Campaign for mother tongues, Wa Thiong’O tells Africans

Campaign for mother tongues, Wa Thiong’O tells Africans
  By Prisca Sam-Duru 

Kenyan literary icon, Professor Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, has advised Africans to resist every effort by their governments to criminalise Africa native languages. According to him, preventing people from speaking or writing in their mother tongues is the easiest way for them to lose their identities. Professor Wa Thiong’O gave the advice while sharing his prison experience at the 2016 Ake Arts and Books Festival at the June 12 Cultural Centre, Kuto, Abeokuta, Ogun State.



 Speaking on the topic, Prison Stories and Literature of Resistance, the famous writer, who disclosed that he discovered his ability to write in his mother tongue, Gikuyu, during his incarceration by the then Kenyan President, Jomo Kenyetta, condemned the idea of preventing children from using native languages in school. He said: “The time has come for Africans to campaign against criminalisation of our native languages. This was a strategy used by the colonial masters to control their subjects. “They started by imposing their names and languages on their subjects to destroy their naming system, discon-nect them from their names and languages: this is a practical means of mental subjugation.”