The Sunday News
Thandekile Moyo
MY name is Thandekile. Just from that, you can tell I am Ndebele. When I talk to people here in Harare, they say my accent gives away that fact. This accent is apparently distinct regardless of what language I’m speaking. This means I speak English and Shona with an Ndebele accent. I am unsure though if I sound Ndebele when I speak the little French I still remember from High school.
I come from Zamadube, Kezi, in the Matobo District of Matabeleland South. When I tell people from Matabeleland that is where I come from, they immediately accuse me of being Kalanga. When I tell people from Mashonaland, most of them assume that I am Ndebele. I did some research about lobola a few weeks ago and my father shocked me when he made reference to what he said is “our” Kalanga culture. This left me wondering, what am I? Kalanga or Ndebele?
I grew up in Gwanda. When people hear that, they ask me if I can speak Sotho. I always find this funny because I do not know why people think Gwanda town is a predominantly Sotho area. If it is, then these Sothos speak it only in their homes for I have heard more Shona spoken in the streets of Gwanda than Sotho.
My mother is pure Kalanga. She comes from Tjehanga in Plumtree and she speaks Kalanga with all her siblings. I always find it funny how, when she’s talking to my mamncanes (her younger sisters) and I, she will address me in Ndebele and them in Kalanga; so beautifully that the conversation flows steadily despite us using two languages simultaneously. I understand Kalanga but my spoken Kalanga is terrible. I am fully capable of having a verbal fight in Kalanga though. For some reason, it is easy to learn the insults and vulgarities of most languages.
Mother tongue is defined as the language that a person has grown up speaking from early childhood. Despite my mother being Kalanga, my mother tongue is Ndebele. This is also in spite of the possibility that my father is probably Kalanga also, a fact I am yet to verify. Ndebele is the language I speak at home. It is my language of socialisation; my language of play and my language of thought. It is the language in which I can best express myself.
I think in Ndebele. I feel in Ndebele.
At school, I was taught in English. All the books I had to read were written in English. As an adult, at work, I find myself forced to speak in English, write in English and to express myself in English. I find it really sad, because all my life, in “official” setups, I have had to translate all my thoughts into a language foreign to me. It is sad that I can never ever channel my feelings to the next person exactly as I feel them. Everything I feel, reaches my audience either distorted or diluted.
How do I explain to my boss that I can’t work with that thin accountant because “uyangijayela!” how do I explain to him that the client he insists I handle “uyangimbuluzela” and it is best he handle her himself? My grievances always go unheard or misunderstood because I have failed to explain in English that I hate to be treated like a “popayi.” Saying to my superiors I am fed up because you treat me like a cartoon just does not express how I feel.
Throughout my life, I have felt the pain and frustration of having to articulate my thoughts and feelings into a language I barely identify with. I have lost arguments, debates and fights simply because I just could not find the correct English words to say exactly what I mean.
Because I was not educated in my mother tongue, at school, every technical term was new to me. Not just new but foreign, difficult to understand, scary and confusing. Before understanding anything about anything I first had to translate meanings of all the words given in every definition from English to Ndebele. Then translate the way I had understood it, back into English. A Geography teacher once gave me this definition of slope: the grade (also called slope, incline, gradient, mainfall, pitch or rise) of a physical feature, landform or constructed line refers to the tangent of the angle of that surface to the horizontal. To understand it I had to find the definitions of the words incline, gradient, mainfall, pitch, tangent and horizontal. I had the double burden of having to perfect my English for me to understand Geography. Imagine if he had just said to me a slope ngumqanso, or umehlo?
Because I was taught in a language I do not identify with, I have a professional life guided by English values and a personal life guided by Ndebele values. There is a serious disconnect between these two lives so to survive I leave my school life at school, my work life at work and the true me emerges later. This is the reason why we cannot apply what we learn at school to our personal lives. This is why our engineers cannot upgrade our rural areas.
Why our undergraduates conduct superficial researches and why our Parliamentarians have superficial debates. How do we expect them to have meaningful debates in a language they cannot fully express themselves in? On the occasions they choose to discuss issues in their mother tongues, nobody translates to those who do not understand that language; reducing our Parliamentary debates to a senseless waste of time and money.
It is difficult to separate language issues from identity issues. That is probably why the first thing you say when you identify yourself is what language you speak. I am Ndebele. She is Polish. He is English. When I say I am Ndebele, it is not just about the language I speak. It means I speak Ndebele, I subscribe to the Ndebele culture, my mindset is Ndebele and I come from Matabeleland. Language preserves culture and mindset and passes it on to future generations through idioms.
What this means is language helps us to hear and understand each other as a community and as a people. It then prescribes how we are supposed to handle ourselves in different situations through idioms which are the coded instructions our forefathers left for us. For this culture to be sustained our duty is to pass on these instructions to our children. For example Ndebele says “kwabo kagwala akula sililo” simply meaning there is no grieving at the home of a coward. This idiom tells us to avoid danger as much as we possibly can. To me, it also means let violence and confrontation be the last resort.
It also tells us to be afraid, do not just jump into things, examine things carefully; do not plunge in.
Mindset is defined as a person’s way of thinking and their opinions. When we heed these idioms, we develop the same mindset. Our response to situations will be similar. For different reasons, many parents today have decided to use English exclusively at home. This means that the mother tongue of their children is English. But that of the parents is Ndebele. The child then learns the English language but not the English culture and the English mindset. Leaving you with a cultureless child drifting between two mindsets; identity crisis!
We are raising a generation of children who do not identify with our culture but are not accepted in the English culture either. We speak to them in English, meaning we cannot pass on our Ndebele mindset, which is embroiled in our idioms. Their way of thinking and their opinions are totally different from ours. They develop a superiority complex as they view us as backward, unrefined, uncivilised and embarrassing. Only to have their self-esteem knocked down when they realise they are not wholly accepted in the white communities they so desperately want to belong to.
I wish I had been educated in Ndebele, I would have understood my environment better and would be in a better position to tackle, defend and develop it. I wish we were so proud of our languages that we could all speak them as simultaneously and beautifully as my mother handles her Kalanga siblings and Ndebele children.
I wish we were as arrogant as Russia, France and China, who tell you to learn their language or stay in your country. I pray my daughter will grow up to be as proud of her Ndebele accent, as I am of mine. I wish I could be confident that 20 years from now, Ndebele: the language, the culture and the mindset, will still be alive.
