As I begin to write this response, I’ll admit that I have no idea how I will manage to remain respectful and conduct myself in a way that will engage rather than enrage the people who will take time to read my thoughts. I will definitely control the anger and the fire that has been building up inside of me for the last 2 days but I will also write this piece with the honesty that it deserves and this may mean that I may offend a few people, a price I am willing to pay.
Two nights ago I was going through my Twitter timeline trying to keep up with what was happening in the lives of the people I follow and also get information from the different news sources that I also follow. I am used to reading the ridiculous, humorous, and ignorant to downright nasty posts but the post from the BBC World account with the implosion; “As the use of English spreads across Africa, are Africans right to say Thank goodness for colonialism?”, left me shell-shocked and I immediately proceeded to click on the link to the article where more surprises awaited me.
In the introduction to the article, the BBC makes it clear that this is not a piece from one of their own writers but rather a post from London-based Ugandan writer Joel Kibazo, whose contribution is part of the series of view-points from African journalists that the BBC has been collecting. Kibazo’s argument or view point is actually ‘very simple’; that a conversation he had with an individual on the same flight as him to Mumbai years ago (and also his travels throughout Africa) have convinced him that what we Africans gained in being able to converse in “the language of the mighty Dollar” more than covers the multitude of sins committed during that era and even up to this point in time even though he conveniently states that “there is little that I admire about the colonial era.”
Joel Kibazo may think that he merely wrote an article praising the role that the English language has played in helping to usher the World into a global village but the cold hard truth is this; that his poorly written piece that is almost bordering on fanaticism is absolutely reductionist and revisionist with regards to not only Africa’s history and culture but most importantly to the colonial era and I personally find it quite disgusting that Kibazo not only entertained this thought but also accepted it.
3 years ago in my 2nd year at the University, I took a compulsory unit called the Modern Foundations of Africa by probably one of the best Professors who will ever teach me. In one of the classes, Dr. Kamau asked the class a question, whether Africa would have developed or become civilized if we had never been colonized and the whole class, I included said no and at that point, he looked like he was about to take out a whip and beat the ignorance out of all of us.
Dr. John Henrik Clarke is credited for saying the following words; “To control a people, you must first control what they think about themselves and how they regard their history and culture.” Up until that class, all 40 of us had been made to believe indirectly and directly; through what we learned in school, what we saw and heard in the media, from our opinion leaders in the society and even our parents, that Africa would be nothing without colonization. Nobody except Dr. Kamau had ever mentioned to us that Amharic, a language with roots in Ethiopia was considered one of the most advanced languages in the whole world. Nobody also talked about the great University of Timbuktu where scholars from all parts of the World flocked to gain the knowledge that it was famed for.
In addition to this, out of the 10 Universities considered to be the oldest in the World, 2 founded in the medieval times were in Africa. The University of Al-Karaouine, located in Fes, Morocco by, unbelievably, a woman named Fatima al-Fihri in 859, which is considered to be the oldest continuously operating degree-granting University by the Guiness Book of Records and Al-Azhar in Egypt, that specialized in literature and religious studies. But nobody teaches us that history, after all, colonization was based on the flawed ideology of ethnocentrism and it was inconceivable whether through sheer ignorance or plain stupidity that the black man had already developed in the fields of arts, sciences and even technology and most importantly in his/her language, just like his/her counterparts in the West.
What Joel Kibazo and those who think like him fail to recognize is the fact that while English has definitely helped with regards to communication, trade and general interaction among different people from different parts of the World, it still functions as a tool of oppression in modern in Africa and I shall illustrate.
In almost all schools in my country Kenya and across Africa, school going children are literally forced to communicate only in English while in school and get severely punished if they do not, so the result is that very few people my age and those younger than me can speak in their mother-tongues, let alone proper Swahili, which is the national language.
People who do not have a good command of English are often made fun of and castigated to the point that it not only affects socialization but also gets to the point of being denied employment despite the fact that they are qualified. My age group in particular suffers the most from this colonial mentality whereby some of us have been forced to fake American and British accents just to show our peers how cool we are. There is a joke in Africa about how when we go abroad to countries like USA and England, even if it is for a week, we suddenly acquire an accent yet those who go to places like India, Japan and China and reside there for years do not come back with accents from those places. This is nothing more than mental poverty, inferiority complex, ignorance and a colonized mindset all added to create the illusion of how ‘superior’ an individual becomes when they grasp the use of the vowels, consonants and verbs of the Queen’s English, which in reality is bollocks!
Joel Kibazo should instead, like renowned African authors and literature gurus who include Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe, advocate for a renaissance in the use of our native tongues and let English complement them and not the other way round. As Prof. Achile Mbembe of Cameroon said in his response to ex-French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s racist and ignorant speech in Dakar 5 years ago, “Colonialism is now presented not as the crime it was from the wars of conquest to the struggles for independence and decolonization, but as a simple “error” that should now be wiped from the slate” and I guess the English language is the perfect atonement for these sins?
I want to conclude with a personal story and I would encourage you all to read an article I wrote not too long ago entitled, “Things Fall Apart” for a better understanding. My maternal grandparents were forcibly evicted in and are now considered Internally Displaced Persons (IDP’s), twice in a span of 10 years from their homes, in a wave of ethnic clashes that had its roots in the colonial history of Kenya. The British took our land; our heritage; our culture, freedom and worst of all, pitted community against community in their divide and conquer strategy, all in the name of ‘civilizing us, giving us a religion and a common language’.
Now 49 years after colonial rule ended, this country has about 1 Million displaced persons, squatters within and in our neighboring country of Uganda. Kenya almost went to the dogs 5 years ago due to serious land issues and negative ethnicity that can be traced to the British rule. The irony for me is that my grandparents cannot speak in English, they never learned it, after all they slaved on British ‘owned’ farms. I would really like Joel Kibazo to try and explain to them what he means by “thank goodness for colonialism”, as he also explains why the benefits of English have not miraculously wiped their tears, sorrows and misery away.
It’s a good thing to appreciate a language, culture or even heritage, but it is definitely a very ignorant and extremely insensitive of you to do this in a manner that seems to justify the oppression that a whole race has gone through as a select members of another race forcefully imposed their way of life and culture on them. The end here does not and should never justify the means.
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Here, here!! A very good post!! I would like to see what Mr. Kibazo has to say in response to this post!!
Excellent piece. Should make every honest cynic and those sincerely deluded wake up and weep.
You have lucidly expressed an opinion which I also share deeply. Kudos!
Beautiful written and told with depth and respect, I really appreciate your article. I will be posting this on my Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome fanpage on Facebook.
The recent passing of CHINUA ACHEBE provides impetus to review his outstanding oeuvre, from which there are many gems to be treasured, including this, his spoken assessment on the legacy of colonialism:
“The kingdom of Benin in Nigeria, when it was visited in the 16th century by Dutch travelers and traders, we have the words they wrote at the time. They compared Benin, the city of Benin, very favorably with Amsterdam. At that point, there was no question about the European being the boss in Africa. But when you moved into the 19th century, the situation is changed. That Benin that was described in very favorable terms in the 16th century was now called the “City of Blood” in the 19th century by the British, just before they overran it. And what happened to Africa was simply the devastation of the slave trade. That was what caused the weakening, the devastation of Africa, so that by the end of the 19th century, when Europe decided to take Africa over, it was easy. The consequences of the colonization of Africa go on to this day. The colonization itself was made possible by the devastation of the slave trade which had happened before it.”
It seems, Professor Achebe was not as enarmoured of the English as the inciting articles author Joel Kibazo appears to be. Those of us comprising the African Diaspora, in the widest sense, must never lose sight of the slavetrade’s antecedents, genesis, disasterous course and the catastrophic sequela of that awful affliction. Such that we are primed to effect the remedy for eradication of the syndrome and not continue to be vectors of its debilatating contagion. Post Traumatic Slavery Syndrome be gone.
[…] As I begin to write this response, I’ll admit that I have no idea how I will manage to remain respectful and conduct myself in a way that will engage rather t […]