18/05/2026
WHOSE LANGUAGE DOES AFRICA DREAM IN? NGUGI WA THION’GO (KENYA) AND MOHAMED MBOUGAR SARR (SENEGAL)
Though Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr belong to different literary generations and write from very different intellectual landscapes, there is a striking parallel in the questions both men force us to confront about language, identity, and African thought.
Ngũgĩ famously chose to abandon English fiction and return to writing in Gikuyu, arguing that language carries far more than vocabulary. It carries worldview, humour, rhythm and most importantly, cultural memory. It carries and transports through the annals of time immemorial, a people’s very understanding of themselves. To him, continuing to think and create primarily through colonial languages risked slowly distancing Africans from their own intellectual and cultural foundations. Language, in his view, was never neutral. It could either preserve a civilisation, or quietly erode it.
But Ngũgĩ’s position was not universally embraced. Some critics argued that English, however colonial its origins, had already become part of modern African reality. Others believed African writers could transform colonial languages themselves, forcing them to carry African experiences, philosophies, contradictions, and emotional realities that Europe neither invented nor fully understands.
In many ways, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (Senegal) stands within that other tradition. Sarr writes in French, yet his work remains unmistakably African in spirit and texture. His novels wrestle with exile, memory, faith, history, intellectual inheritance, and the lingering psychological shadows of colonialism.
What fascinated me most was one particular idea attributed to him in Africa’s Book of Greats - Volume 1: “For him, writing in French is not capitulation but reclamation. He considers it an act of bending the master’s language to serve African complexity, not European comfort.”
That line stayed with me, because hidden inside it is an entirely different understanding of resistance. It was neither rejection of the coloniser's tongue, not surrender to it. It was transformation to suit a desired purpose.
The argument, as I understand it, is that a language imposed through power can eventually be reshaped by those who inherit it. That French, or English, or Portuguese, or any other foreign language no longer remains entirely European once African writers begin filling it with African memory, African rhythm, African grief, African humour, and African ways of seeing the world.
And yet even that position carries tension. For some, writing in colonial languages, especially while receiving recognition from major Western literary institutions, raises uncomfortable questions about legitimacy and audience. About whether global success sometimes still depends on proximity to European intellectual approval.
Can a colonial language ever fully become ours? Or does it always carry echoes of the power that first imposed it?
I do not think this debate has simple answers. Africa today lives in many tongues at once. Most Africans already move constantly between ancestral languages, national languages, school languages, street languages, and global ones. We inhabit several linguistic worlds simultaneously.
Perhaps the deeper question is not which language Africa speaks. Perhaps it is whether, within those languages, Africa still recognises its own voice. Because language shapes more than speech. It shapes memory, imagination, and the way a people dream.
— Betty Kathungu-Furet
Africa’s Book of Greats – Volume 1.
