Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Tyranny of Language | by Francis Wade | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Tyranny of Language | by Francis Wade | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books: Thirty years after graduating from his missionary-run high school near Nairobi, the Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o had gained enough distance to reflect on the lasting effect of colonial education policy in Kenya. “Behind the cannon was the new school,” he wrote in Decolonising the Mind, the 1986 exposition on cultural imperialism in which he examined how the colonial classroom became a tool of psychological conquest in Africa and beyond. “Better than the cannon, it made the conquest permanent,” he wrote. “The cannon forces the body and the school fascinates the soul.”