At age 87, Kenyan author Ng~ug~i wa Thiong’o remains impassioned…

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His U.S. publisher, The New Press, has just released “Decolonizing Language,” which the author praises as a “beautiful” title. “Decolonizing Language” includes essays and poems written between 2000 and 2019, with subjects ranging from language and education to such friends and heroes as Nelson Mandela, online algebra tutors Nadine Gordimer and Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author whose 1958 novel, “Things Fall Apart,” is considered by many the starting point for modern African literature.

Achebe also helped launch Ng~ug~i’s career by showing a manuscript of an early novel, “Weep Not, Child,” to publisher William Heinemann, who featured it in the landmark African Writers series. To prepare us for complete living is the function which education has to discharge. H. Spenser. Syn. — Education, Instruction, Teaching, Training, Breeding. Education, properly a drawing forth, implies not so much the communication of knowledge as the discipline of the intellect, the establishment of the principles, and the regulation of the heart.

Instruction is that part of education which furnishes the mind with knowledge. Teaching is the same, being simply more familiar. It is also applied to practice; as, teaching to speak a language; teaching a dog to do tricks. Training is a department of education in which the chief element is exercise or practice for the purpose of imparting facility in any physical or mental operation. Breeding commonly relates to the manners and outward conduct.

© Webster 1913. 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. “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.” “On the one hand, I am grateful to be here and to have a job at a California university, as a distinguished professor. I appreciate that. But I was coming from a country which was a white seller colony, and I can’t forget that when I’m here. People don’t even talk about it here. They talk about it as if it were normal.

So we talk about the American Revolution. But is it not Native Americans who were colonized?

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