The European English Messenger 16.1 (2007)
Reviewing a Book and How It Relates to Global English Ngugi wa Thiongo, Wizard of the Crow New York: Pantheon / Random House, 2006, 768 pp. Robert Phillipson (Copenhagen Business School, Denmark) and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (Åbo Akademi University, Vasa, Finland) Paving the ways of seeing and willing a moral universe of freedom, equality, and social justice within and among the nations of the earth is surely the special mission of art. Art is dreams of freedom and creativity. Ngugi wa Thiongo, 1998, 131. Many authors from the former British empire with his equal in heaven. He is surrounded by produce a wonderful range of novels. One of sycophantic, scheming people whose main the most distinguished writers is Ngugi of preoccupation is graft and staying in power. Kenya. He is exceptional in that after writing a There are plenty of utterly evil characters, who handful of successful novels in English he subject themselves to cosmetic surgery so that switched to producing plays and novels in an they can more effectively function as the ears African language, Gikuyu, so as to reach a very and eyes of The Ruler. One who falls seriously different audience. He has also written an ill is diagnosed as suffering from white-ache, impressive range of scholarly books, the most the urge to be a white person, and later actually famous of which is Decolonising the mind. goes through limb transplants in order to achieve The politics of language in African literature this. (1981), updated in a series of lectures in Oxford, Race, and the challenge of restoring dignity published as Penpoints, gunpoints, and to Africans, is one of the recurrent themes of dreams. Towards a critical theory of the arts the novel, always packaged subtly so that the and the state in Africa (1998). Ngugis latest narrative never flags. The rulers ideas are book, Wizard of the crow, is a landmark in implemented ruthlessly in the state media and African and world literature, a novel written and education systems in ways that remind one of published initially in Gikuyu, then translated by Zimbabwe, Libya, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan the author into English. It is a monumental, all- alas, the list is endless, and some roots European embracing work in the Tolstoyan tradition, (Stalinism, Kemalism, fascism). A beautiful satirical in the spirit of Cervantes, and Orwellian instance of the books undercurrent of irony is in its moral indignation and political commitment. that the study of the wise thoughts of the Ruler, The narrative also draws extensively on an and the need to have them mindlessly African cosmology of wisdom, folklore, the internalised, is termed parratology. Another that grotesque and the fantastic: as one of the storys the new colonialism of corporations is termed narrators puts it, In his tongue the real and the corporonialism. marvellous flowed out of each other (op.cit., Ngugi doubtless draws inspiration from his p. 570). own experience of corruption in Kenya The setting is a deeply corrupt African state, (portrayed in Petals of blood, 1977) and being dominated by The Ruler, whose grandiose imprisoned by Kenyatta (leading to his auto- project is to build a contemporary Tower of biographical description in Detained, 1981). Babel, the Marching to Heaven project, for The novel is therefore in no way science fiction, which funding is needed from the Global Bank. a mere comic romp, or a gloomy dystopia. It is The Ruler deifies himself, both in the sense of a subtle and complex allegory of the monstrous living up to absolutisms Létat, cest moi and regimes that are in place in many parts of the in that the building will enable him to hobnob world, with the representatives of the Global 50 Bank and the US Ambassador (and Europeans freedom, etc etc (p. 237) (colonial power in a more subordinate role) as vital links in was transferred to those who would maintain maintaining this sort of world order. A sizeable British imperial interests). There are also poetic chunk of the novel is set in New York, where uses of language, for instance to tone down a the Ruler has gone to plead his case for funding, polemical point (by the female hero): unsuccessfully. He falls ill with such unique violence against women bedevils many a home rich, symptoms that western medical research is poor, white, black, religious. In the world today, a flummoxed, and satirised, whereas it is only the husband measures his maleness by mauling his wife. A wizards sorcery that can influence him. wife swallows insults in surly silence instead of resisting the violation of her sacred self. A sacred self soon This grim scene of evil does not make for becomes a scared slave, leading to a scarred life (pp. grim reading, because of a compelling, varied 429-430). narrative style, and comic light relief as in At other points the use of language is more Shakespeares tragedies. The counterpoint to playful, taking the sting out of a home truth about the ubiquitous evil is the younger generation, how the worlds resources are exploited: who have formed a movement for social When it came to forests, indeed to any natural resource, change, with two main characters male and the Abur-rian State and big American, European, and female, yes, there is a delightful and profound Japanese companies, in alliance with the local African, interpersonal thrust too who represent the Indian, and Japanese rich, were all united by one slogan: potential for achieving a just social order. They A loot-a continua. (p. 201) are multi-faceted characters, of varied Occasional utterances are signposted as being experience: the male hero has studied in India in English, invariably connoting high prestige. and is deeply influenced by Indian and Buddhist The infrequent citations in Gikuyu add to the thought, the female hero is an astute political richness of the text. organizer with a clear mission to work for * * * * * change in extremely difficult conditions. The Ngugis book was written in an African central couple find themselves obliged to take language for local consumption and on the role of a sorcerer, a wizard, a witch doctor enjoyment, drawing maximally on local cultural who attempts to heal minds and bodies. This and linguistic norms. Along with his earlier plays they carry off with great human insight and and novels in Gikuyu and their translation into wisdom, and recourse to traditional herbal craft. Swahili, Ngugi significantly demonstrates that Even the great and good, despite being so world literature does not presuppose use of a modern, and monopolising the countrys European language or one of the Asian resources, experience a need to consult the languages with a millennial literary tradition. In wizard, so that the young couple, on separate the Kenyan context, the importance of using a trajectories, get intimately involved in secrets local language, rather than an elite language of state, and in the intrigues of the Ruler and with intrinsically foreign cultural baggage, is that those who surround him. the reading habit can be fostered at the Gender stereotypes are challenged, partly by grassroots. In addition, the polemic thrust of the showing that people of either gender can work novel represents a potential for furthering for change (so as to combat men in power, who political change, for consciousness-raising as a abuse that power at the expense of ordinary practical instrument for decolonising minds. people), partly by males becoming humiliated To classify the novel as postcolonial makes victims of husband bashing. the point that such literature can be written in a The language is varied and rich. There are language that is not the language of colonisation many resonances of the King James Bible, or present-day corporonialism. On the other which tallies well with the extensive hand, if the label postcolonial is seen as a Christianisation of Africa. A minister addresses restrictive categorisation, it should not be used. the Ruler: Ruler who art our father here on Likewise, Amitav Ghosh refused to accept a earth, the English who gave us civilisation, prize in Commonwealth literature for one of 51 The European English Messenger 16.1 (2007) his splendid novels precisely because he did not the present-day world it is Anglo English that accept this designation. Wizard of the crow is remains the touchstone and guarantor of world literature, dealing with universal themes English-based global communication in a context where the narrative and the (Wierzbicka 2006, pp. 13-14). This Polish- characters epitomise global and local corruption Australian scholar also refers to the in the age of corporate empire. ethnocentricity of many theorists from the Anglo- The translation of Wizard of the crow into American world who mistakenly take Anglo English, and a global elite readership, raises the English for the human norm (ibid., p. 12). This issue of what type of English the book is written is the colonial universe that Ngugi was socialised in, or rather has been translated into. Is it the into but has made a complete break from. It is new English that Chinua Achebe pleaded for worth tracing some of its roots. 30 years ago? And if so, is this different from The marketing of world English has been the standard English of the core English- part of political discourse on both sides of the speaking countries? Or does Ngugi write in Atlantic for two centuries. Efforts to make it Afro-Saxon English, to use the term used by intellectually robust have been more spasmodic Ali Mazrui to refer to African elites who are (see Phillipson in press). I. A. Richards, who switching to English professionally and even in combined appointments at Cambridge and the home? Or is the language rather Global Harvard (see the analysis of his key role in English? And if so, is this English what literary criticism in Britain and the US from Departments of English Studies are, or should 1920-1960 in Williams 1961, pp. 239-246), made be, concerned with in the age of globalisation? a definite attempt to do so. His book So much The past twenty years has produced a large nearer. Essays toward a world English (1968) body of analysis of varieties of English provides a rationale for taking Basic English worldwide. Much of it accepts uncritically seriously as an international auxiliary language, Kachrus tripartite division of English into Inner and lays out a case for successors to Basic Circle, Outer Circle and Expanding Circle users, English (ibid., p. 241). When English is a classification that has outlived its utility, since approached appropriately, its acquisition is not it uses vague conceptual terms to cover a huge merely for wealth and prestige, but because range of contexts, drawing on unspecified types new levels of mental capacity are induced of language competence, which lead to suspect the development of those concepts and or meaningless estimates of the number of sentiments: methodic, economic, moral, political, people involved in each Circle. Bruthiaux (2003) on which the continuance of mans venture has demonstrated that this framework ignores depends. We of the West have somehow out the sociolinguistic complexity within each circle, of a strangely unself-regardful, indeed a is linguistically unsophisticated, and muddies the regardless impulse of benevolence committed distinction between native and non-native users: ourselves to universal education as well as to does it make any difference whether Ngugis universal participation in government, nominal English is considered native or non-native? though this last can be (ibid., p. 240). Richards Manifestly not. considered the study of English (primarily Much of the celebratory literature on global literature) as the ultimate qualification for global English analyses it exclusively in instrumental leadership. His book ends with the words: terms. However, as a recent work on the There is an analogy between the conception of a world order and the design of a language which may serve man semantics and culture embedded in the grammar best. The choice of words for that language and the and words of English stresses, publications on assignment of priorities among their duties can parallel global English, international English, world the statesmans true tasks. And it is through what English, standard English and English as a language can offer him that every man has to consider lingua franca neglect the distinctive heritage what should concern him most. If rightly ordered, and developed through a due sequence, the study of English embedded in the language, in its core semantic can become truly a humane education. May not such a and grammatical structures, and ultimately in language justly be named EVERY MANS ENGLISH?
52 This is the Anglo-American civilising mission of British foreign policy, which is subordinate of the twentieth century, to ensure that all to US policy (Curtis 2004): 1) the culture of citizens of the world (presumably females were lying and misleading the electorate is deeply not deliberately excluded, even if they embedded in British policy-making; 2) by represented only 10% of the student body in contrast the secret record of official files is quite Cambridge at that time) are not confined to open about goals that differ markedly from what English for merely instrumental purposes. Its is made public. Foreign-policy making is so users will also adopt worldviews that will make secretive, elitist and unaccountable that policy- them understand that the West, out of sheer makers know they can get away with almost benevolence, has taken upon itself the right to anything; 3) humanitarian concerns do not decide how world affairs should be run. figure at all in the rationale behind British foreign Richards text is uncannily like the neo- policy. conservative agenda that was elaborated in the The promotion of English worldwide has been US in the 1990s, and implemented as soon as central to the foreign policy of the UK and the George W. Bush became president. Our US (Phillipson 1992). So the immediate question values are universal, and we reserve the right is whether university Departments of English to enforce them globally by all available means. are facilitating corporate empire while still Literature takes over the role of religion in peddling civic virtue. What do we understand concealing the special interests of privileged by English in our pedagogic universes in a classes or states, and the hegemony of speakers rapidly globalising world, which is profoundly of privileged languages. influenced by those who wield economic and The subordination of humane values to finance capital (Harvey 2005) and military might political forces is explored in Who paid the (Pieterse 2004)? piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War In my view, global English can be seen as a (Saunders 1999), which focuses on how the product (the code, the forms used in a Americans influenced intellectuals and cultural geographically diverse community of users), as elites in western Europe, through subsidies for a process (the means by which uses of the conferences, publications (such as Encounter) language are being expanded, by agents and other activities. Many were co-opted. The activating the underlying structures, ideologies, key channel for these covert activities was CIA- and uses), or as a project (the normative goal funded foundations of dubious pedigree. Loyalty of English becoming the default language of to the system meant that ends justified international communication and the dominant indefensible means, including lying: ethics were language of intranational communication in an subject to politics (ibid., p. 415). An insider in increasing number of countries worldwide). The the murky universe of CIA intelligence over processes and project are dependent on use of several decades wrote in 1998 that there was the product, and on ideological commitment to an underlying: the project. devastating truth: the same people who read Dante There is a strong measure of wishful thinking and went to Yale and were educated in civic virtue in the projection of those who claim that English recruited Nazis, manipulated the outcome of is the worlds lingua franca, since maximally democratic elections, gave LSD to unwitting subjects, opened the mail of thousands of American citizens, one-third of humanity have any competence in overthrew governments, supported dictatorships, the language at all. Likewise, the notion that plotted assassinations, and engineered the Bay of Pigs English is the language of science is disaster. In the name of what? asked one critic. Not contradicted by the fact that many other civic virtue, but empire. (ibid.) languages are used in higher education and The chronic lying of George W. Bush and Tony research. But such discourse serves both to Blair are not merely personal unethical failings. constitute and confirm English dominance and They are integral to the western political system, American empire, and the interlocking according to the conclusions of a recent study structures and ideologies that underpin global
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English and corporate interests. If European way, represents the creation of linguistic and Union policy-makers do not act to strengthen cultural capital that can challenge English linguistic European languages, global English will hegemony. As a writer in exile, Ngugis efforts continue to expand at their expense (Phillipson have gone into theorising the case for social and 2003). cultural change, and practical work to support Investing in the linguistic capital of English (to African languages (see Ngugi 2000). With Wizard use Bourdieus term, 1992) is a project that of the crow, Ngugi has crystallised a lifetime of transcends national borders, with the product and creative writing and political commitment into a processes privileging users of the language in the benchmark of enlightened entertainment and current world order. Investing in other wisdom. He is an obvious candidate for the first languages, which Ngugi is doing in a pioneering Nobel Prize to be awarded to an east African.
References Bourdieu, Pierre (1992). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge: Polity. Bruthiaux, Paul (2003). Squaring the circles: issues in modeling English worldwide. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 13/2, 159-178. Curtis, Mark (2004). Unpeople: Britain’s secret human rights abuses. London: Vintage. Harvey, David (2005). The new imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1997). Petals of blood. London: Heinemann. Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1981). Detained. London: Heinemann. Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1981). Decolonising the mind. The politics of language in African literature. London: James Currey. Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1998). Penpoints, gunpoints, and dreams. Towards a critical theory of the arts and the state in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ngugi wa Thiong’o (2006). Wizard of the crow. New York: Pantheon / Random House. Ngugi wa Thiong’o (2000). Writing for diversity. In Rights to language. Equity, power, and education, ed. Robert Phillipson. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 97-101. Phillipson, Robert (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Phillipson, Robert (2003). English-only Europe? Challenging language policy. London: Routledge. Phillipson, Robert (in press). The linguistic imperialism of neoliberal empire. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 5/1, 2008. Pieterse, Jan N. (2004). Globalization or empire. New York and London: Routledge. Richards, I. A. (1968). So much nearer. Essays toward a world English. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Saunders, Frances Stonor (1999). Who paid the piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. London: Granta. Wierzbicka, Anna (2006). English: meaning and culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, Raymond (1961). Culture and society 1780-1950. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Editorial Note: For technical reasons, in setting up this article in PageMaker7 I was unable to place the correct diacritics on Ngugi and Gikuyu.
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