[lg policy] Liberate tongue-tied Zimbabwe

[Harold Schiffman]

Liberate tongue-tied Zimbabwe

By Stephen Mpofu



“Move over, primitive natives,” foreign invaders said at their
occupation of Africa, “we not you, must be ensconced in the seat of
official discourse.” The colonialists may not have made that open
declaration, but the blatant condescendingly racist manner in which
their languages — English, French, Portuguese, Spanish — shoved
African languages into the shade was certainly understood as such.
Today several centuries on, indigenous languages in many, if not all
independent African states, continue to play second fiddle to
languages of former colonisers so that the African people helplessly
walk in the shadow of the ghosts of their erstwhile conquerors and
rulers. In Zimbabwe, where English rules the roost, the issue of
languages is one critical front where the revolution that secured the
country from the rule of a foreign culture left an unfinished business
but one that must be completed sooner rather than later for the
self-actualisation of our people.

Consider this scenario.

A politician in fine feathers mounts the podium deep in the country’s
“periphery” before a sea of expectant black eyes then waits for an
interpreter to relay what he says to an audience that includes elderly
people and young educated Zimbabweans. Listening to the speaker an
elderly woman turns to someone next to her: “From which country does
this stranger come from who cannot speak our language”? “No, he is not
a stranger but one of us,” replies the other. “A Zimbabwean who cannot
speak our language/or is he possessed by the spirit of a foreigner who
could not speak our language?” “No, he is not possessed, he is one of
those highly educated people in the ways of foreigners.”
“So forgetting your mother tongue is a sign of being highly educated?”
There is muted laughter around caused by this presumed but not
unrealistic scenario.

Indeed, there are few leaders in Zimbabwe who, like President Mugabe,
can hold forth powerfully and effectively in a delivery lasting quite
long. Not surprising because, feeling proud to be an African he
studied an indigenous language right up to university level, which few
Zimbabweans and other Africans elsewhere scarcely do. There is
therefore a strong and urgent case for a modified, linguistic,
revolution to take care of the business that the political revolution
left unfinished with a new constitution acting as the “commander” of
this fourth revolution after land reform. The question of our mother
tongues remaining Cinderella to foreign languages should be resolved
because as things are, the subordination of the languages which are
repositories of Zimbabwean cultural values also means that our diverse
cultures remain subordinated to a foreign culture with its sometimes
decadent values.

It is undoubtedly for the restoration of the dignity of indigenous
languages as well as for the dignity of Zimbabweans themselves the
Higher and Tertiary Education Minister Dr Stan Mudenge called recently
for Zimbabweans to take advantage of the current constitution-making
to formulate a language policy resulting in our local languages being
used as mediums of instruction in schools.As he rightly stated, in a
speech at Bulawayo Polytechnic, language is a person’s most precious
possession, enabling him or her to be fully functional in a community.
As things stand, English happens to be the official language of all
kinds of business in the country as though Zimbabwe is still under
British rule.

Take the courts for instance, a person giving evidence in a mother
tongue must have that translated into English for the courts’ official
adjudication. Ridiculous, isn’t?
Thus schools appear to be the right point of departure for any new
policy on language to start to change things so that Zimbabwean
languages may reassert the authority they enjoyed before Europeans
came to this country. At present students scoring a high mark in an
indigenous language is not accorded the same respect by fellow
students as that given to one who scores the same high mark in, say,
English or French. What is worse, you find in many African countries
more newspapers published in languages of former colonial powers with
a negligible numbers if any published in a local language.

Even in Zimbabwe letters written in a local language to English
language newspapers must be translated into English for publication.
The implied suggestion being that the leadership of that particular
publication will not understand the indigenous language. Absurd, isn’t
it? Well, yes — no, because that is the position in which a foreign
ruling culture relegated our own mother tongues, sadly with our
connivance. Come to think of it, the use of English as the official
language of many colonial states has helped in keeping Africans
divided on tribal and linguistic grounds. Yet left untouched by
foreigners African languages even in Zimbabwe must have decanted
themselves with one language or two spoken and understood by a
majority of people in a country becoming the official languages. East
Africa probably enjoys more effective communication among people in
the various countries there with Swahili acting as a kind of lingua
franca.

Time has come to liberate tongue-tied Zimbabweans when an indigenous
language begins to enjoy the respect and importance it deserves.
Zimbabweans will share their social circumstances much more closely
than is the case at present, and this will result in greater, national
cohesion, with or without some divisive power-hungry political wolves
on the prowl.

http://www.chronicle.co.zw/inside.aspx?sectid=3147&cat=10
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