OPINION March 15, 2007 Posted to the web March 15, 2007
Stephen Mpofu
Harare
ZIMBABWE looks set to mount a human rescue operation whose importance probably approximates Noah’s ark - a linguistic revival.
The recent announcement by the Secretary for Education, Sport and Culture, Dr Steven Mahere, that Shona and Ndebele will become compulsory subjects up to Junior Certificate and that all other indigenous languages will be taught and be examined at Grade Seven might not appear extraordinary to a casual observer. But if pursued with a clear vision and unflinching determination, the linguistic renaissance could mark a significant milestone towards redeeming the bruised robust image of our people to its original identity.
The effects of colonisation, industrialisation and urbanisation have had a telling impact on the Zimbabwean personality, indeed on black people across Africa, eroding a common layer of consciousness that our people long shared about their Africanness. In the absence of a lingua franca, which might be used to teach science, mathematics, economics, and geography among other subjects, our mother tongues have suffered a wanton and systematic assailant by foreign languages with their dysfunctional imperialist cultural values.
This prompted one man of God, Bishop Tudor Bismark of Harare, to talk of “ShoEnglish” when addressing a church conference in Bulawayo last year.
To complete the cycle of linguistic contamination, one can also talk of “NdeEnglish” in the same way that other Africans may bemoan the pollution of languages by colonial French and colonial Portuguese.
In this writer’s view, the new languages policy seeks to arouse an instrumental consciousness to evacuate us from a culture of prostituted tongues that threaten to be an identity card for our future generations, a blank card.
This article will attempt to interrogate the languages issue further from the melting pot, urban set-up, perspective and from the wider context of Zimbabwe’s rural population where most people live, notwithstanding the urban drift that threatens to overrun social amenities in beleaguered towns and cities. What immediately comes to mind are names of some provinces that are misnomers in so far as they give an impression that they compartmentalise people within tribal homelands similar to South Africa’s former Bantustans.
In that sense, therefore, these names do not appear to be a fillip to a new beginning in promoting our mother tongues that now play a perpetual Cinderella role to a colonial language that has strenuously sought to hound them out of existence.
On the contrary, some of the provincial names would appear to engender a psychological insularity to a free flow of the will to learn languages spoken by the majority in the other provinces.
“Mashonaland”, “Manicaland, (Manyikaland)”, “Matabeleland - (MaNdebeleland)”
– in this age and time! Better is possible, surely?
To clarify this argument, let us suppose that the provinces concerned are medical capsules and the people within them affirm their ethnic position
with: “I am what, I am what I am, what I am; complete and powerful within my capsule. I do not want any intrusion to affect my stuff.”
The above names are pregnant with psychological power. So, resistance to a strange language cannot be completely ruled out given people’s pride, vanity, and sometimes unshakeable, even fatalistic beliefs. Having changed many place names after independence, is it really too late in the 27th year of our Uhuru to replace the names of provinces that are tribally connotative with togetherness — friendly names?
Consider these: Northern Province, North- Central Province, North-East Province, Eastern Province, Masvingo, the Midlands, Southern Province, Western Province, and the metropolitan provinces of Bulawayo and Harare.
That is this sociologist-cum-communicologist’s Zimbabwe with “We are one — Sisonke” as her motto. Let Zimbabweans not forget too soon that some Machiavellian characters have in the past tried to sow seeds of disunity riding on the coat-tails of sentiments of people in particular areas with tribal names by painting a distorted picture that those people were alienated by the State.
Perhaps those provinces under this spotlight should learn from the Midlands Province where it is regarded strange for anyone not to speak both Shona and Ndebele, for instance, at least conversationally.
Equally, great attention, if not greater, and more resources should be given to the promotion of so-called minority languages within some provinces and also spoken across Zimbabwean borders.
The Government’s “Operation Rescue Tongues”, as announced by Dr Mahere, only tows those languages up to the seventh grade instead of hauling them along with the national languages, Ndebele and Shona (and English) all the way to Form Four. We now have a local examinations board in place for both Ordinary and Advanced Levels, so what is the problem?
If a shortage of materials is the drawback, then those concerned should have their priorities right. Why not train people from areas where those languages are spoken to produce the requisite literature that is pregnant with a national and cultural ethos? That way, communication among the speakers of the language concerned and other Zimbabweans, not with their linguistic “cousins” over the border, will improve and unity will be fostered.
Language is the cultural lifeblood of a people, colonial regimes neglected the development of languages spoken within Zimbabwe’s border and other areas with the risk that Zimbabweans and those with whom they shared a common language in neighbouring countries might have developed an affinity to the extent of splitting loyalties between countries if the chips were really, really down.
If people realise that their language is recognised, they will feel appreciated as people who truly belong in Zimbabwe, come what may.
The melting pot scenario is a real poser, exposing Zimbabwe’s false sense of linguistic security similar to a false sense of active labour security under which some countries overseas once lived.
In the latter scenario, those countries worshipped family planning as it were, only to scramble up monetary and other incentives to couples to produce more babies to avert a looming disaster in commerce and industry after old age and death had virtually wiped out their active labour force.
In this country, the young, who are the Zimbabwe of the future, appear daily to slip or to founder in a tongue-less culture with language that has no form or structure.
Decipher this conversation on a commuter omnibus between two young men who do not wish the uninitiated to listen in:
A: Twas pu?
B: Maybe taking my jalopee to the garage then going for a nkrid with my Vum then going for a vumies then a deb.
The translated version:
A: Where are you going, and what are you up to today?
B: I am taking my car to be checked at a garage in town after which I will check on my girlfriend and go for a drink with her and then to a movie before returning home.
George Orwell would probably call their lingo “Decadent urban Speak”.
Like their peers, these same young men probably write letters propositioning a girl in English, embroidering it with jawbreakers and amorous phrases culled from great writers to impress, because they cannot express themselves adequately in their mother tongue.
Not only that, an application letter in Shona or Ndebele or other local languages in response to an advertisement in a newspaper for a job is most likely to arouse sneers and frowns at the other end even though the requirement is that the applicant should be conversant in indigenous languages — because a colonial mentality has taught us to regard our mother tongues as inferior to the white man’s language.
Even more tragic and unZimbabwean is that some of those who are supposed to lead by example can barely deliver a complete speech to a black audience in their mother tongue without breaking down and summoning the English language with a black interpreter to tow them to the end.
But perhaps Shona and Ndebele ought to be made compulsory to these political leaders first so they will be seen to truly “lead by example” as national leaders. But maybe we should forget about them as a lost cause, since “you can not teach an old dog new tricks” and instead concentrate on the very young.
Now, stop by a group of black Zimbabwean school children and listen to their talk. In almost all cases, they communicate not in their mother tongue but in English.
On the other hand, you will never hear their peers of English stock or of Asian origin talking in Ndebele or Shona. A possible explanation is that many black Zimbabwean families raise their children in a state of social confusion. Teachers at crèches, school and maids in the home are the surrogate parents, mainly responsibly for socialising the children. And when not at work, biological parents proudly talk to their offspring in the foreign language used at school, not in their own language to develop it.
In the process, the impressionable children swallow and internalise decadent alien values with the result that some of them become directionless, even deviant, thus unAfrican and as long as black parents remain ashamed of their mother tongues and of their African way of life Dr Mahere’s ark will remain holed in parts.
Trouble with the social chaos in urban areas is that the traditional extended family system, as we have known it, does not exist in these areas.
Instead a reconstituted extended family system — comprising neighbours working in different sectors — which applies there has failed lamentably to come to grips with social pathologies spawned by western decadent values.
As things stand now, the future looks terribly grim for our indigenous languages and Zimbabweans in urban areas might wake up one day in the future to discover that they no longer have a language they can call their own.
Because the urban set-up has often acted as a pacesetter for the countryside in many ways, what is left of the extended family system — which served as a conveyor belt of cultural and moral values between generations — is also threatened.
Operation Rescue Tongues now appears to be the only hope for the folk in communal lands as well since language is also a conveyor belt of cultural values. Zimbabweans should, therefore, realise that people who “speak the same language” are wont to understand and appreciate each other’s social circumstances better and to unite rather than mistake the others for an enemy.
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Set in 2005 during the months of May to December, ‘The Uncertainty of Hope’ , gives a view of life in contemporary Zimbabwe through the eyes of ordinary folk trying to get by.
She wrote the book evenings and weekends and became compulsive about seeing the characters take shape. She did little research as it was life she had observed while in Zimbabwe and particularly Mbare where the book is set. Tagwira says she had difficulty in knowing when to stop editing herself. “I was coming close to self-censoring,” she says. It was her publisher who had a calming effect on her. She wants to write more to build her confidence.