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One Innocent Maja has been contributing to The Herald’s opinion or features pages focusing on language matters.
His thrust has been towards the recognition of minority languages in Zimbabwe.

This is evidenced by his introduction to his articles, two of which I will quote.
In an article titled “Language, the Carrier of Culture” published in The Herald dated March 31 2010, Maja introduced his article as follows “for the past two Wednesdays, I have been writing on the importance of minority languages and the need to include them in the new constitution. Today I will focus on what minority languages are and which ones should be included in the new constitution”.

In an article titled “Minority Language Rights Vital”, published in The Herald September 14 2010, Maja again placed emphasis on the need to recognise the minority languages saying “in the last three articles, we managed to establish why minority languages should be protected . . . ”
The notion that is created by Innocent Maja is that those languages he considers to be major languages are enjoying special consideration from the Government.

A critical analysis of the Zimbabwean situation will show that the country does not have a language policy that is legally backed by the constitution.
Nowhere in the Constitution does one find a clause that states the official position of any language spoken in Zimbabwe, be it foreign or indigenous.
The Zimbabwean constitution is simply silent about the status of languages.

Innocent Maja in his articles has highlighted treaties, conventions and charters that grant language rights, but that simply put are not being enjoyed differently by indigenous languages in Zimbabwe serve that some indigenous languages have a wider population that speak them, languages such as Shona and Ndebele.
The current situation in Zimbabwe is that the language of the minority (English) enjoys a high status by default and through a hotchpotch of legislation that makes it a requirement for a qualification to find some employment, to register with the institutions of higher learning or otherwise.

The languages of the majority, which are indigenous, enjoy a low status largely because of the attitudes of both the indigenous people and the foreigners.
The attitude of the foreigners is eloquently expressed in Bernard Magubane’s book titled “Race and the Construction of the Dispensable Others”.
The other in this case is the black person wherever he or she is in this global village.
The other is deemed to have no history or language that is worth recognising.

The indigenous attitude clearly manifests in the way we view our languages and in the manner our language policies are formulated.
As I was reading through literature that deals with indigenous language policies, I was struck by several questions that confronted the battle to have indigenous languages recognised as languages that are capable of propelling the development of Africa.
One such question is “have African governments started to embark on language planning”?

The answer is ‘NO’.
Yes, an emphatic “NO” because most the continent’s governments do not recognise indigenous languages as official serve for South Africa that has nine indigenous languages that are constitutionally recognised.
Even though that is the case in South Africa, the indigenous languages are still to be modernised so that they can reach a “respectable level” according to researcher known as Madiba in his study titled “Strategies in the Modernisation of Venda”.

“NO,” because when governments start to plan for the indigenous people, language policies will be crafted in such a way that they reflect who the beneficiaries of that policy are.
For instance, the Canadian language law, The Official Languages Act 1969, reflects that the Canadians must benefit from the law, as indicated by this quotation “in addition to declaring that English and French are to have equality of status and equal rights and privileges for all the purposes of parliament and government of Canada, the Act specifically imposes duties on all federal institutions to provide their services in either English or French in the National Capital Region and in such bilingual districts as might be subsequently designated, at their head offices and in any other location where there was significant demand for such services”.

The Act makes sure that the language policy is implemented by creating a position of a Commissioner of Official Languages. This can also be adopted for the purposes of administering our language policy.
Yes, the conventions, treaties and charters must assist in the recognition of languages but the critical role languages must play in social, cultural, political and economic development must be the bench mark of whether certain languages are being discriminated against.

Let us all advocate upgrading of the status of our languages so that we may use them for development as is the case in China, Japan, France and other nations that are proud to use their languages in matters of development.

The other question that displayed the attitude of language planners in Africa, Zimbabwe included is “is it justifiable to invest a lot of economic resources in the development African languages when there is a language of wider communication which can be used”?
This clearly shows that the negative attitude portrayed against indigenous African languages is not only directed towards minority languages as Maja wants to suggest. Therefore Maja should focus on the fate of all the indigenous languages other than focusing on the so called minority languages.

What Maja should know is that even those languages that he thinks are enjoying a high status are not enjoying that status.
They are not even languages of record in both public and private institutions.
These languages actually face a stiff resistance from a cross section of professionals, for example one indigenous person came up with a concoction that he named “gundamiti” which he said was a panacea to the Aids scourges.

The fight that was put up by the medical profession was more on the name, than the properties of the concoction and its effectiveness.
Another example is on a type of seed maize that was labelled using indigenous names of animals that are common in Zimbabwe.
The labels have since changed and the seed maize now bears the names and pictures of the same animals but are now in English.
Is English the mother tongue of the majority or minority? Food for thought.

In his article “Minority Language Rights Vital”, Innocent Maja sought to mislead the general populace by insinuating that people are prohibited from using minority languages to name their children as expressed in his eighth point. No-one in Zimbabwe is denied the right to name his or her child in its mother language except that because of the parents’ attitude towards indigenous languages they have almost resorted to English names or to indigenous language names whose meaning is inclined to Christian values only, moving away from the tradition of the Bantu tribes of repositing their history and world view in names of their children and places.

However, it is encouraging to note that Maja has been consistent in eliciting for a debate on the language issues. I agree with him when he notes that language is an important vehicle of the livelihood of every individual, minority and majority groupings.

This is buttressed by R A Hudson, a sociolinguist, who defined language as a self-contained system of words, sound and meanings linked to each other in various complex ways, in other words we may predict that each language will have words to express most concepts relevant to the culture and that most words in each language will express cultural concepts, definable only in terms of the culture concerned hence the need to recognise all indigenous languages in the country’s constitution.

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