‘Harvard became, over time, a political advocacy organization for one party,’ he claimed. ‘When a university goes from being a university to becoming a political advocacy organization, it doesn’t deserve nonprofit status.’ “In Kenya, even today, we have children and their parents who cannot speak their mother tongues, or the parents know their mother tongues and don’t want their children to know their mother tongue. They are very happy when they speak English and even happier when their children don’t know their mother tongue.

That’s why I call it mental colonization.” In one essay from “Decolonizing Language,” Ng~ug~i declares that writers must “be the voice of the voiceless. They have to give voice to silence, especially the silence imposed on a people by an oppressive state.” During his AP interview, Ng~ug~i discussed his concerns about Kenya, the “empowerment” of knowing your native language, his literary influences and his mixed feelings about the United States. Ng~ug~i’s comments on subjects have been condensed for clarity and brevity.

Ng~ug~i has published a handful of books over the past decade, including the novel “The Perfect Nine” and the prison memoir “Wrestling with the Devil,” and was otherwise in the news in 2022 when his son, M~ukoma wa Ng~ug~i, alleged that he had physically abused his first wife, Nyambura, who died in 1996 (“I can say categorically it´s not true,” Ng~ug~i wa Thiong’o responds). ‘Harvard should be a place where students go to learn and the best research gets done,’ Ackman continued.

‘It shouldn’t be a place that is allowing pro-terrorist organizations on campus, that only allows certain kinds of thinking and speech on campus. “I am fine (with speaking English). After all, I am a distinguished professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, in Irvine. So it’s not that I mind English, but I don’t want it to be my primary language, OK? This is how I put it: For me, and for everybody, if you know all the languages of the world, and you don’t know your mother tongue, that’s enslavement, mental enslavement.

But if you know your mother tongue, and add other languages, that is empowerment.” Ed`u*ca”tion (?; 135), n. [L. educatio; cf. F. ‘education.] The act or process of educating; the result of educating, as determined by the knowledge skill, or discipline of character, acquired; also, the act or process of training by a prescribed or customary course of study or discipline; as, an education for the bar or the pulpit; he has finished his education.

One of the world’s most revered writers and a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize, Ng~ug~i remains an energetic speaker with opinions no less forceful than they have been for the past 60 years. Since emerging as a leading voice of post-colonial Africa, he has been calling for Africans to reclaim their language and culture and denouncing the tyranny of Kenya’s leaders.