May Joy Wangari be the last child to die over English  

This is not my last column to be written in English.

But this is a column about the English language.

Of how we, as a people from places formerly colonised by the English, place more importance on the English language than we do our own languages.

I have a friend who  I have known from the age of 12. We will call him Sebastian because it really is not the typical name that Africans give their children. At least not many Africans I have encountered.

So Sebastian, like me in later primary years, had gone to what was then known in Zimbabwe as a Group A school. Group A schools were government schools in neighbourhoods that our former colonisers had reserved for themselves. in grown up conversations, I would find out that once a week at his primary school just like at mine, Sebastian and other students would go for elocution lessons so that they could speak English “properly”.

In these schools where students did not go on school trips but went on excursions, the most embarrassing thing was to get punished because you were speaking an African language to another African. Talking to Sebastian in high school, I had to be careful that I  modulated my voice lest I be accused of ‘shrubbing’. I never spoke to him in Shona while we were both in Zimbabwe.

And then we went to university. We were both in the US. Sebastian would save money on his calling card once a week so we could have a chat because in Tampa where he was, he had not found anyone to speak Shona with. It was the first time I realized that my friend could speak his and my mother tongue. We would later agree that we would ensure that when we grew up and became parents, our children would not be as colonised as we were.

COLONIAL LEGACY

Fast forward to my becoming a parent.

The Heir’s early years in South Africa ensured that he was exposed to isiXhosa from a host of relatives. When we moved to Kenya when he was six, he was very resistant about learning Swahili, perhaps as a way to hold on to a South African identity. Dude and I were not having it though. We soon signed him up to a football programme which takes on many students from the nearby informal settlement. To those children, his speaking English to them was showing off so he had to toughen up and learn the language.

He speaks pretty decent Sheng now. And while his Swahili will never have him reading a news bulletin in Tanzania anytime soon, what’s sad is that in his year’s group of 40 at school, he is one of less than ten children who speak Swahili.

And his schoolmates are mostly Kenyan.

How does this even make sense?

I somehow imagined that my generation was different. That as we all started giving our children African names and acknowledged our enjoyment of Congolese rhumba as much or more than American R’n’B, we had shed the colonial yoke. Yet we have not really. Like our parents, we still proudly talk of how our children cannot speak African languages in our African countries. How Keletso, Macharia, Tendai or Oduor ‘only speaks English.’

Young Joy Wangari’s death reported this week would have been tragic enough if she had been beaten up for not being able to read. Not only is corporal punishment illegal but beating up someone for being slower than the rest of the class is unreasonable.

What makes Joy Wangari’s death doubly tragic is that she died after being beaten up for her inability to read English well in an African country.  Not Kikuyu. Not Swahili. But English.

If her death serves to teach us anything let it be this: that no language is superior to our own and that before we pride ourselves in our or our children’s mastery of the English language, they should know their or another African language equally well or better.

I cannot begin to imagine the pain her parents must be going through right now. My heartfelt condolences go to her family for this senseless loss. And may the deputy headmaster in question be punished to the full extent of the law so that no other teacher ever repeats such an action.

This is not my last column to be written in English.

But may Joy Wangari’s be the last death over English.