nationalists were taken over by the colonial regime and were placed under District Education Boards chaired by Englishmen. English became the language of my formal education. In Kenya, English became more than a language: it was the language, and all the others had to bow before it in deference.
Thus one of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking Gikuyu in the vicinity of the school. The culprit was given corporal punishment-? three to five strokes of the cane on bare buttocks?or was made to carry a metal plate around the neck with inscriptions such as I AM STUPID or I A M A DONKEY. Sometimes the culprits were fined money they could hardly afford. And how did the teachers catch the culprits? A button was initially given to one pupil who was supposed to hand it over to whoever was caught speaking his mother tongue. Whoever had the button at the end of the day would sing who had given it to him and the ensuing process would bring out all the culprits of the day. Thu s children were turned into witch-hunters and in the process were being taught the lucrative value of being a traitor to one's immediate community.
The attitude to English was the exact opposite: any achievement in spoken or written English was highly rewarded; prizes, prestige, applause; the ticket to higher realms. English became the measure of intelligence and ability in the arts, the sciences, and all the other branches of learning. English became the main determinant of a child's progress up the ladder of formal education.
As you may know, the colonial system of education in addition to its apartheid racial demarcation had the structure of a pyramid: a broad primary base, a narrowing secondary middle, and an even narrower university apex. Selections from primary into secondary were through an examination, in my time called Kenya African Preliminary Examination, in which one had to pass six subjects ranging from Maths to Nature Study and Kiswahili.4 All the papers were written in English. Nobody could pass the exam who failed the English language paper no matter how brilliantly he had done in the other subjects. remember one boy in my class of 1954 who had distinctions in all subjects except English, which he had failed. He was made to fail the entire exam. He went on to become a turn boy5 in a bus company. I who had only passes but a credit in English got a place at the Alliance High School, one of the most elitist institutions for Africans in colonial Kenya. Th e requirements for a place at the University, Makerere University College,6 were broadly the same: nobody could go on to wear the undergraduate red gown, no matter how brilliantly they had performed in all the other subjects unless they had a credit? not even a simple pass!?in English. Thu s the most coveted place in the pyramid and in the system was only available to the holder of an English language credit card. English was the official vehicle and the magic formula to colonial elitedom.
Literary education was now determined by the dominant language while also reinforcing that dominance. Orature (oral literature) in Kenyan languages stopped. In primary school I now read simplified Dickens and Stevenson alongside Bider Haggard. Jim Hawkins, Oliver Twist, To m Brown?not Hare,
3. The Mau Mau, militant African nationalists, widely understood language in Africa. led a revolt in 1952 that resulted in four years of 5. I.e., the person who operates a turnstile. British military operations and the deaths of more 6. University in Kampala, Uganda, that was con- than eleven thousand insurgents. nected with the University of London in the 1950s 4. Swahili, a Bantu language that is the most and 1960s.
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25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
Leopard and Lion?were now my daily companions in the world of imagination. 7 In secondary school, Scott and G. B. Shaw vied with more Rider Haggard, John Buchan, Alan Paton, Captain W. E. Johns.8 At Makerere I read English: from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot with a touch of Graham Greene.9
Thus language and literature were taking us further and further from ourselves to other selves, from our world to other worlds.
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* # A * * * Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world. How people perceive themselves affects how they look at their culture, at their politics and at the social production of wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and to other beings. Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world.
v
So what was the colonialist imposition of a foreign language doing to us children?
The real aim of colonialism was to control the people's wealth: what they produced, how they produced it, and how it was distributed; to control, in other words, the entire realm of the language of real life. Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was 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.
For colonialism this involved two aspects of the same process: the destruction or the deliberate undervaluing of a people's culture, their art, dances, religions, history, geography, education, orature and literature, and the conscious elevation of the language of the coloniser. The domination of a people's language by the languages of the colonising nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonised.
* & $ 7. The English novelist Charles Dickens (1812? 1870) wrote Oliver Twist. Jim Hawkins is the hero of Treasure Island, by the Scottish fiction writer and essayist Robert Louis Stevenson (1850?1894). The English novelist Rider Haggard (1856-1925) wrote African adventure stories. Tom Brown's Schooldays is by the English novelist Thomas Hughes (1822-1896). 8. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), Scottish novelist. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Anglo- Irish dramatist. John Buchan (1875-1940), Scottish author of adventure stories. Alan Paton (1903-1988), South African novelist. William Earl Johns (1893-1968), English author of children's fiction.
9. Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400), English poet. T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), Anglo-American poet. Graham Greene (1904-1991), English novelist. 'Read': here 'majored in.'
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SALMAN RUSHDIE / 253 9
IX
I started writing in Gikuy u language in 197 7 after seventeen years of involvement in Afro-European literature, in my case Afro-English literature.'1' * * Wherever I have gone, particularly in Europe, I have been confronted with the question: why are you now writing in Gikuyu? Wh y do you now write in an African language? In some academic quarters I have been confronted with the rebuke, 'Why have you abandoned us?' It was almost as
