Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas

Part One

Decolonizing Language

1

Decolonizing Education

Since the publication of my book Decolonizing the Mind in 1986, I have seen, over the years, increasing global interest in issues of decolonization and the unequal power relationships between languages. In 2018, the same issues took me to Limerick, Munster, Ireland, for a conference celebrating 125 years since the foundation of the Gaelic League in 1893.

The league was dedicated to the revival of Gaelic, or Irish, which, by then, in its own country, had become subordinate to the dominant English. Despite many efforts, including official government support for its revival, Irish is still subordinate to English. More Irish speak and use English than they do Irish. Some of the most iconic Irish writers, like W.B. Yeats and James Joyce, wrote in English, and they are studied as part of the canon of English literature. I cannot conceive of an English department anywhere in the world, including Britain itself, without courses in these writers of Irish origins. They have become some of the greatest contributors to English literature.

This unequal power relationship between the two languages in favor of the English was not always the case. The early English settlers in Ireland, Munster in particular, gravitated toward Irish, because, by all accounts, in the beginnings of English settlement, particularly between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries, the Irish language was the more endowed in classical learning. Naturally, those early settlers were drawn to the more vibrant Irish tongue. Their gravitation made sense: Irish was the majority tongue, spoken by those among whom the English planters had settled.

London acted, and beginning with the 1366 Statutes of Kilkenny, it passed edicts aimed at protecting the English language against the subversive encroachment of Irish or Gaelic, reinforcing, by law, the use of English, while literally criminalizing Irish. Among other things, the Kilkenny Statutes threatened to confiscate any lands of any English or any Irish living among them who would use Irish among themselves, contrary to the ordnance. These policies were given a literary and philosophical rationale by no other than the poet Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queen and himself a settler in Munster. In his book A View of the Present State of Ireland, published in 1596, he argued that language and naming systems were the best means of bringing about the erasure of Irish memory: It hath ever been the use of the conqueror to despise the language of the conquered, and to force him by all means to learn his.

The marginal status of Irish in its own land did not come about by some kind of natural evolution of language. Its decline in its own land was brought about through conscious political acts and educational policies.

Ireland, it has been observed, was England’s first settler colony. It became a kind of laboratory for other English settler colonies that followed. And what was true for Ireland and other English colonies was equally so for other colonial systems, whether Spanish, French, or Portuguese, or the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. It is also true in the case of domestic colonialism, like the Norwegian suppression of the language of Sami people, and variations of the same in other Scandinavian countries. The suppression of the languages of the dominated and the elevation of the language of conquest and domination were integral to the education system, which accompanied conquest and colonial occupation.

Linguistic suppression was not undertaken for the aesthetic joy of doing so. Spenser was clear that the colonization of the Irish language and naming system would make the Irish forget who they were, weaken their resistance, and therefore make it easier for the English to conquer and subdue them. Language conquest, unlike the military form, wherein the victor must subdue the whole population directly, is cheaper and more effective: the conqueror has only to invest in capturing the minds of the elite, who will then spread submission to the rest of the population. The elite become part of the linguistic army of the conqueror.

Because of its centrality in the making of modern Britain, India became, even more than Ireland, a social laboratory, whose results were later exported to other colonies in Asia and Africa. Thomas Babington Macaulay, as a member of the Supreme Council of India from 1834 to 1838, helped reform the colony’s education system as well as draw up its penal code; both activities have a special significance. In his famous 1835 Minutes on Indian Education, Macaulay advocated the replacement of Sanskrit and Persian with English as the language of education in order to form a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.

Eighty-seven years later, Macaulay’s words would be repeated in colonial Kenya by the then British governor, Sir Philip Mitchell. In outlining a policy for English language dominance in African education literally as a moral crusade to supplement the armed crusade against the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, a liberation army the British called Mau Mau, he saw this new language education as bringing about a civilized state in which the values and standards are to be the values and standards of Britain, in which every one, whatever his origins, has an interest and a part. In 1879, Captain Richard Henry Pratt founded the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he devised his own variant of the method for Native American children, less than twenty miles across the scenic Susquehanna River from the steps of the state capitol in Harrisburg. In 1892, he summed up the philosophy behind the boarding school: Kill the Indian in him, and save the man. His education program followed the same colonial pattern: uproot a few from their mother tongue, which is spoken by most of their people, mold them anew in the language of conquest, and then unleash them on the governed masses.

In his book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney quotes Pierre Foncin, a founder of the Alliance Française, an institution specifically created in 1883 for the propagation of the national language in the colonies and abroad, as being very clear about the goal of the mission. It was necessary to attach the colonies to the Metropole by a very solid psychological bond against the day when their progressive emancipation ends in a form of federation as is probable—that they be and they remain French in language, thought and spirit.¹

The goal was very clear. Imperial educational policies were meant to create colonies of the mind, among the elite of the colonized. The success of these policies is undeniable. A variation of the Irish situation, where even after independence, the intellectuals express themselves more fluently in the language of imperial conquest than in the languages from their own country, is present in every postcolonial situation. In the case of Africa, you even hear the identity of the continent being described in terms of Europhonity: Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone, mainly. Even where the elite are nationalistic and assertive of their independence, they find it easier to express their outrage and hopes in the languages of imperial conquest. Ninety percent of the monies allocated for language education goes to pamper imperial languages. Ninety percent of the population still speaks African languages anyway. Some governments even view African languages as enemies of progress. They believe that imperial languages are really the gateway to global modernity.

Under normal circumstances, it would sound odd to hear that French literature can only be written in Japanese, or English literature in IsiZulu, so that when you meet a French writer who writes in French, you look at them in surprise: Why on earth are you writing in French? Or an English writer writing in English: Why are you not writing in Zulu? And yet this absurdity is expected of African writers and writers from those formerly colonized.

How did this absurdity come about? It is not that those languages are more of language than any other. And under any circumstances, to know more languages can only empower the person. But this was not the case in colonial contexts or any context in which there is a dominating and dominated. It was never a case of adding a new language to what one already had. For the colonial conqueror, it was not enough to introduce an additional language to any community. Imperial languages had to be planted on the graveyard of the languages of the dominated. The death of African languages gave life to European languages. In order for the imperial language to be, the language of the colonized had to cease to be. Amnesia for African languages; anamnesis for European languages.

These two conditions are not inherent in the character of the languages involved. They are mental conditions consciously brought about by how the imperial languages were imposed.

In Decolonizing the Mind, I have talked about the corporal punishment meted out to African children caught speaking an African language at school, children who were then made to carry a placard around the neck proclaiming their stupidity. In some cases, the culprit was made to swallow filth, thus associating African languages with criminality, pain, and filth. This was not just in Africa.

In his 2015 testimony to the Waitangi Tribunal about his experiences of school in New Zealand, Dover Samuels, a Maori politician, tells a similar story. Caught speaking Maori in the school, he said, You’d be hauled out in front of the rest of the class . . . and told to bend over. . . . You’d bend over and he’d stand back and give you, what they called it then, six of the best. . . . On many occasions, not only did it leave bruises behind on my thighs but drew blood.²

The Sami people in Norway went through a similar experience in the period between 1870 and 1970—what they call the brutal century—in an attempt to turn them into fluent Norwegian-language speakers.

Similar violence against native languages is the running theme in the spread of English in the rest of Ireland and in Scotland and Wales. In Wales those who spoke Welsh in the school compound were made to stand in front of the class, with a placard reading welsh not hanging from their neck.

Violence was central in creating the psychological bond of language, culture, and thought: colonies of the mind. You would think that after liberation and independence, the new nations, at the very least, would dismantle that unequal power relationship. But that is precisely the power of the colonies of the mind: negativity toward self has become internalized as a way of looking at reality.

It is a classic case of conditioning you will find in manuals of behavioral psychology. Conditioning is a system of reward and punishment, punishment for undesired behavior and reward for the desired behavior. It is often used in various degrees of intensity in bringing up children or taming animals. The undesired behavior becomes associated with punishment, and hence pain; the desired behavior, with reward, and hence pleasure. The object of conditioning, a child or an animal, comes to automatically avoid the space of pain, the forbidden behavior, and gravitate toward the space of pleasure, the required behavior. In the case of learning, one became the recipient of glory for excelling in the language of conquest, but the recipient of a gory mess for uttering even a single word in one’s mother tongue. One’s mother tongue became the space of pain, to be avoided, and the conquering language becomes the space of pleasure, to be desired.

In the end, the conditioned develop a Pavlovian consciousness, wherein even the sound associated with rewards or punishment can make the mouth water in anticipation of pleasure or make the mouth dry up at the prospect of pain. The trauma experienced by the first generation of the conditioned can be passed on as normal behavior that needs no explanation or justification; the later generations may not even understand why they associate pain with native and pleasure with foreign languages and cultures. In the case of language, the elite and educational planners of the formerly colonized societies assume that European (imperial) languages are inherently global and best able to carry intelligence and universality. That assumption may also explain why criminalizing African languages continues to this day, now administered and enforced by African educationists who don’t see the irony of what they are doing: an African punishing another African for speaking an African language, by order of an African government.

The trauma initially wrought by the colonial education system is thus passed on, inherited. Abnormality becomes normalized. The normalized abnormality is nationalized as the desirable goal of education.

The colony of the mind prevents meaningful, nationally empowering innovations in education. The control by the colonizer of the colonized is inherent in the inequality of the education system. Education may become a process of mystifying the cognitive process and even knowledge.

Here we need to make a distinction between education and knowledge. Knowledge is a question of continuously adding to what we already know in a dialectical play of mutual impact and illumination. The normal cognitive process starts from the known and heads toward the unknown. Every new step makes more of the unknown known and therefore adds to what is already known. The new known enriches the already known, and so on, in a continuous journey of making dialectically related connections. Knowledge of the world begins where one is.

Education, on the other hand, is a mode of conditioning people to make them fit into, and function in, a given society. It may involve transference of knowledge, but it is conditioned knowledge, branded by the world outlook of the educator and the education system. A careful study of the colonial process, as a particular instance of the dominant and the dominated, the master and the servant, can be useful in thinking about balanced and inclusive education. Colonial education was never balanced or inclusive. It has been a question of drawing lessons from the negative.

The colonial process was always a negation of the normal cognitive process. Imperial Europe—its names, its geography, its history, its knowledge—was always seen as the starting point of the educational journey of the colonized. In short, colonization, in the area of education, was always predicated on the negation of the colonized space as the starting point of knowledge. In the area of language, it meant a negation of native languages as valid sources of knowledge and means of intellectual and artistic inquiry. The lack of roots in our base creates a state of permanent uncertainty about our relationship to where we are, to our abilities, even to our achievements.

Decolonization must be at the heart of any balanced and inclusive education. Both the formerly colonizing and the formerly colonized are affected by the colonial system that has shaped the globe