Prince Kum'a Ndumbe III
19 July 2007
opinion
Is there a connection between language and the enslavement or liberty of a people and their capacity for development? What have been the experiences of African countries between political independence and 2006, the year of African languages? In this article, Prince Kum'a Ndumbe III elucidates these questions. He also describes the approaches of the AfricAvenir Foundation to raise consciousness about language and development amongst the people and the decision makers.
1. Language, thought and the colonial context
Language and the articulation of thought
When a child is born and their tongue remains 'attached' or 'stuck', the child will not be able to speak correctly. It is imperative that this organ, which allows us to modulate the sounds of our speech and articulate the words we wish to pronounce, is freed if the child is not to remain handicapped for life. In my Doula tradition, we carry out this benign operation fairly early on. If, later, we see that a child is becoming particularly loquacious, then the tradition is to crack a special nut in the baby's mouth ('ba bo mo kasso o mudumbu').
The language we use enables us to articulate our ideas, feelings, faith, dreams and vision of the world. Language allows us to recount our everyday, to interrogate our past and plan our future. It enables us to articulate constructed thought. And thought is a vehicle of development - or regression.
Thanks to the creation of thought and its practical or technical implementation, discoveries are made, acquisitions preserved, change comes about, predictions and probabilities are programmed, and potential dangers are forewarned of. But it is also thanks to thought that hatred, wars and destruction materialise. Thought and the articulation of ideas are at the centre of human existence; they determine the quality and the rhythm of our progression on earth.
The colonial experience of African countries determinedly applied the breaks to the articulation of the collective thought of the African peoples. The coloniser's language was imposed as the only officially recognised language. African languages were condemned to the domain of folklore as 'vernacular languages' or 'patois'. Thought, that continued to be articulated by individuals in their 'patois', was not recognised and was marginalised. But the collective articulation of the ideas of a given African people no longer identified with the thought transposed by the coloniser's official language. In the colonial encounter between Europe and Africa in African lands, the articulation of thought thus suddenly became a question of contested political power.
The shock of encounter in the articulation of ideas, in the African colonial context, could not admit compromise. The colonist's language assumed exclusivity in the public life of the colonies. Thought expressed in indigenous African languages became marginalised. It was labelled primitive, barbarous, backward, incapable of intellect, incapable of communicating progress or development. Knowledge communicated in African languages was thus characterised as non-knowledge by the colonial master. In reality, thought expressed in an African language felt subversive because it could neither be understood, nor controlled, nor commanded by the colonial master. It had to be defeated or reduced to silence.
Despite the presence of the coloniser, African populations did not stop thinking or articulating their ideas in their own languages. But as they lived as conquered, dominated peoples, whose territories remained occupied militarily, often for over a century, all public support for the articulation of their ideas was suppressed. These ideas had all but disappeared from public spaces and were unknown in the administration, schools, media, and, to some extent, in churches.
Language and transformation in the postcolonial period
Africans themselves had passed through the filter of the colonial administration, schools or church seminaries. Indeed, they had no other sources of information other than the media, articulated in the language of the coloniser. Thus they ended up convinced that Africa would not produce original thought worthy of progress and development. Ideas of progress could only be articulated in the language of the European coloniser.
These same Africans would assume power in African countries after the independence movements of the 1960s and 1970s. They continued the application of the colonial project by imposing the former coloniser's language on the African people. Despite formal independence, which the Asian countries also acquired, thought in Africa remained colonial in linguistic articulation and expression, interleaved in the norms and structures of language and dissemination determined by the European metropoles.
Now, for these same European metropoles, Africa is only a marginal, peripheral continent, very much of secondary concern in the global strategy of power sharing in the world. According to this strategy, Africa must be severely contained, marginalised, controlled, weakened and dominated in order that the winners of globalisation may continue to draw from it what they need to nail their power and globalised supremacy.
African populations, continuing in their overwhelming majority to live their daily lives in their languages, which are no longer used as a means of communication and administration, do not even really understand the strategic games they are embarking on. They remain for the most part ignorant of the concepts, discourses and programmes elaborated for them at national as well as global levels. These populations thus remain in a state of paternalistic dependency. They did not conceive, and do not even have access to, the debate about the fate reserved for them in the framework of globalised competition.
The official language of the public domain operates as an insurmountable barrier for such African populations, who, in fatal error, have sometimes ended up internalising the notion that all these discourses in the white people's language, which they only understand approximately, do not concern them. They believe that the powerful African elite and international organisations will seal their fate, while they do not have the right to speak. We often hear people saying that they have become powerless in the face of destiny, and that only a divine power could break the conspiracy created by the alignment of the interests of the postcolonial local elite with the powers of foreign organisations.
2. The postcolonial state and linguistic schizophrenia
Permanent structural violence and hijacking the discourse
African populations thus live, for the great majority, in a permanent state of structural violence. This violence confiscates all elaboration of thought and fundamental discourse on the life and future of a given African nation. The tiny minority which has gone through the filter of Western schooling, and has become incapable of articulating thought and discourse in its own African mother tongue, largely shares the foreigner's discourse on Africa. Those who try to oppose it do so by derisory means: opposition itself being articulated in a language that the population does not know or hardly understands.
The opposition that should claim back the articulation of thought and discourse in people's everyday language lacks structural support. The ordinary people, although implicated, do not have access to the opposition discourse, purportedly articulated in their favour - as this is in the white man's language. Some may contest my argument with the assertion that French, English, Portuguese and Spanish have become African languages, since in most cases these languages are the only ones used in schools, the administration and the media, in short, in everyday public life, and because this has been the case for more than a century.
Statistics frequently account for the African population of a country by simply considering them as speakers of the former colonial language. Nigeria, with its 470 African languages thus becomes an anglophone country. The two Congos with the 221 languages of the DRC and the 60 languages of Congo Brazzaville become francophone countries.
Certain discourses in Africa today try to demonstrate, more and more insistently, that European languages such as French, English and Portuguese have become African languages. Advantage should be taken of their status as African languages, notwithstanding of course, the peculiar linguistic development, by which Africa has enabled the enrichment of European languages, on African soil. Despite all this, it remains true that the imposition of European languages on Africa has not succeeded in wiping out the African people's daily use of their own languages.
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