THE MOTHER TONGUE
Genocide: the systematic extermination of racial and national groups.
We all understand this term when it used in conjunction with images of mass slaughter; the Nazi death camps, the Hutu-Tutsi episode; the Khmer Rouge.
But there is another form of genocide, an insidious, because invisible, form that is taking place in our very midst, in this liberated, “new” South Africa.
A racial or national group exists because of its memory of itself. It knows itself as such because of collective traditions, collective customs (which go by the name of “culture”) and , perhaps more importantly, because it speaks to itself, of itself, in a collective language: the mother tongue.
In African tradition this mother tongue functions in the evenings to tell and re-tell itself. History and myth, culture and legend, are passed down orally from one generation to another, as families are gathered around the fireplace in a circle. The elders tell the youth who they are and how they fit in to the universe. At initiation ceremonies the mythic secrets of the tribes are passed on to the youths, who inherit the mantle of manhood and nationhood at one and the same time. Language carries nationhood in its very syntactical particularities. A people are by virtue of what they remember of themselves. A member is a limb, and to be dis-membered, to have one’s limbs cut off, debilitates, cripples a nation.
What we see in the new South Africa is a systematic denial, a refutation, of the traditional African way of remembering ourselves. The grimly flickering cold light of the television tube has replaced the warmth of fire. Families do not gather around in a circle at night any more. They sit in serial numbness, glued to the box; imbibing garbage soap nonsense from America. Absorbing puerile attempts to replicate that very American poison, but made on our home shores.
At schools and in the urban marketplaces the lingua franca of English is slowly but surely replacing the various smaller languages of our country with its economic “common sense”. If we want to be successful in the marketplace we must converse in English. This simplistic determinism is creating a situation whereby an entire generation of young, supposedly “free” South Africans, is turning its back on its mother tongue, in order to “succeed” at being second class citizens once again in their own country. This VOLUNTARY rejection of the mother tongue and one’s own traditional heritage is a genocidal tendency that, if not checked BY ALL MEANS NECESSARY, will result in the eradication of a number of groups of people in our country whose unique culture is in grave danger of being lost. Certain languages will die out. Customs and traditions that are the very essence of the notion of a national group, will be lost forever. A slow death, but a form of genocide nonetheless.
June 14th, 2006 at 4:57 pm
even in your rapid fire ..in englsh no less, you spill the said diatribe of your own bile.. what hinders is this nostalgia for things past like the fat fingered soviets finding themselves coopted and in a circus of fools making fun of them as they slouch toward the marketplace where it is as usual everyman woman for themselves.
They too longed for the past where the state took grave measures to ensure their subsistance in a mild world of tryanny. (look closer at your own history and why you were exiled so abruptly there in it)
Here too are the nostalgia for things past where the said horror is replaced with nostalgia, replete with blaming outside infulences. these in and themselves flow with the cadence of a grand novel but do little if any to tell truths.
What is needed are centres of learning to integrate the said languages and customs you so proudly speak of into the makeup of the nationstate .The majority of the whole embracing the parts of its whole.(know this that many languages can confound and breed bigger genocides.. rather than unite)
but as you said ..the new south africa is choosing time and time again to involve itself in the global economy of the world and in doing so show a degree of resilience you seem to not applaud
The lingua franca of english has not replaced the other languages, if anything it has added too and in a way helped, the south african people to communicate with other people of the diaspora(ie.the west indies.. the people of that other genocide..slavery..remember) around the world and surely… that is a good thing.
Colonialism is a bitch and the global marketplace has found itself time and time again confounded by its own hybridization and you who write so well and know so much express that said disdain and genocidal roll call..that i who have lost my language forever, can overstand..Is that not more than enough.. or am i not getting your lingua franka.
June 15th, 2006 at 10:05 am
i am mediating
between the world of my experience
and the world of my dreams
but english is the language of commerce
and i have no mother tongue
August 28th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
Dear Aryan
Today for the first time I had time to read this piece through thoroughly and understand it.
I agree with most of the text, however, I want to pose a question with regards to us rejecting our mother tongues in favor of English.
We live in a country with 11 official languages. We’ve just come out of a long era of apartheid, division, injustices and we are trying to achieve peace, unity and harmony. How then do we achieve unity without appearing/being separatists? (which is where the roots of apartheid lie) we need some form of a bridge for the divide. Personally, (and I hate this about black people) I think we are too (for)giving and eager to please people from other races than blacks. I have a serious problem with us being the ones to sacrifice our heritage while the others (whites/English speakers) get to keep their way of life. But then to contradict myself, I feel this self-imposed ‘castration’/sacrifice stems from the majority of the money, minerals, recourses, etc. lying in the hands of the white man and in order to acquire them back (in a ‘civilized’/politically correct way that is in line with our beloved ‘Freedom Charter’) we need to negotiate. And to negotiate you need to understand each other and see eye to eye, speak a language that you both understand.
Even when each one keeps to their own, we will further be divided amongst ourselves (as black people; Tswana vs. Pedi vs. Sotho, etc.) So then what do we do? Do we all keep to our own until we reach a point where we need each other?
Regards,
The confused Tshiamo who is trying to figure out her ID and role in the teenage rainbow nation.
October 23rd, 2006 at 6:38 pm
[…] lebo mathosa: The difference was with us, like I say, we were the most controversial group in the country. The first thing is we changed our national anthem, and we put a dance beat in it. No one is allowed to do that but we were able to pull that off so that actually shows you how much power Boom Shaka had behind the music scene itself. We sang in our African languages and when you added a little bit of house to the mix of African melodies and rhythms it became kwaito. It was kwaito because we didn’t want to be categorised with the old artists who sang bubblegum music, people like Brenda Fassie, Kamazoo, Senyaka, they were the top people in the music industry before we came up. So the youth wanted to have something totally different from what the others had done before. And kwaito was also different from any international music, so it was something the youth could represent themselves as. Kwaito has been going for as long as I’ve been in the industry now, it’s been more than ten years. If I had to change anything about kwaito music it would be the lyrics in order for the foreign countries as well to be able to understand. They call it kwaito because it is more of the kasi music, I mean the kasi tongue, we speak in our tsotsitaal, and different languages according to how you grew up. So I would change it into something that everyone would be able to relate to and understand and they would be able to sing and say the words that we are singing. Most things that we sing about are more fun things, it’s nothing seriious, nothing political, nothing out of this world that you wouldn’t understand. It’s the same thing that you hear over and over again from other different types of music but now the difference is that we’re doing it in our own language, in our own mother tongue, our own tsotsitaal, the way we were raised in our loxion kulchas. So we’re trying to change things now because the language that most people speak is English so if I spoke my tsotsitaal in English you would be able to understand it. […]