The euphoria of celebrating Kiswahili’s international status is beginning to subside.
I suggest that we now get to the point of effectively using all our language wealth in our daily lives.
You may not be expecting me to say much about our other languages, in view of my partiality and enthusiasm for Kiswahili.
I am, however, a professional linguist and I can think and act professionally and objectively as a professional should do.
I may laud and hail the virtues and graces of Kiswahili, but I must pay due attention and respect to our other languages and the vital roles they play in our societies.
Lifelong advocacy
This has been the lifelong advocacy, complete with concrete literary examples, of our venerable elder, Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
The many works in his native Gikuyu are all eloquent testimonies of his commitment to what he calls our “national regional” languages.
Indeed, Ngugi is no longer a lone voice crying in the wilderness, as far as our indigenous languages are concerned.
The United Nations declared in 2007 that a person’s “mother tongue” was a “universal human right”.
UN Resolution A/RES/61/266 called upon the Member States “to promote the preservation and protection of all languages used by peoples of the world.”
UNESCO, the UN’s specialised agency for education, science and culture, gave the justification for this declaration in 2017.
It pointed out that local languages transmit cultures, values and traditional knowledge, “thus playing an important role in promoting sustainable futures”.
My friend and colleague, Dr Humphrey Jeremiah Ojwang, who calls knowledge systems “epistemologies”, could not agree more.
‘Dying’ of languages
Unfortunately, many indigenous languages all over the world are dying, and continue to die.
A language is considered “dead” when its last known speaker dies.
El Molo, spoken around the eastern shores of Lake Turkana, had only a few hundred speakers when I last heard, just over 30 years ago.
I do not know if the situation has improved or deteriorated. Political, economic and environmental factors, among them, compete with other languages, are the main causes of the disappearance of languages.
This, indeed, is one of the main dilemmas (mitanziko) that a promoter of Kiswahili, like me, faces.
How do we aggressively promote Kiswahili as an East African or African lingua franca without disadvantaging the local languages of the region?
Do those languages have the resources and the power to compete fairly with Kiswahili?
This really is what lies at the heart of the situation in Uganda, where drastic steps were announced recently for the promotion of Kiswahili.
Similar declarations have been made before, including a 1995 constitutional amendment that made Kiswahili an official language, but they bore little fruit.
The Baganda, my own people, are very wary of the spread of Kiswahili.
Their language, Luganda, enjoys a privileged position as the language of the largest ethnic group and the common medium of communication in the capital, Kampala, and its hinterland.
Strong competitor
Their resistance to Kiswahili as a strong competitor has done a lot to impede the spread of Kiswahili in the country.
I do not have a ready solution to this problem and others like it elsewhere in East Africa.
My own approach is that we should not necessarily see these languages as competitors but as allies and relatives.
We should develop them side by side, each playing its role in mutually agreed contexts.
All our languages, including Kiswahili, should be given due attention, respect and resources in education, the media and social and public affairs.
This requires two crucial factors. The first is a clearly and professionally defined language policy and the second is a strong and active commitment of the users of our languages to their systematic use and development.
A language policy means a collection of all legal, administrative and educational decisions governing the development and use of language in a country.
Commitment, as the term implies, is the users’ serious and proactive engagement with language within the framework of the language policies.
Trained and professional linguists should formulate productive language policies.
They should base their decisions and directives on an accurate assessment of the prevailing conditions in their society, prospects of practical implementation and the main aspirations of their people.
Most East African countries, for example, are de facto multilingual.
This means that many languages are spoken simultaneously in our societies and most individuals speak more than one language.
Our main aspirations may be summed up as African identity, national unity, regional cohesion and global outreach.
A realistic language policy for an East African country could thus promote our identity through our local languages, our national unity and regional cohesion through Kiswahili and our global outreach through our colonially inherited languages, like French or English, in which we are communicating right now.
But, as Ngugi and other decolonising activists keep reminding us, there is no need for us to worship and privilege foreign languages as the only “real thing”.
That is a colonial hangover (kasumba ya ukoloni), as Mwalimu Nyerere taught us.
Regarding our home languages, my feeling is that opposing and trying to block Kiswahili will not in any way help their growth and development.
The realistic way forward is for their speakers to learn to speak, write and communicate fluently in them, use them in appropriate contexts and produce large bodies of quality materials, like books, newspapers and audio-visual materials in them.
In this regard, our languages could learn quite a lot from Kiswahili.
I have been writing and publishing books in my Luganda language since 1971, even as I preach the Kiswahili message.
My latest major work is a comprehensive bilingual dictionary, whose first edition is already sold out.
I salute my comrades, apart from Ngugi, in this struggle, like my friend Prof Egara Kabaji Sr, who works in Lulogooli, and my sister, “Cheni” (Jane) Obuchi, who has given us a hefty corpus of Ekegusii works, comprising orature, language teaching materials and translations of Things Fall Apart and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
