a second look
Hamilton Wende
Sipho Seepe’s interesting article about African languages (August 10) reminded me of the moment in November 1996 when I was standing outside the main post office in the town of Bukavu in eastern Congo.
Laurent Kabila was the leader of the new uprising against the corrupt Mobutu Sese Seko and that day was his very first public rally. It was the moment his revolution was to be born. He stood silent in front of the bank of microphones in front of him for a few moments, conscious of all the promise and expectations that lay ahead of him.
He was conscious, too, of the world’s TV cameras lined up with their unblinking lenses shining in the African sun. The crowd in front of him was suspicious, uncertain of what to make of their new political master.
Then, in a masterstroke, Kabila broke his silence. “Jambo sana,” he thundered into the microphone. He was speaking in Swahili, the lingua franca of the east of the continent. He was deliberately snubbing the Lingala-speakers from Mobutu’s Kinshasa in the west. It was an affirmation of identity for the people from the east. But it was also a statement meant for our TV cameras.
Kabila was not speaking in French or English. The opening words of his revolution were in an African language. The era of post-colonialism was dead, he was saying. No one would dictate to Africa. Africa would speak its own languages and the outside world would have to find its own way to understand.
Earlier this year I flew to Kinshasa to cover the chaotic events following his assassination. There my Congolese colleagues spoke with bitterness of how the new rulers from the east spoke no Lingala. Letters applying for any kind of middle-class job had to be written in Swahili and if one didn’t speak Swahili there was no chance of getting a decent job anywhere. In Kinshasa, Swahili had become the language of the oppressor. Ironically, French and English, as international languages, were the only other gateways to a job.
The dilemma is to find a way to nurture all African languages, not to impose the language of an African majority on a number of smaller languages. The need for English and, to a lesser extent, French, will remain a dominant reality of the wider, globalised world. But to expect Africans or anyone else to lose their own mother tongues to a vast Orwellian Newspeak of English would be a tragedy.
There is no reason that African languages cannot be adapted to meet the new world of science and technology. I remember filming in a school in the remote hills of Rwanda. The classroom was made of mud bricks and had no glass windows. It was impeccably neat and clean.
The pupils got up from their desks and trooped in an orderly way into an unlocked back room. Each one of them came out with a battered but carefully looked-after geometry set.
The teacher drew Pythagoras’s famous triangle on the blackboard. Along the edge of the hypotenuse he wrote a word as long as that of the confounded diagonal line of my own childhood. It was the Kinyarwanda word for “hypotenuse”. The children in that desperately poor school were not doing maths in French or English, they were learning it in their own language.
At the moment I am learning Japanese. Every day I study two or three kanji or Chinese characters. Kanji trace their roots directly to hieroglyphics carved on rocks and cave walls thousands of years ago. They are every bit as difficult to master as you might imagine. But without them, you will never understand Japanese culture. To know kanji is to enter a world that carries with it meaning handed down for millennia. Japanese and Chinese children learn science and maths using these complex characters. They have not had to jettison their past in order to find a future.
Language is the thread we take with us into the labyrinth of the world. It is our guide through the shifting layers of pain and beauty. Africans must find a way of preserving and encouraging their myriad of ancient languages. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate. For a language to die is an obliteration of centuries of human memory.
Hamilton Wende is a freelance writer and television producer based in Johannesburg