adminSaul Gwakuba Ndlovu
A Zimbabwean parliamentary story of much interest which was carried by this publication recently was about an official of that august house ordering an MP to ask a minister in Shona and not in SiNdebele.
According to this newspaper, the same official did the same sometime ago, but the concerned government minister, Cde Obert Mpofu, refused and continued to answer a Shona questioner in SiNdebele.
Some people in Zimbabwe have a problem understanding a very, very simple fact about this country — which is that it is made up of many language communities.
Unlike the tiny mountainous Lesotho kingdom where every citizen speaks and understands seSotho (Southern Sotho or isiSweswe, Moeshoeshoe’s language) in Zimbabwe we have a diversity of languages.
They range from chiTonga to chiVenda, with such tongues as chiBirwa, chiShangaan, tjiKalanga, chiKaranga, chiNambya, chiNdau, chiKorekore, chiManyika, chiTalawunda, iSiNdebele, chiZezuru, chiRozvi and chiShangwe featuring in between, not to forget to mention English and Hindi.
Some of these tongues are spoken by a few thousands of geographically confined people, others by communities scattered across districts, some across provinces, and yet some in small mining localities.
Whatever the number and wherever the place, a language is a natural heritage particularly of those who speak it and of the nation in general as well as the world at large.
It is a very unfortunate symptom of social and cultural backwardness for any person to show a bias against any language whatsoever.
In a multi-ethnic nation such as Zimbabwe, government employees should endeavour to learn and understand a wide variety of languages rather than to expect people of the country’s various language communities to speak or understand the employee’s mother tongue.
It is a quality of good leadership to be understood, and there is no better way to achieve that than to speak and understand the language of those one leads.
In parliament, MPs and senators should speak in the languages in which they think instead of interpretational languages, that is, for example, thinking in say Shona, and then interpreting that into English.
An MP who is born and bred in Binga thinks in the Tonga language, and expresses himself/herself best in Tonga idiom in both lexical and syntactical terms, that is with reference to vocabulary as well as to the construction of sentences. The same applies to a Zezuru from Chinhoyi or Mhondoro or an Nkalanga from Tjehanga or Tjingababili or Bango or Malaba.
It is not easy to ask such people to express themselves in any other tongue than the one they suckled from their mother’s breasts.
There are few, of course, who have been vastly culturally exposed that they are culturally transformed and can express themselves articulately in more than one tongue, especially in English.
Those should be treated as exceptions rather than as the rule. What this means is that people who aspire to lead should try to learn the language of those they wish to lead.
The democratic principle here is that leadership should conform to the cultural aspirations and values of those they are leading. That is an important principle for MPs to remember especially when they are reporting back to their constituencies.
Leaders with a Christian religious bend have a very vivid lesson to emulate from the New Testament. It is from the story about Christ’s disciples speaking in tongues during the Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descended on them on that historic Whit Sunday.
We are told that they spoke in tongues, that is to say the Holy Spirit taught them languages they were to use in various parts of the world to teach God’s word.
It is quite reasonable to assume that among those tongues were chiVenda, chiNambya, tjiKalanga, chiManyika, chiYoruba of Nigeria and a number of other languages spoken in various parts of the world.
Some scholars of Christology argue, however, that the only language that was not spoken by the disciples on that memorable occasion was Afrikaans because it had not yet come into existence.
That apart, the important thing to remember is that God sent the Holy Spirit to give the disciples the power to speak in languages of various gentile communities where the word of God would be propagated.
One extremely unfair thing that some Christian denominations did years later was to impose particular languages on some communities in their evangelisation campaigns in Zimbabwe. This was particularly so in some parts of Bulilima, Mangwe, Matobo, Nyamandlovu, Beitbridge districts where local languages were suppressed at schools to accommodate literature written in either Zulu or Xhosa.
The Methodist Church (Wesleyan) was especially insensitive in this regard, as were the Jesuits (Catholic) missionaries based at Chishawasha Mission who promoted chiZezuru to the detriment of other chiShona dialects.
Our government institutions have a constitutional duty to accord due recognition to every language in Zimbabwe.
That is what we fought for, to be free and equal before the law of the land, to worship and express ourselves without let or hindrance, and to feel as much a sense of self-importance to our country wherever, whenever, and however we are.
Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu is a retired, Bulawayo-based journalist. He can be contacted on cell 0734 328 136 or through email. [email protected]
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