On 17 July 1979, the great Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o gave a speech in Nairobi in which he questioned the logic of an African literature in European languages. He had recently been released from prison, where he had been held after his critiques of corruption and inequality had touched a nerve among leaders of the recently independent nation. But his address provoked strong reactions for another reason: up until that moment, Ngũgĩ had been closely associated with the emergence of an African tradition of writing in English and acknowledged as a key figure in the rise of the novel as a major genre on the continent; his fictional work was often cited as an example of how English was being remade in formerly colonised societies. His early novels, from 1964’s Weep Not, Child onward, struck a chord with a global Anglophone audience partly because they echoed the English novelists he had read as a student at Makerere University College, the Ugandan branch of the University of London, and Leeds University, the seat of “Commonwealth” literary studies in the 1960s.

By the time of his speech, Ngũgĩ was a member of the literary establishment in Africa, a leading figure in world literature, and a leader in postcolonial thought. And while it is true that he had challenged what he saw as the hegemony of English in a 1968 manifesto, On the Abolition of the English Department, co-written with two of his colleagues at the University of Nairobi, Ngũgĩ assumed that the abolition of English did not mean dispensing with the colonial language. In fact, for most of the 1960s and 1970s he shared a belief, common among the postcolonial elite, that a literature in the ex-coloniser’s language could indeed be revolutionary. But now the novelist had decided to break away from English, to depart, as he put it, “from Anglo-Saxon literature in order to reconnect to the patriotic traditions of a national and culture literature rooted among the people”. He would henceforth write in his mother tongue, Gĩkũyũ (known to Swahili and English-speakers as Kikuyu).

It is therefore fitting that, in Decolonizing Language, Ngũgĩ, who died earlier this year aged 87, should return to the question of language as effectively his final statement. The 20 essays collected in the book rehearse positions first articulated in his earlier collections, Writers in Politics and Decolonizing the Mind; but the new book is notable for Ngũgĩ’s attention to the dangers that mother tongues face across the world, from colonial Ireland to Sami Norway, New Zealand and beyond. Read together, the essays resonate as a manifesto for the mother tongue both as “the very heart of our being and existence” and the ultimate firewall against “spiritual domination”. The mission of Decolonizing Language, the “revolutionary idea” encapsulated in the book’s subtitle, is an incisive rejection of the notion that European “languages are inherently global and best able to carry intelligence and universality” or that they function as the languages “of power and normality”.

Reading the book and reflecting on the many conversations I had with Ngũgĩ as he tried to come to terms with his exile after learning of threats against his life in 1982, I was reminded of how different the situation was in 1979, when the author made his “epistemological break” with English. I had graduated from the University of Nairobi a few months before, and had taken up a job as a trainee editor in the local office of Heinemann Educational Books, which was at the time a major publisher of African literature. My first task at Heinemann was to edit Devil on the Cross, Ngũgĩ’s first novel in Gĩkũyũ. The famous author had two demands of his young editor: he insisted that his novel be edited to the same standards as the works I was editing in English and that it be directed at common readers, not elites. I went to work on the manuscript, which he had written in prison; when it was all done, and as I sat back and watched the big smile of satisfaction on his face, it dawned on me that for Ngũgĩ writing a novel in Gĩkũyũ had been a kind of homecoming. The book’s initial reception stayed with him for many years: “It was read in groups at homes and factory grounds, on public transportation even, the literate becoming the ‘present’ author of the story,” he noted in 2010.

Ngũgĩ’s decision to break with English provoked strong reactions: it was hailed by writers and cultural activists working in African languages who had felt left out in postcolonial debates that privileged English; it was criticised by prominent African writers, including Chinua Achebe, the “founding father” of African literature, who insisted that English was a necessary linguistic tool in holding together multiethnic nations. Ngũgĩ refused to concede; instead he embarked on a global crusade defending mother tongues as indispensable tools in the decolonization of the mind. In this context, Decolonizing Language can be read as the author’s final take on the overriding theme of this critical project, a clear diagnosis of the challenges mother tongues face in a world defined by linguistic hierarchies. On a more personal level, the book is Ngũgĩ’s last account of his displacement from his own native ground, an acknowledgement of the heavy burden that those who write and speak the language of the other have to carry. The arguments made in the book are exhilarating; reading them in the author’s absence is undeniably poignant.