The “Cultural Bomb”: The Colonisation of the African Mind and Linguistic and Cultural Imperialism

Ali Gunes

gunesali1@gmail.com

 

A week ago, I had a fierce argument with a friend of mine who asserted passionately that, despite contrary views, colonialism helped, in certain ways, colonised countries, mainly in Africa, improve and modernise their technological infrastructure and educational systems. In fact, what he claimed was obviously an orientalist view that contends that the West, with its technological, scientific, civilisational, and educational superiority, helped enlighten and civilise the rest of the world (the East and Colonised countries), which was considered uneducated, backwards, uncivilised, and underdeveloped, etc.

Thus, I strongly opposed my friend’s views. Since I have been studying and writing about colonial and postcolonial literature for a while, I am pretty cognizant of how colonisers acted and what did in different parts of the world in the past and now how postcolonial/new imperial powers are doing by employing overt and covert strategies and policies now to maintain their unsatisfied colonial ambition, greediness and legacy in their former colonies - an ambition to continue controlling and exploiting former colonies as in the past. I recommended that my friend read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Alan Paton’s Cry, My Beloved Country, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, etc., which I believed would provide him with an insight into what colonialism did in the past and what postcolonial or new imperial powers are doing now. Then, I mentioned to him the book Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature by the Kenyan author and academic Ngugi wa Thiong'o, with the intention of showing how colonisers used education and language to control the mindsets of indigenous people for their benefit and to facilitate their exploitation without resistance. For the Western colonisers, military conquest was not enough; they knew this very well, so they employed other apparatuses, such as education, language, and cultural imperialism, not only to strengthen their conquest but also to maintain it over the long term. Now I would like to summarise with reference to wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind how the Western colonisers utilised education, language, and cultural imperialism to ease and open their paths on their journey of exploitation in Africa. The summary is, in fact, relevant to the rest of the world. 

Published by Zimbabwe Publishing House (Pvt.) Ltd in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1986, Decolonising the Mind is a collection of essays concerning language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity in Africa and elsewhere. In his book, wa Thiong’o presents an agonising critique of the enduring legacy of colonialism/imperialism in Africa, arguing that the most deep and disturbing weapons of the coloniser were not only the military but also the linguistic, educational and cultural ones. The colonial and postcolonial powers have been able to effectively engineer the mental enslavement of the African masses through the systematic imposition of foreign languages and Eurocentric paradigms of education and culture. The imperialist project elevated European languages to the level of intellectual superiority and marginalised indigenous African languages, alienating the colonised from their heritage and internalising a sense of inferiority. This sustained a neo-colonial status quo that continues to exploit the continent’s working masses.

Wa Thiong’o contends that the physical violence that pushed the colonial project was complemented and strengthened by the latter’s cultural and linguistic imposition that made it permanent. He writes that “the psychological violence of the classroom followed the physical violence of the battlefield. But where the former was visibly brutal, the latter was visibly gentle.” The coloniser comes to understand that true domination requires capturing and controlling the “mental universe of the colonised…the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world. Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others.” To achieve this, imperialism deploys what wa Thiong’o terms a “cultural bomb,” designed to “annihilate a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.” By making the colonised view their own past as a “wasteland of non-achievement,” the new imperialist power pushes them to identify with the language and culture of their coloniser and oppressor, effectively making the victim complicit in their own spiritual subjugation. As wa Thiong’o succinctly recapitulates, “The bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation.”

The colonial education system was the main instrument of this linguistic imperialism. This is demonstrated by wa Thiong’o’s own childhood in Kenya, where the harmony between the language of the home (Gikuyu) and the language of the community was violently disrupted by the imposition of English as the sole medium of formal instruction. The colonial state actively punished the use of African languages, employing a “button” system where children were turned into “witch hunters” to report peers who spoke their mother tongues, thereby teaching “the lucrative value of being a traitor to one's immediate community.” This institutionalised linguistic hierarchy resulted in what wa Thiong’o calls “colonial alienation” that “became reinforced in the teaching of history, geography, music, where bourgeois Europe was always the centre of the universe.” The quotation suggests that the child’s formal education and conceptualisation of the world must be translated into a foreign language, and that the written word is thus completely divorced from the child's immediate social, cultural, and natural environment. The child was “made to stand outside himself to look at himself,” viewing his own reality through the alienating lens of the coloniser’s perspective and culture.

This alienation is further ingrained through the Eurocentric literature prescribed in colonial schools. Rather than reflecting the rich oral traditions and histories of the African peasantry, the curriculum drives African children to devour European literature, positioning Europe as the “centre of the universe.” As wa Thiong’o writes, when African characters appear in this literature, they are often portrayed through the racist tropes of writers like Rider Haggard or the paternalistic liberalism of Alan Paton, which either demonised African resistance or glorified subservience. Therefore, the African child internalises negative images of their own identity, learning to associate their native languages and cultures with “backwardness, underdevelopment, humiliation and punishment.”

Critically, wa Thiong’o contends that this mental colonisation does not end with the attainment of political independence; rather, it was perpetuated by the neo-colonial state and the African comprador bourgeoisie as Hamid Dabashi argues in his book Brown Skin, White Masks. The postcolonial elite, educated in the colonial system, accepts what Chinua Achebe termed the “fatalistic logic of the unassailable position of English in our literature.” By continuing to write, govern, and conduct high-level discourse and narrative exclusively in European languages, the African petty bourgeoisie effectively isolate themselves from the peasantry and the working class in their countries as in other former colonised countries. Wa Thiong'o emphasises the profound irony of this dynamic: while the “progressive” intellectual detaches himself in English or French, the most reactionary neo-colonial politicians and comprador elites fluently use African languages to manipulate the masses, spreading “feudalistic ideologies, superstitions, lies” and “dictatorial directives” directly to the people in their own tongues. Hence. The linguistic and cultural divide confirms that the masses remain politically disenfranchised and disadvantaged, while the elite maintain a neo-colonial alliance with Western finance capital.

In conclusion, Decolonising the Mind shows that the imposition of foreign languages and Eurocentric cultures is never a benign process of “universal” communication but a calculated, and thus strategically practised, strategy of “mental control.” By breaking the vital link between the African child and their linguistic and cultural heritage, colonial and postcolonial powers have sustained a system of alienation that facilitates ongoing economic and political exploitation in Africa. For wa Thiong’o, the rejection of European languages in favour of African languages is not merely a literary or aesthetic choice; it is a fundamental act of anti-imperialist resistance. True liberation, he asserts, requires the dismantling of the “cultural bomb” and a reconnection with the “revolutionary traditions of an organised peasantry and working class,” proving that the “decolonisation of the mind” is the indispensable prerequisite for the liberation of the continent.

I hope people like my friend can understand this point.