The importance of keeping our cultures, languages alive
Ithought that as we close off yet another important month on the South African calendar, I should focus on the importance of preserving our cultures and languages.
I was watching Morning Live recently, where they talked about how important it is to cherish our cultures and most importantly, our languages.
This is because it is believed that if we do not do so, in the next generation our languages will die a natural death. A sad reality!
In this column, I would like to focus more on my mother tongue, isiXhosa.
I am inspired by different cultures that really do not compromise when it comes to their languages in particular.
In fact, in these cultures they are protective, proud and jealous of their origins.
I would like to single out a few that stand out for me: The Chinese, whose official dialect is Mandarin, then the French, and in our country, the Zulus and Afrikaners who don’t compromise when it comes to their cultures or languages.
My birth language has always been important to me, even in the way I raised my daughter.
Tthough I went to a previously Model C school during my high school years –I still kept my language intact.
When my daughter was two years old, she went to a Christian preschool where the medium of instruction was English.
I could tell she enjoyed learning English and was starting to speak it exclusively.
Though she could hear and understand me when I spoke to her in Xhosa – she still answered in English.
This didn’t sit well with me because while I wanted her to be fluent in English, I also wanted her to keep being proud of her culture and language.
So, one day I told her, in no uncertain terms, that she had to speak English at home. I felt she had more than enough hours to speak English at preschool.
She was three going on four and she knew that when she got home she had to strictly speak Xhosa. I wanted her to be fluent in English because it’s the language of instruction in most schools and the widely used business language across the globe.
However, I also drilled it into her just how important her mother tongue was too.
When my mom used to visit us in Joburg when I still worked there – we would do the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ together in Xhosa before going to bed. It would either be my mom or me leading in the prayer.
A few years later, my mom
asked my daughter to lead us in the Lord’s Prayer aka Bawo Wethu Osemazulwini prayer.
She did it from beginning to end in Xhosa and as a parent, that was the proudest moment of my life. Being strict and forcing my daughter to learn her language led to her being able to do the most important thing – the ability to pray in her own language.
In one of my jobs in Joburg, I had a colleague whose parents were originally from Zimbabwe but she was born and raised in SA. I was amazed that at about 25 years of age, she could only converse with us in English and had not learnt even one of the SA languages in all the time she had been here.
One day, she explained to me that at her house, they strictly spoke Swahili. This is because her grandmother back in Zim spoke Swahili.
She said to me it was important for her to be able to converse with her grandmother in her mother tongue, especially when they were visiting there.
She also said something profound: she felt if she didn’t know how to speak with her grandmother in Swahili, she would have missed out on a lot of blessings from her.
This is exactly another reason it was important for my daughter to learn Xhosa as well.
In my family, not everyone is educated so it was important for my daughter, especially when we have traditional events aka Imicimbi to be able to converse with everyone in the family.
This was especially important when it came to those older than us – so she didn’t miss out on the blessings and wisdom they could share with her.
I would like to implore people to continue being proud of our languages and cultures because other people from other cultures are, and this is paying off in dividends.
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