Gikuyu vs English: Ngugi's struggle for linguistic liberation

As we honour the towering legacy of Prof Ngugi wa Thiong’o — his radical defence of African languages and his defiant challenge to colonial cultural domination — we must recognise that this struggle is not merely political or academic. For many of us, it is deeply personal.

When I once shared my story with Ngugi, he listened like someone who had carried the same burdens. He fully understood my struggle. At the end, he simply said, “Never give up the fight.” Those words have never left me.

I was born during Kenya’s fevered push for independence. The air was thick with resistance, the echoes of Mau Mau still fresh. From the beginning, language was a battlefield. It was not just a medium, but a marker of belonging or betrayal—a dividing line between domination and dignity.

At home in the central highlands, Gikuyu was not just a language; it was our essence. It held our proverbs, our music, our prayers, our ancestral logic. English, by contrast, was suspect. It belonged to the coloniser—emotionally cold, politically loaded. To speak it at home was to risk quiet censure. “That is the language of the coloniser,” we were warned.

But when I crossed the schoolyard gate, that entire moral order collapsed. It was 1963, the year of independence. I was a young boy walking several miles from Mathakwaini to Gathuthi in Nyeri, where the school was tied to the church we attended. In class, English reigned with punitive authority. Gikuyu became contraband.

Speaking it invited punishment through the monito—a wooden token passed among students caught using vernacular. At the day’s end, names were called, and whippings administered publicly. These were not just beatings; they were psychological warfare, meant to breed shame and silence.

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To this day, I still vividly remember the sting. But more than that, I remember the confusion. Why was I punished for speaking the only language I truly understood? Even worse were the mischievous boys who baited timid girls into speaking Gikuyu, only to betray them. This was not education. It was indoctrination.

We imagined independence would bring linguistic liberation. Instead, repression deepened, only now we were enforcing it ourselves. English, once resented, became revered. Parents who had once resisted it now promoted it zealously. Gikuyu proverbs vanished. English crept into our homes, our churches, our dreams.

In churches, we belted out hymns in English, often without understanding a word. Even today, we laugh at how we mispronounced them. The sacred became foreign. Prayer lost its intimacy. The coloniser’s tongue became the medium for reaching God. To some extent, we were made to believe God could not understand Gikuyu. If we wanted our prayers to reach Him, we had to pray in English.

Eventually, English became a class marker. Parents boasted, “My child understands Gikuyu but cannot speak it,” as though fluency in one’s ancestral tongue were an embarrassment. Children who couldn’t string together a sentence in Gikuyu were seen as modern, elite, global.

But my reckoning came. And it came in the pages of ‘Decolonising the Mind’. Ngugi articulated what I had long felt but never named: colonialism was not just about land or borders—it was a war on memory and meaning. The eradication of indigenous languages was the first act of conquest. To dominate a people’s mind, steal their words. Ngugi became more than a literary hero. He became a mentor. In our many conversations, he repeated one truth above all: “If you know all the languages of the world and do not know your mother tongue, that is enslavement. But if you know your mother tongue, you can learn any other language. The beginning must always be your mother tongue.”

Those words haunted me. I had taught, written, even dreamed in English—while my Gikuyu, neglected and bruised, faded into silence. But Ngugi challenged me. Before he passed, he asked me to write a poem in Gikuyu. We worked on the first three lines together—line by line, word by word. Something dormant awoke. Something revolutionary.

Eventually, I completed a long romantic poem for my wife. It felt like I was courting her again—this time in our mother tongue. It sounded sweet. It felt good. I felt liberated. She laughed with joy. Ngugi said, “It feels good, doesn’t it?” Then, he added, “You cannot stop.”

And I have not. Outside the home, children and youth instinctively speak English for survival. But inside our home, we made a deliberate choice. Gikuyu would be our language—not out of nostalgia, but defiance. A reclamation.

Even now, when I visit Kenya, some are surprised that I still speak it fluently after years abroad, as though language should be shed like an old coat at the gates of modernity.

But I know better. To decolonise the mind is to confront the internalised hierarchies we have inherited. It means resisting the seductive prestige of English and daring to recover the languages our ancestors whispered, sang, and prayed in. It means refusing to be a stranger in your own soul.

And so I remain between Gikuyu and English—not in exile, but in resistance. In reclamation. In hope. As Ngugi reminded us, again and again: The journey to liberation must begin with the mother tongue.

-The writer is a professor at Florida Gulf Coast University, US