[lg policy] Resistance to linguistic feudalism and Darwinism: Conditions for creating a reading culture in Africa

[Harold Schiffman]

Resistance to linguistic feudalism and Darwinism: Conditions for
creating a reading culture in Africa

Ngugi wa Thiong’o
2009-10-01, Issue 450
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59136


Reading empowers people, Ngugi wa Thiong’o writes in this week’s
edition of Pambazuka News, but people need more than access to books,
they need access to books in their own languages. In the first part of
a keynote speech given at the 6th Pan African Reading for all
Conference, wa Thiong’o argues that ‘if you want to hide knowledge
from an African child, put it in English or French.’ To ‘know one’s
language, whatever that language is, and add others to it, is
empowerment, says wa Thiong’o, ‘but to know all the other languages
while ignorant of one’s own is slavery.’

I want to start by congratulating the organisers of this conference,
for nothing can surpass in importance books as entries into human
history. I like the lines quoted from morality plays in the Everyman
Library series: ‘Everyman will go with thee and everywhere be thy
guide.’ The book as a guide! That’s why what one of the speakers said
yesterday facetiously, that that if you want to hide something from an
African, put it in a book, is sad, tragic even, where it is true. But
I would put it differently and say that if you want to hide knowledge
from an African child, put it in English or French. Tragically this is
true; it is what we do to our children everyday.

I remember when my mother used to send on a journey alone, to some
relatives for instance. She would give me rigu, food and water for a
rainy day, and then would sit me down and tell me everything about the
path before me to ensure that I would not get lost. Every instruction
was punctuated with: Do you understand? Then would she let me go. Only
a very irresponsible parent would give instructions in words and
language that the child does not understand. Now, nothing is more
important than life’s journey; and yet we in Africa following the
colonial path, send our children on the journey of life with
instructions coded in European languages. The colonialist may have
wanted us to go astray, but why would we, an independent Africa, want
our children to get lost? More likely, it’s a case of the lost giving
instructions on how to lose your way in life.

In my book, Decolonising the Mind, published in 1984, I told the story
of my relationship to my mother tongue, Kikuyu, and my language of
education, English. English was also the official language of the
colonial state. I told how we used to be punished when we were caught
speaking an African language in the school compound. We were
humiliated by being made to carry a piece we called ‘monitor’ around
our necks, literally stating that we were stupid. This humiliation and
negativity were attached to African languages in the learning process.
A good performance in English on the other hand was greeted with
acclaim. Two things were taking place in the cognitive process:
Positive affirmation of English as a means of intellectual production;
and criminalisation of African languages as means of knowledge
production. With English, went pride: With African languages, shame.
For a long time I used to think that this was an African problem.

But some years ago, when I was researching my new Book, Re-Membering
Africa, which has just been published, I found out that what was done
to Africa had already been done to the Welsh. In 19th century Welsh
kids caught speaking their mother tongue in school compound were also
humiliated by being made to carry something around their necks with
initials: WN-Welsh Not. At the very least, my colonial story had been
re-enacted in Wales.

Even earlier than Wales was the case of the relationship between
English and Irish languages. English colonial settlement was first
tried out in Ireland in 16th century. But the English were finding it
difficult to conquer the Irish or rather, tame them. In 1598, Edmund
Spencer, a contemporary of Shakespeare and the celebrated author of
the Fairie Queen and other poetic works, published A View of Ireland
at the Present Time. Spencer was an English land-owner in Ireland, a
neighbour to Walter Raleigh, the founder of the colony of Virginia. In
the book, A View of Ireland, Spencer literally prescribes a cultural
solution to the political and military problem posed by the Irish
resistance. He argues that if you change their names, strike out the
Mc’s and O’s of their naming system, and then impose English, the
Irish would soon forget the Irish nation. Language conquest would
enable indeed complete political conquest. The solution to native
resistance is thus seen as lying in the erasure of their memory
through changing their memory through changing their language and main
system.

It’s really the same colonial process dramatised in Shakespeare’s The
Tempest, where Caliban loses his tongue and then his land to Prospero.
When Caliban complains about the loss of his natural and human
resources, Prospero accuses him of ingratitude for seemingly
forgetting the gift of Prospero’s language: But then Caliban curses
back, pointing out that the price of learning Caliban’s language is
the loss of his sovereignty: ‘I was my own subject, now, your slave.’
Language in other words is part of that transition from freedom to
slavery.

Africans who were taken to Americans by force by Raleigh and his
descendants to become plantation slaves had their languages and their
names literally banned, almost as if the colonists were reading from
Spencer’s manual. In the place of African names, they were given those
of their owners. Even the drum language was banned by the act of
banning the instrument itself. But the plantation master never lost
his linguistic connection to Europe. The Spanish, French, Dutch and
English plantation owners remained connected to their European
Languages.

We find similar practices in Asia. Japan banned the Korean language
and imposed Japanese during the brief Japanese colonial era. We can
say the same things relative to the indigenous peoples of Australia,
New Zealand, South and North America. In the history of modern
colonialism all the colonial powers, at one time or other, have
imposed their languages on the conquered peoples, thus ensuring that
the entire system of production, dissemination and consumption of
knowledge takes place through the colonial language only. Even the
very identity of the colonised is expressed in the language of
conquest. In Africa, in other words identity is based on the language
of the colonial conquest.

The case for mental conquest through language was put best by
McCauley, the British secretary of education, who argued, in his
famous minutes on Indian education, that English should be used to
create a class, Indians in the name, but otherwise imbued with an
English mentality; this class, he argued will help the British as
effectively governors and the governed.

We can then generalise and say that where there is a situation of
domination and subordination, between any two groups, whatever their
colour or religion, this will be reflected in the language
relationship. Unfortunately the linguistic imbalance of power takes a
life of its own and may continue even after the underlying economic
and political situation has changed. I believe that is how English and
other European languages have come to be in the position in which they
are today vis-à-vis other languages in the world, languages through
which instructions for children on their life’s journey, are coded,
with the gleeful approval of their own parents. The result of the many
years of imperial relationship between Europe and the rest of the
globe is world of languages divided into a dominant few, largely from
Europe, and marginalised many, largely from Africa and Asia and
Americans. Today, four of the five languages of the UN Security
Council, are European. It is also not a coincidence that European and
the West happen also to be the dominant economically in the world.

Therefore the problem is global, not peculiar to Africa, although it
manifests its worst results in our continent. While the problem is
basically economic and political; but philosophically, its roots lie
in the conception of relationship between languages in terms of
hierarchy, a kind of linguistic Feudalism and linguistic Darwinism.

Linguistic and cultural feudalism is the view consciously or
unconsciously held that some languages between and even within
nations, are of higher order than others; that they constitute an
aristocracy while others, in a descending order of being, occupy
lesser positions, different degrees of minions.

In the world today, a handful of western languages constitute that
aristocracy. They dominate in the production and dissemination of
ideas; they dominate in publishing and distribution and consumption of
knowledge; they control the flow of ideas. Intellectuals who come from
the supposedly lesser languages find that, to be visible globally,
they must produce and store ideas in Western European languages,
English mostly. In the case of most intellectuals from Africa and
Asia, they become visible on the world stage but simultaneously
invisible in their own cultures and languages. Global visibility comes
at the price of local or regional invisibility.

This is because the dominant languages become perceived, even by the
dominated, as having all the magic power of knowledge and production
of ideas, culture itself, where the dominated languages are seen as
having the opposite. They are incapable of producing knowledge and
good ideas. But I wish it was simply a case of linguistic feudalism is
being transformed into linguistic Darwnism.

Linguistic Darwinism is the extreme product of hieratic dominant
language, dependent of the death of other languages. Languages can
grow but only on the graveyard of others, an attitude that underlies
all practices of monolingualism. In this most extreme form of
monolingualism, linguistic Darwinism sees the growth of a national
language as being dependent on the death of all the other languages.
This is the assumption behind many national language policies: In
order for the national language to be, other languages must die.

The death of any language is the loss of knowledge contained in that
language. The weakening of any language is the weakening of its
knowledge producing potential. It is a human loss. The saying cited
yesterday that the death of an old person is the death of a library is
probably more true of languages. Imagine the impoverishment of world
culture if all the learning in say classical Greek and Latin had died
with the languages? Today we can only imagine but never know the loss
of knowledge with the disappearance of so many languages on earth.
Each language, no matter how small, contains the best knowledge of its
immediate environment: The plants and their properties, for instance.
Language is the primary computer with a natural hard drive.

African languages face the destiny of dinosaurs: Things of the past.
For the national, African and even global good, the prevailing power
relationships of languages and cultures, has to be challenged and
hopefully even shaken up. This was the thinking behind my books,
Decolonizing the Mind, and also Re- Membering Africa.

My first prescription was that writers from marginalised cultures and
languages had the duty and responsibility of making themselves visible
in their languages. As I did not want to be saying do as I say but not
as I do, I made the decision way back in 1978 to break with English as
the primary mans of my writing, particularly in fiction and drama. My
first novel in Gikuyu, Devil on the Cross, was first written on toilet
paper in a maximum security prison where I had been put by a
postcolonial African Government for having participated in the writing
and performance of a play in my mother tongue. Today, I still believe
that writers and other intellectuals have the duty to challenge and
shake up that view of languages in theory and practice

But later I realised that though writers bore the primary duty of
producing ideas in African languages, there was another equally
important player. Writers do no do so in order to decorate their home
shelves with unpolished manuscripts. They want to be published in
order to reach the reader. But alas there were no major publishers in
African languages. So lack of publishers in African languages leads to
lack of writers in African languages and therefore few readers of
African language productions and therefore few publishers willing to
risk money by venturing there, and you can see the vicious circle.

The publisher then is an integral part of any meaningful challenge to
linguistic feudalism and linguistic Darwinism. I have written several
works in Gikuyu. But this would have been impossible without the
willingness of Henry Chakava and the East African Educational
Publishers to invest resources and skills into the project.

It is not question of books only. There are no journals of creative
and intellectual production in African languages. So a young writer
beginning to write has absolutely no forum in which he can showcase
short pieces, at least. Let me show you what effects a journal can
have by citing my own practice. Conscious of the problem of journals
and with the assistance of the New York Niversity where I then worked
as Professor of Comparative Literature and Performance Studies, I
founded a journal of culture and modern literature in 1992. Mutiri was
the first of its kind in Gikuyu. Even under very limited circulation
the journal has made some impact. Let me cite one example.

A Kenyan student, Gatua wa Mbugua, was doing his senior paper at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, when he came across the journal,
Mutiri, at a friend’s house. It was the first time that he was seeing
modem poetry and essays in Gikuyu. He immediately started writing his
own poems and songs in Gikuyu. Later at Cornell University, he wrote
the first ever Masters dissertation on Crop Science in Gikuyu. And
early this year, he successfully defended his Doctorate in
Agricultural Science at Wyoming University. Where his fieldwork for
his Masters was done in Kenya, that for his dissertation was carried
out in the central highlands of Wyoming. He had to be very dedicated
to his task. For his examiners in both cases at Cornell and Wyoming,
he had to give an English translation of the thesis and dissertation.
As for as I know, this was the first doctoral science dissertation in
an African language, certainly so in Gikuyu. The point here is that it
was a Gikuyu language journal that inspired him to do what he has
done, and now he is committed to producing smaller and simpler Science
texts in Gikuyu.

The writer and the publisher need another partner. The government.
Many African states don’t have a national language policy in a
multilingual situation, meaning African languages. In some cases they
have shown hostility. Whatever we may say of colonial states, they,
through literature bureaus, often came up with some sort of policies.
Some post-colonial governments have even shown active hostility to
African languages. Governments have to create an enabling environment
in terms of policies and resources. We have only to look at Kiswahili
in Tanzania today, the result of Nyerere’s progressive linguistic
foresight, continued in the successor Tanzanian governments. By
Kiswahili having a home and a base, it is the one African language
that is becoming an active player in the globe.

The fourth partner is of course the seller of books. Booksellers have
to be willing to stock books written in African languages. At present
this is largely missing. There are very few bookshops that sell
African language books.

I could add other partners: Award givers and conference organisers. At
present, many awards meant to help in the growth of African literature
actually work against African literature and readership. They give
awards that stipulate English as the linguistic means of literary
production. Conference organisers within and outside Africa recognise
only those intellectuals and writers who write in English. I was
talking to Zanzibari writers and on the mainland, and they all felt
that global visibility only went to writers in English. This obviously
has to change: African languages have to speak for the continent. I
have never heard of awards for French literature that stipulate that
such writers, to qualify as French writers for purposes of French
literature awards and conference invitations, must written in Chinese
or Zulu.

There is finally the reader. The reader is the most important
component of the four partners. Without readers and buyers of African
language books, there can never be such a literature. But then those
books have to be there, in the first instance. In other words the five
elements have to work together: Writers, visibility in the world for
writers and books in African languages, will come automatically, from
a solid base in Africa.

The choice open to the world should not be between mono-lingualism and
hierarchy of languages; but between those two models and a network
system among languages. Language relationships within and between
nations should not be in terms of hierarchy but rather in terms of
network, with transitions enabling the transmission of knowledge and
ideas between languages, a theme we can explore tomorrow.

I hope this conference will debate and share experiences that will
really create the African reader of African literary and intellectual
productions, a reader who is an integral active member of the global
intellectual productions, a reader who is an integral, active member
of the global intellectual community. ‘Father, do not send me into the
dark alone among strangers,’ says the persona in one of Sonia
Sanchez’s poems. Parents have the responsibility to send their
children out into the world equipped with the self-confidence that
arises from a clear knowledge of one’s base. Let me put it this way.
To know one’s language, whatever that language is, and add others to
it, is empowerment. But to know all the other languages while ignorant
of one’s own is slavery, I for one choose empowerment rather than
slavery and I believe that this I what this conference is all about:
Empowerment through reading.

http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59136#

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