Nuunja Kahina writing in This is Africa:
More hereWhile in prison, Kikuyu scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o famously rejected English, the colonial language of Kenya, as a medium for his creative writing, and later committed himself to writing solely in his native Gikuyu after writing Decolonizing the Mind. Along with English, Ngũgĩ continued his decolonizing praxis by renouncing Christianity and his colonial name. His theory and example inspired an essential conversation in African Studies regarding the problem of colonial vs. indigenous language use. Yet this conversation has so far failed to move beyond the issue of European colonial languages, ignoring or even indigenizing the colonial dominance of Arabic in North Africa.
Photo credit: AFP / Abdelhak Senna
The Amazigh (pl. Imazighen) are the indigenous people of North Africa, a region internally called Tamazgha, but often known as part of the “Arab world.” The Amazigh language is Tamazight, and is the mother tongue of tens of millions of people in Tamazgha and the Amazigh diaspora. Since Arab invasions in the 7th century C.E., Arabic has been a colonial language in Tamazgha, although the process of Arabization was dramatically accelerated after North African countries became independent of European colonialism in the 20th century. Arabization, under the thin guise of decolonization, supposedly sought to reduce the use of French in "post-colonial" North Africa, but in actuality targeted the indigenous Tamazight language for discrimination.
