Linguicide In Ngugi: The Language Of The African Language
Linguicide
The intense feeling and passion that permeates the book does not in any way blind the argument about the colonization of the mind which is laid with clarity and cogency. The work also mentions how the colonizer came armed with Bible and the gun. The speakers of local languages were made to feel ashamed of their own languages. However, to do this, they themselves became masters of African languages, reducing them to writing and authoring the first ever dictionaries and grammars in these languages. They talked to the colonies being oral culture and yet put the Christian Bible in unlimited quantities in even the tiniest African language. The language of the colonizer became the language of education and culture, and of institutions
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There was an “epistemological break” that made reflection on their own lives impossible which lead to the dulling sensibilities and to the loss of creativity.
Ngugi trusts that when you delete a people's dialect, you eradicate their memory. What's more, individuals without recollections are rudderless, detached to their own particular histories and society, impersonates who have put their recollections in a "psychic tomb" in the mixed up conviction that on the off chance that they ace their colonizer's dialect, they will possess it. Ngugi is persuaded that by receiving outside dialects bolt, stock and barrel, Africans are submitting a "linguicide", which, basically, has murdered off their recollections as a people, as a society and as a general public. Since deletion of memory is a condition for fruitful absorption, the internment of African dialects by Africans themselves guaranteed that the digestion procedure into pilgrim society was finished. Ngugi calls this marvel a "desire to die" that happens in social orders which have never completely recognized their misfortune—like
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Indeed, even in schools, English is viewed as the primary dialect and it is utilized to break the agreement with the mother dialect. Because of this, "learning, for a frontier youngster, turned into a cerebral action and not a sincerely felt experience". This prompts all out separation between the composed dialects instructed in school and dialect talked at home. The concordance with the local dialect is broken, and this outcomes in pioneer estrangement. This estrangement is improved by keeping Europe as the focal point of the universe and pioneer youngster is made to look upon him from the European perspective. They take a gander at the world from Euro-driven perspective and it appears to them "the earth moved around the European scholarly insightful pivot". African dialects are prohibited in schools and are viewed as second rate in contrast with European dialects. Broken into nine sections, through Decolonising The Mind, Ngugi examines the force of writing in African dialects and the devastating way of keeping on writing in Euro-American dialects (call this Afro-European writing, not African writing) while attempting to decolonize through a blend of individual diary, hypothetical treatise and theoretical
Creating African Americans Chapter 1 Summary
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1753 Words | 8 PagesMoreover, Western civilization became the ideal civilization, and became way superior to African “civilization.” As a consequence, African tradition became perceived as primitive, outmoded, and sadly not welcomed by the rest of the world. Unfortunately, a lot of Africans experienced a trend of a dying out culture. (2) It can be implied that even the Africans’ self-perception dropped because the only lifestyle they knew was suddenly taken away from them and they were taught that it was substandard. Therefore, the indigenous inhabitants of the colonies, the Africans, had to adapt to a new, “superlative” culture and view it as more sophisticated than theirs.
Things Fall Apart Post Colonialism Analysis
1837 Words | 8 PagesS. Naipaul and J. M. Coetzee these Post-colonial writers have all dealt with Africa in their own individual and unique ways. Achebe does not treat the African culture and ways of life as something hybrid, complex, dependant for its significance on the Western style of perceiving things or neither has he shown Africa to be existing only in relation to its difference from or consonance with the Western form of religion, culture, identity, and discourse. The major theme of the novel ‘Things Fall Apart’ centers around the destruction of Africa’s intricate, almost incomprehensible but unique way of life and culture in the wake of British colonization and forced or maneuvered conversion to Christianity. The administrative as well as religious changes that the British tries to impose upon the native Africans has the disastrous effects of uprooting the indigenous people from their original root and tradition and can be seen as some instruments of subjugation, subordination and subservience which starts with creating distrust, doubts and insecurity in the minds of people for their Igbo tradition, and its cultural and religious practices and ends with making them internalize the Christian way of life and British administrative apparatuses. Another theme that is explored in this novel is the inherent fault of the central character Okonkwo, who is ambitious, industrious, honest, masculine but is rash, and unthinking and his sense of self and identity is wholly dependent on the approval of others in his community and he thinks of anything that intrudes into it as a threat and he tries hard to be a man though in a flawed manner.
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