A FUTURE WITHOUT YOUR LANGUAGE IS A PAST OF WISDOM THROWN AWAY
Mondli Makhanya

The Sunday Times
November 23 2008

Once upon a time in a place called KwaMashu there lived a man with a long beard. Legend has it that this man, who was well past his prime, would loiter around the railway station with no obvious intent.

When the train was about to take off, the man, known as intshebe yaKwaMashu (the bearded one of KwaMashu), would break into a sprint, evade the ticket examiners and jump over the turnstiles. He would then run along the platform and, just as the doors were about to shut and the train was about to leave the station, he would jump on.

Intshebe yaKwaMashu was also a master pickpocket. Once on the train, he would work his way through all the coaches, sticking his hands into pockets and emerging with loot. The railway police would soon be in hot pursuit, turning the train inside out in search of him. But intshebe yaKwaMashu was always ahead and would be off the train as soon as it entered the next station. Like the mystical Keyser Sšze in The Usual Suspects, he would vanish into thin air. This went on for years. Policemen were deployed to look for him but never got anywhere near intshebe yaKwaMashu.

In time, this criminal became an antihero of sorts. Crowds would gather on the platform to watch his heroics. As he performed his act, there would be whistling and ululating from the commuters' ranks. The more his fan base grew, the bolder he got, until one day age caught up with him and his legs could no longer match his intentions.

He mistimed his step and fell onto the tracks as the train was chugging off. The train wheels sliced him into pieces, much to the horror of the ululating and whistling spectators.

The legend of intshebe yaKwaMashu has been told over and over and passed on from generation to generation. It even spawned a famous Zulu saying: Wakhala ngaphansi njengentshebe yaKwaMashu - you fell like the bearded one of KwaMashu.

This saying is used to illustrate missed opportunities or occasions when someone has committed an absolute boo-boo. In Zulu, it has deep meaning.

At this point, I am sure you are reading this and wondering what the heck intshebe yaKwaMashu has got to do with the state of the nation, global warming or the timing of the next comet. And why you need to know about this inconsequential man who may or may not have lived.

The truth is there is no point to this story. It is just a story that bears telling. There are many such stories in our nation that require passing on because, if we do not record and relay them again, they will wither and die. All nations have their legends and cautionary tales that get embellished with each retelling.

I thought of this story a few years ago when the Sunday Times, as part of our 100th anniversary, erected memorials in remembrance of events, personalities and trends that had shaped the past century. I wondered how great it would be to remember a non-someone who did a non-something and yet is remembered to this day.

I have been thinking about the story of intshebe yaKwaMashu a lot in the past few weeks as I pondered the consequences of the death of indigenous African languages.

Regular readers of this newspaper will remember a story we ran a few weeks ago about the plummeting numbers of pupils writing African languages as an additional language to English.

According to our story, based on Department of Education statistics, out of the 590000 pupils writing matric this year only 12723 chose one of the nine African languages available in the curriculum. More than 113 902 chose Afrikaans as an additional language.

Bemoaning this state of affairs, Limpopo's education MEC, Aaron Motsoaledi, had this to say about parents' attitudes towards African languages: "Many parents are stupidly excited about how well their children speak English. They proudly display them at funerals to read obituaries."

North West education spokesman Charles Raseala was blunter: "When children from former Model C schools visit the rural villages where their parents were born, you still find parents who are proud to tell the elders: 'No, you can't talk to my child in Tswana, she doesn't hear you. She only speaks English.' "

The fact is that, irony of ironies, free South Africa is killing the very languages that our constitution gave a dignified place in national life.

The Nats tried their damnedest to degrade African languages. And failed. The post-1994 democratic order then sought to give all languages their rightful place by giving them equal status as official languages. But, once they had earned the right to speak and develop their languages, black South Africans set about denigrating them as inferior.

Politicians speak to township audiences in English. On African language radio stations, English makes up a big chunk of the repertoire. Young children believe their prayers will only reach the heavens if they deliver them in English.

Over time I have come to accept the inevitable: within the next century the smaller indigenous languages will be winding their way towards extinction, while the major ones will be shrinking at a rapid rate. With them they will be taking ancient wisdoms, dispute resolution mechanisms, knowledge systems and beautiful folklore.

How will future generations ever retell the story of intshebe?