LAUSR

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, one of Africa’s most celebrated writers says: No! it is not, – end of story, Biodun Jeyifo, one of Africa’s foremost literary critics, says it is, adding ‘let us give thanks!’ and John Mugane, a linguist, says there is a dark side to English that returns a ‘no’ verdict that eclipses the ‘yes’ on the bright side. This edition of Contemporary Conversations contains three papers, one each by Ngũgĩ, Jeyifo and Mugane, each expressing conflicting views on English in Africa. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s influence on the ways in which we think about language and its role in enabling Africans to take their rightful role in the world of ideas and actions has been profound. I am delighted to have the occasion to write this introduction and a paper in the company of Ngũgĩ, one of Africa’s best known and most acclaimed writers. Also of great significance is Jeyifo’s paper in this volume, which gives plenty of arguments both for and against Ngũgĩ’s reflections on English in Africa. Ngũgĩ’s linguistic pronouncements enrich conversations and debates replete with literature and lead us to ask a range of questions. One, can languages be imperial? This is a running theme for Ngũgĩ in all his work and addressed in his seminal book Moving the Center (1993). The banishment and ostracization of vernacular languages from schools, of which Ngũgĩ is vocal, is a case in point; two, can they be oppressive? He gives numerous examples of very specific instances (Thiong’o 1993, 12–24) in which English is used in cruel controlling ways and to exclude. Three, can they be revolutionary? They cannot help but be, since languages constitute people’s voices articulating issues, visions and road maps; four, can a mind be ‘colonized’? Ngũgĩ talked about it in his book Decolonising the Mind published in 1986, a work that still generates interest as colonial ideas still linger and we have even reached a state of advanced neocolonization. Accordingly Ngũgĩ’s (2016) volume Securing the Base: Making Africa Visible in the World constitutes an approach to recovery; five, can colonial languages work against the colonial project? Yes, through translation (as his paper in this volume argues) and also to grow vernacular languages to ‘retro-fit’ them for global conversations in the local; six, do languages automatically entail cultures, values and world-views? Yes, but in a dynamic transition predicated on ‘the social ambitions and ideological presuppositions’ of place and time that cause people to vote with their feet. In his paper Jeyifo points out, then discounts, what he calls Ngũgĩ’s explicit claims and implicit assumptions about the fact that English is not an African language. Jeyifo is a literary critic and a long-time activist for social change, a teacher who eschews a bourgeois