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Elliot Ziwira Senior Writer
Today Zimbabwe joins the rest of the world in celebrating International Mother Language Day. This comes in the wake of the demise of many languages due to technological advancements and an increasingly globalised village, with at least 43 percent of the 6 000 tongues spoken across the world facing extinction.

Due to colonialism and hegemony, education systems the world over rely mainly on a few hundred languages, which disadvantage 40 percent of the global population that neither speak nor understand them. The advent of the Information Revolution has further jeopardised thousands of languages as the digital world only makes use of less than a 100.

The subtle nature of colonialism and its attendant efforts to destroy cultural ethos through destruction of shrines, and all that which made colonised people tick, created individuals who hated themselves more than they did their colonisers. This was especially so because they lost their languages which they were made to believe to be the source of their backwardness.

Language carries a people’s culture, and culture is the backbone of societal aspirations. Loss of language equates to loss of culture, and ultimately loss of confidence, as everything that the colonised should be cherishing is reduced to “a quintessence of evil” (Fanon, 1967). Fanon argues that the best way to destroy a people is to rob them of their confidence.

It is norm for the formerly colonised, particularly Africans, to boast of eloquence in alien languages, like English, French, Spanish, German and Portuguese, without realising how much they have lost in terms of tangibles and intangibles of heritage. They so much want their children to speak through the nose, as they say, and invest a lot of resources towards acquisition of the said languages, and the cultures that come along with it. With the death of language, indigenous knowledge systems also suffer the same fate. As more and more people migrate from their countries of birth to the Diaspora, the rout is complete.

It is on record that a language dies every fortnight and takes with it a whole cultural and intellectual heritage. Such a loss cannot be ignored. Naturally, when language suffers, culture becomes the biggest loser. Some languages and cultures may never be redeemed as they collapse under the guise of industrialisation and progress.

For global citizens to live in harmony, there is greater need for linguistic diversity and more emphasis on multicultural education through promotion of mother tongues.

It is against this background that the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), proclaimed International Mother Language Day in November 1999. The proclamation was embraced by the UN General Assembly in its resolution A/RES/56/262 of 2002.

Emile Durkheim (1988) points out that culture is the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.

Culture may be classified as community, national, regional, gender, social and corporate.

In the book “Zimbabwean Literature in African Languages: Crossing Language Boundaries” (2012) Emmanuel M Chiwome and Zifikile Mguni explore the liberating nature of language in its expression of a people’s way of life and the preservation of beliefs.

They argue that the use of indigenous African languages is the first step in decolonising the continent’s citizenry’s mind-set.

Citing Furusa, they maintain that “(a) search for language should be a search for collective wisdom and sensibility. It should be intended to bend the collective volition into harmony with the demands of social development”. This is especially so because “language embodies and is a vehicle of expressing cultural values” (Chinweuzu, et al, 1982:7).

Cultural beliefs obtaining in African folklore, riddles, idioms and proverbs can only be appropriately enunciated through indigenous languages. Language is a powerful vehicle in the conveyance of a people’s mores in their original form.

Foreign languages cannot adequately ferry a people’s mores and values from one generation to another trough folklore. They falter in articulating the gist of realities prevailing in communities at any given time. Colonialism left the African landscape smarting from challenges commensurate with oppressive apparatus, which problems cannot be addressed using the same machinations. Cognisant of the oppressive nature of language, Kenyan philosopher-writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o vowed to stick to his native Gikuyu to hoist his country’s flag above the colonial banner, as a starting point in the liberation of his people.

Chiwome and Mguni note that, “In the context of a former colony like Zimbabwe, literature can be viewed as a site of struggle. In this literary site of struggle, writers can either represent powers that oppress the masses or write from below in order to bring the people living on the margins closer to the centre.”

Suffice to say the institutionalisation of how reality can be perceived through a particular language is baneful to the freedom of expression. Artistes as “truth’s defence” should be the voices of the gagged, feeble and vulnerable. And for them to be able to do so, they should be conversant in the mother tongues used in the communities they care to speak for.

An education system that gives prominence to foreign languages at the expense of indigenous ones encumbers development, social cohesion and linguistic diversity. In a way such a system is more destructive than constructive. An education system that uses indigenous languages for purposes of oppression and agenda setting, is equally destructive.

The Literature Bureau, in colonial Rhodesia determined the nature of literature to be consumed both in schools and by the general readership. Therefore, although indigenous languages like Shona, Ndebele and Tonga could be used to express liberation and freedom, they were skewed to serve the interests of the oppressor, who controlled the printing presses.

The desire to be published prevailed over creativity, thus compromising the body of literary works produced, and as a consequence the oppressed peoples’ hopes and aspirations were relegated to the periphery of existence.

According to Chiwome and Mguni (2012), Solomon Mutswairo’s “Feso” (1956) could only be published after the “offending” first chapter, which deplored the displacement of Africans from fertile lands, was removed.

It is the Government, therefore, that determines the nature of knowledge to be consumed and because of this, issues that really affect the generality of the populace might not be explored.

Colonisation and technological advancements subjected African traditions to immense pressure. The Tonga people, for example, had their own songs, proverbs, idioms and folklores which were directly linked to the Zambezi Valley — their cherished ancestral abode before the Kariba Dam flooded their area. All in the name of electricity, which, however, doesn’t benefit them much.

Their resentment of the dislocation from the life-source they had known for generations, cannot be fully articulated in any other language besides their own.

Their livelihoods are still to improve through the dam, yet their association with the river basin as enshrined in their folkloric songs and folklore remains painfully embedded in their hearts. For their story of the golden times to be carried to future generations there is need to return to the source through language — Tonga. So, in a way they have been robbed of their freedom, and no form of compensation will placate them.

The Chingwizi community in the Mwenezi District, who were displaced when the Tugwi Mukosi Dam flooded its banks in February 2014, would never feel satisfactorily recompensed as long as a return to their ancestral land is not part of the package. Their feelings can only be captured through their own language and not any other.

Similarly, no matter how much compensation they may get, and how many books and newspaper stories are written about their loss, Cyclone Idai victims remain poorer if their cultural bastions, including the graves of their loved ones, are not revived through use of indigenous languages. It is in language that a people’s realities are mirrored.

By recognising the existence of 16 official languages (Ndebele, Shona, Tonga, Chewa, Nambya, Shangani, Venda and sign language among them), the Constitution of Zimbabwe is apt in preserving local languages. The Zimbabwean education system emphasises the use of indigenous languages for instruction to leaners from Grade One up to Grade Four.

However, a lot still needs to be done both in training of teachers in indigenous languages at tertiary institutions, and changing leaners’ mind-sets from an early age. That is, if they are willing and committed to, because learning a language is attitudinal. A mother language-based education system may be effective if the issue of indigenous knowledge systems is enforced in primary school, where it is inculcated in young minds that if it’s not mother tongue, then it’s nothing.