Here we need to make a distinction between education and knowledge. Knowledge is a question of continuously adding to what we already know in a dialectical play of mutual impact and illumination. The normal cognitive process starts from the known and heads toward the unknown. Every new step makes more of the unknown known and therefore adds to what is already known. The new known enriches the already known, and so on, in a continuous journey of making dialectically related connections. Knowledge of the world begins where one is.

Education, on the other hand, is a mode of conditioning people to make them fit into, and function in, a given society. It may involve transference of knowledge, but it is conditioned knowledge, branded by the world outlook of the educator and the education system.

The language of a region holds the most effective and wide-ranging knowledge of the environment of that particular region. Destroy a people’s language, and you destroy the vocabulary by which they understood their environment, and consequently all the knowledge and information developed in the course of their interactions with that environment.

The language of the outsider becomes the language of power and normality. The vocabulary by which the conquering outsider looks at the conquered, their history, their productive capabilities, is that of the outsider. The colonial education system, enforced by the colonial language, was imbued through and through with the worldview of the outsider looking in. Those who went to the colonial school can remember lessons in geography and history that started with those of Europe.

The educated African may have consciously or unconsciously come to adopt the view of the outsider looking in. And in postcolonial Africa, the European language-educated elite has normalized the viewing of Africa from outside itself.

Language is a product of a community in its economic, political, and cultural evolution in time and space. In their very negotiation with nature and with one another, humans give birth to a system of communication whose highest expression and development is the organized sound that we call language. But language is also the producer of a community, for it is language, after all, that enables humans to negotiate effectively their way into and out of nature and that makes our multifaceted evolution possible. It is in that very negotiation with nature that a community comes to know itself as a specific community different from others.

I was attracted to move by the idea of the International Center for Writing and Translation (ICWT), but that was not how I answered my concerned questioners. My response was simple and always the same: “I am going to UCI, the center of the world.” By that I meant no more than the fact that in a world like ours, every point on its surface is a center of the whole. The challenge is for the inhabitants of a specific point to see the links that bind them to all the other points. Every center should reflect the globe as much as the globe should reflect them. William Blake put it better when he challenged his readers to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower.

Linguistic feudalism should be replaced by the concept of network, in which languages and cultures large and small give and take without exploitation or oppression. Such a network assumes the equality of languages.