The sanctity of language or cultural chauvinism?
LANGUAGE is rarely neutral. Built into almost any language are the instruments to ensure its preservation, “supremacy” and value judgements based on its ethnocentricity. It can only see the world through its own limitations, including prejudices. Danish is no exception. As one who has been involved in this issue from the 1960s, and specifically in Denmark as early as 1979, during the years of my exile here from apartheid, I had hoped that the racial tagging of people was a thing of the past. I was wrong. It has come back with a vengeance in the debates about “neger, hottentotter
and farvede” (negro/ni****, KhoiSan referred to as Hottentots and coloured).
Perhaps what is shocking is that it is happening in 2016.
I remember my mythsmashing lectures under Unesco’s anti-racist, anti-sexist programmes, the lectures to Danish aid workers travelling to various parts of the world via Mellem Folkekelighe Samvirke (the International Association for Co-operation and Development) and Danida (Danish Aid Development Agency), and the hundreds of lectures I delivered across Denmark/Scandinavia between 1978-1992.
Wow, how can you re-imagine Aarhus or Denmark if you are not prepared to re-imagine and correct those aspects of your culture that give offence?
(Re-imagining Aarhus and the celebration of Aarhus as Europe’s cultural capital in 2017 is being urged.)
Have you given a thought to the many painful layers of association conjured up by those controversial words?
They are associated with slavery, murder, genocide, blatant racism, rampant colonialism, forced labour, indenture and displacement, torture, humiliation, imperialism, rape, pillage, hate, destruction on a mass scale and a wholesale theft of the material goods and artefacts (now in western museums and collections).
There is nothing associated with these negative and derogatory terms that can be some sort of saving grace. They are steeped in histories of immense sorrow and pain, and even now bring forth rage.
But it does not end there. There is so much more that spills into the here and now, so that the present generation is still reaping the benefits of the eras of slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism.
Europe was not born rich. Its wealth was built on the proceeds of slavery, its transportation, sale and harvesting the products of its labour. There are several publications and internet sources for verification.
We will not even begin to consider the benefits accrued from colonialism.
So do not tell us that these words are just harmless nouns used to describe people.
Every culture, and that includes language, evolves and includes new words, blots out others and changes.
No living culture is static. When the very people described by these notations of shame say that they reject them, you need to listen and stop the knee-jerk responses of “protecting our history, protecting our language”.
The processes of “othering” are deeply embedded in this narrative.
Chicago-based Mikki Kendall is an expert in “manifestations of unconscious bias when we write or speak about characters outside our own”.
Kendall says you decide that the “other” is an unlikely consumer and thus not representative of the larger population. Because a huge part of the assumption is that the “other” does not read. Does not consume. Does not have a right to a voice in how they are
represented.
And your bigoted depiction of them is a key component of the gatekeeping that locks out marginalised communities. Have the humility to listen. I take offence and am deeply angered to be described as “neger, farvede or hottentotter”.
Nobody has the right to define who I am, except my parents who named me. I accepted that with reverence and pride. It encapsulated my person-hood, my identity and my histories.
More than that, I am a South African of Indian extraction and I am proudly African.
And I am not restricted in my humanity to Africa. I am a global citizen, including of Denmark. Yes, this does include the right to criticise, and to be criticised. No language or culture is some kind of holy cow.
Exactly like you, I am a person with several layers of complex identities that make me into the human being I am.
My colour and racial origin is irrelevant to my worthiness or otherwise in the broad spectrum of our species.
I am the end product of thousands of years of shaping and nurturing by various civilisations and cultures.
I am complex, simple, profound and can be just a bit silly at times. I AM! As a South African with a family history of resistance going back to the time of Gandhi in South Africa (18931913), I am fully conversant with the power and negations of discrimination and racial exclusion.
This is my history and my lived experience, felt upon my own body and of all those described as the negative of the white, the derogatory “nonwhite”.
Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko and my generation of the 60s refused to be defined as “what we were not” by a system that valorised everything white and demonised the black world.
We rejected the white reality that saw only its own cultural yardstick as a measurement of its achievements, and applied that same yardstick of measurement, placing the black reality at the opposite end of that one “universal” white Judeo-Christian reality.
It’s racially blinkered system, like Nazism, would not allow it to recognise other equally valid ways of life.
Apartheid negated our humanity as “a lesser one” and relegated us to a level just above that of animals. How arrogantly absurd! It was our ancestors who gave the world the greatness of the civilisations of Egypt, Kush and Meru, the Mayas, the Incas, the Aztecs, the Indians, Chinese, Persians and Moors.
Have the humility to remember that all of this developed when Europe was emerging from simple forms of existence and from the Dark Ages.
Our ancestors gave the world mathematics, astronomy, medicine, great religions, philosophy, architecture, the first cities with sewer and irrigation systems and monetary systems as well as centres of great learning.
They gave the world accurate measurements of time, metallurgy and the fine arts, including some of the world’s greatest music, dance and literature.
Could this have come from uncivilised beings, fit to be no more than slaves, servants and labourers?
It is equally important to remember that the advances made during the Renaissance and all subsequent advances were built on the knowledge that had accumulated over the thousands of years.
Modern knowledge systems did not emerge from nowhere. They were built on knowledge from the “black” world. The same world that is still discriminated against.
In Johannesburg there is an amazing archaeological museum called the Centre of Origins. Here you can trace your racial/genetic origins. And it all points to humanity having its ancestry in Africa.
Any discrimination is discriminating against your own ancestry!