"Writing in our languages ​​is a first step. It will not be enough to revive our cultures if the literature we write does not bear traces of the struggles of our people against imperialism; if it does not call for the union of peasants and workers and the taking of control of the wealth that is too often appropriated by parasites of all kinds, external and internal."

"This book is my farewell to English": Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o does not beat around the bush, he decides that from now on, he will write only in Kikuyu. For an author whose works are widely distributed in the English-speaking world, it is a heavy decision, the reasons for which are explained in Decolonizing the Mind, written in 1986. The origins go back to a "Conference of African Writers in English", organized in 1962, in Uganda: it excluded authors writing in one or the other of the African languages, and the young Ngugi asked himself the question: "How was it possible that we, African writers, showed so much weakness in the defense of our own languages ​​and so much greed in the claim of foreign languages, starting with those of our colonizers? » Through his personal journey as a novelist and man of the theatre, Ngugi wa Thiong'o shows that the role given to African oral literature, the vision of Africa as a whole and not as a division resulting from colonization, the reference to traditions of popular resistance, all of this which passes through language is the necessary condition for decolonizing the mind.