Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Published 1986 · 75,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature to read?
Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature scores 39 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 60 out of 100
- Clear and accessible prose with theoretical density from Fanon and Marxist traditions; explicable without specialist background.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Abstraction: 70 out of 100
- Theoretical arguments about language, consciousness, and cultural imperialism are sustained across the full length.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- Dense with autobiography, literary history, political analysis, and textual readings.
- Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
- Primarily polemical and direct; autobiographical passages introduce personal indirection.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- Language itself functions as the book's governing symbol — both the subject of analysis and the medium of the argument's irony.
- Ironic distance: 60 out of 100
- The book is written in English to argue for abandoning English — a productive performative irony acknowledged by the author.
- Resolution withholding: 30 out of 100
- The prescriptive argument reaches its conclusion explicitly: write in African languages.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Organized in sections moving from autobiography to theoretical argument to literary analysis.
How Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature is regarded
Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature holds a literary regard score of 55 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.