When the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o announced in 1986 that he would no longer write novels in English, the decision was widely read as a gesture — a symbolic protest by a writer already famous in the language he was renouncing. He insisted it was something harder and more literal. Language, he argued, is not a neutral vehicle that carries meaning from one mind to another. It carries a whole world: the images a child first attaches to words, the proverbs that encode what a community has decided is worth remembering, the assumption about who speaks and who listens.
The colonial school, on his account, did its most lasting work not by teaching English but by teaching contempt for the alternative. Children caned for speaking Gikuyu in the playground learned, well before they could articulate it, that their own tongue belonged to the yard and the field while the language of examination, promotion and law belonged to the classroom. The hierarchy became invisible by becoming ordinary. Political independence left it entirely intact; the flag changed and the syllabus did not.
Critics of this position are not merely defending convenience. Chinua Achebe had earlier argued that English, altered in the mouth of the African writer, could be made to carry the weight of African experience, and that a literature reaching across a continent of several hundred languages needed some shared medium. Others point out that the languages of anticolonial nationalism in India — Hindi and Bengali among them — carried hierarchies of their own, and that elevating a national vernacular can silence a speaker of a smaller tongue quite as efficiently as English ever did.
What is not seriously disputed is the underlying observation. The question of which language a writer works in is never only a question of craft. It settles in advance who the imagined reader is, which body of reference can be assumed without footnotes, and what a text is permitted to take for granted.
