Murmures

Historically, people who got colonised or taken into exile fought hard to keep their culture and languages because they formed their identity. Today, a tragedy of our time is people who are “free” and living in their motherland, but are mentally and culturally in exile. Denying ourselves and our languages in preference to the English language is celebrating collapse. Even the Bible acknowledges the diversity and importance of languages as identity markers when it says, “These are the sons of Shem, by their clans, their languages, their lands, and their nations.” I fear that in a few years to come, we will be like Mozambique where people no longer know or speak their own local languages.

When I was looking for an Early Childhood Development school for my daughter, all the pre-schools I visited wanted to impress me with their English and being “refined.”

They insisted on calling me uncle and spoke to my little girl in English even if I answered them in Shona.

I have become so conscious that if as local language speakers we are not proactive, we will be forced by circumstances to have conversations with our children, in our very own homes, in English.

I do not want to repeat the mistake we made with our son whom we sent to an English speaking pre-school and later to a private school, resulting in him nearly losing his Shona.

Despite eventually withdrawing him from the school, we have had to put up a big fight and also put our foot down that “we are not English and we will not speak English in the home, kumusha, at Mbare Musika, in shops or at church.” I am pleased to say slowly, we are getting our boy back.

When we send our children to these English speaking pre-schools, it is a fad and also like Hyacinth Bucket (who insists her surname be pronounced Bouquet) in the old English comedy — most of us will be keeping up appearances.

Yet, it is in these formative years that language gets imprinted in a child’s mind.

The unfortunate thing we do not notice much is that we do not spend much time with these children.

We hand them over to teachers at pre-schools who are of the opinion that they are doing us a great favour by teaching our children to speak and read English — while they are strongly discouraged to speak in Shona.

For most of these mushrooming pre-schools, Shona must be obliterated and shunned.

The attitudes towards our local languages that we struggle to reverse or correct later in life will have been drilled in at a very young age.

And because as parents we drop these children in the morning and then pick them up at the end of the day, we are excited when they parrot what they will have spent the day learning in English.

We are deeply satisfied that our money is being put to good use.

And when the little ones at our English-speaking crèches speak to us in English, we feel we should not let them down, and so we also happily answer and explain things in English.

I am so ashamed of Zimbabweans that I meet in supermarkets and other public places and they are screaming instructions to their children using a foreign language even for simple things like, “Usadaro”, “gara”, “huya kuno”, “usamhanye”, “handina mari”, “usabateizvozvo.” A language that is not used eventually dies. We are contributing to the death of our languages by deliberately reducing the number of potential speakers when we encourage and prefer to speak to our children in English.

A friend of mine says he has given up and has to live with the strange situation where he speaks to his daughter in Shona while she answers in English. He says he has tried very hard to help her learn Shona so that she can switch between the two languages, but it is not working. His daughter is 11 years old and what I have observed is that both father and the daughter are very stressed and frustrated with the language impasse.

The father has now come to realise that by pushing her hard to be conversant in Shona, he is emotionally abusing the young girl.

You should listen to the young girl protesting in English! The father says his greatest worry is that the young girl finds it hard to socialise when they visit relatives kumusha. As a result, she dislikes everything to do with kumusha and the extended family with a passion.

One Shona lady who has allowed her children to decide that English will be their home language told me that one day they visited relatives in the ghetto. When they got there, her son got so excited to see the children playing dodge ball and running freely.

Initially he was not so confident about going to play with them, but after about an hour, the young man from the northern suburbs whispered to his mother that he wanted to go and join the other screaming and shouting kids outside.

The mother urged him and in no time he was also running and screaming with the other children.

After about 20 minutes, the young boy came back to his mother with a long face. The mother asked what was wrong, and the young man said, “Mummy, they are laughing at my Shona. When I speak to them in English, they are telling me to speak in Shona!”

When we allow our African children to speak in English in our homes and even with our maids and gardeners, we are doing them a great disservice. They feel protected and in control, but one day the hunter becomes the hunted. The young man had entered a new world where he was no longer master. That world was not kind to him — it actually bullied him and demonstrated to him that he is not secure. In a country where Africans are the majority, and where Ndebele, Shona, Kalanga, Ndau and other languages that are recognised by the constitution of the country, it is very important to make sure children learn and are fluent and confident using one language that the father or the mother speaks. It is a shame when we have to engage maids and gardeners to be interpreters for our children when grandmother comes from the village.

I know that most of the grandmothers now live in towns, but a day will come when these children will be required to be practical and speak in a local language. No matter how much we love the English language, it is not our language and a few among us will master its idiom well.

The rest of us will forever know that we are not masters of English and sadly, we are no longer masters of our mother languages.

That leaves us in a state of confusion and nervousness. We will have “languageless” children who have no identity and values. We are blind and ignorant to the fact that language carries culture and identity.

I remember how so excited I got when I was in a remote part of Canada called Saskatchewan and I met two women who were speaking in Shona.

The connection was made and completed by language. We asked each other our names, our totems, our villages and they invited me for sadza which we ate listening to Leonard Dembo and Lovemore Majaivana.

All this was made possible by language — being able to identify two African women and know that they are from Zimbabwe.

We can ignore our languages and culture at our own peril. As Charles Mungoshi says in his novel Waiting for the Rain, we need to beat our own drums. We need to speak our languages, sing our songs and tell our own stories. Chinua Achebe in his novel Anthills of the Savannah notes that, “. . . only the story . . . can continue beyond the war and the warrior. It is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters. It is the story . . . that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence.”

The story creates meaning, attitude and context. It also guides, shapes and creates the experience that we have of the world, both as individuals and as a collective.