Culture and Ethics

Indegenous Literature becoming extinct. Its effect on African culture and ethics. Indigenous language literature is slowly but surely under threat of extinction. What does that mean for the indigenous languages? What is there for translation from the original texts for socio-philosophical ideas as a possible panacea? I have noted with regret that many young people in the Anglo speaking African countries between the ages of 15 and 30 years can hardly express themselves in English and neither can they express themselves in their mother tongues. For many, fables, poems and rhymes are but just some foreign language. Their language is neither English nor their mother tongue nor their National language like in the case of Swahili for East Africa. For the case of Swahili in East Africa, even the little Swahili they may have leant (either from school as the case in Uganda or from School and home as for the case in Kenya and Tanzania), when they speak whatever they think they know, it is an adulteration of English, their mother tongue and the very Swahili they learnt in school. That kind of adulteration is what I would refer to as Katogo. Katogo is a prepared meal from Buganda, within Uganda of a mixture of cassava and beans savoured with local ghee, or may be a mixture of matooke (green bananas) and beans or ground nuts or offal, depending on ones choice.

The Euro African language that has caught fire on this continent, especially in East Africa should make anyone who cares for their culture and therefore ethics, very anxious. There is a saying that goes, Swahili was born in Zanzibar, grew up in Tanzania, had a marriage with English in Kenya, gave birth to half- castes who migrated into Uganda, but those half-castes also married the indigenous languages in Uganda and the pregnancy resulted in a still birth that was buried in Congo. When I closely look at the little indigenous language literature that has been produced in East Africa and even the little effort that has been invested to teach our children our indigenous languages, then I know we are headed for a chronic identity crisis. A case in point is the most recent meeting we had in Burundi. Due to the English language challenge in a dominantly French speaking country, it was necessary to have an interpreter for those of us who could hardly communicate in French or English. The young man,
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about 24yrs of age was tasked with translating every sentence, phrase for phrase for the participants either into English or French. I realized that as much as he is very good at French and fairly good at English, many times he needed to mix both French and Kirundi for the Burundians so as to put the point expressed across to the Burundians. There were instances when he could hardly translate the English phrase used into either French alone or Kirundi alone. As a result he would turn either French or Kirundi to best express the point that had been made. The use of two languages in an interchangeable manner or the preference of one against the other in a conversation is my biggest concern. This chronic identity crisis is already resulting in the erosion of our own African ethics and values that are only special to Africa. The katogo refered to earlier comes in handy at this point in this essay because the values that have been adopted by many Africans are neither indigenous African nor are they indigenous Western. They are a mixture of something that is steadily leading to an identity crisis, and that is what I call katogo. Some people could argue that there has been and continues to be an evolution of language, culture, ethics and values. I only choose to agree with them on the grounds that there is no one world system that may choose to remain static that has a place in this world anywhere. Therefore in choosing to remain conservative, the conservatives must evolve with their environment in order to keep their conservatism. I am therefore of the view that it is at this point in time that we critically look at the texts that were translated when our friends came over to Africa to share their form of literacy in the form of English or French or Portuguese or Dutch or Latin or even Arabic. The translated literature mainly comprised of scriptures or bits of it in form of booklets or pamphlets. They hardly understood what the local people said nor did the local people understand the visitors. Take for instance, the first translation of the Old and New Tesaments (the Bible) in Uganda into Luganda. The Bible was first translated from English into Luganda by Pilkington and Duta (Lutamaguzi). Pilkington was a naturally gifted man with various languages including Greek and Hebrew, besides Latin, while his colleague Duta was gifted with speaking Luganda and Swahili. The common language between the two therefore was Swahili. A question arises as to who taught the other Swahili since both of them were visitors or students to the language. Duta may have had an advantage in the sense that Swahili is an African language that has been conceived from other East
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African coastal languages. It is still evolving. It is therefore possible that some Luganda words crisscrossed into Swahili at that time even though as I mentioned earlier evolution has taken over and the Lluganda words introduced at that time are extinct. As a result a lot of what their life style stood for in terms of culture and ethics took part of the center stage during their most noble task of translating the very first Luganda Bible. My submission to this end is to pursue the possibility of a panacea in retranslating many of the current literature especially that from the West (North America and Western Europe) from the original languages into our own indigenous African languages. That way we may be able to salvage the little indigenous literature culture that has not yet been adulterated by the Euro African culture. Mwesigwa- Kasule Amos 06/11/12.