Language as Culture: A Critique of Ngugi wa Thion’go
The bullet was the means of physical subjugation. Language was the means of spiritual subjugation — Ngugi wa Thion’go
Language, both in its written and spoken form, is a powerful tool for communication. It allows us to share thoughts, secrets, beliefs, observations, and values. As a universal, language is innate to human beings and all societies of the world, no matter how remote and secluded, have a fully functional language. However, as the epigraph suggests, language is more than just a tool for communication. Ngugi wa Thion’go believed there was more to language than just communication, and that from a fundamental level, language can be weaponized to control people’s perceptions of reality, and where necessary, lead to their subjugation. This article is an exploration of Ngugi’s thesis; what he got right, where he erred, and the significance of his worldview to recent debates centered on the adoption of Kiswahili as a regional language in Africa.
Decolonizing the mind
Ngugi wa Thion’go is probably one of the few African writers to grant more attention to language and its impacts to people and societies. In “Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature” he explores the issue further and asks critical questions regarding literature in Africa and the role language plays in it: “What is African literature?” He asked.
Was it literature about Africa or about the African experience? Was it literature written by Africans? What about a non-African who wrote about Africa: did his work qualify as African literature? What if an African set his work in Greenland: did that qualify as African literature? Or were African languages the criteria? OK: what about Arabic, was it not foreign to Africa? What about French and English, which had become African languages?
His questions were critical and the answers are beyond the scope of this article. However, Ngugi believed African literature needed to have been written in African indigenous languages. To him, only African languages could convey the African experience, beliefs, values, and knowledge. The African culture as passed down from one generation to another through various oral traditions like narratives, riddles, songs, dances, and stories all rested upon language as a medium for propagation. Colonization by Europeans brought to an end this process as colonial impositions such as the outright ban on local languages in schools and their replacement with English or other colonial languages started. This idea that Kiswahili should be adopted as the medium of instruction in African schools and to serve as the language of communication in East and South Africa is a Pan African thought which cherishes among others prominent thinkers like Ngugi wa Thiong’o. To them, language could indeed be a means of spiritual subjugation and Kiswahili is the weapon we need to counter the detrimental effects English currently has on our psyche.
Language as culture
To make his case, Ngugi argued that language was more than a medium of communication and that it entailed three parts. The language of real life is the language spoken to facilitate the completion of tasks that require teamwork. This use of language is essential in the labor process since people who work together need communication to achieve desired results. The second use of language was language as speech, which is the use of language as we know it. The third is language as written signs which is the way language is expressed in written form and in most cases it follows the structure of language as speech. In Kiswahili, a word is written as it is spoken.
Another obscure but relatively more important aspect of language according to Ngugi was “language as culture” which he argued is the “collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history.” Language as culture brings us to the postulation that without language the transmission of culture is also impossible. Ngugi articulated this simply by stating that “culture is almost indistinguishable from the language that makes possible its genesis, growth, banking, articulation, and indeed its transmission from one generation to the next.” Essentially what Ngugi meant is that it’s almost impossible to unpack aspects of culture that stand independent of language since to him anything of culture and in culture is necessitated by language. Flaws in his arguments started emerging.
This first flaw lends its evidence from observation since it’s readily noticeable to everyone that culture can exist with or without its creation by and transmission through language. Inasmuch as culture sometimes utilizes language for propagation, it also uses direct observation. A young boy who grows up seeing his father wearing a trouser does not need to be told that men wear trousers and ladies wear skirts. Even as culture evolves and dressing patterns change such that even women begin to wear trousers, the child could still make an observation and adjust his beliefs accordingly. We make observations everyday and it’s these observations that partially generate cultures or propagate them from one generation to another.
This pattern, which I believe is culture as imitation has been observed in numerous societies across the world where norms are passed down from generation to generation without direct communication between adults and children. Think of sexual norms that are rarely communicated by adults to children. Culture as imitation is also where the relationship between language and culture is severed. In highly aggressive societies where cultures of violence exist, children are rarely socialized into violence by their parents. Instead, the children make observations, reflect on how older siblings and friends behave, then finally adopt violent ideals too. No language is needed to convey these aspects of culture since actions themselves speak volumes. Another way in which culture may be propagated without relying on language is TV or film where seeing the way other people behave, act, or talk is enough to create new cultures or transform existing ones. Ngugi was, therefore, on the wrong with his insinuation that language and culture were inseparable. From this, language doesn’t necessarily generate culture and it’s not an essential component of its transmission either. The deaf bear witness.
Language and the self-concept
Since culture was indistinguishable from language according to Ngugi, then it was also logical to argue that language itself was culture. This claim is true since we also consider languages to be the inseparable aspects of those cultures that speak it. The Kikuyu language is a cultural artifact of the Kikuyu people and so is the English language to the British. To cement this postulation, Ngugi provides a three tier dialectic necessary for this relationship.
- Culture is the product of history which it in turn reflects.
- Language is an image-forming agent in the mind of a child.
- Culture transmits or imparts those images of the world and reality through the spoken and the written language, that is through a specific language.
The first postulate argues that culture is a product of history and that language is the tool we use to reflect on that history. Essentially, what he means is that history reproduces culture every time we reflect upon it. For example, various taboos, totems, riddles, and even songs are a reflection of various historical events. By telling these riddles and stories, we recreate these cultures and keep them alive. Language is a necessary ingredient for this relationship because it mediates the reflection process “forming images or pictures of the world of nature and nurture.” The formation of images is important and it’s what leads Ngugi to his second postulate, where language is the key driver of this image forming process. The image is the stuff of culture and it is what we see when we think of a particular cultural attribute. However, disparate languages can portray these images differently creating images with no basis in reality. Here, Ngugi makes an interesting argument that:
Our whole conception of ourselves as a people, individually and collectively, is based on those pictures and images which may or may not correctly correspond to the actual reality of the struggles with nature and nurture which produced them in the first place. But our capacity to confront the world creatively is dependent on how those images correspond or not to that reality, how they distort or clarify the reality of our struggles. Language as culture is thus mediating between me and my own self; between my own self and other selves; between me and nature.
Language as culture is Ngugi’s way of revealing the inseparable links between language and culture and also his attempt to prove that changes in one leads to changes in the other. His third postulate is a summation of that process, whereby culture forms images and relies on specific languages to transmit them. If we change the language of instruction from Kiswahili to English, for example, we risk losing the deep cultural traditions embedded in the Kiswahili culture since the images formed by the culture cannot be accurately communicated by English. Since culture also determines who we are, our self concepts, our relationships with one another, and also underlie our specific realities, then the images we have of ourselves can only be accurately realized and communicated using the specific languages we speak. Therefore, I risk losing my true self by adopting a different language that’s not compatible with the cultures of our history. Ngugi’s primary argument looks tight but has a serious flaw.
Image formation and concepts
Ngugi was not entirely right in his belief that culture fashioned us with the images of who we are, our relationships, and our specific realities. His second postulate is erroneous in its entirety since language is not the only image-forming agent in the mind of a child and this process, arguably does not happen in children alone. Children are born with knowledge of certain concepts. Even before a baby can speak or understand language, he is capable of telling the difference between the mother and the father. The baby can also recognize a stranger and will cry if one attempts to hold it. What does this mean? It means children do not need to learn through language the concepts of mother, father, and stranger.
The fact that babies can construct mental categories without words is evidence enough that language is not a necessary requirement for image formation. The same is true of other aspects of culture that are believed to be products of socialization such as sex and gender. A child knows the concept of boy or girl even before he learns the words. According to Judith Rich Harris, the categories boy and girl are constructed based on concepts and not words. Words are not necessary in the formation of categories. The same is true even in animals. Your dog can definitely tell the difference between a human and another dog. Harris even observes that “a pigeon taught to peck at one button when shown a picture of a cow, another when shown a picture of a car, can apply this training to cows and cars it never saw before.” All this is true because language is not necessary for concept formation.
If Ngugi’s second postulate is wrong or limited in one way or another, then there’s a high likelihood the whole argument he’s making is limited too. More specifically, the centrality of language in culture has been grossly exaggerated. Culture is often communicated through language, but it can also be passed from one person to another through imitation. People can also have images of themselves and others, including their relationships, arising not from culture but from innate concepts, and even genetics. The concept of human aggression is notable because of its genetic roots. A culture of violence need not follow a process of socialization mediated by language. It can arise naturally through human predisposition to aggression. If this is true, the idea that socialization takes place in the minds of children only is false since genetics too can shape cultures way before the socialization process begins.
Evolution of culture and language
Richard Dawkins originally observed in the “Selfish Gene” that culture evolved through a memetic process similar to natural selection, where successful memes (rhymes with genes) were adopted and replicated faster and more easily than less successful ones. The birth, growth, and death of cultures can be attributed to this memetic process where cultural values and artifacts are adopted or shunned by their hosts depending on their fitness. Human beings are hosts of culture just like we are hosts of a robust microbiome in our guts. We pick or discard what we believe is important to our needs as humans. A cultural meme evolves further if it can beat the natural selection in this memetic world. Female genital mutilation is a cultural meme akin to bad genes and with time, efforts have been put forth to expunge it from the meme pool.
The role of language in preserving the particularities of culture according to Ngugi’s third postulate is also minimal and switching from one language to another doesn’t necessarily mean a disruption of culture and its images and concepts. People’s understanding of their cultures does not change depending on the language they use because the concepts and images inherent in those cultures might not be embedded in the language to begin with. Even when it does, the memetic process is often at play and what we see as death of culture through language is just the normal evolution of culture in a global memetic process unmitigated by our whims.
The word safari is a Kiswahili word that is now part of the English lexicon. But the concept it evokes to a white person is different from the images it triggers to a Kenyan. To a Briton, Safari evokes images of the savanna followed by tourists in a Landcruiser watching game. To a Kenyan, safari evokes images of a journey. The same word evokes diametrical cultural images because the word itself doesn’t communicate culture. Safari is an example of a successful meme similar to words like Alma Mater (Latin: nourishing mother), bandanna (Hindi: to tie), diaspora (Greek: scattering), and paparazzi (Italian: mosquitoes). These words prove to us culture is an open system that invites influences from outside for evolutionary purposes. Culture also does not follow language wherever it goes. Language might travel as culture stays put and sometimes culture travels and language stays home.
The importance of language as communication rather than a vessel for cultural preservation is still profound. Evidence is global and Ngugi acknowledges some of it but fails to face the contradiction it poses to his arguments later on. He uses English as an example and opines that “it is spoken in Britain and in Sweden and Denmark. But for Swedish and Danish people English is only a means of communication with non-Scandinavians. It is not a carrier of their culture.” Similarly, Kenyans speak Kiswahili but they are yet to adopt the Swahili cultures of the East African coast. In both, the languages are merely mediums of communication and not tools for communicating culture. Ergo, Kiswahili won’t be a carrier of African culture if adopted as the primary language of instruction in African schools. So why then does Ngugi believe English poses a serious threat to African cultures while it’s merely used as a mode of communication and the people who use it rarely adopt its cultural baggage?
The fear of English
Ngugi wa Thion’go summed his claims stating that “Language is inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world.” The foundation he had laid allowed him to further his thesis where language plays a central role. He had argued that anybody who controls a people’s language could colonize their minds. However, as I have shown, images and concepts exist in different realms from language. A colonial power can control language, but he cannot control concepts and images because they exist outside language. A colonist who bans the use of the word Safari does not take away the concept of journey from us or the images it evokes.
When George Orwell published “Nineteen Eighty Four” in 1949, the dystopian novel had themes of social control and totalitarianism. It was set in Oceania where Ingsoc was the reigning political ideology. As a totalitarian regime and a surveillance state, it tried to erase history and created Newspeak, which according to Wikipedia is
an artificial, minimalistic language designed to ideologically align thought with the principles of Ingsoc by stripping down the English language in order to make the expression of “heretical” thoughts (i.e. thoughts going against Ingsoc’s principles) impossible.
The idea that language can be used to influence our patterns of thought is called linguistic relativity and has been the subject of this discussion. To influence thoughts and control people, Ingsoc developed doublethink where peace meant war, love was hate, truth was lies, and plenty was scarcity. 2+2 even became 5. But controlling people’s thoughts through language is not easy. As I have shown, mental concepts are not necessarily created or destroyed by words. People still retain the concept and images of love even when the word is flipped to mean hate. Winston Smith demonstrated this reality through his adamance to accept doublethink.
Ngugi wa Thion’go published his book in 1986 and was probably aware of this phenomenon. People’s thoughts don’t always align with the languages they speak which also follows that influence of language on human thought and culture is minimal. But still, Ngugi proceeded to ask an important question “what was the colonialist imposition of a foreign language doing to us children?” In other words, what effect did doublethink and Newspeak have on Winston Smith? His answer was succinct and clear:
Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonized, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world.
This process involved:
the destruction or the deliberate undervaluing of a people’s culture, their art, dances, religions, 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 the colonizing nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonized.
You’ve probably now connected how his arguments lead to these conclusions; that the elevation of English had the opposite effect to our cultures, our beliefs, languages, and even our views of who we are. But that is not true since most aspects of African cultures still remain vibrant and intact despite the adoption of English in countries like Kenya. Those that have died out probably couldn’t survive natural selection. A good example is traditional housing patterns like grass thatched houses which died out as brick and motor became the norm. FGM has also died out even though male circumcision continues with full vibrancy. Local languages are also widely spoken and most Africans can speak more than three languages. A typical Kenyan can speak English, Kiswahili, and mother tongue albeit with varying degrees of fluency. English should not be an enemy. The adoption of Kiswahili as a language of instruction in African schools will not be effective in stopping the wheels of linguistic and cultural evolution. Even though the motives are good, the adoption of Kiswahili will have minimal effects on the status quo. Our cultures, values, beliefs, and even our self esteem will probably remain as they are or will keep changing as a result of influence from global norms.
