The issue of language in the African context is closely tied to issues of self-determination, self-sufficiency, self-worth, etc. As stated by Izevbayo, “It is generally recognized that language is inextricably linked not only with cultural attitudes, but with the user’s conception of reality. For this reason, as recent critics have pointed out, language is potentially the most subtle and effective means of mental colonization” (Izevbaye 1971: 128). For, when others control a people’s thinking, they also control a people’s behavior and potential for shaping reality in their own best interests. This lack of control is manifested in the social, psychological, societal, and other problems that we now find in the African context that work in the best interests of the non-African such as the previously alluded to financing of our own oppression through created tastes and desires. As advanced by Dr. Carter G. Woodson:
If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one (Woodson 1992: 84-85).
According to the foremost critic on the language question, Ngugi wa Thiong’O, this was the function of the imposition of non-African languages on the African as “the most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world. Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control” (Ngugi 1986: 16). This process of control was legitimated by theories of backwardness and primitiveness that many of we Africans have accepted in our rush towards glittering whiteness, thus reinforcing a subservient condition that is outside of our best interests. With the goal of devaluing the culture and controlling the thinking of the African, the non-African engaged in a process of:
The destruction or the deliberate undervaluing of a people’s culture, their are, dances, religions, history, geography, education, orature and literature, and the conscious elevation of the language of the coloniser. The domination of a people’s language by the languages of the colonising nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonised (Ngugi 1986: 16).
