if, in choosing to write in Gikuyu, I was doing something abnormal. But Gikuyu is my mother tongue! Th e very fact that what commo n sense dictates in the literary practice of other cultures is being questioned in an African writer is a measure of how far imperialism has distorted the view of African realities. It has turned reality upside down: the abnormal is viewed as normal and the normal is viewed as abnormal. Africa actually enriches Europe: but Africa is made to believe that it needs Europe to rescue it from poverty. Africa's natural and human resources continue to develop Europe and America: but Africa is made to feel grateful for aid from the same quarters that still sit on the back of the conti
nent. Africa even produces intellectuals who now rationalise this upside-down way of looking at Africa.
I believe that my writing in Gikuyu language, a Kenyan language, an African language, is part and parcel of the anti-imperialist struggles of Kenyan and African peoples. In schools and universities our Kenyan languages?that is the languages of the many nationalities which make up Kenya?were associated with negative qualities of backwardness, underdevelopment, humiliation and punishment. We who went through that school system were meant to graduate with a hatred of the people and the culture and the values of the language of our daily humiliation and punishment. I do not want to see Kenyan children growing up in that imperialist-imposed tradition of contempt for the tools of communication developed by their communities and their history. I want them to transcend colonial alienation.
$ *c $
We African writers are bound by our calling to do for our languages what Spenser, Milton and Shakespeare did for English; what Pushkin and Tolstoy1 did for Russian; indeed what all writers in world history have done for their languages by meeting the challenge of creating a literature in them, which process later opens the languages for philosophy, science, technology and all the other areas of huma n creative endeavours.
1986
1. Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837), Russian poet, and Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Russian novelist. SALMAN RUSHDIE
In these excerpts from his essay ' 'Commonwealth Literature' Does Not Exist,' ' fiction writer Salman Rushdie (b. 1947; see the headnote to him and see his story 'The Prophet's Hair,' later in this volume) counters the nativist view of English as an imperial yoke that must be thrown off. Recounting the spread of English as a world
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25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
language and describing its indigenization by the non-English, Rushdie claims it as a vital and expressive South Asian literary language, with its own history and tradition.
[English Is an Indian Literary Language]
I'll begin from an obvious starting place. English is by now the world language. It achieved this status partly as a result of the physical colonization of a quarter of the globe by the British, and it remains ambiguous but central to the affairs of just about all the countries to who m it was given, along with mission schools, trunk roads1 and the rules of cricket, as a gift of the British colonizers.
But its present-day pre-eminence is not solely?perhaps not even primarily? the result of the British legacy. It is also the effect of the primacy of the United States of America in the affairs of the world. This second impetus towards English could be termed a kind of linguistic neo-colonialism, or just plain pragmatism on the part of man y of the world's governments and educationists, according to your point of view.
As for myself, I don't think it is always necessary to take up the anticolonial? or is it post-colonial??cudgels against English. Wha t seems to me to be happening is that those peoples who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it?assisted by the English language's enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers.
To take the case of India, only because it's the one with which I'm most familiar. Th e debate about the appropriateness of English in post-British India has been raging ever since 1947;2 but today, I find, it is a debate which has meaning only for the older generation. Th e children of independent India seem not to think of English as being irredeemably tainted by its colonial provenance. They use it as an Indian language, as one of the tools they have to hand.
(I am simplifying, of course, but the point is broadly true.)
There is also an interesting North?South divide in Indian attitudes to
English. In the North, in the so-called 'Hindi belt', where the capital, Delhi,
is located, it is possible to think of Hindi as a future national language; but in
South India, which is at present suffering from the attempts of central gov
ernment to impose this national language on it, the resentment of Hindi is far
greater than of English. After spending quite some time in South India, I've
become convinced that English is an essential language in India, not only
because of its technical vocabularies and the international communication
which it makes possible, but also simply to permit two Indians to talk to each
other in a tongue which neither party hates.
Incidentally, in West Bengal, where there is a State-led move against
English, the following graffito, a sharp dig at the State's Marxist chief minister,
Jyoti Basu, appeared on a wall, in English: it said, 'My son won't learn English;
your son won't learn English; but Jyoti Basu will send his son abroad to learn
English.'
1. Main roads, such as the Grand Trunk Road, the constructed during the British Raj. immense highway
