Incidentally, while re-reading Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, my eyes fell on a television teaser of the upcoming FIFA World Cup sponsored by Castrol GTX. Ngugi, as many of you would know, in his drive at decolonizing the African mind, vehemently rejects European languages as means of expression; he even opposes Africanization of the colonizer’s language. While delving into the paradox of the postcolonial continent, he observes that the neo-colonial ‘comprador ruling cliques are…quite happy to have the peasantry and the working class all to themselves: distortions, dictatorial directives, decrees, museum-type fossils paraded as African culture…all these and more are communicated to the backward masses in their own languages without any challenges from those with alternative visions of tomorrow who have deliberately cocooned themselves in English, French and Portuguese.” While at home, the colonization of the lower classes continues, the images which have become associated with Africa, through the cultural discourse of colonialism, have not really changed. The Castrol teaser shows two young men accidentally falling through an empty Castrol container to emerge in the middle of a dense forest with two lions staring at them; next, they materialize inside a cauldron carried by two native African men in the midst of a tribal procession (made slightly comic…note the expression on the faces of the native men, and how the two boys are appalled by the prospective of being sacrificed; obviously, hinting that the tribe is unambiguously cannibalistic), and finally they pop up in a the middle of the stadium when John Abraham lifts them up. The motive of the ad is to convey to the world that the next World Cup Football is going to take place in Africa. What is painful is that Africa still conjures up in the minds of people across the globe wild animals and weird nocturnal rituals at the heart of the forest! This is, no doubt, an African reality. But, the approach to it is one of comic condescension…a sense of cultural superiority making itself visible in the expression of the two men, incidentally South Asians. And, besides, isn’t Africa something else too? You can’t blame the ad-maker, for he/she has correctly tapped on the popular imagination of the world, when it comes to Africa. What we may ponder over is the immense power of Western cultural imperialism and its tremendous capacity of image-creation! What flustered me is that whether decolonization of the mind is ever possible. Ironically, when such a global phenomenon (that is World Cup Football) is to take place in the continent, age-old fossilized images of the continent continue to act as its identity! It’s undeniable that even before the ad ends, all of us know it has something to do with Africa. For, in our collective unconscious we have always imagined Africa like that only. Who is going to erase such an image…an image that was culturally made current by the European colonizer to justify his imperialistic project in the unsuspecting continent? No academic appeal to reject the language of the master can really affect any overnight transformation. It’s not possible. The disease is too profound to be remedied.
