ABSTRACT
More than 30 years after the publishing of ‘Decolonising the Mind’ (1986) by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, discussions of languages are still central to African literatures and understandings of African epistemologies. However, less noticed is the dimension of Ngũgĩ's theorisation and practice of decolonisation in education and his criss-crossing with those of Mao Zedong. Even though China and Africa have gone through different forms, paths, and degrees of colonisation and have reacted differently, Ngũgĩ and Mao share a similar understanding of class and the role of literature, language, and education in decolonisation. These links are constructed not only through Marxism but also through anti-colonial struggle of the “Third World” and divisive politics in the Cold War era. This chapter focuses on the similarities and differences, changes and revisions between and within the works of Ngũgĩ and Mao in theoretical debates and practices on language, literature, and education. It is hoped to move beyond Eurocentric orientations of region and nation-state and to explore arrays of a possible Afro-Asian epistemology through a comparative close reading, revisiting, and reviewing of the two.
