For generations, English was presented as the language of intelligence.
To speak it fluently was to be civilized, credible, modern. In classrooms across colonized lands, children were taught that mastery of English was mastery of the world. But intelligence was about control, never about language.
Colonial powers did not teach English to elevate the colonized. They taught it to erase them.
As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argues in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), the colonial classroom was not a neutral space of learning. It was a battlefield. African children were punished for speaking their mother tongues, forced to internalize the idea that their languages were primitive, their cultures inferior.
The goal was not literacy but loyalty. By replacing indigenous languages with English, colonial education systems replaced entire ways of seeing, knowing, and being.
Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), described this process as psychological domination. The colonized subject, he wrote, begins to see the world, and themselves, through the eyes of the colonizer.
Language becomes a tool of alienation. To speak English “well” is to gain access to power, but also to distance oneself from one’s roots. The colonized intellectual becomes fluent in the language of empire, yet estranged from the rhythms of their own people.
Today, the legacy of that system endures. A Kenyan child can recite Shakespeare but not their grandfather’s stories. A Kenyan graduate writes flawless English but stumbles in Luo. These are celebrated as signs of progress, of global competence. But what did we lose in the process? Language carries culture. It encodes memory, values, and collective wisdom. When a people abandon their language, they do not merely lose words. They lose identity, continuity, and belonging. They become guests in their own inheritance.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s decision to abandon English and write in Gikuyu was political. It was an act of reclamation. He understood that to decolonize the mind, one must first decolonize language. For him, writing in Gikuyu was a way to restore dignity to African thought, to affirm that intelligence and creativity exist in every tongue, not just in those sanctioned by empire.
The smartest people on earth speak languages most of the world has never heard of.
Intelligence is not performed in English; it exists everywhere. In every dialect, oral tradition, and indigenous philosophy, all of which colonialism tried to silence. The problem is not that English is spoken, but that it is still treated as the measure of intellect. A passport to legitimacy.
To truly decolonize education, Africa must reclaim its linguistic heritage. Schools should teach mother tongue, not as a token gesture, but as a foundation for thought. Literature, science, and philosophy must be expressed in the languages that carry the soul of the people. Only then can knowledge be rooted, relevant, and liberating.
Speaking English has value. The question is why it still defines intelligence. Until that changes, the colonial project continues, not through force, but through fluency.
