Let’s Do Away With English

Earlier this week I woke up at 4a.m. and travelled over 600km to listen to young women speak about their struggles, victories, hopes and dreams for their future. 

These young women aged between 13-21 years shared important insights on shaping their futures; speaking about how they currently and in future should fit into community development, leadership, policy making and various other key areas of societal progress.

However, at times it was quite difficult to listen to and digest what they were saying, not because I was too busy framing and re-framing English sentences to text a request for an extended column submission deadline to the editor of this newspaper, but because English is not our Africa mother. 

Most of the girls, although confident in expressing their thoughts, struggled to do so effectively in English which they spoke in order to accommodate English speaking colleagues. 

So maybe the girls’ messages were lost in translation at times. In this case this would be a letdown for the objectives of meeting with the girls.

The biggest disappointment though in the bigger scheme of things, is that these girls and all their other peers are expected to complete high school with a credit pass in the English language, failing which they ruin their chances of being accepted at most universities.

I remember around this time last year, as I walked through Maseyisini in the Shiselweni region of Swaziland, I found myself in conversation with a random middle-aged man. 

After he detailed the challenges of a typical day in his community, we found ourselves discussing possible solutions to these challenges and obstacles to individual progress and community development. I wasn’t ready for the one solution he proposed; 

“We are denying our children a fair chance at life by continuing to disqualify, deem them failures early in life because of English. I really don’t understand why we are using a foreign language to evaluate our Swazi children so harshly. I didn’t go that far with my own schooling but it just doesn’t make sense to me, siSwati should be the language we teach in and mark our children on and not English.”

This man then went on to give me names of his own children, relatives and neighbors who have been forced to work in the timber companies in Nhlangano because, even though they did well at mathematics and other languages, they failed English dismally, dashing their hopes of entering the oldest university in Swaziland – UNISWA. 

Over the past year this unexpected conversation has got me thinking even about why, decades later, our curriculum and most crucial high school examination, is still based on our former colonizer’s formula. 

It’s also got me thinking about the human beings behind the ‘statistics of those who failed Cambridge O’level English this year’ as education officials often pronounce when exam results are released. 

Whose children are these that we have failed over all these years? What dreams did their parents have for investing in their education? Where are they now? With each day of their lives, what hope, if at all, do they carry and to where?

I’ve been preoccupied with these thoughts mostly because I was taken aback by this man’s eloquent articulation of a frustration that I honestly didn’t think I would ever hear from a fellow rural Swazi because we are known to be a nation that doesn’t question things relating to our welfare, at least not with effort (and by extension reason). 

After all, we are the same people that elected an MP, Mr. Matata, who tells us live and direct that parliament proceeding should accommodate him as he doesn’t know siSwati that well which means he misses a significant chunk of the parliamentary discussions and obviously faces a communication breakdown when hosting constituency’s meeting at Nkilongo.

We can look to some countries that have exercised a high level of self-determination with regards to this issue of the colonial language being used as the number one medium of instruction and school examinations. 

The most recent is Tanzania’s President John Magufuli who's announced that English would be done away with in his country. He’s also pushed for regional organization East Africa Community (EAC) to fulfil the EAC treaty by putting the native Kiswahili first. 

Some have had the audacity to insinuate that President Magufuli’s stance on English is informed by the shallowness in his own English vocabulary; arguing that this lack of English depth makes him a liability to his people because

 “In a poor country like Tanzania where its annual budget depends on donors by 40%, you can’t keep learning native languages hoping developed countries will understand you. The Danish people will never listen to you, the Swiss, Swedish and Chinese will never pay attention to your Kiswahili”.

By the way, the Chinese mentioned above have quietly worked themselves all the way to the top of countries with the fastest growing and most robust economies and they have done so over many decades of speaking only their languages.

Same with the Swiss, Swedes etc so I say, the above criticism of Magufuli and like-minded people is utter rubbish. 

I say perhaps a turnaround in language policy, not only for Swazis but for other African nations too, should be our way of saying that it’s about time ‘they’ listen to us in our chosen languages if they care as much as they claim to and we should care in enough for ourselves by stopping this act of failing our children at life because of English.