Linguistics imperialism risks destroying our heritage

September is heritage month in South Africa and different activities are taking place in celebration of our diversity.

Our heritage belongs to us by birth so it automatically becomes our birthright. I invite all South Africans to take this opportunity to reflect, preserve and promote indigenous languages as they are part of our heritage.

I am aware that we are fighting a very difficult struggle against a colonised mind. The man that we are fighting is a native resolute to indoctrinate his children to breathe the English language every second of their lives.

This is a man who occupies an important position in church and continues to preach in English.

This is a man that Steve Biko, who spearheaded the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa, refers to as “a stepgrandchild of a God”.

This man always speaks in English even when he is in the company of fellow natives. He slays English at meetings irrespective of who his audience is.

He is a principal at a rural school, yet he always makes school announcements in English, to a 100% Tshivenda-speaking population of learners and teachers in a village in rural Venda.

He is determined to destroy our heritage without being aware that our native languages are central to our heritage. He is so westernised beyond mending.

He says he is educated, but still enjoys and promotes linguistic imperialism without realising the damage it causes to indigenous people and their culture. In the process, he has lost his African identity.

And at the end, when he has accomplished his nefarious agenda, our languages shall have vanished.

One of my former learners once said. “When township people are drunk, English becomes their home language.”

Put simply, it means we are still haunted by the ghost of English imperialism, which makes us disregard our languages and look up to the white man’s language as superior.

We also associate success and progress with European languages. We therefore don’t believe someone can be rich if they associate everything that they do with Africannes.

Just because we have interacted with European-oriented textbooks through the school system, we now seek to be the replica of the Europeans. Our textbooks should seek to reflect all that is good about being African – language and culture. This is something our government has failed to achieve on in all the years it had been in power.

Members of a school committee where I teach in Ivory Park, Midrand, have committed to ensure that the majority of literature books in our library will be in the four indigenous languages that are taught in our school.

It is in this library where we intend to start a journey to advance indigenous languages debates, poetry session, story-telling and other multilingual programmes.

It is through these programmes, which we believe that they will be revolutionary in nature, that we aim to start building towards the emancipation of our indigenous languages.

We hope that these programmes will bring black children closer to the appreciation of their languages and also boost their confidence.

For black children to assume their rightful place in the global village, everything should start with them showing respect for their languages.

It remains the truth that imperialism will never be defeated if we continue to undermine our indigenous languages.