The late Prof Ali Mazrui stated in the book The Power of Babel: Language and Governance in Africa: “One out of every five black people on earth has a European language for a mother tongue.” Mazrui then proceeded to show how English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish dominate the African linguistic landscape.

The dominance of the languages of the colonial powers in Africa, where they eclipse indigenous languages in all official spheres, including schools, has remained intact despite the end of colonial rule more than 50 years ago.

Attempts to domesticate Western education and to use indigenous languages as the media of instruction, such as the recent move in Tanzania to “ditch English for Swahili” as it was reported in the media, are often met with ferocious resistance. Why?

The answer lies in the value people attach to or are made to attach to competence in and use of a particular language.

In Africa, for some reason, the self-hating and self-abnegating native places a premium on alien tongues such as French, Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish or English. He mistakenly thinks these alien tongues can become his mother tongue or are superior to his barbaric mother tongue.

Yet less than a millennium ago, English, for example, so much venerated today, was considered the language of peasants. Back then, linguistic dignity rested on written and spoken competence in Greek or Latin. Those were the languages of scientific discovery, technological innovation and philosophical speculation.

Of course, the tables turned when Britain (and its European rivals cum allies, France, Spain, Portugal, and Germany) decided to conquer the world and morphed into the masters whose language the rest of the world would have no choice but to use.

We are in a situation analogous to Shakespeare’s Prospero in The Tempest who forces his slave Caliban to speak his language. The colonial encounter was devastating in its scope and profundity, especially psychologically. You cannot underestimate the impact of the colonial encounter.

Prof Ngugi wa Thiongo in Decolonising the Mind reminds us how the coloniser inflicted a wound on the psyche of the colonised so that the latter would remain a perpetual self-hater, hating everything his including his name, culture, and language.

Not surprisingly some of the forerunners of African modernity, such as poet-president Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal, known for celebrating blackness, would paradoxically declare that ”French is the language of the gods.” In his adoration and deification of the language of his colonial master, Senghor does not tell us whose gods. What we know is that French was not Senghor’s mother tongue.

In the past 130 years the continental and diaspora African, has been constantly made to believe his culture is backward, his language — whether it is Kiswahili, Hausa, Kalenjin, Luo, Gikuyu, Haya, Kichagga, Kisukuma, Xhosa, Luganda or Lugisu — is the language of the savage.

The so-called realists and pragmatists tell us that we have to “ditch” our divisive tribal languages and embrace the global. Global is the shorthand for English, the language of this article, the universal language, the language of aviation and engineering and metaphysics, and the language of Science with a capital “S.”

This premise that science is English is ludicrous. The Chinese discovered gunpowder, for which the initial formula you can be sure was in Chinese; gunpowder was harnessed by the European imperialists to conquer the world. Can’t scientific knowledge be Chinese, Rwandese, Malawian, Chadian, Egyptian, Swahili? Must it be French or English?

What the naysayers do not tell us is that knowledge is not bound to one language. Knowledge is knowledge. Can you express historical or psychological facts in Swahili, Kikamba, Kiacholi, Kinyawarwanda, Kirundi, and Kinyakyusa? Why not? The Japanese learn everything in Japanese, the Germans in German, the Chinese in Chinese the Swedes in Swedish.

People learn better in their mother tongue and English happens not to be the mother tongue of Tanzanians. It almost axiomatic that if you speak good Swahili, people will assume you are Tanzanian, even if you are not.

Kiswahili is the lingua franca of East and Central Africa in general but the linguistic heartbeat of Tanzania in particular. If there is any nation on earth that should be proud of their Swahili heritage, it is Tanzania, the land of Julius Kambarage Nyerere, who was educated in Europe, but who unlike Senghor, did not view the English he mastered as the “language of the gods.”

Nyerere was one of the greatest defenders of Swahili as the language best suited to carry the Tanzania, nay, African experience in official and unofficial domains.

He wrote and spoke English well, he even translated Shakespeare into Swahili, but he was at home in Swahili, the umbilical cord that connected him to his motherland.

Nyerere, by translating the Bard, proved that Swahili has the epistemic and linguistic range to bear the weight of Shakespeare, and indeed universal experience. 

Have the naysayers reckoned that the dismal national examination performance in secondary schools in Tanzania is attributable to issues of competence in English for both students and teachers?

Not only is using another person’s language as the sole vehicle for carrying your epistemological and experiential realities foolhardy, it is inimical to your chances of making innovations and discovery. No nation, as Prof Mohamed Abdilaziz, would tell you, has made tremendous steps in discovery and innovation by using the language of other people.

What the naysayers don’t tell us is that Tanzania is not “ditching” English as such, but merely replacing it with Swahili as the language of instruction.

English will still be taught as it is taught in Germany, Japan, Sweden, and elsewhere. In fact, English and French and Spanish should all be taught. But the people of every nation must begin my mastering their own languages before rushing to declare the language of others the language of gods.

In this regard, Tanzania’s policy of making Kiswahili the language of instruction to university level, if implemented is both exemplary and revolutionary. Tanzanians may just have discovered that Swahili is the language of the gods, their gods.

Prof Ken Walibora is the Nation Media Group’s quality manager for Kiswahili.