adminMorris Mtisi
LAST week I promised you, my beloved readers, serious teachers and learners of English Language an instalment on the crisis of Anglophobia. Well, here we are. Anglophobia is a word I have lexicographed to refer to an acute emotional disease of hating everything associated with our colonisers, the English, including their language.
This xenophobic jingoism is understood.
We all do not remember our days of bondage with a smile on our faces. That is why, fed up with slavery, the slaves took up arms to restore their land and their dignity. That is why the sons and daughters of Zimbabwe finally decided enough was enough and for this chose to die to liberate their land from rabid settler colonial masters whose cultural values and beliefs had nothing common with ours.
It is therefore undeniably true that the debate on language supremacy in Zimbabwe is not separable from the narrative of political struggle against colonialism.
As such, Anglophobia makes a lot of sense.
Yet it also makes sense that our struggle and revolution was not against a language, but against a snobbish racist system and belief which had no respect for human dignity and self-determination.
Indeed in that light, the topic of the white man or woman’s language is political. Yet in the light of the truth and reality, that same language is not politics and therefore indeed not our enemy.
It is also undeniably true that the same colonialists who enslaved us and took away our land, our dignity and adult suffrage and other forms of self-determination, gave us a lifeline: schools. Out of these schools came political leaders, nationalists and revolutionaries who refused to be hoodwinked by patronage and discriminatory shenanigans of the colonial political administrators.
All our genuine nationalist leaders and heroic revolutionaries were and are direct beneficiaries of the same colonial schools, colleges and universities. That was the greatest irony of colonialism. It made its victims wise enough to see the lies, the limitations and deceitfulness of the colonial education system. It made the beneficiaries of its education system smart enough to fight their colonial masters and mistresses dagger for dagger, sword for sword, brain for brain.
Some of the nationalist and revolutionary leaders learnt the enemy’s language to fight him with it; to use it to defeat him all systems down verb to verb, adjective to adjective, until he agreed to leave Zimbabwe for Zimbabweans.
Most of our true political leaders and fathers spoke the English Language better than Ian Smith, Clifford Dupont or Peter Walls. And they (the African leaders) knew it in their hearts that it was their mastery of the enemy’s language that gave them the confidence and verbal intelligence and courage to speak well for Zimbabwe and be understood and respected at all fora the Zimbabwean future was being debated, discussed or negotiated.
It is therefore only those who are either headstrong emotional or miserably ignorant who do not know that the sounds of the grenades, rocket-launchers and AK-47s that freed this country were complimented by the eloquence and flaming oratory, in English Language, of the negotiators for peace and anti-colonialism.
Besides, English language connects the world into one small village made economically robust and politically prosperous through one lingua-franca, English.
While our own vernacular languages make us perfect custodians of our own cultural values and heritages, belonging to our countries of birth, English will make us belong to the world.
As long as our development as a nation depends on passing examinations as they are now, and on global socio-economic, cultural and political intercourse, teachers have a mammoth task to teach English Language well. It is a crucial national developmental tool stretching far beyond the examination stage.
And Anglophobia can only be our worst enemy.
Online Reporter