Today there is no longer a Department of English at the University of the West Indies (UWI). Instead within the Faculty of Humanities and Education there are departments of Literatures and Languages, specializing in the teaching of literature; departments of Language, Linguistics and Philosophy, devoted to the teaching of theories of language and a Department of Modern Language and Literature where one can get specialized training in foreign though largely European languages as they should be termed. At the Mona Campus, the website of the Department of Literatures in English proudly claims the following:

While one cannot create a one-to-one correspondence with Ngũgĩ's landmark ‘On the Abolition of the English Department’, co-written with Henry Owuor-Anyumba and Taban lo Liyong in 1968, the fact that that essay appeared in his book Homecoming which included essays on Caribbean and African literature cannot be minimized. Such a discussion would surely have reached the faculty of the University of the West Indies campuses, engaged in similar decolonization tasks. So it is significant that the department at Mona identifies its strengths as Caribbean literary and cultural studies as it should be and thereby is realized one aspect of the ‘Abolition’ document which for African universities wanted a focus on African literatures and languages. The extent to which this has been achieved, or not achieved, at African universities is an issue worth studying in the context of some of the gains and failures of the postcolonial African state.

Still, it is true that, at the macro level, the University of the West Indies remains, as one of the senior UWI St.