Why writing in your mother tongue is true labour of love

President William Ruto writes on a blackboard after opening classrooms at Nasianda Primary school in Bungoma County. [PCS]

As a first-year student at Kenyatta University forty years ago, I encountered a book that unsettled me and ultimately redirected my intellectual journey. It was Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind. Ngugi argued that language is not just a tool of communication. It is a carrier of culture, memory and worldview. To abandon one’s mother tongue, he insisted, is to participate unknowingly in the colonisation of one’s own mind.