Strangle Hold of English Lit

Felix Mnthali just retired from the University of Botswana where he held the title "Professor of English" (!) for almost 30 years. Ironically, as a "Professor of English", which just means he worked in the English department because that is where one teaches literature in the Botswana university system, he taught African literature. Oh, how he must have felt the crazy strictures of English literature that he writes about in his poem "Stranglehold of English Lit" as he held the title Professor of English and taught African literature during the literary renaissance of the second half of the 20th century. I do not know if he speaks or writes in Tswana (the local language of Botswana) but certainly he must speak Chewa, the major language of Malawai, his home country. But Malawai has 16 language represented in the country, so he could know a few.

In "Stranglehold of English Lit" he seems to rail against the problem of Africans literary efforts being colonized by British literature. Indeed, the official language of Botswana is English and English is also an official language of Malawi. You can't get an education there except in English, but now there is so much from Africa to read in English, so things are different now. In fact, English has morphed into something different in these countries, so that I would like to find out what Ngugi and Mnthali would say about the appropriation of the colonial languages where they have been sort of reversed colonized by the people who use it on a daily basis making it "bear the weight of their African experience" as Achebe would have it.

So yes, the problem with the literature of the colonizer in the colonized country is that it doesn't answer any questions for the colonized. However, it seems to me that in these changing days, English doesn't belong to England any more, nor does it belong to the two northern countries of North America. Nigeria, Botswana, and Malawi, to only name a few, have taken English and claimed it as their own, colonial baggage an all. In fact, since independence, they have unpacked a lot of that baggage and filled it with their own stuff. Nugugi advocates that we embrace it all instead of having a Jane Austen book burning, as it were. This seems most useful. Let's read everything, and let's all write in all the languages we have available. Yes, yes, it is a little more work, and though literacy is costly, it is worth the expense.