Q While the internationalization of a language can facilitate communication across ethnic or national boundaries, it can also provoke resistance (as I noted previously). This is particularly the case with a language such as English which its expansion occurred because of the geopolitics of colonialism and the march of imperial armies. For instance, the question of what language African writers (many of whom write in English, French, Arabic, and other colonial or non-African languages) should use in their literary works is one of the great debates in African literature. Writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong'o (from Kenya) feel that African writers should write in African languages. Chinua Achebe (from Nigeria, whose novel we will read next week) has contributed to this debate by arguing that African writers cannot act as if colonialism never happened (resulting in the dominance of colonial languages in Africa) and that the practical thing to do is to write in those languages (such as English) but in such a way that they are imbued with an African sensibility. Achebe's Things Fall Apart is often cited as an example of a modern African novel written in an English language with an African sensibility. So, it is still English, but a different kind of English. The debate continues, and its persistence is a pointer to the concerns that people still have about the global dominance of the English language (especially the imperial history that that dominance also references).