Join Them If You Cannot Beat Them

Is it really true that you should join them if you can’t beat them even if they are wrong? Well, I’m beginning to think that maybe that old saying is correct because I’ve just decided to quit writing a book on philosophy about composition of the Niger-Congo family branch languages for Bantu speaking peoples of southern and east Africa, a book I’ve been working on for the past seven years now, but due to lack of inspiration I recently started wondering as to why I haven’t discarded it already?   

I realised that even if I were to write and have it published, I would still have to pay people in Africa to read it since the majority of our people aren’t readers and are certainly not willing to regenerate their native languages. That’s the reason I had taken up this project after discerning that our native languages needed reformation. There are so many words we don’t have in our mother languages and therefore all we do is replacing them with foreign language terms while speaking even on air and it’s annoying. 

See, apart from teaching physical education and martial arts, I am a writer. I take pleasure in writing but this time I think I had met my match because it’s not easy tolerating the composition of the Niger-Congo linguistic family branch. I bet those of the Khoisan, Nilo-Saharan, Afro-Asiatic family branches aren’t as rusty as ours in southern Africa. Talking in riddles you think I do, hence wasting your time; but can you imagine that that’s exactly how we speak when utilising our mother languages in southern Africa? Yet we are not aware of the fact that we simply do speak in riddles because of a heightened shortage of terms, and we don’t know how inconvenient that is even for us!

It’s rude to mix languages when holding a conversation in one specific language. Unfortunately we have no choice but use foreign terms even when talking to our grandparents who hadn’t gone to school and we do so because there aren’t words for certain expressions in our native languages.  But can you believe that if you spoke English by mixing it with foreign terms anybody would conclude that you spoke no English. So how would you feel if a foreigner by merely listening to your conversations eventually told you that you spoke no African? Bad!

Nonetheless, Anthropologists, do claim that Bantu languages currently used in Africa are apparently five thousand years old, but we both know that that’s not true because if life on earth as we know it is believed to have had started in Africa then how come that local native languages therefore are only estimated to be five thousand years old? But never mind that because even if that were true, why is it that they aren’t fully developed yet? As a layman you could argue that they are fully developed but do you know the difference between the terms developing and developed? So I don’t know about you and your African native language but in my mother tongue (Silozi) we don’t even have a native word for coffee, at least tea of a teabag is called Masamba but so is coffee! Now would you send such an astronaut using such a language that mixed tea and coffee altogether as Masamba to the moon and back if you were the Director of NASA? I certainly wouldn’t!

Long story short, in southern Africa we have a younger language called Afrikaans and Afrikaans is most probably the youngest language in the whole world. It is only 425 years old but to date; Afrikaans is as fully developed as English if not more! I speak Afrikaans better than English and I raised my children in Afrikaans, and English, of course. But I tell you, Afrikaans is ten times far developed than any other known African native language in Africa. It’s been used twice in international space without mishaps and that can’t be said for any other African native language, not even the renowned Hausa and Swahili.

In short, Afrikaans, formerly known as Cape Dutch is a West Germanic language copied from the South Holland dialect and predominantly manufactured in South Africa in the mid 17^th century. Afrikaans was created from words found in English, German, French, and African languages, and then went through a significant grammatical oversimplification to a point whereby within a century it became as popular in South Africa and Namibia as a spoken language while Standard Dutch remained used for writing. It was only in 1925 that it finally replaced Standard Dutch and eventually became an official language in both South Africa and Namibia. The first translation of the Holy Bible from English to Afrikaans was only published in 1933, whereas by then, even my mother tongue (Silozi Holy Bible) was already in circulation for like two centuries in existence.

And yet the custodians of the Afrikaans language in South Africa kept on working at it, modifying it daily to the point where they finally modernised it so much so that you wouldn’t come across a word copied from neither English, German, French, nor African languages, but purely clean Afrikaans language. And that’s our haughty Afrikaans. A new language in the world which can’t be found anywhere else in the world, neither in Germany nor Holland but South Africa and Namibia! And it’s being used at all universities and in space for instructions in South Africa and Namibia as a second language, of course. But when will I proudly be able to say so for my mother tongue, Silozi, of the Bantu Speaking Farmers of Niger-Congo family branch of West Africa currently in southern Africa? Not in my lifetime I guess, thanks to our repressing cultures and traditions! Cultures and traditions are good things but they can easily choke development dead when left in the hands of traditional leaders to be custodians of a language and cultural civilization.

Well, in case you’re not following the point I’m trying to make, let me school you further by putting you to a simple test, regardless of where in the world you are as long as you’re a person, and more so falling under the Niger-Congo linguistic family branch.

Now with all that knowledge of your home dialect, translate these simple terms from English to your African mother tongue (excluding Afro-Asiatic family branch) for us to see if you have them!

1.    Sorry: ...in English sorry is an adjective term which expresses a feeling of regret for an action that might upset or inconvenient somebody or is likely to do so; but please, don’t tell me that sorry means forgive me!

2.    Please: ...please in English is an adverb or simply interjection term used in requests to add politeness or urgency to requests, commands, or published rules and regulations, so how do you translate please by itself into African language without writing the bible?

3.    Feel: ...feel in English is a verb or basically an intransitive verb referring to how one would seem to themselves to be in a particular emotional or physical state. And in terms of transitive verb, feel refers to how one experienced an emotion or physical sensation. But in my mother tongue (Silozi) feel is basically translated as hear. It’s used in the same context as hearing like with one’s ear. My own people in Namibia and Zambia to be exact do translate feel as hearing, actually saying that they were apparently hearing pain (instead of feeling pain) in their tummy.

4.    Handicapped and disabled: ...in English particularly in terms of medical condition, those two are both adjectives that refer to a physical or mental disability, yet even so they are still considered offensive in English. But how offensive are they in African terms when translated around in your neighbourhood? I certainly don’t want to be the one translating them from African Silozi to English because in that sense they sound highly offensive beyond measure. In fact those terms in our native languages, particularly Silozi, referring to the handicapped or disabled people should be lawfully prohibited forever. For instance, in Silozi (my native language back home) the Mentally-ill, Handicapped and Disabled people are known as “Lyanga ni Lihole,” there is even a programme on NBC Lozi Radio in Katima Mulilo which is popularly known as: Programme ya batu baba pila ni bwanga ni buhole – meaning: Programme for the people who live with “Bwanga ni Buhole,” just how insensitive; oh that hurts if only you spoke Silozi! Anyway, how do you translate them in African languages among your people; to a point where you would translate them from African to English without using vulgar words or rather insulting somebody?  

5.    But maybe we should stop this argument here because already you can see problems I’ve been encountering in trying to make sense of our native languages.  And the problem is that this problem can’t be corrected by one person no matter how good they were; and it certainly can’t be corrected by government alone either. The only hope is that as much as governments in southern Africa are spending money on promoting cultures and traditions, so they should do to help the custodians of native languages update their local languages, respectively. School can’t come close to fixing the problem. Yet I don’t know any teacher who looks forward to teaching African Silozi language at school in Namibia today. And they won’t complain publicly because they don’t know better either. So the project to promote and modernise our native languages would work very well if government took a lead on it because it takes generations forever after generations to carve and improve any given language.   

6.    See, I enjoy speaking African languages very much. Unfortunately they leave me extremely exhausted because of putting more emphasis and effort into gathering words to finish a sentence without mumbling and gesturing.  But foreign languages such as English and Afrikaans never leave me tired at all. And I use little effort to speak them fluently and articulately because all the words are readily available and therefore do come easy.

7.    Basically the point above is what had made me realise that not only do countries’ infrastructure get developed but languages too. As you find developing countries in relation to developed ones, you also find developing languages proportionate to developed ones. So a language won’t develop if the owners don’t know that it has to be reformed in order for it to be developed to where it could be used for instructions at universities and in space even.

8.    Of course, we can choose to accept and continue utilising our native languages as developing as they are, hence leaving the problem for future generations to solve but who says they will do so? Already it doesn’t take a genius to detect that the future generations won’t speak those things at all; but English, unless they are developed like Afrikaans, and therefore we’ll lose many indigenous languages in Africa.   

9.    Before we go, though, the big question still remains: “Do you join them if you can’t beat them even if they were wrong?” Please, feel free to write your comment/s down below. As a writer, I never get offended by a comment. On the contrary, I enjoy negative comments very much because I get to learn new things from the critic. And you can write comments in African languages like I did earlier, and translate their meanings in English. And not only African peoples but everybody globally can leave a comment down below.

10.                   But wouldn’t it be nice hearing how the Americas, Europeans, and Asians had developed their native languages to such a state of art perfection? It certainly would!