Rewrite the English department: Lessons in radical decolonisation

Cornell University, an elite Ivy League institution in upstate New York, made history in early September when its English department became the first in the United States to change its name to reflect the global diversity of those writing in the English language. Staff at the department voted overwhelmingly to change “English Literature” to “Literatures in English” – a symbolic shift away from an overwhelming focus on England. Carole Boyce Davies, professor of English and Africana Studies, hailed it as a landmark moment in the decolonisation of English literature. She said English departments were often like “colonial relics stuck in time”, retaining a formidable streak of eurocentrism, a legacy of the discipline’s central role in Britain’s so-called “civilising mission”. Boyce Davies jointly proposed the move in response to the slaying of George Floyd, whose death at the hands of policemen in Minneapolis in May provoked a global groundswell of protest, as well as a wider reckoning about the continued reverberations of white supremacy and empire. The racism that led to Floyd’s death was forged in the academy, she said. “As academics we are responsible for maintaining the order of knowledge and then transferring this to students who then go out into society. “Whether they go onto Wall Street or into advertising, become politicians, run election campaigns or enter the police force, they reproduce what we teach them. It’s a vicious cycle,” she added. Cornell University Arts Quad [Photo courtesy of Cornell University]Set among the evergreens and towering waterfalls of Ithaca, Cornell has a long history of social activism. Its founding principle that “any person can find instruction in any study”, meant that it was one of the few universities in the 19th century to admit both male and female Black students. In 1969, after a student occupation, it became the first to introduce Africana studies – the study of Africa and the diaspora. Just more than 10 years before that, Toni Morrison, the African American novelist and Nobel Laureate, graduated from its English department. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the recently deceased supreme court judge graduated from Cornell in the 1950s and was taught there by American-Russian novelist Vladimir Nobokov. Mukoma wa Ngugi, a Cornell English professor and novelist, said it was a sign the “marginalised could no longer be ignored”. But he added there was still work to be done to create diversity in the field and across the university. Cornell’s decision has also been welcomed by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan literary colossus. Ngugi, who is often tipped to win the Nobel Prize in literature, told Al Jazeera the renaming “opens up to more literary streams in their own right, not just under the umbrella of English literature”. “I hope other universities follow suit,” he said. Cornell President James A Perkins addresses a crowd in April, 1969. Six years earlier, Perkins launched a committee to increase enrolment of African-American students at Cornell – the first of its kind at a major US university [Photo courtesy of Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University] Ngugi wa Thiong’o and the start of a movement Ngugi’s intervention is notable. Not only because Mukoma, who co-sponsored the proposal, is his son. But also because he himself launched the movement to decolonise English literature at a university in Kenya more than 50 years ago. Ngugi first encountered English literature when, as a teenager at school, colonial authorities suddenly imposed English as the sole language of instruction. It was 1952, and the British had just declared a state of emergency to deal with the Mau Mau uprising, a native anti-colonial insurrection that was met with a sprawl of barbed wire gulags, extreme methods of torture, and the dropping of millions of bombs. Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Mukoma wa Ngugi in conversation at St Paul’s University on February 19, 2019 [Photo courtesy of Esther Njonde]Up until then, Ngugi, who grew up in a large peasant family in rural Kenya, knew only his mother tongue, Gikuyu. He recalled spending evenings by the fireside, as Gikuyu storytellers imparted local wisdom, recounting traditional tales of hares, lions and hyenas, creatures that inhabited his natural surroundings. But the new school rules meant those caught speaking Gikuyu were caned or humiliatingly, made to wear a metal plate around their neck with inscriptions such as “I AM STUPID”. Meanwhile, achievement in English went highly rewarded. Its mastery was essential to ascending colonial Kenya’s steep educational pyramid. The prohibition of speaking local languages on school premises was second on the list of rules at Mukoma wa Ngugi’s primary school in Kenya [Photo courtesy of Mukoma wa Ngugi]Kenya had become part of the British Empire shortly after the 1884 Berlin Conference, when European powers carved the continent up between them, creating linguistic and cultural spheres of influence. Once territory had been seized and political dictatorships enforced, the minds of the colonised became the new frontier. The British set about trying to create a privileged but compliant native vanguard, servants of the empire who would ensure the free flow of tea from Kenya, gold from South Africa, and cotton from India. The need for this was crudely summed up by Robert Babington Macaulay, a British politician serving in colonial India. In 1835, Macaulay called for the introduction of English-language education in India to produce “a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” who could, in turn, transmit Western learning to the masses in the local Indian languages. His vision rested as much on elevating and universalising English culture as it did on the denigration and dismissal of native ones. “A single shelf of a good European Library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia,” Macaulay boasted, despite having no knowledge of Sanskrit and Arabic, the two languages that held pride of place, respectively, among India’s predominantly Hindu and Muslim population. Overlooked cultures Rooted mainly in oral traditions, Africans’ cultures were quickly overlooked. Instead, it was taken for granted that English culture was theirs. Geoffrey Chaucer’s tales of merry pilgrims in the medieval English countryside were now to be imagined, it seemed, as taking place in mid-20th century rural Kenya, dotted with villages and where elephants and wildebeest grazed; while the tea-drinking English ladies of Jane Austen’s novels were presumably to be found in the gossiping women of the African village – perhaps the same ones who worked to cultivate the tea they drank. Then there were the books that portrayed Africans themselves, that played on European stereotypes or were outright racist. Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist, charged novelist Joseph Conrad with being a “thoroughgoing racist” for his depiction of Africans in his widely influential 1902 novel Heart of Darkness, which tells of a voyage up the Congo river, into the heart of territory the Belgians held with brute force. Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe [AP Photo/Craig Ruttle]In one passage, Conrad describes emaciated Black slaves working the ivory trade as “a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping”, just one example among many, Achebe said, of him denying Africans “human expression”. Conrad, Achebe argued, depicted Africa as “the other world” and “the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization”. Ngugi, in his 1984 classic, Decolonising the Mind, argued that the imposition of English caused alienation. “Since culture is a product of the history of a people which it in turn reflects, the child was now being exposed exclusively to a culture that was a product of a world external to himself. He was being made to stand outside himself to look at himself. “The images children encountered in literature were reinforced by their study of geography and history, and science and technology, where Europe was, once again, the centre. This, in turn, fitted well with the cultural imperatives of British imperialism.” Writing back to Empire In 1959, Ngugi left for Uganda, then also a British colony, to study English at Makerere University, the only university in East Africa. It was one of several institutions the British had established in the colonies to manufacture scholars steeped in its values who could serve imperial interests. But nationalist fervour was gripping the continent, and what emerged instead were writers and thinkers who began to challenge English cultural hegemony. While Europe had written Africa off, novelists like Achebe – a graduate from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria – began to write back to Europe. That is, they attempted to rescue and narrate an African past that could subvert Western representations. Responding to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Achebe, in his debut 1958 novel, Things Fall Apart, detailed the intricacies of daily life in a pre-colonial Nigerian village, embedded words from his native Igbo tongue, and presented the British colonial imposition as marking the destruction – and not the start – of a cherished way of life. But “writing back to Europe” involved writing in European languages, over the heads and beyond the comprehension of the vast majority of Africans. Did this confront or uphold Empire? Given the wealth of existing African languages, could such writing even be considered African literature? Kenyan author Ngugi Wa Thiong’o in 2007 [Reuters/Antony Njuguna]These were some of the questions posed at A Conference of African Writers of English Expression,  a landmark meeting of Africa’s budding literati at Makerere University in June 1962. Ngugi, still a student at the university, attended so he could hand Achebe a copy of a manuscript of his novel Weep Not Child. It would later be published as part of Heinemann’s hugely successful African Writers Series. The proceedings at Makerere were shot through with uncertainty at the lingering effects of colonialism in the emerging post-colonial world. Achebe, summarising his position at Makerere years later, pondered: “Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else’s? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling. But for me, there is no other choice. I have been given the language and I intend to use it.” The great Nairobi literature debate Obi Wali, a Nigerian critic, urged attendees to write in their local languages and “not play to the gallery of international fame”. “Until these writers and their Western midwives accept the fact that any true African literature must be written in African languages, they are merely pursuing a dead end, which can only lead to sterility, uncreativity and frustration,” he wrote in Transitions magazine, one of the most influential pan-African publications of the day. Later, Ngugi would take up Wali’s position, noting that writers working in local languages were excluded from Makerere. Cornell’s decision harks back to the decolonisation debates at East African universities that raged through the 1960s. Reformers at Makerere University – dubbed the “Harvard of East Africa” – pushed to diversify the teaching body. At the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, a group of scholars led by Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, wanted to tear down the rigid borders governing each academic discipline. The Kikuyu campus of the University of Nairobi [Reuters/Thomas Mukoya]At the University of Nairobi, where Ngugi worked, a letter from the head of the English department to staff, in September 1968, started a storm. Proposing modest reforms, Dr James Stewart praised the department’s syllabus for its strength in studying the “historic continuity of a single culture throughout the period of the modern west”. Ngugi and two colleagues wrote a letter in response, questioning the underlying assumption that the English tradition was the sole source of Africa’s cultural heritage and rejecting the implication that Africa was an extension of the West. If there was a need to study a “single culture”, they asked: “Why can’t African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?” The Great Nairobi literature debate, as it has come to be known, was less about if African literature should be taught as about where it sat on the literary map, Ngugi told Al Jazeera. “So what we said is we don’t hate English literature, we like it, but we also like African literature – it is a matter of how we organise the relationship between the two. The colonial system wanted to make English literature our centre. We said no, Africa can be the centre also. “We said let’s place African literature at the centre, then after that the related Caribbean and African-American literature. Then South Asian literature and Latin American literature. Then European literature. It’s about placing it in its proper place in relation to us.” It took until the following year for the university to agree to a newly decolonised “Literature department” with a new syllabus that started in African oral traditions and literature and ended in the Western canon. Other universities on the continent followed suit, in a powerful show of African cultural independence. The publication of Ngugi’s seminal text, On the Abolition of the English department in 1974, helped to fan his ideas further. style="width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute; top: 0; bottom: 0; right: 0; left: 0;">