Dante Studamire
Africana Theories
Moving the Centre
Through the text, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms, author/activist
Ngũgĩ Wa Thing’s (1993) argues for a world that reflects the diversity of the world peoples and
cultures. He proffers that the modern world is a product of is a product of European
imperialism and the resistance of it by those who are marginalized today. The idea of “the
centre” can be applied to any mainstream idea, but Ngũgĩ’s argument is specifically positioned
around language. Systems of socialization and power, from economics and politics, to culture
and education are dominated from a Western perspective that “is most dangerous to the self-
confidence of Third World peoples when it becomes internalized in their intellectual conception
of the universe,” (p.xvii).
Ngũgĩ makes the case that language, both literature as well as the words themselves, is
vital to a people’s understanding of themselves. It was his commitment to writing his texts in
his native language of Gikuyu, and the subject matter of his works, the injustices of imperialism,
that played a large part of his exile from Kenya. There is a large economic power discourse in
the text related to imperialism, colonialism and neocolonialism. Ngũgĩ often refers to the
“workers” (p. 12) being linked to controlling central forces. Imperialism, through its destructive
nature, permeates every aspect of a culture, and specifically to many populations, engages
racism. Racism eventually obscures the real relationship between the wealth of a few and the
poverty of the majority in a capitalist society as we see in American culture.
Language is power, it creates consciousness, and as discussed in class, ultimately serves
the interest of someone. Two aspects of language are that they communicate the struggle to
find a means of survival, and it is a carrier of history and culture. In knowing this, what then are
Dante Studamire
Africana Theories
Moving the Centre
the implications for all the modern world systems to be birthed from English, German, and
French? We spoke in class to what it means when your identity is imposed on you. It
encouraged me to draw connections to Asa Hilliard’s ideas of cultural pluralism. In The Maroon
Within Us, Hilliard (1995) recalls the example of a sheepdog is groomed to later be utilized to
herd sheep. It is placed in isolation from other dogs and raised with the sheep, as if it belonged
to the fold. Through this “socialization” process, the dog will no longer act like, or in, the
interest of the dog, nor will it recognize other dogs as brothers or sisters. Likewise, the
destruction of language does several things. It renders people dependent on the dominant
force (often working against the interests of the oppressed people), and it severs the people’s
