Language and Identity in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks

Language is both a tool of colonial domination and a site of anticolonial resistance, and a comparative reading of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Decolonising the Mind and Frantz Fanon's Black Skin White Masks provides a foundational framework for understanding how colonised peoples internalise the colonial language at the cost of authentic selfhood. This study examined how both texts theorise the relationship between language, colonial psychology, and the construction of African subjectivity. A theoretical and close reading methodology drawing on postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, and African philosophy was applied. Fanon's analysis of the psychopathology of colonial language use among Antillean French speakers is read alongside Ngugi's autobiographical and theoretical account of the Kenyan colonial education system's systematic denigration of African languages. Both texts argue that colonial linguistic imposition is an act of epistemic violence that colonises the mind as thoroughly as military conquest colonises the land. The analysis revealed that while Fanon operates primarily within a psychoanalytic and phenomenological framework, Ngugi grounds his argument in a specific cultural politics of African language revitalisation. Both texts ultimately call for a decolonial cultural revolution. The study concludes that both works are essential theoretical texts for Nigerian Comparative Literature students, particularly given the ongoing debate about language of instruction and the status of indigenous Nigerian languages in higher education. The pairing is recommended for theory courses at universities across all geopolitical zones.

Keywords: language, colonial identity, Ngugi, Fanon, decolonisation