Taming English can help us meet our social goals

If you are an employee of anything which calls itself an ISSUE – like the daily news products of all such instruments in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda – you probably already know that the noun ISSUE comes from a verb that, among other things, means to come out of a confinement, in other words, to emerge from it.

PROFITABLY

In the human case, there is first the confinement that we call the brain. There is, secondly, the equally restrictive container known to us, the insiders, as the newsroom. For the newsroom is itself an ultimate confinement. Before it, there is the universally even more restrictive confinement generally known as the human skull.

Although I have discussed this problem umpteen times in my newspaper career, please allow me to assert it one more time. Many of Africa’s newspaper editorial employees nowadays insist on it. It is made manifest through our newspaper colleagues. Many members of our writing and sub-editorial staff continue to insist on it.

One problem, of course, is that all journalists in all of what used to be British colonies upon all the continents continue to be forced to work only through English, a language which gives tempestuous trouble even to its owners, not only in England but also Down Under and throughout the vast continent called North America.

No, I do not at all suggest that African and other Third World states should drop English. From the world system, there is a whole gold treasury to be dug out through that language, but only if we can make a true effort to tame English and learn how to deploy that language not only properly but also profitably.

OUR TOOL

The chief trouble is that, in that quest the whole world over, English can help us only if we make a real effort than we now do to tame, sharpen and make English our own tool. That task is central to the ministry now called Education. Led by the President and the person(s) for the time being in charge of that ministry, we must make it the foremost national vehicle in our march towards all our goals in terms not only of culture and intellect but also especially of technique.

Many former French colonies in the world now appear to realise that fact. Thus all West African, South-eastern Asian and other Third World states now make every effort to teach both English and French at every level of education. Even the conceit with which educated Francophone Africans used to regard their Anglophone African counterparts appears to have ebbed considerably.

The general statement that one can make with regard to that problem is that the English and French languages contain extraordinarily useful technical information that our own native languages do not now contain. But there I stress the word “now” because, as I see it, that is the only reason that, for the time being, those European languages continue to be important to African societies and states.

Those European languages will cease to be so important to us as soon as an African language – such as Kiswahili, Luhya, Kikuyu or Dholuo, emerges that can handle all the sciences -- natural and social -- adequately in one of our own languages. In other words, we cannot just sit down to wait for that time to crawl in.

To achieve our objective social goals as soon as can be, we must take the trouble to force the pace of history. In a word, history must help us to make and deploy all the techniques that we are now lacking. For this lack of vital techniques is the very definition of underdevelopment in African and other Third World societies. Only if we take the bull by the horn can we emerge victorious.

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