ngugi wa thiong’o
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Which books have been important in your life? And how did you, the son of a peasant, get to write one in the Kenya of the ’60s? While growing up, we had no books in Gĩkũyũ, my mother tongue. The Bible’s Old Testament became my book of stories. In high school, when I saw a…
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“Literature is the honey of a nation’s soul, preserved for her children to taste forever, a little at a time! Gikuyu said that he who has put something aside never goes hungry. Do you think Gikuyu was a fool when he said that? A nation that has cast away its literature is a nation that…
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From the chapter The Language of African Literature: […] African languages refused to die. They would not simply go the way of Latin to become the fossils for linguistic archaeology to dig up, classify, and argue about the international conferences. These languages, these national heritages of Africa, were kept alive by the peasantry. The peasantry…
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For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria: I’ve started reading this already but have been interrupted by other reading interludes: A Thousand Splendid Suns; Something Torn and New; I, Alex Cross; The Epic of Askia Mohammed; Our Sister Killjoy. I’ll be discussing some of them in later posts as they do fit the…
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Word Press Tags: tichaona chinyelu, ngugi wa thiong’o, linguicide, something torn and new “Africans, in the diaspora and on the continent, were soon to be recipients of this linguistic logic of conquest, with two results: linguicide in the case of the diaspora and linguistic famine, or linguifam, on the continent. Linguicide is the linguistic equivalent of genocide. Genocide involves…
Tichaona Chinyelu 