On Language and National Development/Integration (III)
If we had a choice, we would have chosen French. First, it is a language which has enjoyed a far-reaching influence and which shall enjoy it in great measure. In the eighteenth century, French was proposed and accepted as the universal language of culture. I know that today, it has come after English, Chinese and […]
If we had a choice, we would have chosen French. First, it is a language which has enjoyed a far-reaching influence and which shall enjoy it in great measure. In the eighteenth century, French was proposed and accepted as the universal language of culture. I know that today, it has come after English, Chinese and Russian… but if quantity is lacking there is quality…I do say that it is the supreme language of politeness and honesty, a language of beauty and clarity. (Emphasis mine)
We may excuse Segar, the proponent of the philosophy of Negritude, as a product of conscious and systematic cultural assimilation and Frenchification embarked upon by the French imperialist in their colonies in Africa—a policy which has left behind, and in fact a heritage of unrelieved parasitism in those independent Francophone countries like Togo, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Benin, etc. But what do we say about a similar, uncritical fawning on the English language by a foremost Anglophone intellectual and political theorist like Ali Mazrui, who in 1975, was so overwhelmed by the global spread of spoken English that he projected that, ‘by the year 2000 there will probably be more black people in the world who speak English as their native tongue, mainly in Africa where the language would have become indigenous’
The debate on the language question is even more virulent among African writers who are the direct inheritors of language as a veritable vehicle of literary creativity and creation. Some of the pioneers of literature of foreign expression have been widely polarized on the status of the English language in literary, political and ideological contentions. On the one hand are leading writers like Chinua Achebe, Ezekiel Mphahlele and Gabriel Okara who advance either the wholesome adoption of the language for national reconstruction or its domestication and re-invention. On the other hand are leading writers like Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong’O who advocate outright jettisoning of English for an indigenous (Gikuyu) or continental language (Swahili)
The South African writer, Mphahlele, wrote a letter to the Ghana-based Magazine, Transition, declaring that English and French have become the common language with which to present a nationalist front against white oppressors and ‘where the white man has already retreated, as in the independent states, these two languages are still a unifying force’. Nigeria and African leading novelist and author of Things Fall Apart, Africa’s most widely read and translated novel, Chinua Achebe, had never made any bones about his willingness to stick to a re-invented version of English while still taking cognizance of the ‘fatalistic logic of the unassailable position of English in our literature.’ In 1975, Achebe expressed in a speech titled ‘The African Writer and the English Language’ the burden of a guilty conscience which the African writer carries in abandoning his mother tongue and sticking to English for plying his trade. He wrote as follows; Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else’s? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling. But for me, there is no other choice. I have been given the language and I intend to use it.
Even Gabriel Okara, one of the earliest Nigerians to consciously engage in a startling, experimentation and subversion of Standard English through translation of indigenous thoughts and concepts to the English language, confessed, in 1963, his unabashed faithfulness to the foreign tongue. Let me quote him extensively here;
As a writer who believes in the utilization of African ideas, African philosophy and African folklore and imagery to the fullest possible, I am of the opinion that the only way to use them effectively is to translate them almost literally from the African language native to the writer into whatever European language he is using as a medium of expression… In other to capture the vivid images of African speech,, I had to eschew the habit of expressing my thoughts first in English… I had to study each law expression I used and to discover the probable situation in which it was used in order to bring out the nearest meaning in English.
This laborious enterprise of enriching the foreign language by subjecting the mother tongue to such a grueling process of transformation is considered as a viable option of creating new English which carries the ‘weight of African experience and of reflecting the African culture’. It is considered as a genuine and acceptable effort in designing the Nigerian English, comparable to the versions of English designed by Americans, West Indians, Canadians, and so on.
Two African writers who consider the manipulation, appropriation and domestication of the foreign languages to convey the African situation and experience as mere desecration and as politically unwise are Ngugi and Soyinka. Both of them proposed alternatives which in the end prove attractive but not wholly realistic and sustainable in my view. Ngugi wa Thiong’O considers language as the invaluable cultural tool that could be deployed to create a distinctive history, mores, lores, and values of a people. He finds culture as embodying ‘those moral, ethical and aesthetic values, the set of spiritual eyeglasses, through which’ a people come to ‘view themselves and their place in the universe’. He argues passionately on the side of the inviolability of language in the civilization imperative; ‘Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history.’
This is the kind of passion that compels the conclusion which Ngugi reached in finding writing only in indigenous language (Gikuyu in his own case) as the only viable route to linguistic authenticity. It is also the only way, in his view, that African writers on a genuine and anti-imperialist struggle and engendering a revolutionary tradition of organizing the peasantry and working class in Africa in their struggle to defeat imperialism and create a higher system of democracy and socialism. These are Ngugi’s thought-pattern. His prose-classicist fictions, A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood drew very little attention of the government. But the heavens were let loose when he embarked upon his community theatre effort. The play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want, which led the peasants in the anti-colonial struggle . This instant impact which led to his detention for a long time, was mainly because these works were written in the local language.
Writing in the native language is, no doubt, both attractive and impactful, as we find in the above example of Ngugi and Gikuyu his language. But in terms of accessibility to large audiences, even in one’s own nation, mother tongues are painfully limited. How many Kenyans speak Gikuyu, not to mention the larger African and world audiences for whom a writer of Ngugi’s stature must address? We are thus back to either translation or transliteration or both. This is expedient because, as the Indian writer and philosopher, Raja Rao, once said, ‘truth in literature is universal and cannot be confined to the cocoonage of indigenous language… truth is not the monopoly of the Sanskrit (or any language.) Truth can use any language, and the more universal the better it is.’
Wole Soyinka, one of the best and most creative users of the English language as sole vehicle of communication, found the retention of European languages in independent Africa as both anachronistic and obstructive to the attainment of the Pan-Africanist ideal in Africa. As remedy, he advocated , at the Festac Colloquium in 1977, the adoption of Swahili as a lingua franca for the whole of Africa. He buttressed his argument with sound and fine logic. Which space will permit elaborating upon here—issue of spread, neutrality, ease access to its phonology, among others. However, no government of Africa has paid any heed to his proposal. In any case, the argument of spread does not hold water. No part of West Africa, including Nigeria which holds over a fifth of the African population, speaks Swahili. It is not also spoken in South Africa, the strongest economy in Africa today.
To be continued