d’une identité commune qui respecte aussi les différences, il faut traverser deux gouffres différents. Le premier est la division entre groupes ethniques, dont j’ai parlé plus haut ; le deuxième, la rupture entre les générations. Les jeunes Kényans d’aujourd’hui peuvent-ils bâtir une communauté avec leurs aïeux et parvenir à se comprendre mutuellement sur des questions telles que la valeur et l’identité ? Le problème n’est pas nouveau. C’est en fait un thème majeur qui revient (...) constamment depuis les années soixante, début de l’indépendance du Kenya. On y a souvent vu le besoin de développer une « culture nationale » kényane partagée. Ce thème a été étudié par de nombreux auteurs au Kenya. Je commencerai par brosser un tableau d’ensemble en étudiant les contributions d’Okot p’Bitek, Frantz Fanon, Bethwell Ogot et Ngugi wa Thiong’o à ce sujet dans le contexte des années soixante et soixante-dix. J’étudierai par la suite la contribution du philosophe kényan Henry Odera Oruka. Ce dernier a été profondément influencé par les débats sur la culture nationale quand il a lancé son projet de « philosophie sage » – une approche qu’il a cru à même de jouer un rôle dans la création d’une culture nationale kényane et qui s’est prolongée dans l’oeuvre de Chaungo Barasa. J’analyserai enfin comment les universitaires kényans travaillent à décrire et forger des valeurs nationales, offrant une autre perspective que celle du gouvernement kényan, qui tend à considérer la culture comme une attraction touristique. (shrink)

The challenges of building community based on a common identity that also respects differences has two different kinds of chasms to cross. There is the division of ethnic groups, and there is also the generational gap. Given recent problems of ethnic violence that broke out during the December 2007 elections, can contemporary Kenyans build community, coming to common understanding with others on issues such as value and identity? This is not a new problem. It has often been expressed as the (...) need to develop a common Kenyan “national culture.” After a survey including Okot p’Bitek, Frantz Fanon, Bethwell Ogot and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s contribution to the topic in the context of the 1960s and 70s, I will then go on to discuss the contribution of Kenyan Philosophy professor Henry Odera Oruka, who was greatly influenced by the ongoing discussions regarding national culture when he began his sage philosophy project – a project he clearly described as being able to play a role in the creation of Kenyan national culture. I explore some of Odera Oruka’s unpublished work on this topic. Chaungo Barasa has continued this project. I move on to survey how current academics in Kenya are working to describe and forge national values as a meaningful alternative to Kenyan government ongoing endeavors to promote culture as a tourist commodity. (shrink)

Lifestyle diseases constitute an increasing proportion of health problems and this trend is likely to continue. A better understanding of the responsibility argument is important for the assessment of policies aimed at meeting this challenge. Holding individuals accountable for their choices in the context of health care is, however, controversial. There are powerful arguments both for and against such policies. In this article the main arguments for and the traditional arguments against the use of individual responsibility as a criterion for (...) the distribution of scarce health resources will be briefly outlined. It is argued that one of the most prominent contemporary normative traditions, liberal egalitarianism, presents a way of holding individuals accountable for their choices that avoids most of the problems pointed out by the critics. The aim of the article is to propose a plausible interpretation of liberal egalitarianism with respect to responsibility and health care and assess it against reasonable counter-arguments. (shrink)

This book looks in particular at Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah and Petals of Blood by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, but situates these within the broader context of developments in African literature over the past half-century, discussing writers from Ayi Kwei Armah to Wole Soyinka. M.S.C. Okolo provides a thorough analysis of the authors' differing approaches and how these emerge from the literature. Okolo argues that these authors have been profoundly affected by the political situation of Africa, but have also (...) helped to create a new African political philosophy. (shrink)