The book, which advocates linguistic decolonization, is one of Ngũgĩ's best-known and most-cited non-fiction publications, helping to cement him as a preeminent voice theorizing the "language debate" in post-colonial studies.

[1] Ngũgĩ describes the book as "a summary of some of the issues in which I have been passionately involved for the last twenty years of my practice in fiction, theatre, criticism, and in teaching of literature".

Several of the book's chapters originated as lectures, and apparently this format gave Ngũgĩ "the chance to pull together in a connected and coherent form the main issues on the language question in literature.

"[2] The book offers a distinctly anti-imperialist perspective on the "continuing debate ... about the destiny of Africa" and language's role in both combatting and perpetrating imperialism and the conditions of neocolonialism in African nations.

They examine this practice as part of the systematic oppression of imperialism in neocolonial societies, and they investigate its ramifications on the psychological, physical, and cultural well-being of colonized people.

On this side of the argument, writers and activists see using the colonist languages as a practical alternative which they can employ to improve conditions of colonized peoples.

For example, a colonist language can be used both to enhance international communication (e.g. people living in Djibouti, Cameroon, Morocco, Haiti, Cambodia, and France can all speak to one another in French).

This side also views the subversive potential of the appropriation of a colonist language by an indigenous people; it is seen as a “counter to a colonial past through de-forming a 'standard' European tongue and re-forming it in new literary forms.”[4]

In his book on Ngũgĩ and his work, Lovesey quotes Albert S. Gérard on this topic:[5] This is the dilemma of the African writer today: either he may use a European language and thus gain recognition (and financial reward) from a worldwide audience, but at the risk of cutting himself off from the very roots of all but the most esoteric creative flowering, the common experience of his own society; or he may use his own mother tongue, stoically shun the appeal of the world market, remain one of the inglorious Miltons of the present age, but help his own people’s advance into the age of mass literacy and pave the way for future achievements and renown.Ngũgĩ's contribution to the language debate is widely known and studied, and he has theorized on the topic extensively.

[6] In December 1977, following the production of the controversial play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), which he co-wrote with Ngugi wa Mirii, and the publication of his highly politicized novel Petals of Blood (1977), Ngũgĩ was imprisoned without trial or charges in Maximum Security Prison by the authoritarian Kenyan regime.

Both Petals of Blood and Ngaahika Ndeenda were openly critical of neocolonial life in Kenya, and they garnered Ngũgĩ a reputation with the Kenyan regime as a political dissident.

[7] Upon his release from prison, Ngũgĩ continued to write and produce activist literature and theatre, and he remained critical of the situation in Kenya.

[8] Due to his writing about the injustices of the dictatorial government, Ngũgĩ and his family received threats of violence and death, and were forced to live in exile.

How people perceive themselves and affects how they look at their culture, at their places politics and at the social production of wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and to other beings.

In Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ discusses, true to Fanon's form, the negative ramifications on the national consciousness as a result of racism, legalized bigotry, and dispossession.

[15] Ngũgĩ remains "sincerely committed" to the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and it is important to note that many liberation movements in Africa have had Marxist roots.

Or rather, Marx and Engels began to reveal the serious weaknesses and limitations of Fanon, especially his own petit bourgeois idealism that led him into mechanical overemphasis on psychology and violence, and his inability to see the significance of the rising and growing African proletariat.

The anecdotal perspective in Decolonising the Mind lends a certain accessibility to readers on political or theoretical issues that is missing from much of the typical and more disengaged academic discussions of linguistic imperialism and post-colonialism.

He determines that in the 1962 Makerere conference, after "all the years of selective education and rigorous tutelage," he and his contemporaries had been led to accept the "fatalistic logic of the unassailable position of English in our literature" (20).

Furthermore, as Gikandi discusses, Ngũgĩ places his own childhood and youth in a trajectory "that moves from linguistic harmony with his African community to a disjunctive relationship under the grip of the colonial language" in order to support his theory of language, part of which maintains that the native tongue promotes a view of the world that is shared by all members of the linguistic community.

"[18] In a short essay titled "Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: In Praise of a Friend", Gayatri Spivak, a fellow pioneer in post-colonial studies, remembers that Ngũgĩ was a "hero" at the time of the appearance of Decolonising the Mind, which instantly became the "controversial classic it remains to this day": "His political commitment and courage, his imprisonment and exile, had given him an aura.

"[19] Decolonising the Mind was perfectly suited to its moment in Africa and relevant to neocolonial struggles in other nations, and it was quickly adopted to the canon of post-colonial studies in language.

[24] Speaking to Ngũgĩ's relevance to the first debate, Spivak notes that while globalization requires a few hegemonic languages in order to maintain international communication, in order to nurture "the impossible dream of a welfare-world globalization (by which she means 'using capital as socialism would'), this requirement must be supplemented by a deep immersion in that world's richness of language."

Ngũgĩ, she notes, is caught in a "double bind"—bound by his desires to reach a global audience and to write to a "subaltern" language.

Gikandi notes that the "more complicated" problem with Ngũgĩ's unexplained return to English for students of his work is contextualizing and rectifying the decision with his politics of language.

Furthermore, Ngũgĩ offers a "useful resource" for the growing use of narrative and autobiographical methods in TESOL research, and can be used to work to correct the "glaring absence" of non-Western authors, subjects, and publications.

... Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's work helps us to recognize, lest we forget, the extensive impact our programs exert on the world beyond our geographical, cultural, and class borders.