Algunas citas del libro de Wa Thiong´o, Ngugi, (2005), Decolonising the Mind. The politics of
language in African Literature, James Curry, Oxford, Estados Unidos.
Cultural bomb
The effect f a cultural bomb is to
annihilate a people´s belief in their names, in their languages, in their
environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities
and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of
non-achivement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland.
It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from
themselves; for instance, with other people´s languages rather than their own.
p.3
Language as culture is the collective
memory bank of a people´s experience in history. Culture is almost
indistinguishable from the language that makes possible its genesis, growth,
banking, articulation and indeed its transmission from one generation to the
next.
(…)
Language as culture is thus mediating
between me and my own self; between my own self and other selves; between me
and nature. Language is mediating in my very being.
(…)
Writen literature and orature are the
main means by which a particular language transmits the images of the world
contained in the culture it carries.
p. 15
How people perceive themselves
affects how they look at their culture, at their politics and the social
production of wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and to other
beings. Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings
with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship
to the world
p.16
The real language of African theatre
could only be found among the people –the peasantry in particular- in their
life, history and struggles.
p. 41
Social life itself arises out of the
contradiction between man and nature. But man is part of nature. Karl Marx
said: “He opposes himself to nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion
arms, legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to
appropriate nature to his own wants. By thus acting on the external nature and
changing it, he at the same time changes is own nature”. Drama encapsulates
within itself this principle of the struggle of opposites which generates
movement.
p.54
Education, far from giving people the
confidence in their ability and capacities to overcome obstacles or to become
masters of the laws governing external nature as human beings, tends to make
them feel their inadequacies, their weakness and their incapacities in the face
of reality; and their inability to do anything about the conditions governing
their lives.
p. 56
Dance, mime, song were more dominant
than words in telling this story of repression and resistance. P. 58.
It is true that imperialism –trough
its heritage of a highly developing science and technology, its amassing of
enormous productive forces through a reorganization of the labour of millions
under eighteenth and nineteeth century mercantile and industrial
capital-brought to Africa the possibilites of knowing and mastering that world
of nature. But at the same time it denied the conquered races and peoples the
means of knowing and mastering that world. On the contrary their land were
confiscated, their people often killed by a civilization that had wiped out
populations and civilizations in America,
New Zeland and Australia.
Thus the very means and basis of a progressive ordering of their own lives were
taken away from them. The elaborate systems worked out to cope with nature and
with one another were often destroyed, leaving human beings at mercy of a
social order more cruel and more incomprehensible in its chaos, its illogically
and its contradictions than nature itself.
p.66
Capitalism and the development of
science and technology introduced the possibilities of the conquest of nature:
capitalism by is uncontrolled use and exploitation of natural resources ensured
the virtual dominance of nature over man by way of droughts and
desertification.
p.66
In the peasantry and the working
class who are changing language all the time in pronunciations, in forming new
dialects, new words, new phrases and new expressions. In the hands of the
peasantry and the working class, language is changing all the time, it is never
standstill
p. 68
Since literature, like religion and
other areas of culture, is a reflection of the world of nature and human
community, the outlook of a critic in real life will profoundly affect their
interpretation of the reflected reality
p.104
