Xhosa man’s language mission
Hleze Kunju has earned his PhD in Xhosa and wants more SA languages to be the medium of teaching at universities
IT WAS a moment he thought he’d never see – the high point of a long, challenging journey. And making it all the sweeter was that the most important person was there on the podium to put the academic cap on his head. Rhodes University student Hleze Kunju recently became the first person to obtain a doctorate in Xhosa – but his wife, Susan, is really the one who made it all possible, he says.
“I’m so grateful to her for keeping things together and looking after our children while I was working on my PhD,” he says. “It definitely wouldn’t have been possible without her and that’s why I asked the university to give her permission to cap me at the graduation.”
The 31-year-old dad of three is now on a mission to get more people to follow in his footsteps and study subjects they’re passionate about – in the language their parents taught them.
Behind Hleze’s soft-spoken demeanour is an activist with a burning passion for his mother tongue, which has taken him on an intriguing four-year adventure into Zimbabwe in search of a Xhosa community the world had all but forgotten.
It’s time, he says, for academics to start producing materials in their own languages.
“English has become a language to determine the level of your intelligence. If you speak good English, you’ll get a good job. This shows we’re still oppressed or colonised in our minds,” he says.
Hleze, who also writes short stories and poetry, recently started lecturing Xhosa at Sol Plaatje University in Kimberley in the Northern Cape.
If Xhosa had been an option open to him when he started university, he’d have grabbed it. Instead he enrolled for a BA degree in music (which he completed with distinction).
He studied in English even though he wasn’t comfortable with the language. Coming from rural Cofimvaba in the Eastern Cape, English was almost a foreign language to him. “I remember students in lectures raising their hands and starting discussions and I had no idea what was being said.”
Despite the culture shock he continued to study in English and excelled, completing his honours and masters degrees in music.
Yet despite his success the dearth of Xhosa at Rhodes University really bugged him. “I felt it was unfair that you’re in class with a person whose first language is English,” he says. “It felt like running a race with people who are ahead of you and you have to start way back but the finish line is the same.”
FOR his thesis Hleze tracked down a 200 000- strong Xhosa-speaking community in Zimbabwe, believing they deserved to have their history recorded in their mother tongue. He’d heard about them by chance while teaching music and drama in Mashonaland in northern Zimbabwe.
“I was just curious at first but it broke my heart when I discovered there was nothing written in Xhosa about them,” Hleze says.
“I met with them – some were in their late nineties and some passed away a year after I started my research, so I’m grateful I got to speak to them. If I hadn’t, a lot of that history would have been lost.”
Hleze attributes much of his love for his mother tongue to the Xhosa and music teachers at the schools he attended in the Eastern Cape.
He was delighted when Rhodes University introduced Xhosa as a medium of instruction in 2008. “I eventually became an assistant lecturer and then a lecturer in Xhosa,” Hleze says.
He met his wife, Susan, in music class at Rhodes and the couple now have three kids – Likuwe (7), Oluncedo (5) and Olithemba (3). He’s pleased the children will be able to study in their home language all the way through to tertiary level if they wish to do so.
“Transformation is possible,” he says. “We just need to start where we are with what we have.”