The Sunday News
There is more to language than a medium of communication. Language is at the same time a signifier of identity, culture and belonging, as it is a carrier of messages from one to the other.
As such language is central not only to belonging but also to being, to existence. To have a language and to use it is to possess an existential signifier. Some linguists are usually quick to state that language distinguishes humans from animals.
Philosophers are more cautious about such simplifications because evidence is abound that animals have their own languages that we humans are too full of ourselves, arrogant and ignorant, to accept and understand that natural reality. It is our anthropocentrism and speciesism that has us dismiss animals from the comity of thinkers and communicators. Language is always embodied.
It is always the language of somebody or something. It is violence to somebody or something to marginalise and or abuse any language.
I have frequently heard some knowledgeable people make a distinction between generic language and sign language. That distinction, to me, is a fallacy because all languages are actually sign languages. In written language the shapes on a surface that we write and read are nothing more than signs that we have given meaning and collectively understand.
In speech, the sounds that we exhale from our mouths and discharge into the air to communicate are sound-signs that we have collectively given meaning and we understand. When we speak, we frequently accompany our speech with some bodily gestures and movements that are signs, fundamentally.
There is no gainsaying, therefore, that all languages are sign languages or that the first language is sign language. As a system of signs that carry meaning and that matter, language is central to being and belonging, to existence. Correctly, Frantz Fanon made the weighty allegation that language is a carrier of civilisation.
As such, language is also a signifier of human development and a serious political object and social subject.
Don’t touch me on my Swahili
There was sadness in decolonial circles recently when the Tanzanian government announced that it is banning Swahili as a language of instruction in secondary schools.
English takes over as the language of instruction in Tanzania. It is hoped that the colonial language will enhance the international competitiveness of Tanzanians that have so far been studying all subjects including sciences in Swahili. This has been understood to limit the circulation of Tanzanians in the international economies and polities where English and other colonial languages enjoy privilege.
Swahili has been the pride of Africa. More than a hundred million Africans speak Swahili. Only recently the African Union adopted Swahili as the language of its work. In South Africa, the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), Julius Malema, the troubled Pan-Africanist, called for the introduction of Swahili as an official language that would help unite South Africans with other Africans in the continent.
Malema believes that South Africans tend to be xenophobic because they have not been exposed to other African cultures well.
As large an African cultural figure as Wole Soyinka once prominently called for Swahili to be adopted and promoted into the lingua Franca of the African continent.
That is how meaningful Swahili has been. And that is why most African decolonists are depressed by the decision of the Tanzanian government to demote Swahili from its privileged position as a growing language that had the potential to unite Africans and minimise the use of colonial languages.
That Swahili is being demoted to promote the English language is even more perplexing to the decolonists that do not enjoy seeing even the smallest sign of victory for coloniality. What seems like the funeral of Swahili has troubled the decolonial souls of Africa a lot.
The paradox of Language and African unity
The decolonial politics of language in Africa is not a simple but a much complicated matter. The June 16 youth uprising of 1976 in South Africa was in resistance to the introduction of Afrikaans as an official language of instruction. The paradox is that the brave students resisted Afrikaans for the English language, another colonial language.
Ngugi wa Thiongo faced a similar paradox when he resorted to his Gikuyu mother tongue for his literature. Most Africans, including Kenyans from other ethnic groups, complained that the abandonment of English for Gikuyu robbed them of access to Ngugi’s great literature. Some even accused Ngugi not only of nationalism and nativism, but also tribalism. He was accused of trying to impose his tribal language on Kenyans and Africans.
Gikuyu writing also reduced Ngugi’s sales and by narrowing the market for his books to a province in Kenya. That is how the African cultural titan resorted to translating his Gikuyu books to English, and then eventually tip-toed his way to writing in English again. Ngugi realised like the Tanzanians that colonial languages were also made economic languages that are a passport to employment, markets and wealth.
In the charged African languages debate Chinua Achebe argued that the colonial languages were not going anywhere. What was needed was from Africans to appropriate the colonial languages and even use them against colonialism. After all the colonial languages were more unifying to Africans than African ‘tribal languages’ that were not spoken or understood by all Africans even within one African country. Africa is, it seems, too diverse and complicated to be united by one African language. Even one African country is too diverse to adopt one African language as its only language without doing the colonial thing of promoting one language by demoting many others.
The unique and interesting truth about Swahili, however, is that it is the only African language that is not tied to a tribe, or a nation for that matter. There is no ethnic group called BaSwahili or MaSwahili. That is why some Pan-Africanists and decolonists have entertained the idea that Swahili could unite the whole of Africa because it is not a tribal or national language.
The interest ends there as the paradox emerges that Swahili is only partly a Bantu language otherwise its larger genealogy is in Arabic, which makes it a largely colonial language.

Sign language
We are taken back to the realism of Chinua Achebe when we realise that we cannot achieve purity and authenticity in languages. We have to be content, maybe, with the knowledge that a language is as good as what we use it for, colonial or decolonial purposes, even if it is a colonial language.
The political attitude that we inject into a language, be it English or Zulu, is more important to decolonisation than the language itself. In other words, there is more to language than language. Language grows bigger than its owners and users and becomes the property of humanity that can be used or abused. As such, any language, including colonial languages, can be deployed to unite Africans. Just as a native language in Africa can be used to divide Africans if it falls into the wrong hands.
Language: The sign of signs
It is my reasoned gravamen that all languages are after all sign languages. As such, language is far deeper than what meets the eye because all the objects that we see with our eyes, trees, stones, land, and other artefacts are after all signs that communicate meaning to us.
All sounds, even those that are not made by humans but by animals, plants, wind, and other objects and elements are also sound-signs that deliver some meaning to us. As a system of signs language does not actually carry meaning but we give it meanings through our common interpretations and understanding. There is no language that is some magic glue that will unite Africans one day.
It is Africans that should give the purpose of unity to all languages, colonial and indigenous, in order for African unity to begin to matter in African affairs. Africans must have the will and the intention to unite and there would be no language, colonial or otherwise, that can divide them.
As a system and family of signs language, whatever language, is symbolic and meaningful. It is our job to inject the meaning of African unity into whatever language is at our disposal.
Language is the creator of all realities and maybe that is why the bible insists from the beginning that ‘in the beginning there was the word’ that was used to speak the rest of things into existence.
The ‘word’ as the soul of language is the father of all creation and nature, otherwise. So, language is not only divine, but it may also be religious and spiritual.
As such, at the symbolic level, to use language, all language, is to pray which makes every language a ritual and an incantation. African unity will require more than linguistic ritualisation but political will in order to come to full fruition.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria, in South Africa.
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