1. The document summarizes Ngugi's argument that remembering and acknowledging Africa's past through African languages will help restore Africa's identity and lead to an African renaissance. 2. It discusses how colonialism and slavery imposed a framework of whiteness that caused Africans to define themselves in relation to whiteness through "dismembering practices" like renaming and separating populations. 3. Applying the sociological imagination shows how personal experiences intersect with larger social forces, empowering Africans to engage in self-definition outside the colonial framework of whiteness.

1. Loanni Del Monte
ENG 352
Professor Khwaja
27 February 2019
Something Torn and New​: Self-definition in the process of ​re-membering ​and the
sociological imagination:
Thesis/Main Idea:
Ngugi makes the overarching argument that remembering and acknowledging the
African past of slavery and colonization - writing and creating in African languages, namely, as a
way to activate memory of a society and people before colonization - will re-member Africa and
restore its “wholeness” as a continent and people, and ultimately bring about the African
renaissance. I contextualize a major point of his argument, that is, the fact that Africans have
defined themselves and their blackness in reference to the old colonial framework of whiteness
in a consequentially (arguably) neocolonial state, within the concept of the “sociological
imagination.”
1. Definition of the ​sociological imagination​:
a. Coined by sociologist C. Wright Mills in 1959, it is described as the intersection
between history and biography, at which the study of both together allows us to
understand the intimate relationship between personal troubles and societal or
systemic issues.
b. The self and society shape each other in “specific biographical and historical
contexts,” and, alternatively, the self is but “a product of larger social
contexts.”(​Tamdgidi 169-170)
2. The biography of continental and diasporic Africans converges with the history of
colonialism and slavery to shape these individuals and their conceptualization of their
own blackness to operate in a framework and only in relation to whiteness.
3. Dismembering practices: Different ways in which colonialism and slavery has imposed
a framework of Eurocentrism/whiteness in which continental and diasporic Africans have
had to self-define and -conceptualize, usually to equate their blackness to ​otherness​:
a. African colonial subject:
i. The dismemberment of the continental African is “that of the colonial
subject’s memory from his individual and collective body. The head that

2. carries memory is cut off from the body and then either stored in the
British Museum or buried upside down” (6), in relation to the burial of
Waiyaki from the Agikuyu anticolonial resistance.
ii. Occurs on the black body:
1. Changing of African names to European/Christian names after
baptism
2. “The African body became a walking commercial for European
memory.” (15)
iii. Occurs on the African continent:
1. In the larger context of names and their power, Ngugi describes
“the African landscape is blanketed with European memory of
place. Names like Port Elisabeth, King Williamstown,
Queenstown, and Grahams-town cover the landscape that Hintsa
died protecting from foreign occupation. Westlands (formerly
Kĩrũngiĩ) and Karen now become the names of the lands Waiyaki
once traversed.” (8)
iv. Naming of black bodies and land serves to alienate the population as far
as possible from themselves and the ​memory ​of an autonomous society
existing before colonialism by erasing any evidence of such entirely.
1. He emphasizes the vital link of names to memory as vital parts of
language as a carrier of memory: “how we identify objects, classify
them, and remember them.” (9)
2. Ngugi also explains the important fact that the very state of being
of Africa, as in its geography and physical “dismemberment”, was
also the work of the colonizer in the Berlin Conference of 1884; so
that Africans of the same culture who spoke the same language
were separated and identified by arbitrary borders.
b. Diasporic africans:
i. Renaming of transported Africans during slavery:
1. “A systematic program eliminated their memory of Africa. Their
own names and naming systems once again were seen as a
barrier to the intended amnesia. So, break up their names. Give

3. them the names of the owners of the plantations to signify their
being the property of Brown or Smith or Williams.” (13-14)
ii. Ngugi explains later in the text, as does Jean-Paul Sartre (a French
philosopher with ties to the Negritude movement) the system of slavery as
symbolically visualized in the renaming of transported Africans signals a
shift in their lives as human beings: they move from living for life itself and
their own personal fulfilment, to living solely for the another and their life’s
fulfillment.
iii. Not only does this process totally erase the memory of Africa and a
pre-existing culture, language, and way of life, but then defines the person
in relation to something entirely other: the white master and slave-owner.
c. Conclusion: If we recontextualize this “dismemberment” of the African
landscape and its diasporic and continental peoples into the sociological
imagination, the memory of a biography independent of the colonizer - a culture,
community, language - is erased and refuted by the history of colonialism that is
the system of power itself. What is created as a result is an entirely new
framework centered around whiteness - European culture and language - in
which Africans on the continent and of the diaspora are forced to define
themselves in relation to, and that is as “otherness.”
d. Language as a monolithic entity:
i. Linguicide in the diaspora & linguifam on the continent:
1. Separating Africans of the same culture and language to inhibit
communication
2. Indoctrinating African populations the supremacy of European
languages and the inferiority of African languages, punishing and
embarrassing school children that spoke their native languages as
active discouragement
3. Results, too, in the erasure of a memory of an African culture and
community.
4. Conclusion:
a. This is all to say the dismembering practices of the colonizer - from separating
the African populations into groups of diasporic and colonial subjects, to using
language and naming as a particular part of language, all in order to completely

4. erase any memory of a culture, community, and language independent of the
colonizer - work together in order to make up the colonial framework of
whiteness. As a result of an intersection of an African biography interrupted by a
European history of colonization, continental and diasporic Africans are thrusted
into a unique framework of whiteness that they are also forced to define their
blackness in relation to. This inevitably results in their definition of themselves as
the other and lesser (to whiteness).
b. Why is it important to think of the process of self-definition as it relates to
Africanness and blackness through the lens of the sociological imagination?
i. The sociological lens empowers African peoples, continental and
diasporic alike, to engage in a positive and empowering process of
“self-conception” and create a uniquely African “interpretive lens”, unlike
the colonial framework of Eurocentrism and whiteness that defines
blackness for them.
ii. Tada Akin Aina exemplifies the autonomy possible in this process of
self-actualization:
1. “Africans must interpret and explain Africa… In other words, we
must find our voices and our minds by providing our own
narratives. Africa must be its own interpreter through generating
its own knowledge, discourses, stories, myths and narratives.”
(98)
2. The author’s words are strikingly similar to Ngugi’s call to action at
the end of the text, in which he calls on the “keepers of memory”,
African writers and creators, to write and create in African
languages to enrich African societies and cultures (as opposed in
European languages to augment the already enormous canon of
European literature and culture).
3. It, therefore, also parallels the importance of a sociological lens
when considering the process of self-definition when it comes to
blackness, and particularly how that process and act has been
thwarted in a history of colonization.
5. Questions and further research:

5. a. Where do we see the effects of self-defining blackness in an oppressive colonial
framework of whiteness exemplified in the text?
b. I would be interested in further researching other “dismembering practices” of
diasporic Africans. Ngugi provided few, though significant, examples of how that
process can manifest in Africans taken from the continent during the slave trade
and how that experience is so different from that of living in a colonial state. I
would also explore the “dismembering process” - the process of the erasure of an
African culture - as experienced by non-American diasporic Africans and how
those experiences are unique to their geographical, political, social and economic
locations.

6. Sources:
Aina, Tade Akin. “Reclaiming the Promise of the Sociological Imagination in Africa.” ​African
Sociological Review / Revue Africaine De Sociologie​, vol. 8, no. 2, 2004, pp. 90–102. ​JSTOR​,
www.jstor.org/stable/24487449​.
CARR, GREG. “Translation, Recovery, and ‘Ethnic’ Archives of Africana: Inscribing Meaning beyond
Otherness.” ​PMLA​, vol. 127, no. 2, 2012, pp. 360–364., ​www.jstor.org/stable/41616827​.
HEALEY, JOSEPH F. ​DIVERSITY AND SOCIETY: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender​. SAGE
PUBLICATIONS, 2019.
https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/23985_Pages_26_30.pdf
Jules-Rosette, Bennetta. “Jean-Paul Sartre and the Philosophy of Négritude: Race, Self, and
Society.” ​Theory and Society​, vol. 36, no. 3, 2007, pp. 265–285. ​JSTOR​,
www.jstor.org/stable/20730796​.

7. ● Linguifam:
○ Translations between from non-european languages to european languages
consists of 99% of translation, Ngugi calls on