By Anote Ajeluorou and Greg Austin Nwakunor
Ever wonder why many Europeans and other nationals living in African set
up indigenous schools here and elsewhere with a strong bias for their
respective local languages or mother tongues? The French, the Dutch, the
Germans, the Turks, the Chinese; they all have their own schools that teach
their respective local languages besides the broader curriculum for examination
purposes. Like the tortoise and his ancient shell, these Europeans go
everywhere with their local languages or mother tongues just as, ironically,
they have labelled African languages ‘vernacular’ that should be banned!
As a result, African children,
nay many Nigerian children, raised even in their home towns and villages now
speak very little of their mother tongues preferring instead to speak
‘English’, Nigeria’s official language of communication, business and prestige.
Needless to say, those with abilities to write the mother tongues are dwindling
by the second. In most cases, it’s the bible that is the only surviving written
material or text of most local languages; the much-talked about threat of
indigenous language extinction couldn’t be more real for a majority of African
languages than this.
It’s against this bleak
background that some three Nigerian and African writers, scholars and academics
spoke at the recent handover to Port Harcourt city UNESCO World Book Capital
2014 baton. Eminently qualified to speak on this vexing issue and condemn
negative attitudes regarding neglect of mother tongues both at homes and in
schools were Dr. Gabriel Okara, Prof. JP Clark and §prof. Omolara Ogundipe,
currently at the Department of English Studies at University of Port Harcourt. They
spoke at different sessions during the weeklong literary events that
accompanied the handover ceremony designed to stimulate interests in books that
open windows of opportunities to those who make them lifelong companions.
Okara, a poet and children’s
writer, was responding to a question on his major prose work The Voice, which he wrote back in the 1960s,
and why he peppered it with a lot of Izon elements and ambience. Okara, who
turned 93 on April 24, was engaged on sundry literary and national issues embedded
in his writing. For Okara, the language issue is a touching and even personal
one. It’s akin to an elder watching a tethered goat give and unable to do
anything to help. He affirmed that his desire to preserve his native Izon language
prompted him to create an essentially Izon ambience in the novel, as a way of
rescuing his language from dying out outright.
For Okara and a host of other
discerning intellectuals and thinkers, a grasp of the mother tongue is a key
element in deepening intellectual pursuits, as it prepared the basis for a
clearer understanding of concepts. Okara maintained that Africa was losing a
lot as a result of abandoning its mother tongues for foreign languages.
He said, “By using English as a
means of communication, we’re losing some ofour values. When we try to
translate from our languages, we lose some of our meanings and values. And if
we lose our local languages, we lose our culture as well, as language is
carrier of a people’s culture!”
For Clark also, poet, playwright
and first African to be appointed to a chair in an English department of a
university, abandonment of mother tongue that seems the modern fad in raising
children both in the cities and villages by most parents is so disheartening,
as it amounts to emptying out the soul of a continent and replacing it with
hollowness. His mood, while speaking on the issues, was that of melancholy and
loss of all that is dear and enduring. He said he was to realise the loss he
was also aiding to perpetuate late in the day, and admitted being complicit in
the language betrayal and but couldn’t do much about it afterwards as a writer.
Clark said he only came to
realisation at University College, Ibadan that all the great English poets and
writers he’d read at Government College, Ughelli, were actually writing in
their mother tongue or local language. He recalled his maternal uncle, Debesi,
an Urhobo, who was a great poet, composer and singer of Udje performance poetry, whom he’d seen perform as a child and
compared his prodigious performance talent with those of the English poets he’d
been taught in school like Chaucer, Wordsworth, Byron, Blake and the rest and
found no greater talent in these English men than in his uncle. As an act of
redemption and restoration, he quickly began to translate some of his uncle’s
song-poems into English like ‘The Death of Okrika’, a moving dirge on the loss
of a newly wed bride, and those of others he could find.
He also translated the Ijaw epic
Ozidi into English and which
performance he helped midwife in the 1960s; it all stemmed from this need to
resurrect his mother tongues – Urhobo and Izon – into mainstream linguistic
recognition.
He regretted, however, that he didn’t
write his poetry and plays in either Ijaw or Urhobo (his mother being Urhobo),
something he can’t start doing all over again. But having realised the mistake
of his generation of writers in not using their respective local languages like
their Kenyan counterpart, Ngugi wa Thiong’o (author of Weep Not Child), Clark encourages younger writers to try and
reverse the trend by writing in their local languages. Clark said, “try and
take back your mother tongues in your writing in indigenous languages and not
just write in English alone. Let the children grow up in your mother tongue. Do
it well by knowing it well. At a conference of writers, wa Thiong’o wanted us
to write in our local languages but we were all doing this in English”.
Coming from a man of Clark’s
stature, and being humbled by such generational mistake, as pioneer writer and
thinker, this must mean something. Educational policymakers would only do well
to listen and learn.
Late Prof. Babs Fafunwa’s
6-3-3-4 education policy of the late 1980s was designed to redress this
language difficulty when it prescribed that the first few years of a child’s
education should be in his or her mother tongue. But this was soon jettisoned
for a host of logistical problems and a lack of commitment.
But to complete the mother
tongue proposition at the Port Harcourt UNESCO World Book Capital 2014 was
Prof. Ogundipe. She spoke at the Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God@50 Celebration sub-event commemorating Achebe’s second
novel that turns 50 this year. For this first female to graduate first class in
English from University of London at University College, Ibadan, the place of
mother tongue in a child’s early education is key. She narrated how, as a
child, her mother, an English teacher, forbade them from speaking any language
other than Yoruba at home. It was not until she entered the school system and
at advance classes that she first encountered English. She went on to make
superlative grade in it.
For parents who erroneously
assume that exposing a child to English at an early stage would aid him or her,
Prof. Ogundipe has a shocker for them in her own personal experience, which
should serve as shinning model. According to her, “My mother, an English
teacher, didn’t encourage us to speak English at home, but I went on to get 7As
in my school certificate and the first Nigerian woman to get a first class at
University of London!”
She said those of them who went
through that process spoke better English and charged parents to be at the
forefront of instituting mother tongues in schools, as they stood more to gain
by so doing. Ogundipe opined that language embodies a whole set of values,
particularly African values, which she said were already being lost with the
entrenchment of a foreign language. She frowned at how Nigerians, especially
those in the Diaspora, shun their local languages and actively promoted its
abandonment. She said efforts to set up a Yoruba language study centre in the
U.S. some years ago to help Yoruba children failed because of poor parents’
attitude towards the project.
“Parents should fight for the
institution of mother tongues in schools, at home and through study centres”, Ogundipe
noted. “Parenting is also at the heart of the mother tongue debacle. Parents
need to change their attitudes towards their mother tongues, and it should
start from homes where mother tongue should be encouraged”.
Also lending his voice to the
debate was former Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), Dr. Wale Okediran and
National Organising Chairman (NOC) for the Arrow
of God@50 Celebration. He argued that Achebe, the late literary icon,
although wrote his prose works in English, was passionate about his Igbo
language and tradition, which he made popular in his works. He said Achebe also
wrote some of his poems in Igbo language, adding, “The Achebes, even though had
western education, were steeped in African tradition. Too bad we moderns forget
the traditional ways as we educate our children in English”.
