The Mind Was the First Colony
A tribute to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, V.Y. Mudimbe, and Amadou Hampâté Bâ
PositiveMinds | Positive Stories | Edition 067
Illustrated by me (A. Coulibaly) with canva.com
“Decolonisation of the mind is the most powerful weapon against colonial domination.”
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who passed away on 28 May 2025, was more than a writer. He was a liberator of thought. He revealed with precision how colonialism crept into the soul through language, replacing dignity with inferiority, and memory with mimicry. His passing is a loss, but his voice remains — clear, urgent, and necessary.
His words have long resonated with me. Not as a theory. As memory. And as pain.
I was just a child, maybe eight or nine years old, sitting on a hard school bench, when I first felt the burn of linguistic shame. At my primary school, we had a disciplinary ritual known as the symbol. The supposed goal was to accelerate our mastery of the French language. In reality, it was designed to uproot us from our own languages — to sever the very cord that connected us to our families, our culture, and our selves.
If you were caught speaking your mother tongue — even in a whisper — a fellow pupil would approach you with a look of triumph and say: "Tiens, prends le symbole." And just like that, you were marked.
The symbol was never the same object. Sometimes it was a piece of wood, sometimes a tin plate hung around your neck. But one teacher went further. He chose a cow’s skull, complete with horns. It was heavy, grotesque, and humiliating. If you couldn't find someone else to pass it to, you took it home — and worse, brought it back the next day. During morning assembly, you’d be called out and forced to stand in the middle of a circle, surrounded by classmates, while everyone pointed and laughed.
They called it a game. But it was nothing short of psychological violence.
That day, I learned that my language — the one I spoke to my mother, the one my grandmother sang lullabies in — was not welcome. That speaking like my ancestors was something to be punished. I was too young to speak French fluently, and too afraid to speak my own language. I became silent. And in that silence, something sacred was stolen.
Ngũgĩ understood this theft. He exposed it for what it was: not a path to education, but a weapon of domination.
And he was not alone.
When the Drum Fell Silent
Amadou Hampâté Bâ warned us too. In Amkoullel, L’enfant Peul, and L’Empire Peul du Macina, he chronicled how colonial systems dismantled not only governance but also guardianship. Oral traditions — the griots, the elders, the storykeepers — were pushed aside. Their wisdom, once transmitted across generations through proverbs and parables, was dismissed as backwards. Their stories, once sacred, were trivialised as folklore.
In their place came foreign scripts, printed in distant capitals. The colonial textbook replaced the griot’s drum. The cold authority of written words drowned out the warm cadence of memory.
But even in silence, the drum remembered its rhythm. Around fires, in music, in metaphors, the stories lived on. Unwritten does not mean forgotten. And unrecognised does not mean untrue. The resistance was not only in protest — it was in persistence.
The Library That Shrunk Us
Just weeks before Ngũgĩ’s death, we lost another intellectual giant. V.Y. Mudimbe passed away on 22 April 2025. His idea of The Colonial Library revealed something many sensed but lacked the words to explain: that the very foundation of knowledge had been colonised.
For decades, Africa was studied through borrowed lenses. Written about in terms that distorted, diminished, and dehumanised. Texts like "Primitive Africa", "Tribal Logic", and "Myths and Superstitions" did not simply misunderstand us. They redefined us for others — and eventually, for ourselves.
The damage went beyond labels. It rewired identity. It taught us to doubt our past, to question our intelligence, and to view our own knowledge systems as inferior.
But libraries can change.
The act of decolonising knowledge is not only about rejecting harmful narratives. It is also about writing new ones. It is about giving voice to Ubuntu, Sankofa, Afrofuturism, and philosophies rooted in place, history, and lived experience. It is about affirming the plurality of truths and the legitimacy of oral, spiritual, and intuitive knowledge.
We do not need permission to remember who we are.
What Must Change in Global Development
These lessons reach far beyond literature. In global development, we still see the long shadow of colonised knowledge. Whose data counts? Who sets the agenda? Who gets to speak in international forums — and in what language? Who is deemed “capacity-building” material, and who is the “expert”?
When we rely only on externally validated systems of knowing, we erase the wisdom born of survival, community, and culture. When we define progress through imported models, we uproot people from their own paths of possibility.
Decolonising development means changing what is taught, who teaches it, and how learning is valued. It means elevating ancestral knowledge alongside academic knowledge. It means shifting from extraction to exchange, from ownership to relationship, from instruction to dialogue.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o chose to write in "Kikuyu", not to isolate himself, but to re-root himself. Amadou Hampâté Bâ fought to preserve oral traditions so that identity could not be stolen with silence. V.Y. Mudimbe dismantled the intellectual machinery of empire so that truth could finally stand unchained.
We owe them more than gratitude. We owe them continuity. Let the next generation carry the drum, rewrite the library, and reclaim the symbol.
Note: Tilé has more to say about decolonisation, localisation, and shifting power through visual metaphors. Explore the Visual Wisdom collection to learn more.
#NgugiWaThiongo #VYMudimbe #AmadouHampateBa #DecoloniseTheMind #LanguageJustice #EpistemicJustice #Ubuntu #AfricanPhilosophy #GriotWisdom #OralTradition #GlobalDevelopment #PositiveMinds #VisualWisdom
