Summary

A conference in 1974 on “The Teaching of African Literature in Kenyan Schools” reopened the debate with regards to secondary schools. The conference committee called for the centrality of African written and oral traditions before any external ones. The conference was particularly pan-African and rejected divisions between Sub-Saharan and Saharan Africa, and between East, West, and Southern Africa. With that foundation in place, the conference then argued for study of black literatures in the Caribbean and Americas. Then African students could be introduced to works of world literature, like Tolstoy.

Ultimately, Ngũgĩ suggests that the language debates were part of a broader attempt to rethink an inherited colonial system of Eurocentric education towards more actively anti-imperialist and Afrocentric system of education.

In Part VI, Ngũgĩ describes two lines of thought that have emerged in Kenya intellectual circles...