Indigenous Knowledge Systems: Management of Harurwa Part 5b

“WHOEVER does not inform his children of his grandparents has destroyed his child, marred his descendants, and injured his offspring the day he dies. Whoever does not make use of his ancestry has muddled his reason. Whoever is unconcerned with his lineage has lost his mind. Whoever neglects his origin, his stupidity has become critical. Whoever is unaware of his ancestry, his incompetence has become immense. Whoever is ignorant of his roots, his intellect has vanished. Whoever does not know his place of origin, his honour has collapsed.” (African Philosophy From Antiquity).

If you fail to grasp the vagaries of colonialism and racism, you may need to think deeper. Imagine yourself as a Zimbabwean who speaks one of the native languages as a mother’s tongue and only learnt English at a later stage in life.

You will even understand better if you go to England and then have the nerve to impose your version of English on the English language. For instance, as an African you tell the English people to begin to say ‘axe’ instead of ask, thinking that they will actually accept the pronunciation as correct.

You will be imposing on the English that “axe” that still grammatically means, ‘pose a question,’ when to the proper and original English person it refers to that implement used to cut wood.

When you pose a question, you ask not axe. Or if you are from India, you force the English people to have to accept that “father-in-laws”, is correct as far as the Indian version of English is concerned when it’s clear that the plural in this instance is not on the law, but on the father, brother or mother.

Therefore, the correct phrase is fathers-in-law, mothers-in-law or brothers-in-law. That’s the grammatically correct thing to say in proper and grammatically correct English not the incorrect father-in-laws.

Or you want to force the real English people to accept that it’s correct to say, “I should have went”, when the grammatically correct thing to say is, “I should have gone”. Or you force the English people to say, “they books”, instead of “their books”, or “they teeth”, instead of “their teeth”, because “their” is clearly the correct possessive pronoun.

Because you grew up incorrectly thinking “they books” means “their books” and you don’t even know what a possessive pronoun is, grammatically, you go on to impose that grammatical error on the real English people; and you impose it as the correct thing when the whole world knows that its grammatically wrong.

Yes, you can even go on to tell the real English people that it’s ‘congradulations’ not congratulations because you grew up wrongly thinking that it’s correct to say congradulations when the correct thing to say is congratulations.

In grammatically correct English, you don’t congradulate people. You congratulate them. But tell that to some ignorant Zimbabweans, they will find it real bizarre because they think it’s correct to say congradulate when it’s clearly grammatically incorrect.

You even go further to tell the real indigenous English people and impose on them that this version of English of yours, which you only learned much later in life, full of fatal mistakes, is now the standard English they should all conform to henceforth.

Can you imagine what would happen if you do that? Well then, if your answer is that war would be immediately declared by the English on that linguistic dictatorship which you imposed on their language, then it must now be easier for you to understand how colonialism and racism destroyed us even linguistically.

Now it should be easier for you to understand why we must equally declare war on a white man, who comes and destroys our languages, simply because colonialism and racism allow him to do so and not because of any merit.

Hence, the so called standard Shona has been wrong all along as it dwelt only on Zezuru as George Fortune saw it and made it a one size fits all for all Shona speakers.

This is hardly a proper representation of the Shona language in its fullness.

In other words, if Fortune was living in Mutare where the Chimanyika dialect of Shona is spoken, we would have ended up today calling Chimanyika Standard Shona.

So, to Fortune, any Shona he heard being spoken in the part of Zimbabwe he was residing in was the version that all Shona speaking Zimbabweans spoke; which is a serious error.

He didn’t give any consideration for the different types of Shona spoken in different parts of Zimbabwe. This is where Fortune’s so called standard Shona totally misses the mark and for the academic that he is touted to be, that’s where he also loses academic respect.

A little bit of research would have given him the important academic evidence that would reveal to him that what he was now imposing on all Shona speaking Zimbabweans as standard Shona was actually a dialect of Shona not spoken by the majority.