THE MUZZLE

The highly provocative image of a muzzled African shown here is used on the cover of Paul Lovejoy's (1986) edited volume Africans in Bondage. Lovejoy does not provide details as to what the picture meant, and rightly so. This picture has to be seen to be believed, for it is truly beyond words. The “Who?”, “Where?”, and “When?” questions are absurd, since they are precisely the ones erased by the treatment of the human beings thus muzzled. The muzzle muffles the identity, the location, and the dignity of the person. The picture records the animal-like treatment of Africans and is reminiscent of what steps were taken to control Africans during slavery. The picture is as unbearable as the questions it raises and the ideas it insinuates. It is reminiscent of the chilling and often ugly epithets of racism.⁴

Historical sources indicate that the muzzle was said to serve a number of practical purposes, among them, to prevent slaves from “consuming stolen sugar cane, excessive drinking, and even from eating earth” (Conrad 1983).⁵ But regardless of the stated intentions offered by those who forced slaves to wear these muzzles, there can be no doubt that they also prevented these human beings from speaking. Could there be a more dramatic example of silencing than the incarceration of a person's mouth? There can hardly be a more brutal treatment of someone from an oral tradition, whose very existence is talk- and song-filled. This essay takes as its starting point the muzzle as the quintessential form of linguistic incarceration. This outrageous image graphically symbolizes the brutal and forceful silencing of African languages along with the distortion and suppression of Black expression proceeding from the human face. The muzzle appears adjustable so that it can be varied in tightness, restricting jaw movement and thus locking the tongue in, and with it African sounds. Without a voice, the African person is not even a character, but the negation of a person, reduced from speech to groans.

Subduing Africans required simultaneously arresting the body and containing the language and remanding it into custody within the person. It is therefore not difficult to see that Black languages have faced the same fate as their speakers. In taking the Akan, Bambara, Fon, Igbo, Mande, and the hundreds upon hundreds of other African identities apart, it was important to incarcerate the language and to pass a death sentence upon the language in a way that reduced individual ethnicities to merely African. Under the label African, specificity was lost in a sea (or better still, the silence) of generality. Since the times of slavery, Ebonics (here used to include all Black sounds, Black English vernacular (BEV), Creole, Patois, and indigenous African languages)⁶

have been systematically destroyed in obvious ways (the use of the muzzle) or through other subtle, more nuanced but no less ferocious processes. Many sub-Saharan African languages are on death row, leaving many of its speakers stranded in semilingualism (or plummeting linguistic competence), peculiar monolingualism, or asymmetric bilingualism.

LINGUISTIC INCARCERATION

The control of human bodies is undermined by linguistic freedom. Through the use of the muzzle, Africans were forced to keep it all (physical and mental) inside, to never say what they thought, not even to the wind. This confinement of languages in people's minds is the initial step in erasing them. Speaking had in some cases led to the organization of successful revolts, as one can glean from the remark in the 1744 book A New Voyage to Guinea, in which

It is thus on record that the strategy in slave ships was to simulate the Tower of Babel in order to firmly control the human cargo. Even on reaching North America's Chesapeake Bay, the slave trade deliberately scattered men and women from various nations in order to diminish any sense of solidarity that they would have formed while cramped together on the transatlantic journey (Berlin 1998, p. 115). To make these people seen but not heard was an important initial dehumanizing act. To be enslaved involved the confounding of tongues as a means of separating slaves through packaging them in close proximity, with no one speaking the other's language. Under such conditions, ideas could not be ferried from head to head. Perhaps the muzzle may thus have been needed in part as it became apparent that many sub-Saharan Africans were multilingual (or some languages mutually intelligible), allowing communication between slaves. Without language, plans could neither be made nor executed. In the case of slave ships, the Africans, though perfectly able to speak, were rendered mute. They were effectively mute in a crowd of languages, though obviously full of thoughts in the mind. This meant that slavery was an absurd space populated by a crowd of talkative mutes. This was true both during the journey as well as on arrival.

When a language is taken away (or is confined to only one's own mind) communication atrophies to basic instincts—an inhuman existence particularly brutal to oral cultures. For Africans, verbal interaction is the quintessential activity that buoys humanism:

Oral cultures live and die with the spoken word. To take the African person apart, the separation of African languages from their cultures is a very effective strategy for rendering the African personality irrecoverable within a very short time (perhaps a couple of generations). This muffling or denial of language, or curtailing its mastery by Black folk, is a central pillar of human erasure. The muzzle muffled expression, and without expression the humanity of people is considerably undermined. The arrestation and incarceration of African languages did not affect slavery only in snapshots; it was sustained through successive generations after the end of slavery. We learn that as late as 1908 the Gullah dialect spoken in the South Carolina Sea Islands was regarded as savage:

There can be little doubt that such “expert” witnesses provided the logic for the flagrant incarceration of Black languages wherever they were found. But we also learn that the Gullah were suspicious of people they did not know, and closer familiarity revealed that the “vocabulary and syntax the Sea Islanders used when speaking to strangers differed markedly from that they employed in addressing friends and relatives” (Turner 1947, cited in Levine 1977, p. 146). This means that the folklorists Bennett and Gonzalez may well have collected gibberish as data, which explains their “expert” opinions. Experts were important contributors to linguistic racism both in the new world and on the African continent. The practice of linguistic incarceration was reinforced by experts. Though colonialism was cast in racial and cultural racism by the British, the Germans, and the Portuguese, and in cultural racism by the French, an important part of its execution was the demonizing of native languages as inferior and subhuman, a clear case of linguistic racism. Alice Werner, Professor of Swahili and Bantu Languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies, went on record saying that in Sudanic languages,

Examples of this kind, simplifying Africa and Africans at face-value, abound. The amateur linguist F. W. H. Migeod, a transport officer in Ghana (at that time, the Gold Coast), referring to the more than 2000 languages of Africa, opined in 1911 that,

Further, regarding the humanity that occupies the vast continent, Migeod saw a connection between the vast riches of Africa and the downfall of its inhabitants.⁷

This obviously racist determinism, assuming Africans to be simple in thought and action, and therefore simple in language and lacking of metaphorical depth as well, is a part of the deep-seated loathing that informs the architecture of linguistic chauvinism. As it turns out, Africa is not only home to four of the twelve linguistic families of the world, its particular families are much more heterogeneous than most, and many of these languages have yet to be studied. The work of Joseph Greenberg and others has revealed that the structures of African languages are far from simple, and broad generalizations such as those made by Professors Werner and Migeod only served the racist agenda integral to the colonial regimes in sub-Saharan Africa.⁸

It is noteworthy that linguistic incarceration for some has been total: not merely the shutting off of the sub-Saharan language, but also the keeping of Western languages beyond the reach even of those who have wished to learn them. For the bid to linguistically dominate Africans, there was no hiatus even during World Wars I and II. When Africans were conscripted to fight European wars, denying African soldiers' language was a strategy much used by the French. Frantz Fanon observed that one of the strangest legacies of World War I was Petit Nègre,

The phonological and syntactic structure of Petit Nègre was constructed using the subversive approach of reinforcing mispronunciation and other deformations in grammar.⁹

The irony is not lost: while fighting for France, Africans were also in linguistic combat with the French, who only wanted bodies to execute their wars.

Arresting the development and the use of sub-Saharan African languages has been at the center of most domestic development policies in sub-Saharan Africa. The de-emphasis of vernaculars (the native local languages of acquisition and interaction) in deference to the dominant language (usually English, French, or Portuguese, but also domestic ones such as Swahili, Amharic, etc.) has led many to live in state of linguistic stagnation that places them in a downward spiral of declining linguistic acumen. Neglect of the mother tongue greatly compromises mastery of any subsequent language, as T. H. Baldwin, Acting Assistant Director of Education in Nigeria's Northern Provinces, observed in 1944:

Ignoring the obviously loaded concept of “more highly developed language,” the point here is that a strong command of the vernacular yields vital dividends in second language acquisition and learning. The prohibition of African languages from formal education, and with it the stealth muzzling of Black students, has a long history. By passing Decree 77 in 1921, the Portuguese forbade the use of African languages in Namibia schools, including publications in African languages, and by 1950, Portuguese became the sole medium of instruction in all schools, including private ones (Goke-Pariola 1993, p. 35). This bludgeoning of indigenous African languages out of schooling has culminated in what is now a widespread consequence: many Africans regard their own vernacular as orthogonal to pursuits of modern life, and even more so to intellectual endeavors. Of the French in Belgian Congo, a place with more than 200 languages, Goke-Pariola writes that “the Belgium strategy was first and foremost to avoid multilingualism. If that failed a ranking of national languages was to be done with French at the apex and African languages (regional vehicular languages) were to be helped to develop ‘rationally’” (1993, p. 35). By policy, mostly by decree, the traditional Black school was/is shut down by the incarceration of Black languages, and Black folk were/are forced to “pay attention” in languages they do not for the most part speak, nor even understand. Thus, like Petit Nègre mentioned above, we see the only dominant language available to Africans being used to the detriment of African languages, and, in the cases of Belgian Congo and Namibia, the use of some of the dominant languages to the same effect. Apartheid South Africa provides a case where a dominating language collided head on with the powerful Nguni languages (Xhosa and Zulu) in the infamous Soweto uprising.

Apartheid South Africa made it policy to remove African languages from formal intellectual pursuits when on June 16, 1974, Minister of Bantu Education and Development M. C. Botha issued a decree making Afrikaans the compulsory medium of instruction in Black schools. What followed was the Soweto uprising, in which over 30,000 students rioted against the policy, with the result that more than 500 people were killed.¹⁰

Thus the muzzle was carried to its final solution through the barrel of the gun. In a very real sense, languages were being shot at, making linguistic martyrs of the dead. This is a fresh case of murdering the corporeal to destroy the linguistic that the world must henceforth confront through the Hector Pieterson¹¹ Museum which opened on World Youth Day, June 16, 2002.

Sometimes the domineering language is also historically of indigenous stock, as is the case with Amharic imperialism. In the kingdom of Ethiopia, Amhara political and cultural dominance was buttressed by the insistence that Amharic be the language of the governments, the courts, the schools, and even of Protestant and Roman Catholic missionaries. The missionaries were for instance required to conduct a service in Amharic before it could be repeated in the local language (Nelson and Kaplan, 1981, p. 87). The muzzle has been thus imposed to control people and action in precisely those public spheres that are supposed to protect human rights.

THE CONTEMPORARY MUZZLE

From what I have said so far, it is reasonable to state that African languages have been rounded up and incarcerated by various regimes and institutions, not only in the past, but also in the present. Today the muzzle still holds Black tongues in place in very real and concrete ways, especially in sociopolitical spheres. The modern day equivalent of the muzzle is evident in sub-Saharan Africa, in the mismatches observed between language use for functions and activities that logically belong together. Taking Kenya, for example, there is no explicit gain associated with the mastery of local languages, with the exception of Swahili. Consider the following incongruities in language used between things that ought to go together, if reason were to prevail (≠ reads is not equal to or very seldom is):

• The language of local knowledge (indigenous) ≠ the language of education (English).
• The language of the home (indigenous) ≠ the language of instruction (English).
• The language of the child (indigenous) ≠ the language of the textbook (English).
• The language of daily life (indigenous) ≠ the language of the textbook (English).
• The language of play (indigenous) ≠ the language of learning (English).
• The language of acquisition (the child's own) ≠ the language of the school (English).
• The language of comprehension (indigenous) ≠ the language of exams (English).
• The language of practical problem solving (indigenous) ≠ the language of exams (English).
• The language of the teacher (indigenous) ≠ the language of instruction (English).
• The language of survival (indigenous) ≠ the language of education (English).

In the area of education, there are pronounced incongruities between the language the child understands, the language of the parent, and the language of schooling. Often the language of the child is also different from that of the teacher, and neither has a command of the language of instruction. It has been vehemently argued that schooling in indigenous languages is not viable, politically and economically, except perhaps for the woefully inadequate provision of mother-tongue instruction in the first three years of primary school education, as a bridge from vernaculars to English in Kenya.¹²

The performance of Kenya's children in 2002 is illustrative of the quality of the harvest. Announcing the results of the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education, Kenya's Minister of Education, Professor George Saitoti, revealed that,

The language of the child is incarcerated, reducing education to the pursuit of fluency in English mediated by markedly non-proficient instructors. Whenever the switch is made from the child's language to the language of the school, there is always an instructional blackout. For the vast majority of children, the blackout is total and final. Learning then is reduced to verbatim memorization (and handwriting!). To arrest the use of indigenous languages when they are most needed initiates the process of necrolinguistics, the erasure or non-mastery of the vernacular under the linguistically impoverished conditions imposed in order to learn English.

It is well known that adult language learners need intensive formal training even in the target language environment. To make language matter, Africans would have a virtually intractable problem of trying to learn English as adults in the absence of native speakers of English and with highly contaminated linguistic and cultural input. This situation establishes inferiority in perpetuity, where one strives to reach the unreachable. While working so hard to learn Portuguese, French, and English, sub-Saharan Africans have abandoned their indigenous languages and modes of thinking, and without much practice in indigenous languages, many of the educated occupy a linguistic no-man's-land, speaking peculiar English, French, or Portuguese, which is unintelligible to native speakers. This, too, is necrolinguistics—the extraction from Africans of native languages while letting grossly impoverished input inform African English proficiency creates esoteric linguistic beings:

Further instances of linguistic incarceration are indicated by the linguistic incongruities in Kenya and many other sub-Saharan states. Lacking a meaningful connection between society and language, no linguistic equations seem to work in Kenya's economics. The languages of the people producing Kenya's wealth (in agriculture and tourism) are not even recognized. Indigenous languages produce the goods and drive the demand, yet they are not the languages of upward mobility, nor the languages of essential services (health care, justice system, school, etc.). Indeed, the languages of production are not the languages of distribution. This is econolinguistics¹³

in disarray. Again, taking ≠ to read is not equal to or very seldom is, observe the following:

• The language of production (indigenous) ≠ the language of distribution (Swahili).
• The language of production (indigenous) ≠ the language of upward mobility (English).
• The language of goods (indigenous) ≠ the language of services (Swahili/English).
• The language of the majority (indigenous) ≠ the language of essential services (Swahili/English).
• The language of the informal sector (indigenous) ≠ the language of the formal sector (English).
• The language of demand (indigenous) ≠ the language of supply (Swahili/English).
• The language of innovation (indigenous) ≠ the language of technology (English).

These mismatched linguistic identities immediately suggest some of the reasons for the challenges facing Kenya in its attempt to democratize and engage its citizens in determining the country's future. Linguistic disenfranchisement is a muzzle that serves to ensure the longevity of the existing linguistic regime designed to exclude the majority. This is why in matters of justice and politics the language of the civilian is not the language of governance, nor that of jurisprudence. Seldom is the language of the plaintiff or the accused the same as that of the counsel; nor is the policeman's language that of the defendant, of the counsel, or that of the judge. Likewise, the language of the civilian is hardly ever the language of political debates or that of leadership (≠ reads is not equal to or very seldom is):

• The language of law enforcement (Swahili) ≠ the language of jurisprudence (English).
• The language of rural-rural (e.g., regarding land) disputes (indigenous) ≠ the language of the law courts (English).
• The language of law enforcement (Swahili) ≠ the language of a majority of the population (indigenous).
• The language of proficiency for the vast majority (indigenous) ≠ the language of the Constitution (English).
• The language of the majority of citizens (indigenous) ≠ the language of governance (English).
• The language of the average citizen (indigenous) ≠ the language of parliament¹⁴

  Swahili is rarely used by Kenya's parliamentarians in their deliberations.

  (English/Swahili).
• The language of the voter (indigenous) ≠ the language of the ballot (English/Swahili).
• The language of proficiency for most Kenyans (indigenous) ≠ the language of power (English).

Wherever one looks, Kenya is riddled with mismatches between language proficiency and language deployment. Here are yet more to consider (≠ reads is not or is very rarely the case):

• The language of the patient (indigenous) ≠ the language of health care and physicians (English).
• The language of the nurse (indigenous/Swahili) ≠ the language of the physician (English).
• The language of the patient (indigenous) ≠ the language of hospital records (English).
• The language of memory (indigenous) ≠ the language of written records and of archiving (English).
• The language of speaking (indigenous) ≠ the language of writing (English).
• The languages most widely spoken (indigenous) ≠ the languages of prime time broadcasting (English/Swahili).
• The language used in religious practice (indigenous) ≠ the language used in critical thinking (English/to a much lesser extent Swahili).

Traditional and Western religions appear to have a match between language proficiency and language deployment. It is not surprising, then, that some of the most effective institutions in sub-Saharan Africa are faith based. That the institutions which are the least tribal and the most united in purpose (whether in combating HIV-AIDS, clothing the poor, mobilizing people for political participation, etc.) are also the ones that have managed to deploy indigenous languages, speaks to the reality of the benefits that accrue from the linguistic capital of local initiative, indigenous know-how, and even the adaptation of technology. Here are some interesting consistencies (= reads is often the same as):

• The language of the bible (indigenous) = the language of worship (indigenous).
• The language of liturgy (indigenous) = the language of the worshippers (indigenous).
• The language of prayer (indigenous) = the language of the supplicant (indigenous).¹⁵

  Except of course for Muslims whose use of Arabic is an essential religious imperative.

• The language of conflict resolution (indigenous) = the language of the majority (indigenous).

With all the mismatches mentioned above, the point should be clear: the modern linguistic muzzle in Kenyan (and in sub-Saharan Africa, more generally) is institutionalized, and is fast becoming conventional. When Kenya's linguistic posture and practice is scrutinized, the picture that emerges is grossly untoward, to say the least, for the non-elite majority of citizens. The mismatches and inconsistencies listed above go beyond merely requiring proper linguistic alignment: they also embody the untold violation of human rights through language. The inconsistencies raise questions regarding the nature of justice meted out by the justice system, the kind of health care provision possible, and even the nature of governance and issues of suffrage. The muzzle is thus in place primarily through disregard of indigenous tongues and the promotion of the hegemonic aspirations of regional linguistic monopolies in the global culture currently in formation. Ngugi wa Thiong'o observes that,

Clearly, modern Kenya continues to remand most of its indigenous languages, essentially holding them in custody. It is therefore not surprising to find the linguistic incompetence that characterizes a large portion of the young population. Children and young people are products of their elders, so they learn rather quickly that indigenous languages are of no value. They abandon them, turning to regional or Western languages which in turn elude them because of the lack of good linguistic models for those high-premium languages. Given globalization, linguistic incarceration does not look as though it will be eligible for parole any time soon. Indeed, the muzzle, first literal and now figurative, continues to muffle African association of sound with meaning. The incongruent deployment of languages in Kenya aptly conveys the modern Tower of Babel, where the diversity of languages is underutilized in favor of the confounding yet-to-be-mastered but nonetheless privileged regional and Western tongues. Over the years this incarceration has come full circle, leading finally to the non-mastery of local language and thus condemning many Black folk to semilingualism or linguistic in-betweenness.

LINGUISTIC IN-BETWEENNESS

Semilingual or quasi-languaged folk should not exist, at least as far as the discipline of linguistics is concerned. In linguistics, one is monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual, whether using sound or sign. People whose language ability and practice cannot be uniquely associated with a particular spoken or sign language supposedly do not exist. The “word” from the discipline of linguistics is that, absent catastrophe, any child born healthy and hearing (in a human environment) develops a language triggered by the surrounding linguistic input. It is indeed a marvel of humanity that children the world over develop language ability at roughly the same age, achieving total mastery without deliberate or demonstrable effectiveness or even the necessity of instruction, and continuing to improve it rather rapidly through life. Steven Pinker (1999) writes that,

With regard to word recognition, it has been claimed that the listener knows the meaning of a spoken word in mid-pronunciation, in about one-fifth of a second,¹⁷

while the written word is accessed even faster, in about one-eighth of a second.¹⁸ In terms of orality,

How could linguistic in-betweenness exist if language were an instinct, as Pinker persuasively suggests? That would be the equivalent of being “semi-instinctual.”

Semilingualism is not entirely unknown in the literature. Bloomfield (1927) describes a young Menomini¹⁹

man as follows:

The case of this Menomini person is equally descriptive of a growing population of children and young adults in many sub-Saharan African countries: restricted vocabularies, highly limited grammar ability, and fixation on a limited set of constructions not as a matter of preference, but because of a paucity in the command of the requisite grammatical structures available in the language. In the case of the Menomini, linguistic-death-in-life left many young people linguistically deficient and barbaric, and with that their fate was sealed: they were equivalent to zombies, linguistically speaking. Within East Africa's urban areas, and increasingly in rural areas, many children, youth, and young adults are unable to master any one of East Africa's languages, including Swahili.²⁰

There are many who belong to an ethnic lineage and indeed loyally adhere to many of its rites and ritual practices. But this they do without speaking a word of that language. Instead they go through life speaking a concoction of indigenous languages with a Swahili base. These concoctions have been mistakenly characterized as SHENG (after Swahili-English). SHENG is complicatedly sprinkled with elements of dominant indigenous languages such as Dholuo, Gikuyu, Kamba, Kalenjin, but using a Swahili intonation, and, depending on the speaker's social status, it may also come with an English jolt added to it.²¹ SHENG is spoken primarily by Kenyans whose age ranges from small children to young working adults in their late thirties or early forties. SHENG has its beginnings in the poverty-stricken parts of Nairobi, which are congested with mostly inadequate housing that has resulted in the largest slum in the world. Nairobi's sustained high levels of unemployment and an ever-increasing rural-urban migration have contributed to a continuously increasing urban congestion in Nairobi's working-class neighborhoods. City congestion means that these people, who speak one of forty-two or so different Kenyan languages, have had to live with each other with little or no personal privacy in the slums. Indigenous languages are frowned upon and are considered a hindrance to success in Kenya's elite circles. Peer pressure among young people is toward a group solidarity based on the abandonment of parental languages and acquiescence to the urban-speak, SHENG. The urban youth living in these multiethnic neighborhoods created the SHENG jargon to communicate with one another.

There are several varieties of SHENG. Here we identify three broad types: A, B, and C, which are not entirely distinct, and are often used seamlessly. Type A SHENG is the most common in the poor sections of Kenya's urban areas (especially in Nairobi). Type A SHENG combines the phonology of the various indigenous languages to form words which are pronounced with Swahili stress patterns (penultimate stress).

In the examples below under SHENG A, the word oshago, with its use of o-morphology on both the beginning and the end of a noun, is a feature common in Dholuo (a Nilotic language). The word shag is taken from the Gikuyu word gichagi (village), which has been stripped of its vital noun class marker gi- and to which has been added a nominalizer extension -i, to leave chag (-ch- is also pronounced as -sh- and -s-). In fact, each word in SHENG A is a linguistically intricate (and also orderly or rule-governed) construction. In Nairobi's Eastlands and other working-class neighborhoods, Gikuyu and Dholuo are well represented. The A variety has very little or nothing to do with English and ought to be called “Swahili-Other.”

Some varieties of SHENG A are used as private languages among young people who, for lack of spatial privacy, resort to a linguistically constructed space allowing the younger generation to gain communicative privacy from their parents and other authority figures. The need to exclude authority figures (such as parents, teachers, law enforcement agents, etc.) from communication between young people is a defining characteristic of SHENG A. The need for privacy in congested space also requires secret vocabulary to be changed from time to time so that authority figures do not get to catch on to what the youth are doing. SHENG A has over forty words for girl; over twenty words denoting police, over ten words for marijuana, and ten words for money:²²

To live while speaking only some version of a patois is what urban youth in the slums are condemned to. There are a variety of Type A SHENGs, some of which are restricted to inner-city neighborhoods and specifically designed to exclude everyone outside the locale, age-set, or group.

In SHENG B, the roots no longer come from indigenous language sources, but from English, even when retaining the Dholuo o- marking at the beginning and the end of the word. In the word othato, the root -that- is taken from [thirty]. In the word nakulove, na- is the present tense prefix that follows a truncated ni-, which is the first person singular. The -ku- that follows is a prefix for second-person singular [you], such that nakulove means [I love you]. SHENG B is very systematic in its use of English roots and may be regarded as English which is morphologized mostly with Swahili affixes. In the B variety, pronunciation is Swahili driven.

SHENG C is the reverse of SHENG B: the C variety is English-morphologized Swahili and should really be called ENGSH (or English Swahili). In this case, all roots are English, and all the affixal morphology is Swahili. The pronunciation however is English driven. The word unbwagable [one who cannot be wrestled down], which has become popular among incumbent politicians, uses English morphology. The strings un- and -able are familiar morphemes attached to any verb in English to reverse its meaning or the state of the verb. Of all of the different types of SHENG, variety B influenced the naming of Swahili-English.

SHENG A is common in the poorer sections of Kenya's urban areas; SHENG B is spoken by those who have benefited from an English education and may live in upper-middle-class neighborhoods; SHENG C is spoken by educated Kenyans. SHENG A is the most fascinating, for it is developing as a distillation of Kenya's rich linguistic heritage and arising from multilingual abilities of the speakers. SHENG B Swahilicizes English, enriching itself by foraging word roots (primarily from English), and SHENG C anglicizes Swahili. Both SHENG B and C, however, are building up from a very impoverished (and phony) Anglo environment. SHENG C demonstrates English speaking with code-switching involving substitutions of English words for Swahili ones and using English word formation rules on Swahili words and then incorporating them into Kenyan English usage. Because of speakers' lack of proficiency in English, it is through SHENG B and C that semilingualism is being incubated. In urban settings, more and more children and young people are moving away from SHENG A, but are also failing to learn either their native tongue or Swahili adequately. In addition, they have little or no real interaction in English with native speakers. Since they lack adequate Swahili and wish to move closer to English, SHENG B will remain debilitating to these people. SHENG C can be subsumed under English, as it is often heard in upper-middle-class residential areas and almost never in Kenya's shanty urban sections. The trouble is that some now speak only B and C varieties of SHENG and no other language. Like the Menomini man White Thunder, these folks speak no language well or beyond the confines of inner city life—and worse, sometimes not beyond an immediate neighborhood within, say, Nairobi's Eastlands. In a sense, they occupy a squeezed space between languages, mastering a language neither within nor outside their group.

The assumption has been that Kenyans are losing the forty-two or so indigenous languages to English and Swahili, the latter being the largest regional language of Eastern Africa. But there is ample evidence that neither English nor Swahili is being mastered by Kenyans, whichever age group one considers. In the case of children, this fact is reflected by their poor performance on language exams. The use of the vernacular as the standard language appears to be axiomatic, but the lack of a stable vernacular (or semilingualism) is undermining the efforts of language education and serves as a near guarantee of failure, with only rare exceptions (Goke-Pariola 1993, p. 34; Rickford 1999). Small wonder that, even after four decades of concentrating on Swahili and English and neglecting other Kenyan languages, little progress has been made.

With regard to English, the situation in Kenya is being replicated across sub-Saharan Africa. A check on the status of Europe's languages in Africa overwhelmingly reveals that the “phonic” part of Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone Africa is in fact phony. European languages have not fared at all well in sub-Saharan Africa. Paulin Djite observes that “… French has failed to hold sway and spread [in Côte d'Ivoire], especially beyond the urban centers” (Djite 2003, p. 39). Ngugi wa Thiong'o (2000) estimates that 90% of Africans speak only African languages (cited in Skutnabb-Kangas 2000, p. 232). Bernd Heine (1992) estimates that up to 20% of Nigerians speak English (especially Nigerian English), and no more than 10% speak French in “Francophone” Africa, while Portuguese is spoken by only 5 to 10% in “Lusophone” Africa (cited in Skutnabb-Kangas 2000, p. 233). Skutnabb-Kangas (2000) correctly observes that South Africa is in fact more Zuluphone or Xhosaphone than anything else.²³

There isn't much hope for making Africa genuinely Anglophone, Francophone, or Lusophone, if experience teaches us anything. It is disheartening to advocates of the “teach them more English” approach to sub-Saharan Africa to learn that, in very large democracies outside of Africa, English has yet to take root. Skutnabb-Kangas reports Pattanayak's observation regarding India thus: “in spite of the massive effort of the past 200 years, a mere 1% of the total population may be said to have acquired facility in manipulating English in some manner and in the mid-90s he [Pattanayak] assessed it at less than 4%” (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000, p. 232).

The loss of vernacular indigenous languages through semilingualism is a feature diagnosed by necrolinguistics. The supreme paradox is that, in spite of the poor report card on the use of European languages, many of the indigenous languages are at the same time threatened. It is this highly limited use of English, French, and Portuguese, going hand in hand with the loss of indigenous languages, that is a milestone of linguistic-death-in-life: the taking away or curtailing of people's linguistic wherewithal with no discernible compensatory gains. In Western cultures, a loss of language may not necessarily mean a loss of connection to the land, but in oral cultures, loss of language means loss of geography (in the sense of place and orientation). The word Gikuyu refers not only to the language, but also the people and the land. In addition, Gikuyu is also the name of the father of all Gikuyu people. Loss of Gikuyu, the language, is at the same time a loss of the land, the people, and the traces of one's identity, for knowledge gained through centuries of experience in the Gikuyu environment is thus lost (the flora and fauna of Gikuyuland, the topography of the land, its historical importance, etc.). Unmistakably, then, loss of Gikuyu creates in situ heritage communities of people who must now reconstruct knowledge of their environment in a new language. But if the new linguistic resource for thinking and deliberating is only half of what it formerly was, then the result can only be stagnation. Semilingualism in this case can be said to be a form of linguistic zombiism. Oliver Sacks observes that

Linguistic in-betweenness or semilingualism is not a healthy state of being. But since the message in sub-Saharan societies is that indigenous languages are an impediment that should remain sidelined, people pursue regional and international languages which are only in the airwaves and therefore cannot be mastered by the majority of people. But, beyond semilingualism, discordant monolingualism is also caused by linguistic incarceration and the silencing of indigenous languages.

DISCORDANT MONOLINGUALISM

Discordant monolingualism arises when the language one speaks is not the language of the culture one practices. Discordant monolinguals are primarily found in urban areas, although their numbers are on the rise in rural areas as well. It is a central claim of necrolinguistics (being advanced here) that when the languages of oral cultures fall into disuse, the immediate effect is to distance those cultures from the environments of their formation, in addition to all of the associated knowledge borne and transmitted by those languages. What results is a bizarre situation in which people are aliens at home. With the loss of language, it is as though the land pushes people away, reducing them to mere residents. People who were once inseparably linked to the land are thus transformed from natives to heritage communities, albeit in situ. According to the Gikuyu proverb riika na nyumba itiumagwo, “the age and the clan have no exit.” But the ethnic age and the clan cease to exist not long after the language is lost. This is the effect of discordant monolingualism.

In East Africa, one's mother tongue has often been the vehicle of culture. Thus if one speaks Chagga (a language spoken on the northeastern slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro, Mt. Meru, and in the Moshi area, in the United Republic of Tanzania) as a mother tongue, one also by and large lives a Chagga cultural life. A Chagga cultural life means that the relevant construal of kinship structures, ritual adherence, relation to the environment, and the deployment of symbolic meaning are all principally predicated upon the system, attitudes, and beliefs of the Chagga. If that were not so, there would be no Chagga culture and world view to talk about. Urban areas are particularly instrumental in separating language from culture. To my knowledge, the individual who speaks one language while existing in another culture has not been treated in the linguistic literature. Does language shift imply cultural shift? What does it mean to be a Swahili monolingual Mchagga, an English monolingual

,

²⁴

a French monolingual Bangubangu,²⁵

or a Portuguese monolingual Tsonga person?²⁶

In sub-Saharan Africa, Afro-Saxons²⁷

come to exist only through the loss of indigenous languages.

Tanzania is Africa's shining example of the rise of monolingualism, where Swahili has been praised not only for uniting the country but also for achieving levels of literacy far superior to many other sub-Saharan countries. But a closer look does not leave one with a rosy picture at all. Tanzania is another great example of the linguistic tsunami that Swahili is causing in the region: the demise of the more than 120 languages indigenous to Tanzania is imminent. Clearly, when Wole Soyinka suggested that Swahili could serve well as the language for Africa,²⁸

he could not have had in mind the linguistic scorched earth policy that Swahili has visited on Tanzania and which appears to be gaining ground in Kenya. The linguistic incarceration and the semilingualism discussed above, the annihilation of local tongues is rife. It turns out that we should curb our enthusiasm when it comes to the powerful regional languages of Africa. The linguistic inabilities manifested by East Africans are escaping notice as institutions clamor to ram the dominant languages into people's psyches. Swahili is thriving at the expense of local languages. In Eastern Africa today (especially in Tanzania and Kenya, but also in most sub-Saharan countries), we must ask what it means to own a language. We now have Chagga and Sukuma people (along with those who once spoke any of the 120 Tanzanian languages) who are Swahili monolinguals. There are indications that in Tanzania 44.3% of the population is under fourteen years of age and speaks mainly Swahili. Indeed, most of the Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM) population born since 1977 uses exclusively Swahili.

Discordant monolinguals include children who have a receptive understanding of their parental language but never utter a word in it. There are many children who respond to requests by their parents whether made in Gikuyu or in English. So a dialogue is English-Gikuyu on the parents' side, but exclusively English is spoken by the child. This Afro-Saxon in the making grows up in total disregard of his or her parental language and has hostile attitudes toward the local language as backward, old-fashioned, and embarrassing. But due to the lack of proper interaction in English with its native speakers, more and more young people are becoming like White Thunder, the Menomini man described above.

There are also children who, though native in one language (say, Chagga), have parents who speak their second language (say, Swahili) to them, while for all intents and purposes living the Chagga culture. This is the emergence of the Afro-Swahili: the creation of a heritage group whose members speak Swahili while having ethnic attachment to their country of origin. If heritage communities are established in foreign lands, and the loss of indigenous languages creates in situ heritage communities, it follows, then, that losing the indigenous language converts traditional lands into foreign ones, making strangers of the inhabitants. In this way, language is connected to the land (or the soil, as many Africans are wont to say). By using a language that is discordant with the lived culture, children live the life of foreigners in their own country. But there is an even greater issue involved in this form of monolingualism.

Language loss forfeits intellectual advantage (Sommer 2004, p. 20) and may in fact lead to an abyss riddled with what Derrida terms a “disorder of identity,” in which intricate sociopathological and psychopathological connotations abound, buoyed by a peculiar monolingualism described in Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin (Derrida 1998, p. 14). Why would Derrida, with a Judeo-Franco-Maghrebian geneaology, find his French monolingualism so thoroughly lacking with respect to his Judeo and Maghrebian self? In monolingualism of the other, there is no possibility of subverting convention and creating a subsidiary dialect that one could then call “one's own.” Monolingualism of the other produces serious turbulence in one's otherwise progressive corporeal life, in the sense that it is couched in an impasse: a perfectly rich language (French, in Derrida's case), with a long intellectual history, nonetheless remains detached and unfeeling for those who (like Derrida's people), while adapting to French for centuries, have remained excluded by it over the course of those same centuries. We may thus assume that there are many who, like Derrida, make strides in many spheres, while at the same time being unable to cross the multiple rifts caused by linguistic peril over time, and are left clinging to merely prosthetic notions such as residence or citizenship, which can and has been conferred and withdrawn in various epochs, as Derrida observes. Thus while monolingualism is hopelessly unidirectional in the sense in which Sommer (2004) describes it,²⁹

monolingualism of the other adds a series of truncations without much record of what the missing parts are, let alone where they might be found. It follows, then, that the monolingualism of the other cannot restore or rehabilitate its linguistically disenfranchised ranks. French could not provide compensatory comfort to a Franco-Maghrebian such as Derrida.

ASYMMETRICAL BILINGUALISM

The eminent scholar, philosopher, poet extraordinaire,³⁰

and former President of Senegal Léopold Sédar Senghor attained legendary prowess and acumen in the French language and culture, being recognized as the most honored Black user of the French language by France itself, and far surpassing all other Black Francophones (Mazrui and Mazrui, 1998, p. 13). I have called his bilingualism “asymmetric” because it invites scrutiny of the challenges introduced by one-sided bilingualism. We would be hard pressed to find any French person interested in African languages to even half the extent that Senghor was interested in French. Whatever benefits accrue to the human spirit from bilingualism must be limited if the two languages do not communicate beyond the confines of a person's head. Senghor himself appears to have had serial monologues, albeit in two languages, whereby one language refused to speak to the other—each living in lonely isolation within the same head. From Jules Michelt's Introduction to a Universal History (1834) we learn that,

Senghor is reported to have said that “France wants bread for all, culture for all, liberty for all, but this liberty, this culture, and this bread will be French” (Vaillant 1990, p. 53). Over half a century after Michelt, in 1902, William Ponty, French Governor General of Senegal, made it clear that “the basic precondition of the success of our domination, of its continuation lies in the use of our language …by the local population” (Vaillant 1990, p. 53). And, more than a century later, we find the French desperate and quite unhappy, claiming that the dominance of English has caused the erosion of French, as is illustrated by the following complaint made by a member of the French parliament on Newshour:

Small wonder that Senghor's life had to be meticulous and deliberate: his Serer-French bilingualism³²

meant that French was in combat with Serer “in one dark body,” as W. E. B. Du Bois puts it in The Souls of Black Folk (1903[1999], p 11). Despite the claims that Senghor bridged two cultures, one is left wondering what purpose a bridge serves if the aim of one side is to annihilate the other within one person. With asymmetrical bilingualism (of unequally yoked languages), the person becomes the rope used in a tug-of-war pulling the African in both directions, with each side ferociously determined to win. For many educated multilingual Black folk around the world, asymmetrical bilingualism creates a disquiet, a loneliness experienced in the tensions between the attraction and repulsion of two worlds in constant play (without ever being played out). This is why Senghor's double consciousness reflects the “two-ness” that Du Bois describes (1903[1999], p. 11). It is equivalent to living in a mental exile, a space full of conflict. Senghor experienced two linguistic strivings, one inherent, the other learned. No one is better suited than Senghor to gauge how deeply a mother tongue is lodged in one's being, despite one's ardent and perennial patronage of another. Senghor's utter love and loyalty for the French language and culture is legendary, rising above forgiveness and overflowing into a priestly plea on behalf of France that is as Catholic as are the sins of France, and prominent among which is colonialism.³³

Senghor broke through that almost impenetrable racial, cultural, and cognitive barrier that defines Africanism, but he is said to have remarked that “je ne peux pas pleurer en français [I cannot cry in French].”³⁴

This statement is not in praise of French (though Senghor was not lacking in statements which were). Nor does it mean that his speaking French leaves him deliriously happy (by meaning, for instance, that speaking French takes away all tears). Rather, here Senghor identifies something that the French language could not do for him—it wasn't there for him. There was something in Senghor that French could not tame. But Senghor is the joy of French assimilation policy and the hope of all those aspiring to all things French. If anyone not French were able to “cry in French,” Senghor should have been able to.

It is therefore not a trivial matter for Senghor to say that he could not cry in French. Whatever is embodied by crying has a language, and that language is the mother tongue, which is also (we may assume) the language of real laughter. One might then say that Senghor's soul belonged to his native Serer, but French possessed his mind, and his body belonged to both Serer and French, albeit ambiguously. A vital component of necrolinguistics is to recognize the phenomenon of languages in conflict within mental spaces, to understand which languages lose out to others and what anxieties accrue to the body in the process.

The declaration “je ne peux pas pleurer en français” is intriguing because it suggests that deeply felt or experienced mental exhalations³⁵

are grounded in mother-tongue languages much more than in the languages learned later in life. To attempt to cry in the language of the other seems in some sense counterfeit or bleached in feeling, even to the most bilingually determined. Disturbed by the search for words in midcry, one has to choose which one to serve, the crying or the translation. In the latter case, the crying is lost in the translation. The language that spits out what coalesces out of experience defies translation. Perhaps this is why the biography of Senghor written by Vaillant (1990) makes numerous mentions of Senghor's sustained wish for and pursuit of the study of African linguistics. This is the natural result of foreign language study: if properly done, it leads one back to one's native language, with a curiosity and appreciation that is impossible without bilingualism.³⁶ Perhaps, too, this is why dreams prevented Senghor from resting. The possibility of a complete lingual-cultural-racial metamorphosis (turning White) was the stuff of nightmares for Senghor, as we are told in his biography:

For Senghor, “turning White” would mean losing everything about himself and his suffering, which was absolutely intolerable: “For Senghor it was a question of honor, the honor of the Serer” (Vaillant 1990, p. 59). We learn that on his seventieth birthday Senghor gave his benediction in Latin, a departed language survived by French and the other rich progeny of Romance languages:

It remains an open question whether Senghor gave any benediction in Serer, the living language in which he could cry. But there is an interesting interplay between vernaculars and foreign languages: it is axiomatic that vernaculars enhance (rather than hinder) second language acquisition, and the converse is true as well; learning a second language inescapably leads to one's appreciation of one's own language. But asymmetrical bilingualism, while having the traditional benefits of bilingualism (principle among them the ability to traverse two cultures), is couched in a combat, with one side seeking to dominate the other. In Senghor's case, this combat informed his Négritude and developed in him a great longing to study African linguistics. Symmetrical bilingualism, on the other hand, has existed for millennia in sub-Saharan Africa, where knowing two or more languages is not one's transition to monolingualism of the dominant but an asset for developing human networks that form the backbone of African humanism.