The Herald
By Innocent Maja
17 March 2010
Opinion
Harare — In an article entitled “Minority Languages Vital” published in The Herald on March 10, I spoke about the importance of languages. I was intrigued the next day to see an article indicating that Minister David Coltart had intimated the introduction of an Indigenous Languages Bill.
This is a step in the right direction.
I, however, feel that beyond the Indigenous Languages Bill (whose provisions will be analysed in future articles), language rights should be entrenched in the Constitution.
This is because the Constitution is the supreme law of the land and entrenching language rights in the Constitution sets norms that can be used to challenge laws, policies and practices that tend to discriminate against minority languages.
It is not the intention of this article to get into much detail about the issues raised by Minister Coltart.
Today the focus is on chronicling the history of Africa that has led to the marginalisation and discrimination of minority or indigenous languages in most African states.
The problems associated with the protection of minority languages arguably have their genesis in the colonial domination of Africa. Pre-colonial Africa saw communities bound together with culture and language. In fact, language was a vehicle of culture.
People were culturally identified by the languages they spoke. For instance in Zimbabwe, people are referred to as “Shona,” “Ndebele”, “Tonga”, “Ndau”, “Kalanga”, etc because of the languages they speak.
When the colonialists occupied Africa, they viewed linguistic diversity as a barrier to their hegemony and administration of their new colonies. The French, British and Portuguese particularly adopted language assimilation policies in most of their colonies.
Suffice to point out that the French and Portuguese were more radical in their assimilation policies than the British who were a bit accommodative of African languages.
The colonisers accorded official language status to their foreign languages. The relics of such policies are prevalent in Africa today where states are divided into English-speaking, French-speaking and Portuguese-speaking.
British colonial powers came to a conclusion that because of the abundant linguistic diversity in Africa, English was a preferable alternative to local languages for the administrative, communicative and educational tasks they had set themselves in Africa. The effect of such policies was that Africans were forced to speak English language as a medium of communication, a source of acquiring information and language of opportunity.
In education, European-style education was introduced in European languages in African communities over the first decades of the colonial era. African languages and cultures began to be marginalised in the New World Order. This became the culture of education.
When the British and Americans tried to introduce adapted education — that advocated a curriculum embedded in local knowledge and local languages — in the British colonies, it was vigorously rejected by parents who suspected it as an attempt to keep them from acquiring European knowledge and power.
They rejected both the local knowledge curriculum and the local language in which it was to be taught. This sense of the inappropriateness of African language as a medium of conveying knowledge in the formal classroom continues to be a widespread perception among African parents today.
This scenario created a black elite who became superior by virtue of their mastery of the foreign language. The foreign language became a language of opportunity. Those who were competent in foreign languages would secure jobs, acquire a high status in society and would be prosperous.
In other words, language became a pathway to good jobs, material benefit and power in the colonial Africa. As the black elite grew in size and quality, they became far removed from African culture.
They denigrated and belittled African languages as primitive. It is important to note that Western languages did not triumph on account of their innate or inherent superiority. They were culturally and politically installed only after the armed and forcible subjugation of native peoples. Colonialism therefore introduced numerous linguistic problems that Africa is still grappling with today. Firstly, it separated language and culture.
Secondly, the foreign language became a medium of access to information. Indigenous languages were therefore marginalised in this regard.
Thirdly, competence in the foreign language became a medium of securing a good job. Fourthly, those that were fluent in the foreign language became more influential in politics because they had access to information and could communicate with the colonial powers.
The advent of independence saw the emergence of the nation state in Africa, which basically adopted the colonial policies. The nation state considered the formal recognition of multiple languages and language communities as a significant barrier to national integration.
The new independent African states made a two-faceted argument, namely: (a) the notion that multi-lingualism inhibits national integration and (b) the notion that national integration necessarily involves the emergence of a nation state with only one national language. In this environment, linguistic diversity becomes a characteristic to ignore as far as possible.
The new nation states began to view linguistic diversity, linguistic minorities and minority languages as problems. Minority or indigenous language speakers are construed as linguistic oddities, deficient, suffering from lack of knowledge of the dominant language and backward rather than owners of a positive resource, another language, or multilingual skills.
Most “minority language” speakers end up abandoning their mother tongue and embracing the foreign and dominant languages. May convincingly argues that the process was a three-pronged one, namely:
The first stage sees increasing pressure on minority language speakers to speak the majority language, particularly in formal language domains.
This stage is often precipitated and facilitated by the introduction of education in the majority language. It leads to the eventual decrease in the functions of the minority language, with the public or official functions of that language being the first to be replaced by the majority language.
The second stage sees a period of bilingualism, in which both languages continue to be spoken concurrently. However, this stage is usually characterised by a decreasing number of minority language speakers, especially among the younger generation, along with a decrease in the fluency of speakers as the minority language is spoken less, and employed in fewer and fewer language domains.
The third and final stage — which may occur over the course of two or three generations, and sometimes less — sees the replacement of the minority language with the majority language. The minority language may be “remembered” by a residual group of language speakers, but it is no longer spoken as a wider language of communication.
This has seen the discrimination, exclusion and marginalisation of minority or indigenous languages. Unfortunately, minority language speakers have ended up losing and/or diluting their culture, failing to express themselves, not accessing information, not accessing education and justice and failing to participate in development and decision-making.
They have remained a marginalised lot, doomed to nothingness. Zimbabwe is not an exception.
Its official languages are only English, Shona and Ndebele. What happens to the other section of the nation that speaks minority languages? Should they be ignored? Let me leave you to ponder on what Constantine, the philosopher, said:
Does not the sun shine equally for the whole world? Do we not all equally breathe the air? Do you not feel shame at authorising only three languages and condemning other people to blindness and deafness? Tell me, do you think God is helpless and cannot bestow equality, or that he is envious and will not give it?
Finally, as we think about what to include in the new constitution, we should ask ourselves whether it is ideal for us to continue subscribing to the nation state argument in respect of language diversity or it is time for us to shift our mindsets.
I am inclined to adopt the latter approach and believe that the nation state argument overlooks two salient facts.
Firstly, linguistic diversity per se is not a political problem. Rather, ignoring linguistic diversity is the problem.
Secondly, national unity does not imply cultural or linguistic uniformity. Instead, nation states can be more representative and achieve stronger and sustainable unity if they guarantee the right of minority communities and their individual members to distinct language and cultural practices.
Let me hear your thoughts on the issues raised in this article.
Innocent Maja is a senior partner in law firm Maja and Associates as well as executive director of the Centre for Minority Rights and Development.