According to What You've Read by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

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"Linguistic communication…has a dual graphic symbol: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture," writes Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o in contemplating why language is powerful. The power of a linguistic communication does non only prevarication in speaking it but likewise in using it to create and transmit culture through time.

Some of Ngũgĩ'due south clearest utterances almost language are in Decolonizing the Listen. I of his major contributions to the word of African languages is his thought that language is a systemic issue. Language is equally powerful as the institutions it animates and which animates information technology in plough. Information technology is one thing to speak Yoruba at home and quite a different thing to teach in a school organisation where Yoruba is the primary language of pedagogy, where physics textbooks are in Yoruba, and where a library containing 2 million documents and books are all in Yoruba. Speaking Yoruba is great, but establishing Yoruba inside institutional spaces where  information technology grounds the production of noesis is fifty-fifty better.

Literature is ane such institution. Today, African language literature dwells at the margins of a literary civilization and manufacture that seems immovably centered on European languages. To be clear, this essay is not about critiquing the use of European languages in African literature, in function, because I find those debates and controversies ho-hum. They are ideologically-driven and end up reducing circuitous cultural and historical forces to questions of identity and actuality: Does literature written in European languages count equally African literature? Then yous have those on the other extreme who merits that English is an African language. I want to motility on from these ways of formulating the trouble. I desire to gear up aside ideology for a second so that I can see clearly what the real stakes are.  Afterwards all, we've had these quarrels for decades and yet nothing has changed. The fact is that no matter where nosotros stand on the so-called language controversy, nosotros can agree that African language literatures urgently need to be centered in African literary culture. In other words, nosotros can all write in whatever linguistic communication we delight and even so invest in African language literature. Those are non two mutually exclusive things. The problem was never that Achebe wrote in English and saw all kinds of value in doing and so. The trouble is that Achebe and many in his generation did not practise enough to include African language literatures in the culture, in the industry, in the market. Take the African novel for instance. In The Rising of the African Novel, Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ suggests that the decision to go along African language novels out was strategic. In an attempt to consolidate the African novel into a global form, competing forms of the novel were excluded then that the realist novel in English language came to be the dominant form of African literary expression. The more global the African novel became, the less information technology seemed worth information technology cultivating the local reading cultures that served African language novels. It turns out that in the 1950s and 60s when African literature written in European languages were taking off, African language literature was left behind. The question is how practise we reverse this unfortunate history?

In some countries, African language literature is older than literature in European languages. Thomas Mofolo was writing at the plow of the 20th century. Kickoff in 1906, his novels were initially published as serials in Leselinyana, a local paper published in the Sesotho language. A year ago while was drafting a chapter in my book, I read English translations of letters to the editor sent in response to Mofolo's controversial book Chaka. These letters gave me a glimpse into Sesotho reading culture at the time, how vibrant it was, how engaged these readers were. Similar trends were taking place in Lagos with Yoruba journals, in Nairobi, and other places. Today, with the exception of Hausa linguistic communication, Swahili, and a few others, African language literature has get curiosities you lot run across in special collections athenaeum in university libraries. Even with Swahili literature, we could do so much more than to build it into a richer, more than diverse cultural ecosystem. I beloved the work that the Mabati Cornell Kiswahili Prize, Jalada, the African Books Collective, Munyori Literary Journal, Afrolit San Frontiere, Imbiza Periodical and others are doing to build the civilisation, but more is needed.

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One area where African linguistic communication literatures lack every kind of institutional influence is in translation. When we talk well-nigh the problems facing African language literary culture, we tend to focus on texts originally written in these languages, not on translations, which nowadays a far more dismal movie. 1 of the greatest scandals of modern literature is that an Igbo translation of Things Fall Apart has not been published. Word on the streets says that at that place are translations out there. They just haven't been published. In whatsoever case, an Igbo translation of Things Fall Autonomously should non just exist but should too have considerable impact on the civilization around the book. Simply it's non just Things Fall Apart. What of Keen Expectations? What of The Kamasutra? What of Isaac Newton? Why isn't there a Swahili translation of Game of Thrones, a Yoruba translation of Dear, a Shona translation of Sex and the City? African languages are translated into European languages, only never the other way round, except in cases such as the bible with its legacies of colonialism. In Nations Negres et Culture, Cheikh Antar Diop translates a short excerpt of Einstein's Theory of Relativity into Wolof. He wanted to prove that African languages could handle the almost abstract philosophical thought. Of course they can! That shouldn't be the point of contention. The existent value of Diop's experiment is that it shows us the cost of depriving African languages of the ability of translation. When language B is translated into linguistic communication A, the translation benefits language A because the translated linguistic communication enriches the translating language. For instance, imagine all the new words and images that would take to be invented to translate Einstein's Theory of Relativity into Igbo. Igbo stands to gain far more from the translation than English language. Ngũgĩ unashamedly calls this uneven relationship a kind of "preying." "How," he asks:

"can we enrich our languages? How can we "prey," on the rich humanist and autonomous heritage in the struggles of other peoples in other times and other places to enrich our own? Why not, accept Balzac, Tolstoy, Sholokov, Brecht, Lu Hsun, Pablo Neruda, H. C. Anderson, Kim Chi. Ha, Marx, Lenin, Albert Einstein, Galileo, Aeschylus, Aristotle and Plato in African languages?"

I adopt to call up of translation less equally preying (I bristle at the fierce imagery) and more as an openness to the riches offered past others. Every language is a storehouse of cultural, metaphysical, and linguistic treasures. Translating texts in other languages into African languages is how we partake of the global substitution of these treasures.

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It is common to pose the question of African language literature as a controversy, a line drawn between Achebe and his supporters on the i paw, Ngũgĩ and his militants on the other. The arguments accept been updated over the decades, merely we still come back to that founding debate. It'south fourth dimension to move on from the controversy so that we can take on the chore. Fourth dimension is of the essence. African language literature suffers from infrastructural bug resulting from over a century-long neglect that needs to be urgently reversed.

Stakeholders who claim that at that place is no marketplace for African language literatures are missing the importance of chapters building. Imagine how things would have been different if the last 100 years had been spent building on the momentum set up off past Mofolo's generation: cultivating markets, setting upward literary prizes, training writers and translators, expanding literacy, advocating for government policies, and networking with global institutions. As someone who runs a literary platform, I've been thinking a lot about these issues. What part can Brittle Newspaper play in making space for African language literature? This is a question that everyone—publishers, critics, authors (regardless of what linguistic communication you lot write in) should exist asking.

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Source: https://brittlepaper.com/2021/08/what-ngugi-wa-thiongo-taught-me-about-the-power-of-language-to-transform-culture/