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Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o Books

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Petals of Blood

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“If you know all the languages of the world and you don't know your mother tongue or the language of your culture, that is enslavement. But if you know your mother tongue or the languages of your culture, and add all the other languges to it, that is empowerment. In reality it is impossible for any person to know all the languages in their own country, let alone the world. This is where the art of translation comes in.”

CultureEmpowermentTranslationEnslavementLanguagesMother Tongue
Book:The Language of Languages
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“Hoy a los niños se les enseña a cerrar los ojos y a bloquear los oídos para que nunca vean las necesidades del pueblo ni oigan sus gemidos. El que solía oír, hoy se ha convertido en sordo. El resultado de esos colegios son aquellos de quienes se dice: «¡Lástima de esta generación, porque tienen ojos y no pueden ver, y tienen oídos y no pueden oír!». Porque se les ha enseñado a ver y oír un solo mundo.”

ChildrenEducationToleranceWorldview
Book:Devil on the Cross
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“For the first 3 weeks of that month, I was also under internal segregation. This simply meant that no other political prisoner was allowed near me. During meals, I was made to sit apart from the others, often with a guard between us. During my ration of sunshine, I had to sit in my corner, often with a watchful guard to ensure that there was no talking or other contact between me & any of the others. Because we were all on the same block it wasn't easy for the warders to enforce total segregation. The other political prisoners would break through the cordon by shouting across to me or by finding any & every excuse for going past where I was sitting & hurriedly throwing in one or two words of solidarity...This was always touching coming from people who were in no better conditions.”

HumanityPrisonerSolidarityKenyaPolitical Prisoners
Book:Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir
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“For a detained patriot, breaking through the doubled walls of gray silence, attempting even a symbolic link with the outside world, is an act of resistance And resistance--even at the level of merely asserting one's rights, of maintaining one's ideological beliefs in the face of a programmed onslaught--is in fact the only way political prisoners can maintain their sanity and humanity. Resistance is the only means of trying to prevent a breakdown. The difficulty lies in the fact that in this effort one must rely first and foremost on one's own resources (writing defiance on toilet paper for instance), and nobody can teach one how to do it.”

SpiritPrisonResistanceImprisonmentKenyaPolitical Prisoner
Book:Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir
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“What Waringa tried hard to avoid was looking at the pictures of the walls and windows of the church. Many of the pictures showed Jesus in the arms of the virgin Mary or on the cross. But others depicted the devil, with two cow-like horns and a tail like a monkey's, raising one leg in a dance of evil, while his angels, armed with burning pitchforks, turned over human beings on a bonfire. The Virgin Mary, Jesus and God's angels were white, like European, but the devil and his angels were black.”

InspirationPoint Of View
Book:Devil on the Cross
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“Berlin of 1884 was effected through the sword and the bullet. But the night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard. The physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom. But where the former was visibly brutal, the latter was visibly gentle … The bullet was the means of physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation.”

EducationViolenceColonialismDiscourseColonizationSymbolic Violence
Author:Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
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