NOTHING GETS A GIRL A DRINK LIKE A BIT OF THE MOTHER TONGUE
Tessa Dowling

The Sunday Independent
September 25 2005

I was sitting in kwaMzoli, in Guguletu, waiting for a drink and I said "Ndinxaniwe" (which in isiXhosa means "I am thirsty").

Girlfriends, you won't believe the effect a simple click from an umlungu mouth had on the amagents - not only did I get several drinks, but they nearly slaughtered me an ox as well.

Since then one of the sisters whom I met at that wonderful watering hole phones me just to hear me speak her taal.

In fact, she gets me to speak to her friends and family too.

"Bamba, bamba kancinci, sana, - hold on, baby - I am just going to call my brother, he won't believe it! Heyiii! Umlungu othetha isiXhosa njengawe! (A white who speaks isiXhosa like you!) It is very, very good."

Which has all got me to pondering on the nitty gritties of one of the greatest gifts of our heritage, our African languages.

Last year I did a study to find out how many of our young people were learning African languages and I got a shock - you would think that each and every school would be teaching an African language by now, but hayi bo, that is not the case.

Check these statistics for the Western Cape. Grades 10 to 12 pupils enrolment 2004. English second language: 126 574 pupils; Afrikaans second language: 56 365 pupils; isiXhosa second language: 572.

This situation has got so bad in so far as now we have Cameron Dugmore, the MEC for education in the Western Cape, saying that next year the abelungu will be forced to learn isiXhosa. Good! And I hope the same thing is going to happen in Gauteng, otherwise we are going to lose our heritage.

For example, only five government schools in Gauteng offer Sesotho as a second language. And even though isiZulu is the biggest language in the country, only 37 schools will teach you how to say "Ngifuna ukuthenga le" in isiZulu, which means I want to buy this.

And it's not only in the schools that we are ignoring our African languages. I got fed up when I was reading an isiXhosa magazine: there were only three advertisements in isiXhosa and the rest (more than 30) were in English.

Then I was thinking to myself, "No, no, my girlfriend, maybe I have been asleep all this time and I am just waking up now after many years and in fact everyone is speaking English. Maybe I died and am late."

So just to make sure I turned on the television and it was Idols, so I knew I must be alive because if I was dead I would be in heaven, and as far as I'm concerned, that show doesn't feature there.

So then I went onto the internet and searched for the latest (not the deadest) census figures and this is what I found: In 2001 English was stated as a home language by approximately 3 673 203 of a total of 44 819 777 South African citizens, that is, by 8,2 percent of the population.

When people are feeling down because they can't speak English too good, or if they are very much pleased with themselves because they speak it like the Queen, they must mos just take a look at the facts and get some perspective.

I mean you have got to agree, when you look at the facts, that African languages are part and parcel of who we are. Seriously. You can't deny it. They are our heritage.

And if the language in this article irritated you, then that's all the more reason for learning isiZulu or Setswana, or Tshivenda or Xitsonga, or isiXhosa, or Sesotho, or Sepedi or Siswati, or even "other".

*Tessa Dowling is the director of African Voices, a multimedia language development company. It has just produced phrase CDs for isiXhosa, Sesotho, isiZulu and Setswana. See www.africanvoices.co.za