The vexed question of
language dominated last Wednesday evening’s launch of my novel The Texture of
Shadows at the auditorium of the Steve Biko Centre in Ginsberg in the Eastern
Cape.
Earlier in the day I had
visited the museum, library and archive. Stammering with memory and unresolved
aspirations, the images, artefacts and an encounter with the widowed Ntsiki
Biko at the centre took me back to the heyday of the black consciousness
movement, as did the visit to Biko’s well-tended grave. It had originally been
planned as a mausoleum. Uncomfortable with ostentation in a region struggling
with the deaths of young people from HIV and Aids, the Steve Biko Foundation
quickly scotched this notion.
One was struck by the age
disparity of the audience at the launch. It was comprised mainly of very young
people and very old people, as though the cohorts of those aged between their
mid-20s and mid-30s had simply disappeared. This, therefore, meant those who
had just woken up to the realities of what it meant to be young, black and poor
in a democratic state had a shared experience with those who were once young,
black and poor in an apartheid state.
It is impossible – unless
one is fatally oblivious to one’s surroundings – to ignore the effect of
language, of English, when one is faced with an audience that is overwhelmingly
black. The Eastern Cape is a region once blessed with an unerring cultural
instinct; it gave us Enoch Sontonga, SEK Mqhayi, Tiyo Soga and AC Jordan, and
it formed the epicentre of the struggle against apartheid.
Today, in the Eastern
Cape, there is no mistaking the decline of isiXhosa as a language of discourse.
Whereas KwaZulu-Natal, for instance, boasts a vibrant resurgence of isiZulu,
from the initiatives at tertiary institutions to burgeoning isiZulu-language
newspapers such as Ilanga and Isolezwe and an isiZulu version of the Sunday
Times, the Eastern Cape has lost most of its flagship isiXhosa titles.
The indigenous languages
might experience differing degrees of marginalisation, with some possibly
getting a better deal, but the stubborn fact is that they are all being
marginalised.
Though some black people
might find this unpalatable, I believe that we are the main architects of the
destruction of our languages. For a reason that’s possibly not hard to find, we
have relegated our languages to second-class status. Even in instances where we
could have communicated differently, we have opted to use English – even in
meetings where almost all members of the community speak one indigenous
language or another.
Leaders address
congregations of black people, at funerals, rallies or in media broadcasts, in
a language hardly spoken by the community – sometimes barely by the leader
himself. This makes us easy victims of misinterpretation. We’re also likely to
reflect what we’re thinking in, say, Setswana or Tshivenda, in English, with
disastrous consequences. This is possibly why we have no parallel when it comes
to interlocutors claiming to have been quoted out of context.
Now, the man or woman “on
the ground” has no choice but to listen and make the best of a bad bargain when
faced with official bombast in English. Parents are the ones who will scrimp
and scrape to put their child into school, for the simple optimistic reason
that their charge would, one day, use the education to deliver them from
poverty. English is the most important element of a code to decipher the
hieroglyphics of power and prestige.
All this, however, is a
carry-over from an unaddressed past. It is a past that hangs over the present
and gives it shape and content. It is a past of inequalities and iniquities
where for centuries language has been used to subjugate and brainwash. One
might say that we fared a lot better than the slaves plucked from Africa to
enrich the West and give it the arrogance to turn a scornful gaze on the
continent and call her children benighted and shiftless. This past goes to the
very heart of our culture.
One would like to believe
that bodies such as the Pan South African Language Board, which is charged with
protecting and promoting people’s linguistic rights, are doing their best.
Their efforts, however, are subverted by attitudes that come from policy
weaknesses.
One believes that South
Africa is a country with a wide gulf between intention and implementation. As a
former regulator in broadcasting and telecommunications, I’m still baffled by
the fact that today, in 2014, we still have local content quotas.
Go anywhere in the world
– in Brazil, for instance, you’re under no illusion on hitting Rio that you’re
in Brazil. The music, the films, the telenovelas are all homegrown. Local
content is the norm.
I will not go into the
shark-infested waters of affirmative action in a country that is overwhelmingly
black.
On the question of
language, an issue arises about black writers writing in English. I remember
our poet laureate, Keorapetse Kgositsile, telling me how Mazisi Kunene used to
refer to the English used by African writers as “Fanakalo”.
When this came up at the
launch, I had a moment of déjà vu, taken back to some of the no-holds-barred
debates among writers and scholars at the Africa Centre on Covent Garden, or at
a book fair hosted by the Camden Centre on Bidborough Street, in the London of
our exile. There, you’d have the celebrated Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o
holding forth on why he would henceforth write in his native Kikuyu. Someone,
perhaps Nuruddin Farah, would counter that Ngugi was free to hold such views
because he knew he would be translated almost immediately on publication.
My belief is that writers
have to write. They have to use the tools at their disposal. Language is one of
the major tools. But the language has to be informed or underpinned by skill,
because writing is a craft.
One of the biggest
problems facing South African writers of every stripe is impatience to be
published. The second, which leads wannabe writers to file off intemperate
missives, is to take rejection personally and ascribe race or some form of
negrophobia as the reason. In my short life on this earth I have come across
numerous disappointed white writers; two or three of them have blamed
transformation for their rejection.
South Africa has been
blessed with writers such as the late Nadine Gordimer, who understood that,
sometimes, people – black and white – had to write in the colonialist’s
language to write against the colonialist. I believe that language has to be
appropriated and tempered – what we call “ukukokotela” in the parlance of the
street – and express what needs to be conveyed.
English has become
another language. This is what the world has to confront. Yet the writer who
has appropriated English, in whatever form, has to know that it is a language
laced with poison.
Gabriel Okara wrote The
Voice, a novel of immense beauty, in the Ijaw idiom of Nigeria. Reading this
story of struggle and commitment, the reader forgets that the vehicle carrying
the story forth is English, and the sensibility towards redemption is Nigerian.
This, however, does mean
that the powers that be have to be more coherent in the championing of all our
languages. The scholars, publishers, writers and researchers have to
collaborate in this quest.
There are commissions
galore on the question of language, but they have to be harmonised. Our
institutions have to resuscitate literary prizes for literature in indigenous
languages. These are baby steps. The bigger step is for government to intervene
and take control and remember it is governing in the interest of the majority.
Or else there’ll be
service delivery protests by people who will demand to be addressed in the
languages of their dreams.
