Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o on 'Linguistic Power-sharing'

       Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o addressed the just-held South African Sunday Times Literary Awards, and they now print his speech, Linguistic Power-sharing: Culture and the freedom of expression.
       Some fun details about his first literary honors ("I am sure I could have done with something less honorary and more monetary"), and then he again makes the case for the revitalization of the use of African languages, concerned that:

The African middle class is running from their languages. In the process they perpetrate child abuse on a national scale. For to deny a child, any child, their right to mother tongue, to bring up such a child as a monolingual English speaker in a society where the majority speak African languages, to alienate that child from a public they may be called to serve, is nothing short of child abuse. To have mother tongue, whatever it is, and add other languages to it is empowerment. But to know all the other languages and not one's own is enslavement. I hope Africa chooses empowerment over enslavement.

       And, of course, I completely agree with his closing words:

I still like what Mao once said: let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend. So also languages: Let a hundred languages contend and a hundred flowers will bloom.