It’s high time we played by the rules of a language

As with other English verbs with UR endings, to occur – to take place – is turned into its simple past form (occurred) simply by doubling the R in the last syllable and appending the usual simple past tense letters ed. Yet in our newspapers, the verb to occur is usually turned into the past tense simply by adding to it the letters ed.

Such a chimera as occurred is what you thus end up with. On our obituary pages, we read that “The death of…” somebody has occurred. But, in English, there is no such word as “occured” (with a single R). In the past tense, the verb to occur becomes occurred (with two Rs) in the simple past tense.

CIVILISATION

In writing, the C and the R are doubled in the continuous form (occurring) and in the simple past form (occurred). The doubling of the letters C and R is so central that, if you ignore it in writing, you terribly confuse your readers, frequently with appalling consequences to understanding. Yet that often happens especially in Eastern Africa’s English language newspapers.

If your nationalist politicians have latched onto a colonial European language as your medium of education, of intellectual intercourse and of governance, you are committing your education system to foreign interests, which are extremely difficult to contain. Yet Africa must fully tame the languages not only of its mental education but also of its governance, especially if it is English or French.

That was the great political failing of Africa’s so-called nationalists, those who led our continent into its alleged independence. Where a colonial tongue remains the language of your elite, you have appallingly compromised your independence.

Why? Because, as Europe had introduced and imposed it on Africa, “education” was aimed directly at taming the minds of Africa’s future (educated) elite into favouring as “civilisation” the material interests in your country of the colonising European elite.

INDOCTRINATION

As long as upper-class Europe imposed certain values claimed to be “civilisation” on the young natives through the colonial classrooms and church-houses, upper-class Europe’s social assumptions about you and socio-economic desires from you remained the essence of all the classroom indoctrinations that were so powerfully advertised as “education”.

No, it will not be easy to extricate ourselves from that trick of the mind into which Europe cheated our nationalists into “independence”. Many Africans already recognise the state of affairs as “neo-colonialism”. But it will take a special caste of Africans to redefine our independence and to latch onto the most effective method by which our continent can arrive as soon as possible at true mental and material self-rule.

That – I assert – is the responsibility now facing Africa’s elite of the younger generation. It makes it abundantly clear that members of Africa’s new class of liberators will recognise its full ramifications only when, as a group, they begin to give their own definition to such terms as “freedom”, “independence”, “nationalism” and others.