October 20, 2026

Reclaim Your Own Ground

Colonialist alienation takes two interlinked forms: an active (or passive) distancing of oneself from the reality around; and an active (or passive) identification with that which is most external to one's environment.

Ngũgĩ wrote this while examining his own colonial schooling in Kenya, where children recited poems about English daffodils and snow while their own rivers, hills, and mother tongues were treated as backward. He saw that colonial education did more than teach facts—it trained people to measure their worth by how closely they resembled something foreign. This alienation, he argued, cut deeper than economic exploitation because it colonized the imagination itself. The remedy he practiced was straightforward: look again at what is actually in front of you and recognize it as enough.