“African peoples did not hear of culture for the first time from the Europeans; that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty that they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity.”
— Chinua Achebe.

JOKES flying around on social media over the proposal by Primary and Secondary Education Minister Dr Lazarus Dokora for Science and Maths subjects to be taught in local languages confirm the long held belief that language was not only used as a tool for colonialism, but cultural erosion as well.
Where Dr Dokora was supposed to have received support, he was ridiculed and lambasted by a populace which deeply believe that speaking good English is a sign of sophistication, intellect and education.
Today’s children hardly utter a word of their language and more shocking is the delight those children’s parents derive from hearing how the youngsters now speak English more than the owners of that language.
“The wisdom of humanity is coded in language, once a language dies, the knowledge dies with it,” once said director of Utah University’s Center for American Indian Languages, Lyle Campbell.
When colonialists came to Zimbabwe and other countries, they found locals with a tightly-knit cultural and language foundation that precipitated their enormous economic growth, unity and development.
Wisdom of humanity was passed on from generation-to-generation through storytelling, poetry, music and dance in one’s language, not a foreign medium.
We were supposed to interrogate the colonial status quo which brought with it the many changes that have eaten into the very core of our culture and tradition as a people and nation.
We were supposed to confront the many issues like language and their culture that they brought and imposed on us.
Why could we not teach them our language?
Why could we not teach them our culture and traditions?
If we could learn English so quickly, what stopped whites from learning our languages at a similar pace?
Belgian King Leopold II’s letter to colonial missionaries, 1883 provides several insights into why colonialism was a legacy meant to last centuries.
Today many African countries use foreign languages as official languages for obvious reasons which are important to the colonial masters and their long-term interests.
Below is part of Leopold’s letter and the avarice contained therein:
“Reverends, Fathers and Dear Compatriots:
The task that is given to fulfill is very delicate and requires much tact.
You will go certainly to evangelise, but your evangelisation must inspire above all Belgium interests.
Your principal objective in our mission in the Congo is never to teach the niggers to know God, this they know already.
They speak and submit to a Mungu, one Nzambi, one Nzakomba, and what else I don’t know.
They know that to kill, to sleep with someone else’s wife, to lie and to insult is bad.
Have courage to admit it; you are not going to teach them what they know already.
Your essential role is to facilitate the task of administrators and industrials, which means you will go to interpret the gospel in the way it will be the best to protect your interests in that part of the world.
For these things, you have to keep watch on disinteresting our savages from the richness that is plenty (in their underground. To avoid that they get interested in it, and make you murderous) competition and dream one day to overthrow you.”
From the above piece the question that arises is: What does erosion of language leave behind?
Consider the following:
The tragedy with much of the literature on colonialism is that it tends to focus on the economic exploitation of many African countries through the use of excessive force towards the latter.
What this literature ignores is that there was systematic exploitation of Africans through the manipulation of language and mainly through the church which gave us a white Jesus and taught us to pray using languages alien to us.
This killed both our language and traditional way of reaching out to Musikavanhu.
In a paper titled The Position of Language in Development of Colonisation published in May 2011 by the Department of Persian Language and Literature, Human Science Faculty, Lorestan University, Mohammad Khosravi Shakib explores how colonialism killed language and cultures of the colonised across the world.
“Language is often a central question in post-colonial studies.
During colonisation, colonisers usually imposed their language onto the peoples they colonised, forbidding natives to speak their mother tongues.
In some cases colonisers systematically prohibited native languages.
Many writers educated under colonisation recount how students were demoted, humiliated, or even beaten for speaking their native language in colonial schools.
In response to the systematic imposition of colonial languages, some post-colonial writers and activists advocate a complete return to the use of indigenous languages.
Others see the language (e.g. English and Arabic) imposed by the coloniser as a more practical alternative, using the colonial language both to enhance inter-nation communication (e.g. people living in Egypt, Iran, Libya can all speak to one another in Arabic) and to counter a colonial past through de-forming a ‘standard’ Arabic tongue and re-forming it in new literary forms.”
It is an indisputable fact that we have to revert back to our languages if we are to recoup the little that is left of our culture and tradition.
After all, language defines who we are as Zimbabweans.