“To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.”
Frantz Fanon (1925 – 1961)
“I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations.”
Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784)
Many years ago, my neighbour, a young Frenchman married to a Senegalese woman met me at a parking lot outside our residence and sought to know why many Africans he had met in Toronto seemed reluctant to express themselves in their respective African languages. My neighbour seemed completely perplexed, precisely because he had made the effort to learn Wolof – a widely spoken language in Senegal and Gambia, whereas many African-born citizens had instead rejected African languages. I looked at him closely and pondered over his question. Trying to avoid an anthropological lecture that afternoon, I simply recounted several factors that accounted for some Africans’ reluctance or inability to speak indigenous African languages – one of which was the fact that a growing number of urbanised Africans grew up in households where they communicated for the most part in English/French or Creolised versions of colonially-derived/imposed languages. East and southern Africa present a completely different experience where indigenous languages are spoken and written with tremendous pride. It may help to add that if I were writing in Swahili for instance, I would actually complete my spell check in Microsoft Word by selecting Swahili from Microsoft’s long list of the world’s languages.
Contrary to contemporary conceptions of the precolonial African subject as monolingual and sedentary, the reality is that most precolonial peoples were multilingual. A number of reasons accounted for this; regional and long-distance trade, interethnic marriage and the friction and fission that tended to spur the migration and merging of peoples from different linguistic areas. Indigenous multilingualism began to suffer as a result of the colonial encounter where priority was now placed on speaking the coloniser’s language. Nevertheless, the colonial encounter presented a paradoxical setting. On the one hand, some languages like Duala and Mungaka were developed into literate languages while at the same time colonial and subsequently postcolonial apathy discouraged the use of African languages in formal education and public institutions. Native teachers generously enforced these policies by punishing pupils who dared to speak an African language in school.
Today, many have internalised this colonial prejudice and not infrequently we hear ordinary folks admonish a speaker about the dangers of provoking “the rain” when someone speaks an African language in public. It is on this count that many Africans, especially growing numbers of young and urbanised Africans think of indigenous languages as backward, unfashionable and outdated. Should this trend continue, many of these languages will experience what linguists call language decay or language shift. This describes a process whereby a language suffers decline in its speakers’ competency – or when speakers have limited vocabulary in their native language.
One of the biggest challenges facing parents in the African diaspora is promoting the use of indigenous languages in their homes. This challenge is exacerbated by many parents’ inability to read or write their mother tongues as well as the absence of relevant literature in these languages. In many of the ethnic associations at home and abroad, indigenous languages aren’t the primary language of business during monthly or weekly reunions. A common excuse often advanced is that English or French should be used in order to accommodate non-speakers. Despite this, there’s progress and I’m glad to see some developments in Cameroon.
Since 2011, the Advanced Teachers’ Training School in Yaounde has been training teachers to teach selected indigenous languages in Cameroonian schools.
The government will have to demonstrate that these efforts are not merely cosmetic but spring from a well of philosophical and deep ideological convictions about the place of African languages in decolonizing the mind.
If many of our communities had our houses in order, we wouldn’t have had to wait for the Cameroon government to initiate this laudable development. Just like many home town associations have by-passed the government in the past to promote infrastructural development in their respective communities, we could strategize on ways to promote literacy in our indigenous languages outside of the formal educational institutions.
Let me therefore conclude with a few suggestions on practical steps we could embrace in our communities to promote and revitalise indigenous languages.
We must begin from the firm conviction that our languages are modern and contemporary and can serve our needs in all domains of modern life – science, technology and the arts. We must be convinced that our languages are the ultimate repository of our cultural knowledge and heritage and that depriving our children of this vital heritage is a tragic betrayal.
In 2017, I worked on and published a booklet titled The New Mungaka Alphabet for Beginners. In the fall of 2018, Godlove Gwaabe, a co-instructor and I adopted Zoom, an online video conferencing tool as our primary platform to teach a weekly online class that lasted for about an hour. We scheduled the alphabet over a 14-week period and tackled an average of two alphabets per session. Our learners included native speakers as well as individuals who had no prior knowledge of Mungaka. Our experience teaching this course online has definitely made a difference although we’ve had significant challenges by combining learners with vast differences in proficiency. Plans are underway to rectify this challenge by separating basic learners from native speakers and promoting literacy based on the needs of each group. Over the years, we’ve added other online tools such as Google Classroom and BookWidgets – resources that have enabled us to develop learning aids such as Flash Cards with audio, word search games, quizzes and more. These platforms have helped us in tracking our learners’ progress and to provide guided assistance in their learning endeavour. We hope this experience will inspire other language communities to adopt similar strategies and that eventually, teachers of indigenous languages may collaborate on best strategies.
Another important item we must embark upon is to publish children’s books and other didactic materials in indigenous languages. Our progress will be minimal without more literature (for a friendly press accepting manuscripts in indigenous languages, see spearsmedia.com). In the absence of these materials, parents are encouraged to prepare basic literature with the names of common animals, birds, and household items. These resources will serve their needs and would be a fun addition to activities during ethnic association reunions.
Finally, home town associations must invest in the creation of a language society or committee, tasked with providing intellectual leadership and support to efforts in the teaching and use of mother tongue languages in Cameroon and abroad. Such committees must allocate resources in promoting the publication of alphabet and colouring books, grammar and short stories in their respective mother tongues. Should diaspora associations adopt this approach, the spill-over effects would be momentous and I see a day when indigenous communities in Cameroon will rely on the resources and expertise of their diaspora peers in revitalizing and promoting literacy in our languages.
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