SINGAPORE – One Wednesday evening in 2017, when I was a literature undergraduate, Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o – who famously stopped writing in English and switched defiantly to his native Gikuyu – made an appearance on campus and said something that has troubled me since.

He was almost 80, subdued in manner, and often dropped the kind of pithy sentence that inspired not applause but reverential silence, then scribbling. To the Singapore audience, he had said: “If you know all the languages of the world, but not your mother tongue, that is enslavement.”

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