Professor Ngugi speaks during the Pan-African meeting in Dar es Salaam.

The presence of Professor Ngugi wa Thion’go at the conference created an atmosphere whereby almost everyone scrambled to have his photo for memory at the hall. People with their cameras surged forward each wanting to have a snap

Professor Ngugi wa Thion’go in a group photograph with a preparatory committee team, Tanzanian chapter. Seated on his right is Professor Bugyabuso Mulokozi of the UDSM who was the Chairperson of the preparatory committee of the conference, and standing on his back is the Executive Secretary of the Children Book project Ms Pili Dumea among the committee members.

Earlier, in his paper presentation to participants of the conference Professor Ngugi noted that, in the world today, a handful of western languages constitute an aristocracy while others in a descending order of being occupied. They dominate in the production and dissemination of ideas, they dominate in publishing, distribution and consumption of knowledge, they control the flow of ideas. Intellectuals who comes from the supposedly lesser languages find that, to be visible globally, they must produce and store ideas in western European languages, English mostly. In case of most intellectuals from Africa and Asia, they become visible on the world stage but simultaneously invisible in their own cultures and languages. Global visibility comes at the price of local or regional invisibility. According to Prof. Ngugi, this is because the dominant languages become perceived, even by the dominated, as having all the magic power of knowledge and production of ideas, culture itself, where the dominated languages are seen as having the opposite. They are incapable of producing knowledge and good ideas as this is simply a case of linguistic feudalism, the reality is that linguistic feudalism is being transformed into linguistic Darwinism.