English Language as Hydra

Its Impacts on Non-English Language Cultures

Vaughan Rapatahana, Pauline Bunce, Vaughan Rapatahana, Pauline Bunce

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781847697523
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In far too many places, the worldwide trade in English-language teaching, testing and publishing has become a self-perpetuating, self-congratulating, neocolonial monster … a veritable multi-headed Hydra. Too often the English language industry aggressively promotes itself as some sort of "uplifting", "essential", "proper" or even "better" means of communication than any other language. Unfortunately, its relentless global outreach is taking place at the direct expense, and the active denigration, of local and regional languages – not to mention individual identities.

English Language as Hydra brings together the voices of linguists, literary figures and teaching professionals in a wide-ranging exposé of this monstrous Hydra in action on four continents. It provides a showcase of the diverse and powerful impacts that this ever-evolving, gluttonous beast has had on so many non-English language cultures - as well as the surreptitious, drug-like ways in which it can infiltrate individual psyches.

1 The Challenge – Ndaraca ya Thiomi: Languages as Bridges¹

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Andũ amwe moigaga atĩ thiomi nyingĩ thĩinĩ wa bũrũri kana wa thĩ nĩ ta nyũmba ya mbamberi, atĩũiguwano gatagatĩinĩ ka mĩikarĩre na ka ndũrĩrĩ no ũrehirwo nĩ gũkorwo andũ makĩaria rũthiomi rũmwe tu. ũguo ti gwo ma. Kĩrĩa kĩagĩrĩire nĩ thiomi kwaranĩria, hatarĩ ũhoro wa imwe kũhinyĩrĩria iria ingĩ … Thiomi ihane ta ndaraca cia kũnyitithania mĩikarĩre.

Some people argue that many languages in a country or in the world can make a house
of Babel; they believe that understanding between cultures and among nations can only
be brought about by speaking one language. I don’t believe that to be the truth. What is
important is for languages to be able to communicate without a few of them dominating
others. Languages can become bridges.

A bridge assumes an existing gulf, almost impassable ordinarily, between two entities. A bridge enables crossings across the gulf. The nature of the gulf dictates the design and architecture of the bridge. A recognition and close assessment of the gulf is essential in determining the kind of bridge that is needed. In other words, do not spend your resources and energy building bridges where there are no gulfs to cross. A bridge enables a constant to-and-fro between two entities – in short, it enables crossings, transitions and even continuities. In other words, a bridge is not a one-way crossing, for exodus only. The image of the bridge, therefore, brings to the fore the intellectual and artistic wealth that could be an enormous commonwealth, if we built bridges to enable crossings.

The opposite of a bridge is a wall, a barrier, that which bars contact and exchange, or if there is contact and exchange, it is that of a horse and its rider. Remember that between the horse and the rider there is plenty of contact, exchange and even a flow of trust and affection. But the structural basis of their relationship is that of a dictator and the dictated. Uneven power relationships, even those enabling contact, can be barriers to mutually beneficial crossings, transitions and continuities between languages and cultures.

Unfortunately, relationships between languages have not always been characterized by the image of the bridge, but by that of the wall. This is the wall of the inequality of power. The inequality has its basis in economics and politics, but philosophically, its roots lie in the conception of a relationship between languages in terms of a hierarchy: a kind of linguistic feudalism and linguistic Darwinism.

Linguistic and cultural feudalism is the view, consciously or unconsciously held, that some languages – between and even within nations – are of a higher order than others; that they constitute an aristocracy, while others – in a descending order of being – occupy lesser positions, different degrees of minionage. This is because the dominant languages have become perceived, even by the dominated, as having all the magic power of knowledge and the production of ideas – culture itself – whereas the dominated languages are seen as having the opposite. They are seen as incapable of producing knowledge, good ideas and good art.

This perception has nothing to do with the inherent powers of languages. It has been brought about by a historical process. In my book, Decolonising the Mind, published in 1984, I told the story of my relationship to my mother tongue, Gĩkũyũ, and my language of education, English. English was also the official language of the colonial state. I told how we used to be punished when we were caught speaking an African language in the school compound. We were humiliated by being made to carry a piece we called ‘Monitor’ around our necks, literally stating that we were stupid. Thus, humiliation and negativity were attached to African languages in the learning process. A good performance in English, on the other hand, was greeted with acclaim. Two things were taking place in the cognitive process: a positive affirmation of English as a means of intellectual production and a criminalisation of African languages as means of knowledge production. With English, went pride; with African languages, shame. For a long time, I used to think that this was an African problem.

But some years ago, when I was researching my new book, Something Torn and New, I found out that what was done to Africans had already been done to the Welsh. In the 19th century, Welsh children caught speaking their mother tongue in the school compound were also humiliated by being made to carry something around their necks with the initials, ‘W.N.’ (Welsh Not). At the very least, my colonial story had been re-enacted in Wales.

Even earlier than Wales was the case of the relationship between the English and the Irish languages. English colonial settlement was first tried out in Ireland in the 16th century. But the English were finding it difficult to conquer the Irish or, rather, to tame them. In 1598, Edmund Spenser – a contemporary of Shakespeare and the celebrated author of The Fairie Queene and other poetic works – published A View of Ireland at the Present Time. Spenser was an English land-owner in Ireland and a neighbour to Walter Raleigh – the founder of the colony of Virginia. In his book, A View of Ireland, Spenser literally prescribes a cultural solution to the political and military problems posed by the Irish resistance. He argues that, if you change their names – strike out the Mc’s and O’s of their naming system – and then impose English, the Irish would soon forget the Irish nation. Language conquest would enable, indeed, complete political conquest. The solution to native resistance was thus seen as lying in the erasure of their memory through changing their language and naming systems.

Africans who were taken to the Americas by force by Raleigh and his descendants to become plantation slaves had their languages and their names literally banned, almost as if the colonists were reading from Spenser’s manual. In the place of African names, they were given those of their owners. Even the drum language was banned by the act of banning the instrument itself. But the plantation master never lost his linguistic connection to Europe. The Spanish, French, Dutch and English plantation owners all remained connected to their own European languages.

We find similar practices in Asia. Japan banned the Korean language and imposed Japanese during the brief Japanese colonial era. We can say the same things relative to the indigenous peoples of Australia, New Zealand and North and South America. In the history of modern colonialism, all the colonial powers, at one time or other, have imposed their languages on the conquered peoples, thus ensuring that the entire system of production, dissemination and consumption of knowledge takes place through the colonial language alone. Even the very identity of the colonized is expressed in the language of conquest. In Africa, we talk of Francophone, Lusophone and Anglophone Africa – in other words, identities that are based on the languages of the colonial conquest.

The case for mental conquest through language was put best by Lord Thomas Macaulay, who argued – in his famous 1835 Minute on Indian Education – that English should be used to create a class, Indian in name, but otherwise imbued with an English mentality. This class, he argued, would help the British effectively govern the vast nation. They would more or less stand as a buffer zone between the governors and the governed.

The result of many years of an imperial relationship between Europe and the rest of the globe is a world of languages divided into a dominant few – largely from Europe – and a marginalized many, largely from Africa, Asia and the Americas. A handful of European languages constitutes an aristocracy. Today, four of the six official languages of the United Nations are European. They dominate in the production and dissemination of ideas; they dominate in publishing and distribution and in the consumption of knowledge; they control the flow of ideas. Intellectuals who come from the, supposedly, lesser languages find that, to be visible globally, they must produce and store ideas in Western European languages, mostly English. In the case of most intellectuals from Africa and Asia, this is how they become visible on the world stage, but simultaneously invisible in their own cultures and languages. Global visibility comes at the price of local or regional invisibility. And within a nation, national visibility comes at the price of regional and communal invisibility.

The consequences for Africa in terms of self-perception and pride, and the conveyance of knowledge, are enormous. A gulf is created between the intellectual elite and the people. The middle class generally becomes defined by its abilities in European languages; the masses, by their rootage in African languages. But since knowledge production and storage is largely in European languages, it also means an ever-deepening gulf between the abilities of the possessors of the two language systems to access each other’s knowledge.

I was at a Pan-African conference in Dar es Salaam some years ago to discuss strategies and tactics for encouraging and deepening a reading culture in Africa. One speaker light-heartedly said that if you wanted to hide something from an African, put it in a book. This would be sad, tragic even, were it true. But I put it differently and said that if you wanted to hide knowledge from an African child, put it in English or French. Or if you wanted to hide the keys to the future, hide them in the dominant European languages. Tragically, this is what we do to our children every day in Africa, Asia and in the indigenous cultures of Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific and the Americas.

I remember when my mother used to send me on a journey alone to meet relatives. She would pack food and water for me and then would sit me down and tell me everything about the path before me to ensure that I would not get lost. She punctuated every instruction with the question: do you understand? Only then would she let me go. She was not doing something out of the ordinary. It would be a very irresponsible parent who would give instructions in words and languages that the child does not fully understand.

Nothing is more important than life’s journey, and yet, we in Africa and other indigenous cultures send our children on the journey of life with instructions coded in the dominant European languages. The colonialist may have wanted us to go astray, but why would we, an independent Africa, want our children to get lost? Is it a case of the lost giving instructions on how to lose your way in life? The colonists may have even wanted to create a gulf of knowledge between the elite and the people. But why should we in Africa want to continue to deepen and widen the gulf?

I wish it were simply a case of linguistic feudalism, but the reality is that linguistic feudalism is being transformed into linguistic Darwinism. Linguistic Darwinism is the extreme product of the hierarchy of languages, where the growth of a dominant language is dependent on the death of other languages. Languages can grow, but only on the graveyard of others – an attitude that underlies all practices of monolingualism. In the most extreme form of monolingualism, linguistic Darwinism sees the growth of a national language as being dependent on the death of all the other languages. This is the assumption behind many national language policies: in order for the national language to be, other languages must die. There are many variations of this, for instance, when big regional languages are empowered at the expense of the smaller.

The death of any language is the loss of the knowledge contained in that language. The weakening of any language is the weakening of its knowledge-producing potential. It is a human loss. The saying, often cited, that ‘the death of an old person is the death of a whole library’ is probably true for all languages. Imagine the impoverishment of world culture if all the learning in, say, classical Greek and Latin, had died with the languages? Today, we can only imagine, but never really know, the quantity and quality of knowledge lost with the disappearance of so many languages on earth. Each language, no matter how small, contains the best knowledge of its immediate environment: the plants and their properties, for instance. Language is the primary computer with a natural hard drive.

African languages face the destiny of the dinosaurs: extinction. For the national, African and even the global good, the prevailing power relationships of languages and cultures have to be challenged and, hopefully, shaken up. This was the motivation behind my books, Decolonizing the Mind and ReMembering Africa. What is the way out? My first prescription was that writers from marginalized cultures and languages had the duty and responsibility to make themselves visible in their languages. As I did not want to be saying, ‘Do as I say, but not as I do’, I made the decision – way back in 1978 – to break with English as the primary means of my writing, particularly in fiction and drama. I have no regrets. I still believe that writers and other intellectuals have the duty to challenge and shake up linguistic feudalism and linguistic Darwinism – that hierarchical view of languages – in theory and practice.

But later, I realized that, even though writers bore the primary duty of producing ideas in African languages, there was another equally important player. Writers do not write in order to decorate their home shelves with unpublished manuscripts. They want to be published, in order to reach the reader. But alas, there were no major publishers in African languages. So a lack of publishers in African languages led to a lack of writers in African languages and, therefore, fewer readers of African-language productions and, therefore, fewer publishers willing to risk money by venturing there, creating a vicious circle. The publisher, then, is an integral part of any meaningful challenge to linguistic feudalism and linguistic Darwinism. I have written several works in Gĩkũyũ. But this would have been impossible without the willingness of East African Educational Publishers to invest their resources and skills into the project.

The writer and the publisher need a third partner – the government. Many multilingual African states do not have a national language policy regarding their own African languages. Whatever we may say of colonial states, they – through literature bureaus – often came up with some sort of policies. Far from helping, some post-colonial governments have even shown active hostility towards African languages. Governments have to create an enabling environment in terms of policies and resources. We have only to look at Kiswahili in Tanzania today – the result of Nyerere’s progressive linguistic foresight – continued by the succeeding Tanzanian governments. By Kiswahili having a home and a base, it is the one African language that is becoming an active player in the globe. There is, of course, the vexed question of Kiswahili suffocating other African languages, but this is a result of linguistic feudalism.

I could add other partners – booksellers, for instance. They have to be willing to stock books written in African languages. At present, there are very few bookshops that sell such books. Other partners are the award-givers and conference organizers. At present, many awards meant to help in the growth of African literature actually work against African literature. They give awards that stipulate English as the linguistic means of literary production. Conference organizers within, and outside, Africa recognize only those intellectuals and writers who work in English. In Africa, national, continental and global visibility has only gone to writers in English.

The three partners – government, writers and publishers – are the most primary. The working together of these three primary players would go a long way towards empowering knowledge in African languages and, hence, considerably reducing that gulf between African and European languages as producers of ideas.

A question frequently asked, after I talk about the necessity of using African languages as literary instruments, is that of the multiplicity of languages. The presence of many languages within nations can be a strength if the relationship between them is not based on notions of hierarchy, but rather on those of a network. In the vision of a network, there is not one centre, there are several centres equidistant from each other, but connected in a mutual give-and-take. Every language draws from another. Every language gives to another. All languages end up giving to, and taking from, each other, laying the groundwork for a complex independence and interdependence within and between cultures.

But how do they do that? Or rather, how would they do that? By building bridges between them, through translations. Translation is what enables that traffic of ideas between languages. In his book, A Discourse on Colonialism, the Martiniquan poet, Aimé Césaire (2000), once described culture contact and exchange as ‘the oxygen of civilization’. Language networking through translation can only help in the generation of that oxygen within, and between, nations.

To the other players that I have mentioned, I would also add the translator. The translator is the maker of bridges between languages. Translations have played an important role in the history of ideas. The much-talked-about European renaissance would have been impossible without translations. Christianity and Islam – and their spread all over the world – have been enormously aided by the translations of the Bible and the Qur’an. Translations and translators can play an even bigger role in the African renaissance. In my book, Something Torn and New, I have talked of translations between African languages; translations from Europhonic African literature into African languages; the translations of diasporic works of Caribbean and African American writers into African languages in a vision I describe as Restoration; and finally, the translations of the finest traditions in world cultures into African languages. This bridge-building would have a big impact in the restoration of pride, initiatives and productivity to Africa.

Wherever we are, we have to d...