The Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o wrote that when he was a child, he spoke Gikuyu, "the language of our evening teach-ins, and the language of our immediate and wider community, and the language of our work in the fields were one" (1994 [1986]: 438). This harmony was broken when he went to the colonial school, introducing a rupture between the language of education and that of home. Moreover, those who spoke their mother tongue were punished, and "English became more than a language: it was the language, and all the others had to bow before it in deference" (1994 [1986]: 438; italics in the original).

Invoking this experience to attack Achebe's modernist optimism, Ngugi treats language as the property of its speakers; it has owners (1994 [1986]: 436). Thus colonial education is a form of violent expropriation – it takes away the language one truly possesses – and alienation – it forces one to use a language that belongs to others, the colonizers and the indigenous "petty bourgeoisie." Ngugi links this property model of alienation to another, a rupture within experience, between spoken and written language, between the language that is the "carrier" of one's culture (1994 [1986]: 439) and that which is only a means of communication with outsiders. He thus seems to conflate two kinds of "violence," that which transpires in the power relations of colonialism and a more general schism that lies between authentic speech (that of the mother, the hearth, of "real-life struggles" 1994 [1986]: 437) and the general semiotic properties that decenter language – its learnability, what Derrida (1982 [1971]) calls its iterability, and the decontextualizing effects of writing. But by conflating these semiotic properties, which are inescapable characteristics of language, with colonial relations, which are historically specific forms of power, he risks making any challenge to actual relations of domination unthinkable or at least unspeakable.

Achebe and Ngugi represent two versions of high modernism, cosmopolitan and identitarian, which flourished in the early postcolonial world. Since that time, complexities and contradictions have become increasingly evident. Cosmopolitanism draws indigenous elites into foreign allegiances which may exclude people at home for whom the requisite education and mobility are not available. The essentializing claims common to national historiography and identity politics are marked by their colonial genealogies (Chakrabarty 1992). The respective language ideologies of the cosmopolitan and the nationalist are equally suspect since the poststructuralist turn in postcolonial studies. The presumption of universal transparency that allows Achebe to assume that the African writer could enter freely into English literature has been thrown into doubt; so too Ngugi's romantic assimilation of ethnic group to language, and both to an originary self-presence. If the colonial translator worked under assumptions of universality, and thus transparency among languages, postcolonial critics commonly insist on particularity or heterogeneity, and thus the resistance to translation among languages, as crucial to larger projects of historical agency (Jacquemond 1992, Mahrez 1992, Niranjana 1992; cf. Liu 1995, Spivak 1992).

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