Answers about Education

"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? So I am very fascinated by this normalized abnormality." 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). I have no doubt that his experience was by no means unusual. We wave our little flags today, pile the cream and jam on our scones, chink our teacups. But what that generation endured is hard to fathom, decades on. No technology, no phones, relatively basic medicine, no touchy-feely therapy sessions. It was do or die; you had no choice but to get on with it. The lack of self-awareness, the total entitlement, the utter selfishness: when you stop to think about it he's probably far more representative of modern British attitudes than his (comparatively) hard-working brother or father. 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, best online learn to read program 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. "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." 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 online tutoring programs 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. His best known books include the nonfiction "Decolonizing the Mind" and the novel "Devil on the Cross," one of many books that he wrote in his native Gik~uy~u. 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, 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.