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Let’s use Kiswahili in all spheres of national life
2006-02-01 07:42:50
By Charles Kayoka
When I listen to and read about the debate on whether or not Kiswahili language should be promoted as a medium of instruction in higher learning educational institutions I cannot help find the predicament the post-colonial African is trapped in.
Since our first encounter with the West over 300 years ago, our own identity has become suspect, and all that formed the fabric of our existence became subjects of questioning and attack.
I look at the debate this way!
The former Senegalese president and founder of the Negritude, Leopold Sedar Senghor, once wrote that the successful project of our ’secret enemy’ is making the African doubt even her own self.
Colonialism and its attendant elements — slavery, forced paid or underpaid labour on colonial farms, racial subjugation, and the brainwashing education through religion and formal education — has made us change the focus of reference.
Colonialism told us, directly or indirectly, that the metropolitan centre supplied the meaning of everything.
The metropolitan’s view was the standard, and ours a deviation, in fact does not apply.
Colonialism was a first move towards globalization of ideas, of language, of education, of culture, of religion, and of thinking in general.
The African felt proud and exalted at her own achievement if she spoke the foreign master’s language better than her own language, and feels demeaned if she cannot speak that language the way the owners of the language do!
But the highest of the colonial master’s achievement is seeing the African herself in the frontline against her own culture and self.
The fight against Kiswahili, and the prejudicial attitudes towards it is but a fierce attempt by the African trying kill the very essence of a nations’, and indeed a society’s, cultural existence.
The colonist told us that Kiswahili cannot be a better language, and we in turn, echo his doubts over own language. We start looking at it with suspicion and all those who champion its existence are similarly held suspect.
A professor is measured by his/her mastery of English, and a book he/she writes in Kiswahili is considered to have worthless knowledge and his degrees are treated second rate.
It is because of the same de-racinating effect, we can see the African getting less for doing a job which his White (Indian, Arab, or White) counterpart in doing, and in the same offices (sometimes with less productivity).
The racial brainwashing we got indicates that the black-African has less intellectual capacities, and we, being good students to the teaching are acting accordingly.
Since the colonial project became very successful it made the African cast away every element of his culture and decided to live on borrowed culture.
We are now living on borrowed religions and we are actually ready to fight bloody wars against our own kind for religions which we do not know much about and we don’t believe in one hundred percent.
(We would not be seeing Christians and Muslims holding festivals and ritual honouring their dead.
We would not be seeing the killings of the elderly on suspicion of witchcraft.)
This and others are signs of an African who lives in ambivalence.
It is like the prodigal monkey who wants to attend two parties at the same time.
When he comes at the crossroads he still forces to go both ways and he dies in the process.
We want to be Christians and Moslems and at the same time remain Africans who believe in the African world (religious) worldview.
The foreign religions are telling the African that Africa has no God, it only had deities and we all worshiped idols.
And we believed in their word that theirs are universal faiths, meant for salivation of all humanity.
With that we never took time to investigate the validity of their ’truthful claims’, we believed that they are the messengers of the ’word’ and we are the recipients.
Since colonialism treated us slaves who, by nature and training are not supposed to ask questions, we never took time to question whether we were in presence of universal faiths or not.
The way the African believed in the colonial messengers was typical of the two rules in the army.
They go like this; Rule one, the general is always right.
Rule number two: if you are in doubt refer to rule number one.
We can explain our relationship with the colonial master in the same way; The Mzungu is always right, rule number one.
Rule number two: if you are in doubt refer to rule number one.
Colonialism has made us believe that to speak a foreign language and is a sign of self-liberation and in fact a symbol of modernity, for modernity means doing away with the past; and Kiswahili and the culture it stands for is a thing of the past.
It is also argued that to be whole integrated in the globalization process mastery in foreign language is very crucial.
One wonders how did the Japanese, the Chinese, or Russians, Indians become integrated in the world economy while they speak their own tongues.
I always find truth in what Franz Fanon wrote about the problem of developing national consciousness, us being post-colonial subjects for having among us, a middle class section, which still strongly identifies itself with the ’massa’.
And he wrote: ’the traditional weakness, which is almost congenital to the national consciousness of under-developed countries, is not solely the result of the mutilation of the colonized people by the colonial regime.
It is also the result of the intellectual laziness of the national middle class, of its spiritual penury, and of the profoundly cosmopolitan mould that its mind is set in.’
And we shall all agree with him that even the problem of lack of decision on language policy emanates from the ingrained ambivalence among members of the middle class; these are our professors at the university who still link us with the sources of ideas and knowledge developed at the centre; journalists who still eat crumbs falling from the ”massa’ table and have promises of foreign visits where they should be seen speaking in foreign languages; policy planners who still think that nothing will move if we switch over to our local languages and fail to give convincing explanations to the foreign donor as to why we should stop using foreign languages; to businessmen who send their children to foreign, or local English/ French medium, schools however useless that education may be owners of the so called international schools who call their institutions fantastic English names of western saints, statesmen, towns which have nothing to do with our culture but only to cheat the prospective customers that a good education is provided under those names which fill the mouth when pronouncing them.
The President said Kiwahili is one of the pillars of our nationhood, let it be so by actually using it in all spheres of our national life.
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