Decolonising the Linguistic Encirclement in Africa

In this chapter, we take up, broaden, and repurpose the concept of ‘linguistic encirclement’ that Ngugi wa Thiong’o pioneered in the 1980s. Wa Thiong’o introduced this concept to describe how Africans were colonised and territorialised through the deployment of European languages in ways that invented balkanised African identities based on colonial heritages. We extend the critique of linguistic encirclement to cover four invented categories of languages that have an encircling effect on identity imaginings, educational policies, and other social policy agendas. We argue that invented language and identity categories continue to advance the Euro-modernist cognitive empire by consigning Africans into enclaves and hierarchies of humanity that would enhance colonially inherited forms of exploitation, domination, and control.