Diary of a mad reader

Official languages in Africa Afrikaans Arabic English French Portuguese Spanish Swahili other African languages (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From the chapter The Language of African Literature:

[…] African languages refused to die. They would not simply go the way of Latin to become the fossils for linguistic archaeology to dig up, classify, and argue about the international conferences.

These languages, these national heritages of Africa, were kept alive by the peasantry. The peasantry saw no contradiction between speaking their own mother-tongues and belonging to a larger national or continental geography. They saw no necessary antagonistic contradiction between belonging to their immediate nationality, to their multinational state along the Berlin drawn boundaries, and to African as whole.  These people happily spoke Wolof, Hausa, Yoruba, Ibo, Arabic, Amharic, Kiswahili, Gikuyu, Luo, Luhya, Shona, Ndebele, Kimbundu, Zulu or Lingala without this fact tearing the multinational states apart. During the anti-colonial struggle they showed an unlimited capacity to unite around whatever leader or party best and most consistently articulated an anti-imperialist position. If anything it was the petty-bourgeoisie, particularly the compradors, with their French and English and Portuguese, with their petty rivalries, their ethnic chauvinism, which encouraged these vertical divisions to the point of war at times. No, the peasantry had no complexes about their languages and the cultures they carried!

In fact when the peasantry and the working class were compelled by necessity or history to adopt the language of the master, they Africanised it without any of the respect for its ancestry shown by Senghor and Achebe, so totally as to have created new African languages, like Krio in Sierra Leone or Pidgin in Nigeria that owed their identities to the syntax and rhythms of African languages. All these languages were kept alive in the daily speech, in the ceremonies, in political struggles, above all in the rich store of orature – proverbs, stories, poems and riddles.

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• Wikipedia Co-Founder Adding More African Languages (voanews.com)
• “The Language You Cry In” …oral-aesthetic musings (malaikamutere.com)
• Translators Face Cultural Dilemma (revolutioninmedia.com)

~ by Tichaona Chinyelu on May 4, 2012.

Posted in books, literature, writing
Tags: african languages, african literature, decolonizing the mind, gikuyu, Languages of Africa, ngugi wa thiong'o, politics of language