Online Reporter
Gibson Nyikadzino
Zimpapers Politics Hub
THIS year’s culture month is themed “Celebrating Indigenous Voices.” Culture month is being celebrated amidst an age-old misconception that has lingered for long in Africa and Zimbabwe. The misconception is on whether one’s eloquence or fluency in a foreign language like English can be a measure of intelligence.
Such a misconception has had detrimental effects and moral consequences for the confidence and humanness of the African indigenous people, considering that languages like English, Portuguese, Spanish, and French were exported to this part of the world as instruments of domination.
For decades, the language question has remained one of the most critical issues Africans have grappled with, and in most instances, failed to resolve adequately and sufficiently. There is no radical policy that has been adopted by the majority of African countries to transform the appetite for English into indigenous languages.
Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe in 1964 once asked: “Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else’s? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling.”
Rejecting colonial languages is not a matter of abandoning them altogether.
It is quite interesting to observe how writers like Tsitsi Dangarembga and the late Charles Mungoshi used English to convey Zimbabwe’s rich life and values using a colonially imposed language.
For Zimbabweans, it is not about choosing which language over another, but learning to use their mother tongue first before subcontracting English and mainstreaming it as a pillar of identity and cultural expression.
It is a stubborn reality that colonial languages offer broader accessibility in the “global village,” but they also marginalise indigenous expressions and narratives.
Surprisingly, today, African folklores are being spoken in English, losing their originality, authenticity, and meaningfulness each time a colonial language is used for their expression.
Without doubt, foreign languages do not necessarily carry the full realities of African experiences in their existence today, but they rather destroy the critical values the indigenous people intend to express. There is a loss of creativity that also accompanies the use of English in telling indigenous stories.
This creates an “othering” of other groups as language use is employed to create and perpetuate societal inequalities based on knowledge production initiatives.
Compared to China, Japan, Iran, Russia, and Sweden, among others, local languages have been used as the medium of instruction from primary to tertiary institutions; though English is there, it is in the periphery.
This is not the case here in Zimbabwe, where indigenous languages have been made second-rate mediums of educational instruction, with preference given to English. Of greater admission is that English language use in Zimbabwe should be seen as it is: intrinsically linked to the legacy of the coloniser.
It is a language that has a sad history, a history of oppression of the indigenous people, hence manifesting serious power imbalances, as the African was the one instructed to learn English, while the coloniser did not learn indigenous languages.
When one is therefore regarded as intelligent based on their eloquence in English, it is sad to realise that such is how the colonial mentality is perpetuated, with the sole objective premised on hindering the development of a true African identity.
Kalanga, Ndebele, Shona, Chewa, and Ndau, among other local languages, give an authentic Zimbabwean experience that reverberates across the country’s geographical confines and even transnationally.
Zimbabwe’s local languages must be used to bear the story of the nation’s history, ambitions, experiences, and traditions in befitting ways that project Zimbabwean or African philosophical belief systems and ideologies.
There is no way an embodiment of cultural imperialism can be adopted and made to fit appropriately in the cultural framework of the indigenous people without negatively diluting the authentic local values.
A continued use of English, mostly referred to as the language of business, means cultural imperialism remains the mother of the slavery of the indigenous mind, birthing the blindness of the local mentality and a deafness that persuades people to allow foreign languages to dictate how they should tell stories from their country.
It is rare to convince the most critical mind that the continued acceptance and use of English as the medium of educational instruction and storytelling can produce the Zimbabwean citizen who advances the country’s political, social, and economic agenda.
Foreign languages can act as impediments to the spread or sustainability of Zimbabwe’s languages. It is unfortunate that the relevance of local languages continues to diminish in some aspects as they are not expansive in explaining certain processes or words.
No matter which foreign language one wants to adopt, it is important to identify it as a form of cultural oppression since it was the symbol of an outsider, who, in turn, does not want to learn the indigenous language.
Cultural and linguistic bonds that are still present between indigenous people and former colonisers make it difficult to choose what language to use or in which culture to coalesce.
There is a need for a paradigm shift that urges Zimbabwe not to solely resist imperialism, cultural hegemony, and neo-colonialism by rejecting colonial languages, but to view the language question as an opportunity to project the people’s identity.
By making local languages the medium of instruction in the education sector, it makes more items accessible to both local and international audiences.
In the age of digital media, it is also key to leverage digital platforms as powerful tools to promote indigenous languages by ensuring their survival in the global sphere.
If nothing is done, present and future generations will be devastated continuously by losses still resulting from the dismantling of indigenous languages under the veil of using English, French, Mandarin, or Portuguese.
