Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas

Brilliant thoughts on modern African literature and postcolonial literary criticism from one of the giants of contemporary letters



“One of the greatest writers of our time.” —Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a towering figure in African literature, and his novels A Grain of Wheat, Weep Not, Child, and Petals of Blood are modern classics. Emerging from a literary scene that flourished in the 1950s and ’60s during the last years of colonialism in Africa, he is now known not just as a novelist—one who, in the late ’70s, famously stopped writing novels in English and turned to the language he grew up speaking, Gĩkũyũ—but as a major postcolonial theorist.

In Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas, Ngũgĩ gives us a series of essays that build on the revolutionary ideas about language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity that he set out in his earlier work. In a book that is intricate, nuanced, and accessible, he reaffirms the power of African languages to fight back against both the psychic and material impacts of colonialism, past and present. Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas also explores these themes through chapters on some of Ngũgĩ’s contemporaries, including Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.

A book with immense relevance to our present moment, Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas works both as a wonderful introduction to the enduring themes of Ngũgĩ’s work as well as a vital addition to the library of the world’s greatest and most provocative living writers.