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“While we were busy haranguing the ruling circles in a language which automatically excluded the participation of the peasantry and the working class in the debate, imperialist culture and African reactionary forces had a field day: the Christian bible is available in unlimited quantities in even the tiniest African language. The comprador ruling cliques are also quite happy to have the peasantry and the working all to themselves: distortions, dictatorial directives, decrees, museum-type fossils paraded as African culture, feudalistic ideologies, superstition, lies, all these backward elements and more are communicated to the African masses in their own languages without any challenges from those with alternative visions of tomorrow who have deliberately cocooned themselves in English, French, and Portuguese. It is ironic that the most reactionary African politician, the one who believed in selling African to Europe is often a master of African languages; that the most zealous European missionary believed in rescuing Africa from itself, even from the paganism of its languages, were nevertheless masters of African languages, which the often reduced to writing. The European missionary believed too much in his mission of conquest not to communicate it in the languages most readily available to the people: the African writer believes too much in ‘African Literature’ to write it in those ethnic, divisive and under-developed languages of the peasantry!”
Excerpts from the first chapter of Ngugi wa Thiong’o book entitled The Language of African Literature-pg26
