In my primary school we had days for speaking English and for Kiswahili. And then French was introduced. There was no room for speaking indigenous languages. There was no room for having a local accent while speaking English or Kiswahili. Your English was to be as polished as could be and your Swahili was expected to be closer to Wallah Bin Wallah or you didn't stand a chance. The effort to polish our spoken and written English was done under duress. That is beyond the many books/novels we were encouraged to read to build on our vocabulary. Even though Kiswahili shared the same space, given it is also a national language, little to strangled effort was made to have us polish it as much as English. And thus there was the DISK. The disk changed structures, from being a horn hanging on a string to being a well curved piece of wood written, disk.
We had days secluded for each language and unfortunately even Kiswahili was not a priority because it was only spoken on Fridays. Lucky were people like myself whose parents were Kiswahili teachers. It was a personal prerogative of my father to instill the appreciation of Kiswahili in me. He tasked himself with providing the needed reading materials, went through every assignment with me and sometimes we had to go beyond just the assignment. However his only shortcoming was not allowing us to speak 'mother tongue' in the house. The only mother tongue I could speak was Luo, even though I am Luhya. My mother had subconsciously done her bit of work by always speaking the language to me and taking me to her home as many times as she could, where the only language of communication was Luo. I'm never sure why my father wasn't speaking Luhya to us.
The Disk was used to shame those who couldn't speak English on the days when we were supposed to speak the language. It is a pity that the very custodians of our culture were the same ones pushing us to think speaking proper English was a mark of literacy or a hierarchy of intelligence. I cringe when I hear people speaking Luhya and all I do is fumble around with chippings of the language that I struggle to pick when my people speak.
It is interesting that most language policies in Africa state that the L1, first language (mother tongue) of the child is the first language that a child should have access to until a certain stage when they begin to pick other languages like English. Not many institutions have this in practice because we have mentally locked ourselves with the DISK and convinced ourselves that we are as good as how much we can master not only the English language but also the accent. It is hilarious how an African who has never travelled anywhere beyond the river at the back of their homestead to actually speak ' English of the nose'. If you ever travel the world in reality you will realize people don't care for those accents. You will meet highly intelligent people that speak no English but are making a great impact in their society.
And just before you make a defense, this post is about encouraging you to be comfortable in your indigenous language. That you can learn another language and use it only for purposes of communication but not to change your entire identity or feel like your own language will leave less of a mark. Remember the only way to take chargee of someone is to take away that which provides them with power, their language.
Oya make you join am for this discussion today and let's go unlearn and learn a thing or two about language and the role it plays in sustainable development... maybe we can convince you to rather begin thinking about language sovereignty in sustainable development.
Akwabaa! Waruako u! Karibu! Murakaza neza!
