Performance and Language Diversity in a Globalizing World

Abstract

The events that precipitated a turning away from writing in English to writing in Gĩkũyũ for the Kenyan author, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, are well known to most scholars of African literature and African performance. According to Ngũgĩ, the first steps were taken during his involvement in the writing and production of a play in a village called Kamĩrĩĩthũ on the outskirts of Nairobi in 1976. It seemed only natural that a play by and for residents of this village, comprising mainly peasants and some factory workers, should be in a local language. The experience and the events that followed had a transformative effect on Ngũgĩ, and from then on, he was to do virtually all his creative writing in Gĩkũyũ. Ngũgĩ himself acknowledges as much in his book, Decolonising the Mind, where he stated: ‘It was Kamĩrĩĩthũ which forced me to turn to Gĩkũyũ, and hence into what for me amounted to an epistemological break with my past, particularly in the area of theatre.’1KeywordsPublic SphereMinority LanguageWrite TextIndigenous LanguageLanguage DiversityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.