the lAnguAge of mAstery 87and imaginative capacities. What would it mean to turn away from Euro-
pean writers designated as “literary masters” toward African artists and
storytellers whose own worldviews and cultural deployments could alter-
nately become antimasterful models of imbuing native languages with new
potentialities?
If brute European force confirmed the physical subjugation of the
colony, language for Ngu ̃gı ̃ marked its “spiritual subjugation” (1986, 9). To
redress this subjugation, to reclaim African identity and to refuse the sub-
suming nature of colonial languages, in 1968 Ngu ̃gı ̃ famously called for
the abolition of the English department at his then home institution at the
University of Nairobi. Responding to proposed developments of the En-
glish department and its ties to other departments, the justification for the
necessity of English is articulated by way of a need to study “the historic
continuity of a single culture” (1973, 145). If this is so, Ngu ̃gı ̃ asks, “Why
can’t African literature be at the center so that we can view other cultures in
relationship to it?” (146). To answer this question we must recall Macaulay’s
stance on Sanskrit literature and the vernacular languages of India: they are
simply too unrefined, too void of elegance and too inept at expressing the
more profound and philosophical subtleties of human existence. Ngu ̃gı ̃ in-
sists that the continued centrality of English language and culture in Africa
is neocolonial, a pedagogical device to ensure the ongoing supremacy of
the Western world and its traditions. Instead, he summons a course of lit-
erary study that would move from the local toward the global regardless
of whether the local includes works that have been subjectively bestowed
with titles of literary excellence. For him, it is urgent to study oneself from
the point of view of one’s culture first and to expand from this point toward
other linguistic and literary traditions.
While Achebe and Ngu ̃gı ̃ appear as opposing figures in the postcolonial
language debates, their own uses of language similarly rehearse the violence
at stake in claiming or recrafting language in the postcolony. Employing
animal metaphors of “sacrifice” and “prey” to think the relation between
humans and their languages, both writers take for granted human mas-
tery over the nonhuman world. Language is repeatedly figured as some-
thing to hunt, to kill, to subject. Yet this metaphorical attachment to human
practices of mastery is also challenged through their mutual insistence on
thinking postcolonial language beyond mastery, as a relation of human re-
configuration and entanglement that does not necessitate mastery. Achebe