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Rumbidzai Mhlanga, Sunday Life Reporter
Culture is expressed through language, one cannot understand culture without accessing language directly thus language and culture are intertwined.
Through their belief that language portrays the true identity of a person, Anthu Foundation last week hosted an IsiNdebele spelling Bee and Debate in IsiNdebele.
Historial and cultural activist Pathisa Nyathi said the Spelling Bee was a great way of teaching students to be confident in speaking their language as well as learn to spell Ndebele words.
“The programme was great to cultivate interest for indigenous languages in students as well as build confidence in speaking the language fluently. It was also a way of preserving the language and culture as language is a component of culture.
The students knew how to spell the words but I think teachers should go further into teaching them to understand the meaning of the words. They should also learn to use those words even in sentences, therefore, students should be versatile, know words by sounds and codes, improve knowledge of the language and vocabulary,”
Dr Themba Nyoni shared the same sentiments with Nyathi saying the Spelling Bee and the Debate in IsiNdebele was a way of showing the beauty of culture.
“There are a lot of Ndebele words that are spelt wrongly, that people use daily thus children should know the right spellings and the IsiNdebele Spelling Bee was the right platform to highlight such issues.
The beauty of culture is its language, we live in an urban world where there is so much influence of other languages like English hence people fail to carry out a full sentence in IsiNdebele without adding an English word. The debate was a bid to teach students to converse and use language with its associated diction, idioms and proverbs.”
The director and founder of the foundation, Lionel Muchirahondo, said although both initiatives were meant to help students to be fast and critical thinkers, the main purpose was to help the youth take pride in speaking their language.
“The idea was to create in students a sense of pride in indigenous languages. Anthu Foundation is committed to building a bridge that transcends cultural, political, social, economic and religious barriers and through these initiatives.
We felt that we would be able to inspire the young and coincidentally 2019 is observed by the United Nations as the International Year of Indigenous Languages, with the aim to establish a link between language, development, peace and reconciliation. As a foundation we believe we achieved our goals and hope to add more culturally inspired initiatives in 2020 and beyond,” said Muchirahondo.
Muchirahondo says they selected knowledgeable teachers, educationists and cultural experts to be judges on both initiatives.
“The inaugural winner of the spelling bee competition was Thulisile Ndlovu from Mzilikazi High school who was awarded a floating trophy as well as a laptop and the winners for the debate in IsiNdebele’s best speaker, runner-up was Nonkazimulo Ndebele from Sobukhazi High School and the overall speaker was Inc Tshabangu from Mzilikazi High School, the winning team was Mzilikazi High School as well,” said Muchirahonda.
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