admintalking in English to relatives and friends on Facebook but unable to speak Shona, Ndebele, Kalanga, Tonga, Ndau or any of our Zimbabwean languages. When our parents want to talk to these children, we step in to become translators of the English language to our parents and translators of the mother tongue to our children.
Translating languages this way is a difficult job and we are not doing it so well. At the same time, we are slowly killing the language of our mothers.
Soon after independence, we gave the children Shona and Ndebele names to celebrate our language and national identity.
But Tafadzwa, Tatenda, Tanaka, Tarumbidzwa, Takudzwa, Tadiwa, Tamuka, Tasimba, Tendai, Ruvimbo, Rutendo, Rudo and others do not speak Shona. Here is the scenario that replays itself over and over again when my nephew Tatenda visits the village to see his grandparents, Mbuya na Sekuru. His mother, Mai Tatenda begs him by saying, “Please,
Tatenda, shake hands with Sekuru and please Tatenda, say makadii to Ambuya and please Tatenda, say maita basa and please Tatenda, take those ear phones out of your ears because Mbuya wants to say something to you.” And Mbuya says, “Wakadii Muzukuru? Inga makura nhai Soko veMbire, Mahomuhomu Makwiramiti.” Mai Tatenda turns to her son and says, “Mbuya is saying how you are and you have grown so much. And she also says something about your totem which is too hard to translate. Do not worry about it.”
And Tatenda grunts, smiles uncomfortably, shakes hands with Mbuya and Sekuru. Mai Tatenda laughs with proud embarrassment as Tatenda walks away to text and listen to music from his IPhone. Eighteen year old Tatenda has finished the once a year ritual conversation with his grandparents.
When I was at St Columbus Primary School we did not fear that the English language would take over our lives. Everything we learnt about our history and culture came from my mother, Mbuya VaMandirowesa, uncles and aunts and the whole community. There were many dark nights when we sat around the fire and Mbuya told us stories about the mischievous Tsuro the Hare and Gudo the baboon. Each story had a moral lesson to it.
We also learnt about our past and developed a sense of who we were through storytelling, riddles, sayings, proverbs, metaphors, songs, ceremonies, rituals, games, dances and performances. Through greetings, we knew how we were related to each other, the power differences between us, ways of speaking and not speaking. We also knew ways of laughing, mourning, expressing love, joy and laughter. Sometimes not speaking was speaking.
When we misbehaved in public, it was my mother’s look that said, “hatidaro”, we do not do that. Back home, she completed the ‘hatidaro’ reprimand with either verbal scolding or a beating. Any one of the elders could discipline us for bad behaviour because there was a code of behaviour, hunhu, understood by everyone. The rules were all passed on to us orally. There was nothing written. In those days we fully understood the language and its role in defining who were in society.
In Grade three or Grade Four, we had a Shona book titled “Nakirwai” first published in 1957.
Some of the stories Mbuya VaMandirowesa told us were in this book. For the first time, we could see our grandmother’s fables in written form and we could read the books to each other.
But it was not just Mbuya’s stories in this Grade Four book. Somewhere in between the Tsuro na Gudo stories was a story of Zuze, a young village boy who left his village in search of a job in Salisbury. He lost his first job as a kitchen boy because he broke the white madam’s plate. Then he got a job in the hotel and was fired again because he could not speak English. After much searching, Zuze moved to the farms where he got a job as a bread messenger delivering bread from one farm to another. It was a long walk carrying nine loaves of bread because one farm covered so many miles.
One day Zuze was so hungry and he decided to eat one loaf of bread because he believed that nobody would be able to tell that he had nine loaves instead of eight. After all, each time he had delivered the loaves and a letter, Murungu, the white man, took the bread and letter and said nothing, “vanotambira mazingwa netsamba ndiye mwii”. So Zuze went behind an anthill and ate the whole loaf of bread. With his stomach now full, Zuze continued on his delivery journey.
After receiving the eight loaves and reading the letter, Murungu asked Zuze in Chilapalapa, “Upi ro munye bread, Zuze? Ro Baas kaena ena nika wena nine bread but mina kona eight kupera. Why?” Surprised, Zuze asked Murungu where he got the information about eight loaves. Murungu said the letter told him so. Zuze opened his mouth wide because he did not know that a letter could talk.
The book had a picture of a very tall white man in a red jacket and tie towering above a short confused Zuze holding a basket with loaves of bread.
Zuze asked for the letter and took it to a secluded place for interrogation, “Imwe Akalata, munapita kumuzungu mudakanena kuti ndadya chingwa seli kwachizere ine!” The letter said nothing and Zuze went back to Murungu and says the letter did not speak upon questioning, “Inga haizataura izvo ndaibvunza paseri pachidzere?”
Murungu ignored Zuze but he wrote to Zuze’s boss to say one loaf was missing. When confronted by his boss, Zuze argued his case saying the letter had refused to own up to the offence during questioning. “Why was the letter afraid to speak to me? Zvino yatyenyi kududza kuneni?” Zuze was immediately fired from his job. He presumably returned to the African reserves where he lived with other fellow Zuzes.
We grew up singing a song about Zuze saying, “Zuze stole the white man’s bread and ate it behind the anthill. Zuze wakaba chingwa chemurungu, akachitemura seri kwechidzere!” In our imagination Zuze was not us, but other ignorant people in the village who could neither read, write nor speak English.
At the end of the book “Nakirwai” was a story about Matambo, a desperate village man who went to a white man’s farm looking for any job. Fortunately for
Matambo, the white farmer spoke Shona and English was not a requirement for the job. Matambo was then interviewed for a job as a horse cart driver, mukokeri wemanyurusi. To convince the white farmer that he was capable of doing the job, Matambo said he was related to donkeys because his grandfather had paid three donkeys as bride price to marry Matambo’s grandmother. Given such past family history, the horses would naturally like Matambo, “aizonhuhwa kaukama nawo.”
The white farmer laughed so much and gave Matambo the job on probation. Within a few days, Matambo had mastered the art of horse cart driver. He built himself a small hut in the farm compound and his family left the village and came to join him on the farm, never to return home to live again. As time went by Matambo’s fame as a horse cart driver who smoked a pipe spread far and wide, all the way back to the village. The white farmer loved Matambo so much that he even allowed him to drive Mai Matambo into town while she sat like a queen in the horse cart, “aikwidza mukadzi wake mukarichi yemurungu.”
Mukokeri Matambo occupied a place in our imagination, for he gave us an insight into farm life. We sang the song, “Chemutengure Vhiri Rengoro” , praising his skills. Some people left the village for the farms to try their luck, hoping to be as successful as Matambo, the man who needed no education or English skills to work with horses.
At school, we teased those who could not speak English by calling them Zuze or Chemutengure. We did not realise that Zuze did not actually exist. Years later, we now know that Zuze was just a caricature, a stereotype created to show the cultural superiority of the white man’s command of the English language and the written word. It was an intelligent but very racist way of denigrating village people and oral modes of communication. Such stories were carefully created to take a place within our young minds and make us feel inferior. Up to this day, memories of the Zuze and Chemutengure songs have stayed in our minds.
Independence opened many doors for us and speaking English well helped us to go to university and mix with other English speaking people here and overseas. When we became parents, we naturally wanted our children to go to the former whites only schools, where they would learn to speak English quickly. Without thinking, we looked down upon the village and ignored the role Mbuya and all the elders played in teaching us language. We thought the village was full of Zuze and friends. Children born after independence had nothing to do with the language or the culture of the relatives back there.
We wanted our children to speak English only and speak it like white boys and girls. We looked up to our former colonial rulers for better English skills and copied their lifestyles. Speaking English with a village accent often revealed that you went to a rural boarding school, like I did. I had to prove that I was not related to Zuze, so I worked hard to change my accent. At one stage, I also wanted to belong somewhere in the social hierarchy, often determined by money and a good English accent.
While we were busy telling each other that our children were not vana Zuze, the children were busy mimicking and masquerading as English boys and girls waiting for a time when they will leave the country and go overseas to speak more English to the English. When those children got to London or any of the big cities, their English, American and Australian friends asked them what indigenous language they spoke back home in Africa. They looked around with embarrassment and said, “None.”
Over there in the Diaspora, the children regretted that they did not understand much about their mother tongue and the culture embedded within the language. They also discovered that the ability to speak Shona, Ndebele or another Zimbabwean language gave them pride and a sense of shared identity. They were able to exclude others in conversations and share jokes not easily translated into English.
Back here in the city, when Mbuya visits us, our job as translators is redundant because the children do not have time to talk to her. They lock themselves in their rooms talking to friends on Facebook and WhatsApp, or they are surfing the Internet, playing video games, watching television, texting or simply listening to music. We also do not have time to talk to Mbuya because we are too busy working to make more money.
But we make Mbuya comfortable in front of the big flat screen television where she will sit day after day watching Hollywood movies or Africa Magic without understanding any of the English spoken in the movies. She will sit there, bemoaning the slow death of language and culture we have created. When she has seen enough kissing and fake love making on television, she packs her bags and returns to her fields and chickens back in the village.
As the gap between the village and the city continues to widen, we will stop being translators for our children because our parents would have departed this earth and moved on to join the ancestors. Our children will come back to the village as tourists, taking pictures of what remains of the village huts and their grandparents’ graves to show on Face book. In those graves, lie the death of language and communal memory.
This is not to say the English language is not important. No. English is a valuable medium of communication to negotiate our way in the global world of commerce.
Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic. She holds a PhD in International Relations and is a consultant and director of The Simukai Development Project.
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