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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o’s Language(s) of African Literature

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One of the most fundamental problems newly emerged national literatures and writers in Africa have had to face in the post-colonial era has been to decide in which language to write in order to appeal to both the native readers in their recently independent countries and to large (international) publishing houses that would foster the sales of their books overseas. An unequivocal decision was difficult to make since, on the one hand, in majority, they wanted to be faithful to family vernacular traditions but, on the other, they wished to disseminate their message to a broader audience in the Western world. This paper, then, attempts to uncover the ideas contained in Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature ([1981] 2005) and, to a lesser extent, Chinua Achebe’s “The African Writer and the English Language” (1975) in regard to these dilemmas.