Centuries of slavery when they were constantly made to feel less than human, left Africans with a monumental crisis of identity and self-worth. Colonialism which followed the scramble for and partitioning of the continent only further exacerbated this confusion. Very many positive aspects of our culture have been repudiated by natives because they have been schooled to believe that those things are backward and barbaric.
While admitting that there were facets of the cultures that needed to be consigned to the dustbin of history, there are many positive others that have been equally rejected because of this serious lack of a sense of self-worth. Of everything in a people’s culture that can be lost or thrown away due to ignorance, language is the most significant. A people who undermine their language will soon enough lose all sense of identity.
Gradually but inexorably, Nigerians are losing their received language because many people erroneously believe that the only way their children can speak English very well, is if such kids are stopped from learning their native languages.
What this means, is that the age-old process of generational transmission of this vital aspect of culture is being truncated. So you find a situation where a Bini man for instance is married to a Bini woman and they both live in Benin City and yet their children can’t speak their language.
Can there be a worse form of alienation? All this in an effort to belong to the Joneses and be seen to be more English than Queen Elizabeth. But the irony is that those Nigerians who speak English pure as glass are also the ones who speak their native languages in their most pristine form, but the irony is lost on these wannabes.
They gleefully tell friends and relatives not to speak native languages to their children as that would impede their ability to pick up English early or learn it proficiently. If this strange reasoning were correct, what explains the phenomenon of polyglot? Language is the pride of any people.
That’s why in international diplomacy, leaders refuse to speak any other language other than their own. Even when they understand and speak the other languages perfectly, they still depend on interpreters.
This engenders negotiation from a position of strength, a sense of history and a refusal to denigrate that history. In no way was this most strongly underscored as during the cold war years when leaders and diplomats from the United States and the defunct Soviet Union would expressionlessly wait for the interpreters to do their job before responding in their native languages.
The late Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor when asked why he always spoke to his son in his native language responded in a way that many Nigerian parents would do well to emulate: “My son will learn English in school as I did. My parents were illiterates and couldn’t have spoken to me in English, but here I am… your language is your security.”
It bears recalling that indigenous languages were introduced into school curricular some time ago by government as a way of arresting the slide in their use.
The success of this effort or better still lack of it, is something that should be a cause of concern to all. It also underlines the fact that such government ‘decrees’ are rarely the solution to such problems. We insist therefore that the bulk of the work rests squarely with parents at home.
They are the first socializers children are exposed to and they should not abdicate their responsibility. It is in an attempt to stem the battering indigenous languages were receiving that famous Kenyan writer, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, once advocated that Africans should write in their own languages. He took his own advice and began writing in his mother tongue.
Another equally great African writer, Ayi Kwei Armah, however shot the idea down, describing it as akin to a man wanting to move forward yet have his eyes permanently fixed on the rear view mirror and the gear in reverse.
These divergent views will always exist, but they are neither here nor there. The point that needs to be stressed is that efforts be must be made at all levels – from the family to the government- to reverse this dangerous trend of undermining the indigenous languages.
