In my essay I shall be discussing views and attitudes of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o towards the language of the colonizer with particular reference to his collection of essays entitled Decolonising the Mind. I shall also mention another contemporary of Ngugi, Frantz Fanon, whom Ngugi takes after. I shall also discuss the importance of language as seen through the eyes of these two authors. When one thinks of language, one of the first things that come to mind is the particular culture to which that language appertains. Language is thus representative of a culture and its people; it is one of the most crucial elements that give the people their unique identity. Moreover, language is power, or embodies it, for language is the means through which people come to an understanding of their surroundings. Hence, language can be said to be a most powerful instrument as it can control people and the culture they belong to. Taking this into account, one can easily understand how the language of the colonizer formed a great part of the agenda of colonization itself. One of the struggles that the highly educated and bilingual postcolonial writers have to face is to try and strike a balance between the power dynamics of the tensions found between colonized-colonizer and indigenous-alien. Literature produced by postcolonial writers is at the core of this particular tension, for it is a medium through which conflict and toil is expressed in an attempt to cut the chords of colonization. Through their writing, postcolonial authors speak out about how the ‘imperial language’ dominated every area of their culture. In his work titles ‘Postcolonial Literature’, Justin D. Edwards discusses this issue and as well as its solutions: Armed with their pens, the said authors address the dominance of imperial language as it relates to educational systems, to economic structures, and perhaps more importantly to the medium through which anti-imperial ideas are cast. The postcolonial voice can decide to resist imperial linguistic domination in two ways - by rejecting the language of the colonizer or by subverting the empire by writing back in a European language.1 Frantz Fanon speaks in despondent terms about the dialectic of language existing between the colonized and the colonizer. He believes that in the eyes of the colonizer ‘the colonized is raised above jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards’, an idea which Fanon strongly dismisses. He not only rejects the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, but also encourages total rejection of the standards of the colonizing culture; its principles, values and more importantly its language. In Fanon’s view ‘a man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language’. Thus, he reasons that whoever takes up the language of the colonizer is, in simple terms, accepting the world of the colonizer together with his own cultural standards. Fanon regards language as a technology of power that drives cultural dominance. Although the most obvious instance of the process of colonization is certainly the physical possession of a land followed by the imposition of a governmental presence on the natives of the land, an even stronger dominance is possible through the colonization of the people’s mind. By imposing a new language on the native people, one is not only made to associate himself with new ideas and customs of another culture, but is also subject to influences in the way he thinks and perceives things. In simpler terms, when postcolonial writers opt for language of their colonizer, they work with certain phrases and expressions which are unique to the culture as they express its particular characteristics of thinking. In order for the colonizers to hold complete dominion over their colonized, a complete eradication of the former natives’ ideological structures has to take place, destroying every thing that constitutes their identity; including their language, culture, history and customs. Fanon argues that this is exactly what the Colonizers did as they replaced all the aforementioned indigenous qualities with those belonging to the European culture: A language is to take on a world, a culture. The Antilles Negro who wants to be white will be whiter as he gains greater mastery of the cultural tool that language is. 2 Following in Fanon’s footsteps, Ngugi Wa Thiongo advocates drastic measures in order to promote decolonization in his collection of essays called Decolonising the Mind. These essays explicitly show the different ways how the language used to write African literature directly promotes imperial dominance. He puts forward a powerful argument as to why African writers should opt to write in their native and traditional African languages instead of European languages. He explains that when one writes in the colonizer’s language, he is depriving his own people from