On the back of September’s heritage celebrations, we need to be critical of what we claim and celebrate as our heritage considering the distorted nature of what some of us have inherited.
Language is one critical aspect of an individual’s heritage. It defines who they are and through it, people are able to create and shape their world view and develop relationships not only with one another, but with their environment as well. The African history of colonialism and apartheid, which is still perpetuated through various colonial matrices of power, has and continues to negatively affect linguistic interactions.
The impact is of such a degree that the indigenous African languages are quickly losing their foothold as communities experience a linguistic shift to English, which is a minority language, but due to its economic dominance commands authority. African parents are putting up with a system that demands their children be taught in a language other than their own and many of them see nothing wrong with that. Given a chance, they would demand that the status quo be upheld or even enhanced.
These are the lived experiences of colonisation and its impact on daily lives, including language.
If you control people’s language, you control their understanding that forms their world view. You further control the extent of their development, as language is pivotal in ingenuity. Ingenuity speaks to inventiveness and originality. Surely, this cannot manifest through the second, third or fourth languages of instruction, which is a common phenomenon across the African continent. Even as people celebrate their heritage, many are struggling to identify some features of their heritage in their languages, let alone start and finish a sentence in their mother tongue.
In some communities, it is even seen as a sign of being educated. What type of education is this that disinherits you of your mother tongue? In celebrating diversity, why is it that it is only the black child who gets given an English name? So many questions that are indicative of a system that is unkind to language diversity as it is lopsided to disadvantage indigenous African languages. It renders celebrations of unity in diversity a mockery.
African food, music, and attire form the tapestry of Heritage Day. For a day, people marvel at the richness of their food and feel different, but good in their traditional attire while dancing to the sounds of their own music. The sad part is that people have become tourists in their own heritage. Their identity no longer forms part of their daily lives. It is one to be visited occasionally.
Foreign tendencies have formed habits that in turn are creating new identities and heritages. It is these new heritages that the current generations will bequeath to forthcoming generations. However, we as a people would have moved further away from who we originally were. This has dire consequences on the identity and progression of the nation.
Let us critically think about what it is that we are celebrating when we are detached from the heritage ceded to us by the generations before us.
– Dr Mpumelelo Ncube, academic head and senior lecturer at the Department of Social Work, University of the Free State (UFS)
