Africa is a playground for various European linguistic structures. These have stolen the continent’s ability to develop in stature and self-belief. English, French, Portuguese and Spanish are the major European languages that are accorded official language statuses in various African countries. These languages have become lingua franca between Africans even though this continent is blessed with a myriad of languages.
LANGUAGE OF DOMINANCE
Around 1500AD, about 5 million people spoke English and were obviously British. Today (500 years or so later), that number has grown by 40,000% to around 2 billion. Put differently, British cultural imperialism, dominance and influence has multiplied a 40,000 times.
In 2018, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) revealed that half of the 6,000 languages spoken across the world will disappear. The Khoi and the San languages are already in advanced stages of that disappearance as none of the African countries have adopted them as official languages. Did nature dictate that this be the case or did some human elements engineer this evolution?
THE TEMPEST
Attempting to answer the above question, let us detour for a second. William Shakespeare, as early as 1611 in one of his revered works “The Tempest”, explains concisely the relationship between language and colonisation. This famous British author (I do not want to debate whether he agreed with the characters or not) presents a falsified image of the people of the Caribbean Islands by using some very racist likeness in representing the status of various characters in this play.
Caliban (a character in The Tempest), one of the many inhabitants of a certain island, is a victim of colonisation. The sad thing is that Caliban in the earlier stages of their relationship had faith in Prospero. In an act of betrayal, he is classified as a savage and thus a slave of the west. The coloniser forces him to follow the western ways wherein his viewpoint is reshaped, using language, in order for him to interpret the world using his colonisers’ lenses.
At some point a frustrated Caliban, the colonised, rebels against Prospero, the coloniser, “You taught me language and my profit on’t is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language!”. Controlling the mind of the colonised is the greatest goal that the colonisers aim to achieve. Enslaving them, subjecting them to cheap labour, stealing their land and what it offers is the ultimate goal.
Caliban’s frustrated and angry lines show an undiluted confession by the victim of how inappropriate language is used by colonisers to influence the state of mind of the colonised. He reminds the colonisers that infusing their language onto him imparted a skill to insult.
YOU ARE A MODERN VERSION OF CALIBAN
All African nations, without exception, can identify with Caliban’s experience. Language and its use, therefore, is never neutral and unbiased. History and even the current epoch continue to show it to be more than just a method of communication but a tool of social dominance and superiority.
Shakespeare, in the aforementioned work, represents the state of mind that existed to impose the European approach in global politics. They saw Africans as savages who were barbaric, animalistic and deserved no respect but subservience to the European master. One could still that they have a modernised version of the same thing. They are using various modern techniques to keep Africans carrying the begging bowl whilst they are exploit them using their languages of dominance.
Nguni waThiongo insists, “They gave us their accents in exchange for their access to our resources. When African intellectuals and leadership were busy perfecting their borrowed accents, Europe and the West were busy sharpening their instruments for access to the resources of the continent. Accents for access: unfortunately, that is the story of post-colonial Africa”.
LANGUAGE DEFINES US
What role does language play in developing or destroying an African’s identity?
Steven Bantu Biko’s (Black Consciousness Movement leader) thoughts in the 70s speak to what Caliban faced at the hands of Prospero when he said, “The greatest weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed”. This great son of Africa, further, argued that the basic objective of a colonialist is to make an African feel like a foreigner in the land of his birth.
Following Biko’s analysis, it would be correct to say Caliban was being castigated by a coloniser who, through language enforcement, was creating a mind that viewed Prospero’s ways as the refined ways.
Losing a language goes hand-in-glove with losing a culture. Losing the latter goes hand in glove with losing identity. Language use, therefore, allows the users to define who they are. This is a people’s history, culture and identity lost forever.
Colonial languages have become congruent with societal status. This happens at the reduction of African languages to second or lesser strata.
Persons may find themselves not getting appointed into jobs or not given audience, not because they are not capable, but because they do not have a good account of a British language.
WE OWE OUR CHILDREN AND OUR ANCESTRY
As we negotiate our way to complete freedom, we need to be stubborn about our identity. Language is one of those elements that allow us to pass our culture and identity from one generation to the next. It is the gift that we owe to our children and grandchildren. It is the debt that we owe to our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. Professor Okoth Okombo puts this point more lucidly when he says, “the death of a language is like the burning of a library”. How does history record your role if your language dies during your era?
We need to be careful as we go through what is referred to as globalisation. Africa’s thought contribution into the rest of the globe is under attack as indigenous languages are slowly becoming under-utilised. Using our languages as defining features ensures that our participation in the global village is not counterfeit as we ought not to allow the global village to be characterised by the erasure of African language and identity.
THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY REMAINS RACIST
Africans are taught at schools using the so-called universally useful languages mainly English, Portuguese and French. The assumed usefulness of these languages is questionable.
The purpose of education is learning and access to knowledge. Knowledge is knowledge – does it really matter the language that it comes in? Does it make me a deficient scientist if my education came in Igbo, kiSwahili or IsiXhosa?
The prominence that African countries give to these European languages makes Africans to continue being subjects of their colonisers. It takes colonialism to persist despite political independence.
hakespeare’s Caliban also later discovered that the Prospero he had put faith in was not giving saintly assistance to him but was selfishly nurturing him to become his slave.
Do we have enough material that is published in African languages for the Instructors to make use of?
We do not. African publishers are mainly recognised insofar as the indigenous African language books that they publish. Books in Mathematics, Economics and Accounting are mainly published in European languages with the obvious benefit of these countries. Prospero continues to dominate even if he is seated in Buckingham Palace.
We need to fix this gap. African languages are slowly running the risk of becoming extinct.
Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow”.
Colonisation goes hand in glove with the use of language to further the ideals of the colonisers. The colonised get forbidden from speaking their languages and, like Caliban, they are forced to speak foreign languages.
The right to publish is an important tool towards ensuring that our languages stay afloat. This ability, however, is diminished if its application is occasional. This is also achieved through the deprivation of funding to African language publishers. Books at schools are and still are published in English or French. This is another method of economic manipulation of the African market to the benefit of European countries.
Mobile technology has grown in leaps and bounds across the African continent. African writing professionals must exploit the potential capacity provided by the evolving digital technology in book publishing. The African writer’s audience is no longer constrained by the national boundaries. Immediately a book is published, it becomes available to the global audience. This avoids costs associated with freight, staffing and packaging that tend to take the bulk of the expenses. This, however, must be done with measures against piracy in place.
COLONIAL LANGUAGES ARE A WEDGE BETWEEN AFRICANS
Okay Colonialism is a severe dent in the promotion
of unity in Africa. It has led to scenarios
where Africans distinguish and discriminate
between one another on the basis of the Eu-
ropean language that each speak.
Can we really talk of a British Cameroon and
a French Cameroon? The answer unfortu-
nately is a big YES. European languages
seem to have assumed a superior status in
determining whether that country remains
united or not. A very ugly discord currently
exists wherein there is a battle between
Africa’s referred to as Anglophone, Luso-
phone and other Africans who are said to be
Francophone. It is not about the spoken