[lg policy] Languages as Bridges: Building network against linguistic feudalism and Darwinism

[Harold Schiffman]

Languages as Bridges: Building network against linguistic feudalism
and Darwinism
The Arts Oct 11, 2009 By NGUGI WA THIONG’O

The first part of this discourse was published in our last edition

TODAY, four of the five languages of the UN Security Council, are
European. 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. And within a nationalnational visibility comes at the
price of regional and communal invisibility.The consequence for Africa
in terms of self perception and pride and conveyance of knowledge is
enormous. It creates another gulf: between the intellectual elite and
the people. The middle-class generally becomes defined by its
abilities in European languages; the masses by their rootage in
African languages. But since knowledge production and storage is
largely in European languages, it also means an ever deepening gulf in
the abilities of the possessors of the two language systems to access
knowledge.

I was in a pan African conference recently in Dar es Salaam to discuss
strategies and tactics for encouraging and deepening reading culture
in Africa where one speaker light-heartedly said that if you want to
hide something from an African, put it in a book. This would be sad,
tragic even, were it true. But I put it differently and said that if
you want to hide knowledge from an African child, put it in English or
French. Or if you want to hide keys to the future, hide it in European
languages. Tragically this is what we do to our children everyday.

I remember when my mother used to send me on a journey alone, to meet
relatives, she would pack food and water for me, and then would sit me
down and tell me everything about the path before me to ensure that I
would not get lost. She punctuated every instruction with the
question: do you understand? Only then would she let me go. She was
not doing something out of the ordinary: it would be a very
irresponsible parent who would give instructions in words and
languages that the child does not frilly understand. Now, nothing is
more important than life’s journey; and yet we in Africa 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? Or is it a case of
the lost giving instructions on how to lose your way in life? Or he
may have wanted to create the gulf of knowledge between the elite and
the people. But why should we in Africa want to continue with
deepening and widening the gulf? But I wish it was simply a case of
linguistic feudalism; the reality is that linguistic feudalism is
being transformed into linguistic Darwinism. Linguistic Darwinism is
the extreme product of hierarchy of languages, where the growth of a
dominant language is dependent on 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 dependant 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. There are many variations of this: for instance when big
regional languages are empowered at the expense of the smaller. 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 often
cited that the death on old person is the death of a whole library is
probably truer 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 really know the quantity and quality of
knowledge lost 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 motivation behind my books,
Decolonizing the Mind, and also Re-Membering Africa. What is the way
out?

My first prescription was that writers from marginalized 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 means of my writing, particularly in fiction and drama. I
have no regrets. I still believe that writers and other intellectuals
have the duty to challenge and shake up linguistic feudalism and
linguistic Darwinism, that hierarchical view of languages in theory
and practice. But later I realized 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 unpublished 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 lead 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 the East African Educational
Publishers to invest resources and skills into the project.

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. Whatever we may say
of colonial states, they, through literature bureaus, often came up
with some sort of policies. Far from helping, 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.

I could add other partners: for instance, booksellers have to be
willing to stock books written in African languages. At present there
are very few bookshops that sell African language books. Or the award
givers and conference organizers. At present many awards meant to help
in the growth of African literature actually work against African
literature.
They give awards that stipulate English as the linguistic means of
literary production. Conference organizers within and outside Africa
recognize only those intellectuals and writers who work in English. In
Africa, national, continental and global visibility only went to
writers in English. But the three partners, government, writer and
publisher are the most primary.

The working together of the three primary players would go along way
towards empowering knowledge in African languages and hence reduce
considerably that gulf between African and European languages as
producers of ideas.    A question frequently asked, after I talk about
the necessity of using African languages as literary instruments, is
that of the multiplicity of languages. But many languages within
nations can be strength if the relationship between them is not based
on notions of hierarchy but rather on those of a network. In the
vision of a net work, there is not one centre; there are several
centres equidistant with each other but connected in give-and-take.
Every language draws from another. Every language gives to another.
All languages end up giving to, and taking from, each other, laying
the groundwork for a complex independence and interdependence of
cultures within and between cultures.

But how do they do that? Or rather how would they do that? By building
bridges between them, through translations. Translation is what
enables that traffic of ideas between languages. In his book, a
Discourse on Colonialism, the Martinquan poet, Aime Cesaire, once
described culture contact and exchange as the oxygen of civilization.
Language networking through translation can only help in the
generation of that oxygen within and between nations.

History of ideas
To the three other players I talked about I would add the translator.
The translator is the maker of brides between languages. Translations
have played an important role in the history of ideas. The much talked
about European renaissance would have been impossible without
translations. Christianity and Islam and their spread all over the
world have been enormously aided by the translations of the Bible and
the Quran.

Translations and translators can play an even bigger role in the
African renaissance. In my book, Re-membering aka Something torn and
new, I have talked of translations between African languages;
translations from Europhonic African lit into African languages; the
translations of diasporic works of Caribbean and African American
writers into African languages in a vision  I describe as restoration;
and finally the translations of the finest traditions in world
cultures into African languages.

This bridge building would have big impact in the restoration of
pride, initiatives, and productivity to Africa.
Wherever we are, we in Africa have to debate and even share
experiences in the kind of bridge buildings that will really create an
African literary and intellectual who, rooted in his own base, 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 mental slavery. I hope that Africa will choose
empowerment.

-- http://www.vanguardngr.com/2009/10/11/languages-as-bridges-building-network-against-linguistic-feudalism-and-darwinism/
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