Yet, whilst Thiong’o is adamant in the embrace of the European language symbolising cultural domination, his literary counterparts, such as Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe, disagree. This elevation of European culture is harmful in that the child is taught to hate their own cultural roots. This is because, as Thiong’o notes, eliminating one’s culture makes controlling their relationship to the world easier: ‘for a colonial child, … the alienation became reinforced in the teaching of history, geography… where bourgeois Europe was always the centre of the universe’. The choice to focus on language as a tool of mental subjugation is incredibly important in the conversation of decolonisation. The language was the means of spiritual subjugation. He notes that language was the most important tool, in holding the ‘soul prisoner’: ‘the bullet was the means of physical subjugation. As language is an expression of relations between people, language gradually becomes 'a way of life’. He establishes this relationship by analysing language from a Marxist perspective. Thiong’o shows us, readers, how forgetting one’s language means forgetting one’s culture, community and sense of being.
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