Language and decolonising

The Pan South African Language Board declared February as the month to promote the use of all South African languages. I write to echo this idea, which seeks to enhance the status of all our languages and also to reflect on what Ngugi wa Thiong’o taught me during the Steve Biko memorial lecture at the University of Cape Town in 2003.

He said “memory lies in language”.

The imperialist West has subjected us (as Africans) to its memory. In Africa in particular, hegemony of Western languages is still prevalent.

Thus, even our landscape has British and European names – for instance Alice, King William’s Town, Grahamstown, Berlin, East London etc. Where do we feature African names?

It seems to me that this memorial lecture 13 years ago was yesterday.

This world scholar was appealing to us to think outside of our comfort zones. We should make history a living subject, as he has with the history of our languages.

Just recently at the University of Fort Hare, students were raising a pertinent and thought-provoking question about the name of the university, suggesting it be named after Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe.

This speaks to what Wa Thiong’o raised some years ago. As I recall, he said “our bodies are branded in slavery with the names of slave owners”.

He used himself as example – his slavery name is “James”. Whenever somebody calls him “Jaaaames” he puts a smile on his face, but if his African name is used he becomes frozen.

My close friend is Zolile but he prefers Rueben. There are thousands of examples of western names: William, Michael, Ben ... almost all of us are stuck with names which don’t really reflect who we are.

Language embedded with culture is the “most crucial aspect of colonisation”. I want to reflect these thoughts because the giant of the African renaissance will be giving a lecture on decolonising the curriculum. I might be putting the cart before the horse, pre-empting Saturday’s lecture, but it would be good if this great African intellectual would tease out the issue of language and the curriculum. It cuts across all spheres of education.

As I listened to him some years ago Wa Thiong’o said Africans were programmed to believe they could not store their thoughts or information in their own languages. He saw this as storing our grain in somebody else’s granary. He argued that African thought has been produced and stored in other people’s languages, in other people’s memory. That is like storing the grain we have cultivated and harvested in someone else’s granary!

We say “it’s okay, I understand your languages”, but if we keep on doing so the hegemony of Western languages is unstoppable. Our languages will remain inferior forever and ever, amen!

There is a prevalent myth among most academics, teachers, parents and the public, and especially us as the black elite, that we cannot use African languages due to the insufficient development of these languages. People argue that African languages are not capable or ready for use in our education, whether as mediums of teaching or to be taught as languages. People just disown their languages. They hate them. Wa Thiong’o alluded to this being a result of colonial habitus.

Just recently, Nigerian teachers rejected the use of Nigerian languages in the teaching of mathematics and science. Teachers throughout African continent hold to this same approach even though a number of studies have been done in Africa and abroad to dispel it as a myth.

To mention a few: A six-year project in Nigeria in 1976; the Project for the Alternative Education in South Africa in the early 2000s; the Consortium Research Project headed by the Human Sciences Research Council published work in the late 2000s on the use of mother tongues to assist learners with conceptual understanding of key concepts in mathematics and science.

But whenever you propose the use of African languages as mediums of teaching, the unconvinced policy-makers always want research to be done. Until when I ask? Really, until when! Which empirical evidence are you talking about? If you go to any rural or township school teachers use these languages quite often.

Professor Omotoso once wrote an article on the promotion of the vernacular which continues to leave me unshaken. “Education is good in any language but better in your mother tongue,” he said.

Indeed Wa Thiong’o was spot on to say Africans are much too comfortable taking their grain to someone else’s granary. Knowledge or information in any language is knowledge and should be stored as such.

We are not saying away with English. Of course, we need learners to get good tuition in English. But this should not be at the expense of African languages.

Yes, some of the concerns are real on the issue of the development status of African languages. BUT, a language being a fully-fledged medium of teaching and learning is a work in progress. It has never been an overnight process.

As the late Professor Neville Alexander put it, it takes a generation to intellectualise a language, it is an intentional and consistent process which goes forever.

Even those languages which we may think are developed are being updated with new words. This is a process which needs a lot of intellectual and capital investment. Those who are familiar with the history of Afrikaans development, will know that.

Why is it an issue for African languages? African language-speakers should learn a thing or two from the development of Afrikaans. Why do Africans have the syndrome Wa Thiong’o refers to – “IT’S OKAY, I understand your language” – when we know it is not true?

It is worse for our learners and students. Hence they perform below par.

With the wrong recipe for education, Africa will always get the wrong product. If we ignore the use of African languages to teach mathematics, science etc, we will never get the cream of the crop students and produce good students.

It’s even worse in the Eastern Cape, the “Home of Legends”.

Curriculum and language intertwine. Thoughts/memory are expressed better in one’s home language. Yet African vernacular learners are expected to translate their thoughts into English, and vice-a-versa in a form of dual translation.

Let’s promote literacy and the culture of reading in all languages, including in African languages.

The problem is even worse in areas of learning such as mathematics and sciences. Students are expected to deal with two languages at the same time – English as the medium of teaching and mathematics jargon. Hence they struggle to improve in these learning areas.

Besides the issue of language there are other educational issue that contribute to African students performing below par in these learning areas.

Myriad people and many literate persons have the misconception that when one talks of mother-tongue based bilingual education, one refers to the despicable former system of Bantu education. This is not correct! The architects of Bantu education deliberately planned to keep the recipients of that kind of education as “drawers of water and hewers of wood”. As such it would serve no purpose and be time consuming to teach a Bantu mathematics and science.

I believe it is imperative for all language activists to understand the politics of our languages in order for us to see the need for their development and elevation in the domain of education and so forth.

In most African countries learners are taught in their respective mother tongues in the foundation phase, but are subsequently taught in foreign languages in highly conceptual subjects when they have hardly mastered or can speak properly in their mother tongue. (English in our case, and foreign in the sense that for most African language speakers their proficiency skills tend to be higher in their home languages.)

Let us for instance ask how do you teach a Grade 4 child about the basic operation of mathematics which will then take them into algebraic expression without explaining it in their mother tongue or home language? How do you do that so that they grasp these concepts?

The same applies to natural sciences. How do you explain technically embedded themes – energy and change; life and living for example? You cannot do it without alluding to the mother tongue. Pedagogically and cognitively this makes sense. It eschews rote learning which leads to functional illiteracy.

Hence most learners learn most things by heart. That is, they do a lot of memorisation. Decolonising South Africa’s curriculum without looking at the issue of “language as national discourse”.

That lecture I heard 13 years ago left me so inspired that I decided to make my contribution to decolonising our curriculum by writing dictionaries so that African language speaking kids could understand the knowledge content much better.

In conclusion, we cannot decolonise the curriculum without reflecting on who we are. Your language is your mirror, without it you cannot reflect who you are.

Let us ignore those skeptics or slaves of European languages and concentrate on what is possible for the development of African languages as high status media of communication, lingua franca, languages of business, commerce, politics, science, mathematics etcetera. That is how Wa Thiong’o inspired me in the lecture for utata uBiko titled “Consciousness and the African Renaissance”.

Zola Wababa is director of the University of Fort Hare-based IsiXhosa National Lexicography Unit, the national legal custodian of IsiXhosa