FYI, this column from the Nairobi paper, Daily Nation, was seen on H-Swahili... DZO
Re-Membering and recreating Africa through language Published: 1/29/2007 http://www.nationmedia.com By: RASNA WARAH UNTIL I HEARD HIM speak, I always thought Kenya's most celebrated literary icon, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, was overstating the case for the revival of African languages in literature and in daily life. In a column I wrote for the EastAfrican shortly after his much-awaited homecoming in 2004 after 22 years in exile, I wondered whether the state of being in exile had contributed to Ngugi's nostalgia for his mother tongue. Could it be, I asked, that the author, feeling alone, lonely and alienated in a foreign land, hung on to the one thing - the Gikuyu language - that connected him to his peasant roots in Limuru? Would Ngugi be such a die-hard proponent of this language, which is spoken by less than 6 million people, had he remained rooted in his country? Why did he not promote Kiswahili, a regional language spoken and understood by more than 100 million people, not just in East Africa but in parts of the Horn, the Great Lakes region and the Indian Ocean islands? But when I heard his three-part lecture entitled "Re-Membering Africa" at the University of Nairobi's Taifa Hall this month, I realised that I had missed the point. Ngugi reminded his audience that language was not simply a mode of communication; it was "a medium of our memories, the link between space and time, the basis of our dreams". It was, as Ralph Waldo Emerson noted, "the archives of history". When we actively discard our own languages, we commit "linguicide" - we kill off or "dis-member" our memories. Because erasure of memory is a prerequisite for successful assimilation, the burial of African languages by Africans themselves has ensured that the process of assimilation into colonial culture is complete. Hence, Africa's bourgeoisie view their own languages as "shameful", "inelegant", "incapable of expressing intellectual or scientific thought", or too crude to be exported to other lands. They write their stories in foreign languages, adding to the vast pool of literature written in English or French, rather than contributing to the growth of literature written in African languages. Ngugi's insistence on using his mother tongue as the principal medium of his writing is not simply a reaction against Anglicisation; it is more about resurrecting the African soul from centuries of slavery and colonialism that left it spiritually empty, economically disenfranchised and politically marginalised. NGUGI BELIEVES THAT WHEN YOU erase a people's language, you erase their memory. And people without memories are rudderless, unconnected to their own histories and culture, mimics who have placed their memories in a "psychic tomb" in the mistaken belief that if they master their coloniser's language, they will own it. On the other end of the spectrum, this same disconnectedness creates monstrous aberrations such as the Mungiki in Kenya or the modern-day Hindu revivalists in India, who distort and re-write not just their own histories but their own culture in order to further colonise and terrorise not just other communities, but also their own people. Ngugi believes that one of the most obvious ways that we can reclaim our histories and our memories is by passing on our languages to our children. He derides those Kenyan parents who speak to their children in English only, which, he says, has resulted in a "linguifam" - a linguistic famine - within African families and societies, which didn't exist when his generation or even my generation was growing up. We are multilingual by necessity and by choice. Like most literate Kenyans, we speak at least three languages - our mother tongues, Kiswahili and English, plus any other language we might have picked up along the way. Today, there are many Kenyan parents who will not speak to their children in their mother tongue because they don't want their children's "propah" English accents to become "contaminated" by an African or an Indian language. Yet, these are the same parents who will not flinch when a French person speaks English with a French accent or when a teenager born and brought up in Nairobi suddenly develops an American twang. Cynics might claim Ngugi is not in touch with the reality of a globalising world where English is the preferred language of trade and the Internet. But Ngugi is not promoting African languages at the exclusion of other languages. On the contrary, he believes that multilingual societies are better placed to deal with global complexities. What we are creating are monolingual children who are proficient in only one [foreign] language. Africans, says Ngugi, must master their own languages before they master foreign languages that neither reflect their histories nor their memories, just like all the continental Europeans, who first learn their own language, be it German or Greek, before learning other European languages. These Europeans know what we have yet to learn - that when we nurture our own languages, we are, in essence. nurturing our own souls. Nation Media Group all rights reserved 2004 For querries or info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] **************************** Disclaimer ****************************** Copyright: In accordance with Title 17, United States Code Section 107, this material is distributed without profit for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material posted to this list for purposes that go beyond "fair use," you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. 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