Writing in Crisis: Ethics and History in Gordimer, Ndebele and Coetzee Book

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o had already published four acclaimed novels in English when, in 1977, he gave up the language as a vehicle for fiction. A few years later he published this polemic, which he said would be his last writing in English in any genre.

Consequently, he's now probably even more famous among sociolinguists than students of literature, because Decolonising the Mind is a rare example of a top practitioner setting out a total rationale, complete with backstory and running examples, of the political and cultural implications of choosing one language over another.

It would be possible to argue on purely artistic grounds that a local language is simply better at describing certain things - the rhythms of daily life, say, or regional wildlife - than another. But what makes Ngũgĩ's argument so powerful is that his grounds are not artistic, but political. Writing in Kikuyu may give him access to new and interesting aesthetic effects, but that's not why he does it - he does it to resist cultural appropriation and to target a more primary audience.

There's always been a big irony in literature from former colonies that uses a colonial language - what Ngũgĩ calls 'Afro-European' literature, a useful term that I'm happy to adopt. Abroad, it's often praised in proportion to how well it shows us the details of different, alien lives, and yet it's obviously aimed at us, not them: the people described are often exactly those excluded from reading it. Chinua Achebe's descriptions of yam farmers in Nigeria will rarely be read by yam farmers in Nigeria, because most of them can't read English.

Ngũgĩ had a crisis about this after writing his third novel, A Grain of Wheat (still the only one of his that I've so far read).

I knew whom I was writing about but whom was I writing for? The peasants whose struggles fed the novel would never read it.

There's an obvious answer, of course, which is that people write in order to communicate ideas, and writing in a major world language communicates your ideas more widely than doing so in a small regional language. Six or seven million people speak Kikuyu, whereas four hundred million speak English natively and probably almost as many again as a second language. The implications of this are not just remunerative - though that's no small consideration - they're also practical, if you're interested in influencing bigger audiences.

Nevertheless, for Ngũgĩ this is an argument for having a better translation culture, not for the abandonment of a writer's native language. The attempt to wrangle African languages into English has been invigorating and transformative for English - one thinks of Amos Tutuola or Ben Okri - but, at the end of the day, why the hell should we be benefitting at the expense of other languages? 'We cannot have our cake and eat it,' he says.

Why, we may ask, should an African writer, or any writer, become so obsessed by taking from his mother-tongue to enrich other tongues?

It's a fair point. For Ngũgĩ, there's little difference between a postcolonial English enriching itself from African languages, and a colonial England enriching itself from African labour or resources. The problem is circular, because the lack of literatures in many smaller languages leads to an assumption, even from native speakers, that they are unable to support a literature, let alone a world literature. But if addressing that misconception is not the job of writers, whose job is it?

We African writers are bound by our calling to do for our languages what Spencer, Milton and Shakespeare did for English; what Pushkin and Tolstoy did for Russian; indeed what all writers in world history have done for their languages by meeting the challenge of creating a literature in them, which process later opens the languages for philosophy, science, technology and all the other areas of human creative endeavours.

As an English-speaker, one reads this book with, first of all, a renewed sense of gratitude that so many writers have in fact chosen to write in English, along with a troubling re-evaluation of why they felt it was necessary to do so. At the very least everyone should agree that more translated fiction should be out there, and not just coming from the major languages. Ngũgĩ is one of the few big writers putting his money where his mouth is by writing only in his native tongue, but even he's had to make concessions: his major work, Wizard of the Crow (Mũrogi wa Kagogo), was translated into English by Ngũgĩ himself, so he did actually write the text of the English novel that everyone's reading. If that's not having your cake and eating it, I'm not sure what is.