adminLovemore Ranga Mataire Senior Writer
THE development and promotion of indigenous languages is a crucial endeavour needing urgent national discourse particularly at this juncture when most African countries are battling to find a suitable developmental model for the broader social and economic transformation of people.
After experimenting with various economic models without tangible results, African governments now need to realise that as long as African languages are restricted to oral use while children learn in foreign tongues, underdevelopment will remain a living reality on the continent.
It is thus crucial for political leaders to move away from paying lip service to the promotion of African languages and come up with policies that can restore the dignity of Africans, their languages and cultures.
The development and promotion of indigenous languages must be informed by the fact that the physical departure of European colonisers from the continent was not synonymous with the end of European presence on the continent.
While the departure demonstrated the end of physical or formal domination, its residual effects are now being reflected on the cultural front as they manifest as mental enslavement and economic servitude.
Acknowledging the devastating effects of colonialism on local languages, the director of the Africa Studies Centre at the University of London, Dr Kimani Nehusi says the continued use of foreign languages as the language of instruction has been a major ingredient for economic underdevelopment in Africa.
“The ways of thinking and behaviouring engendered by the colonial system, as well as institutional arrangement that continually reproduces them, were left intact.”
Dr Nehusi argues that the domination of African communities and society by European languages is the major cause of the continued stultification of development and the failure to restore African languages to a position of centrality in the conduct of all African affairs; political, economic, legal, social or educational. He says the failure to embrace African languages as the basis for all daily interactions has been the major impediment in the restoration of African cultural autonomy, personality, self-confidence, creativity and sustained development.
Not long ago, Frantz Omar Fanon remarked that: “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.” Fanon’s view is shared by the director of the Centre of Advanced Studies of African Society in Cape Town, South Africa Professor Kwesi Kwaa Prah, who says; “Language is the dominant feature in any culture. More than any other aspects of culture, it is in language that the whole cultural heritage of any people is registered and catalogued . . . language is the root directory of the culture of ‘speech community.”
In the context of Zimbabwe, the influence of colonial languages is so pervasive that it seems like a difficult task to start rewinding the mental genocide inflicted on people through the use of colonial languages and the denigration of indigenous languages.
The use of colonial or foreign languages is so embedded in the country’s social fabric to a level where it assumes some kind of a status symbol where in church the pastor speaks in English even though the whole congregation is conversant in Shona or Ndebele. It is even worse at institutions of higher learning where students studying Shona or Ndebele are forced to write their assignments and examinations in English.
Aware of the effect of language as a profoundly powerful tool, the colonisers pervasively enforced it in schools, churches and all other important facets of governance. The colonisers understood that as an important tool in defining one’s identity, language was at its core a carrier of a value system. It is so because to speak is to think, and every individual thinks in language, mostly his or her mother tongue.
Language is therefore the medium through which reality is perceived and thoughts are conceived and vocalised in song, writing, dance or poetry. It cannot be doubted that language is thus the instrument of perception, of thought and of the way in which human minds are entrenched into consciousness, reinforced, clarified and validated.
Since each language expresses a worldview and is the medium through which deep thoughts or philosophy are conceived in the human mind, it therefore logically follows that the value system and culture of that particular foreign language automatically mediates how Africans perceive the reality.
Foreign languages institutionalize foreign value systems and worldviews and therefore hijack the cognitive and psychological structure of Africans. The mediating presence of Western languages particularly English is an entrapping, limiting and dangerous presence that ultimately hinders the development of African people.
The current language situation in Africa is debilitating in that all national business, be it the legislature, judiciary, education and general administration, is conducted in a foreign language.
Is it not ironic that some Asian countries like Singapore and Malaysia got their independence at the same time with some African countries but they have been able to transform their flags and anthems into real independence?
The rationale is simple. There is something intrinsic in the use of one’s mother tongue that spurs innovation and development. Most, if not all Asian countries, have managed to elevate their languages to a point where the language of formers colonisers is on the fringes of daily interactions.
In Africa, only Tanzania can be applauded for elevating Kiswahili to a language of instruction at schools and universities. A team of Zimbabwean journalists on a recent fact finding mission in Tanzania discovered that the majority of newspapers in that country are written in Kiswahili.
Conversely, the journalists discovered that the use of local languages instilled a sense of pride in their culture and also a keen interest in localised news.
Furthermore, some newspapers actually survive purely on street sales with insignificant revenue coming from advertising.
If the situation in Tanzania could be replicated in other African countries especially through the use of Kiswahili, which is widely spoken in eastern Africa and by more than 40 million people worldwide, it would create a fertile ground for home-grown economic solutions and innovations. With its roots in the Bantu languages of sub-Sahara Africa, Kiswahili can be the springboard for both economic growth and African integration.
Sadly, African intellectuals and the elite who are supposed to lead the way in the emancipation of the continent are actually the ones on the forefront of denigrating everything African. They pride themselves on deriving their sources of values, religion, fashion, idols, models, ideas and ideals from the template of the former colonisers.
It would be folly to expect the same intellectuals to invent anything as they are mostly not in favour of any fundamental changes in the system that gives them power and privileges.
If Africans wish to transform themselves, then they must realise that while language has been a key factor in the oppression of Africans and the destruction of Africa, it can also be an important tool in the reconstruction of the new Africa that is so desperately needed.
Online Reporter