There was an old essay by Ngugi in The Guardian recently, setting out his idea of colonialisation and decolonialisation of the mind through language.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/aug/12/ngugi-wa-thiongo-aminatta-forna-decolonisation-language-conquest

He begins by talking about the colonialisation of the Irish and finishes with what happened later in Africa. Two passages stood out to me.

On Ireland:

"Among other things, the Kilkenny statutes threatened to confiscate any lands of any English or any Irish living among them who would use “Irish among themselves, contrary to the ordnance”. These policies were given a literary and philosophical rationale by none other than the poet Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene and himself a settler in Munster. In his pamphlet A View of the Present State of Irelande, published in 1596, he argued that language and naming systems were the best means of bringing about the erasure of Irish memory: “It hath ever been the use of the conqueror to despise the language of the conquered, and to force him by all means to learn his.”"

On Africa:

"It was never a case of adding a new language to what one already had. For the colonial conqueror, it was not enough to introduce an additional language to any community. Imperial languages had to be planted on the graveyard of the languages of the dominated. The death of African languages gave life to European languages. In order for the imperial language to be, the language of the colonised had to cease to be. Amnesia for African languages; anamnesis for European languages.

These two conditions are not inherent in the character of the languages involved. They are mental conditions consciously brought about by how the imperial languages were imposed. In Decolonising the Mind, I have talked about the corporal punishment meted out to African children caught speaking an African language at school, children who were then made to carry a placard around the neck proclaiming their stupidity. In some cases, the culprit was made to swallow filth, thus associating African languages with criminality, pain and filth."

In the intro to the essay they mention that he has died since your interview. We, listeners to the podcast, were fortunate you interviewed him when you did.