“Linguicide is the linguistic equivalent of
genocide. Genocide involves conscious acts
of physical massacre; linguicide, conscious
acts of language liquidation. This is
precisely the fate of African languages in
the diaspora… If history is replete with the
death of languages, there have also been
cases where languages have been resurrected
from the dead. Israel, for instance, needed
the resurrection of Hebrew to reconnect with
the ancient memory…
The African continent’s relationship to the
world has thus far been that of donor to the
West. Africa has given her human beings, her
resources, and even her spiritual products…
African languages are essential for the
decolonization of African minds as well as
for the African renaissance… All this calls
for a very different attitude toward our
languages on the part of African governments
and the African intelligentsia.”
The colonization of Africa and the Atlantic
slave trade has left most people of
African descent with a nagging sense of
inferiority. This is the thesis of Ngugi wa
Thiong’o who believes that Europeans over
the past six centuries or so succeeded in
stripping the continent of its culture,
natural resources, inhabitants and
spirituality, while simultaneously spreading
the belief throughout the world that
Africans were godless savages and that
blackness was “a mark of inferiority.”
In his intriguing new book,
Something Torn and New: An African
Renaissance, Mr. Thiong’o argues that
separating Africans from their native
language played a critical in not only their
exploitation but in their continued
capitulation to being regulated to
second-class status today. The author goes
on to say that black folks today suffer from
an unrequited “quest for wholeness,” a
thirst for knowledge of self which can never
be satiated so long as they speak and write
solely in the languages of their former
slave masters and colonizers. For English,
Spanish, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese are
rife with subtle color-coded symbols and
messages which will only continue to
reinforce racist notions of white supremacy
for generations to come.
At times, Thiong’o certainly
sounds like an impractical dreamer, given
the
abject state of the African diaspora. For
instance, in America, the bulk of black
children never bother to master English. So,
what makes anybody think they’d suddenly be
the least bit interested in studying
Swahili? That being said, Something Torn and
New does nonetheless make a passionate, if
not ultimately persuasive case for the
restoration of dignity to the black man via
the serious study of lost languages and a
cultural roots renaissance.