Ngugi wa Thiongo The role of colonial language in creating the image of a savage continent. AN intellectual is a worker in ideas, with words as the primary means of production. Ideas are constructed in specific languages, and if we believe that ideas are important in development, in the determination of relations of wealth, power and values in a society, then the languages of their construction and eventual distribution may be a matter of life and death for societies. For that very reason we cannot divorce issues of language and writing from issues of wealth, power and values. An intellectual is also an interpreter, mediating between society and specific processes in nature, society and thought. Both as a worker in ideas and as an interpreter, he or she plays an important role in our collective psyche. I want to look at the genealogy and types of the modern African interpreter. There are three types and three roles into which he could and has fallen in the colonial and post-colonial era: the interpreter as a foreign agent and messenger; as a double agent; and as a peoples scout and guide to the stars of freedom. In 1554, John Lok, an Englishman, made his first voyage to what is now Ghana. On returning to England, he brought back with him five Africans. They were kept in England long enough for them to learn English. Four of them returned to Africa as interpreters and public relations men for subsequent English voyagers. Thus, according to an account of William Towersons voyage of 1556, it was one of these interpreters who pacified a hostile crowd of natives. At first the natives would not come out to meet them in their ship, but at the last by the perswasion of our owne negros, one boat came out to us, and with him we sent George our negro ashore, and after he had talked to them, they came aboard our boates withoute feare. Note the possessive reference to the interpreter. The pattern was established. The region was now ready for the era of English participation in the Atlantic slave trade. An account of voyages all round the world, Principal Navigations, came out in three volumes in 1598-1600, firing the imaginations of Elizabethan and Jacobean writers. Thus, in Shakespeares The Tempest, by the time Caliban has learnt to curse [his master Prospero, in Prosperos tongue], he has already shown Prospero all the secrets of the island. Prospero does not have to learn Calibanese in order to get to know these secrets. Instead, he teaches Prosperese to Caliban, in the tradition of Loks five Africans. Caliban learns Prosperese and spies against himself. The same process is dramatized in Defoes Robinson Crusoe, where Crusoe teaches Friday English - and the first lesson is that he, Crusoe, is master. KING GEORGE OF ENGLAND It is the languages of Europe, which define, delimit and identify each of the plantations in the Caribbean, the Pacific and Americas. It is the languages of the different masters, which keep them apart, and so prevent the various enclosures from communicating with one another. Spanish enclosures remain Spanish; English, English; and French, French and these never meet unless through conquest and reconquest. Within each plantation, African names and languages are systematically eliminated. Thus, for diasporan Africans, the European languages worked as a boundary more difficult to cross than the Atlantic Ocean. Their linguistic linkage to the mother continent was broken, but that between the plantation owner and his linguistic base in Europe remains intact.Read more reunionblackfamily/apps/blog/show/10735251-the-role-of-colonial-language-in-creating-the-image-of-a-savage-continent
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 07:56:38 +0000
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