Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature

Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature is a nonfiction book published in 1986 by the Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. In the Introduction, titled “Towards the Universal Language of Struggle,” Ngũgĩ writes: “This book, is a summary of some of the issues in which I have been passionately involved for the last twenty years of my practice in fiction, theatre, criticism, and in teaching literature” (1). Decolonising the Mind is a series of essays based on Ngũgĩ’s lectures that explore the key themes that have preoccupied the author between the 1960s and the 1980s: theatre, language, politics, literature, and the history of the colonization of the African continent. In writing "Decolonising the Mind," Ngũgĩ drew on his experiences of imprisonment and exile following the production of a controversial 1977 play that challenged the authoritarian status quo in Kenya.