Imagining Multilingualism

Imagine something with me.

There is a country which, much like many in the world, has many speakers of many languages. This country is a part of one of the many places in Africa colonised by Europeans since the 15th century. Over the 500 years since colonies of Europeans first touched its shores, only a few of these languages have died. This is unusual, given what happened in many other parts of the world.

In fact, as a result of one of the colonising powers’ mixed offspring’s nationalistic devotion to the development of their own creolised language, many of the indigenous languages and their attendant cultures were actively promoted as part of government policy for the last 50 years of the 20th century. This went some way towards fixing the damage done by the previous one and a half centuries of rule by the British Empire, famous for its incredibly brutal policies regarding language.

However, the attendant totalitarian racist social engineering in the last half of the 20th century, including a built-in education programme aimed at diminishing every person of colour’s sense of self and autonomy, when overlaid on the existing substrate of conversion to a Christian ideology that relegated all people of colour to be servants to their paler masters, meant that anyone who promoted their own language or culture was deemed a rough heathen at worst and a sell-out at best.

The resistance movements that answered the system combined Pan-Africanism, communism, unionisation and self-sufficiency – noble ambitions, devoid of tribalism and petty nationalism in favour of a greater dream of a non-racial harmony. Many of the greatest minds led this resistance, and the response of the state to their resistance was to detain, prosecute, imprison and murder them.

After many years, during which many of the languages continued to develop written and spoken expressions in spite of the brutality of the regime, the country was eventually made free to engage in democracy – there were to be no more white masters, no more servants of colour. This change was achieved with some bloodshed, and many compromises, but it was accomplished.

Now I want you to imagine the diverse people of this country, newly given the ability to choose what mattered to them. Their vision of non-racial harmony shines through in a Constitution that puts many others to shame.

In terms of language, they made a choice that few others have made. Instead of choosing a single European language as their everyday currency, they chose to promote a multiplicity of languages (including English and the creolised European language mentioned previously). They set up legal and constitutional safeguards so that each language and culture would be promoted and developed so that their speakers would never again be made to feel inferior or be disenfranchised because they did not possess the codes to access its courts, its parliaments, its schools and heritage and marketplaces as equals.

The world applauded.

The country set up new laws to make sure that each ‘language’ chosen (a little arbitrarily, admittedly, but in the right spirit) would be able to develop all the resources needed to usher in a new age of linguistic diversity – dictionaries, formal language bodies, mandatory multilingualism in all spheres of life and the option for all schools to choose whichever languages suited them.

The world rose to a standing ovation.

After the initial glow of the new age had faded, it became clear that these noble ambitions carried a cost: one not only in money but also in terms of identities and truths and inadequacies that few were able to confront. Some of the languages needed more work than others, and it was heavy going to get them all to a place of equality.

The applause slowed, then ceased. Attention shifted to other more worthy candidates for the world’s attention.

The work continued. Mostly it was erratic, a few steps forward up a slippery slope. The few stronger languages continued to develop and prosper in the new world, racing to colonise new empires in the vacuums left by the old ones, as pale monoglots emigrated, quietly laagered or died off.

In an attempt to answer the problems, a Board was established to promote and defend the languages. At first, they seemed to be doing good work – holding events, making plans, fighting for more recognition and raising awareness of what needed to be done.

People took notice. Much hope was put in them.

This hope proved to be in vain, however. For the Board’s focus on events and recognition and awareness continued and continued to promise actual real tangible action, but… there was never enough money.

You see, no matter how many events they held or how much awareness they raised, no matter how much of their budget was spent on tinsel and ribbons and big screens and DJs, no matter how many writers and musicians and dramatists they adopted, no matter how many times they devoted significant percentages of their budget to redesigning their logos or making banners or taking out full-page spreads in well-read newspapers, things just seemed to get worse.

Of course, the government investigated their lack of performance. On numerous occasions, in fact. And there were many different recommendations made, including that this Board be shut down and authority for their various activities be absorbed into the overarching Department of Arts and Culture, which had now become Sports, Arts and Culture, but which really seemed to be nothing more than Recreation – especially for the numerous highly paid executives growing fat at the top of this hierarchy of uselessness.

The recommendations were ignored, of course. As they always were.

Because any treatment plan aimed at dealing with the malignant thing that had grown from the noble intentions of the Constitution, fattened by the guilt and regret and low self-esteem engendered by years of colonialism and infighting and abortive attempts at autonomy, was deemed an attack: an assault framed as neo-colonial, as racist, as tribalist, as ‘captured’, as counter-revolutionary.

So the cancer grew, and grew, and metastasised until it had infected the minds not only of the Department of Recreational Uselessness but also the Department of Education, now demoted to being the Department of the most Basic, the Department of the Lowest Bar in the World.

Don’t get me wrong, though – some people still continued to work in the background, in spite of the system. As before, some languages continued to grow in the toxic waste-dump. It rather reminds me of the mould that thrives inside the crumbling reactor at Chernobyl.

And the malignancy that had mutated from the Board began to take on the characteristics of the previous regime – it began to divide the languages against each other, and to make decisions about what was correct and what was not. It began to attack and denigrate and publish dictums and edicts of its own – Thou-shalt-nots and Cease-and-desists dripping with carcinogenic ooze, aiming to control and define and pollute what might be growing of its own accord, or anything that went beyond the original limits chosen misguidedly by the dreamers of the first constitution.

Now imagine that we are thirty years into this new world.

There are 14 people at the head of this Board. They are supposed to be the guardians of every aspect of the languages they serve, but they are somehow only presiding over ever more opulent events, talk-shops and other self-congratulatory sessions that reek of ego and corruption, where lip-service is paid to the principles of the founders while each new incarnation seeks only to take as much as possible before they are discovered – whereupon they are rooted out and fired, only to be replicated almost exactly by others of the same ilk. These 14 individuals now earn as much in one year as 7 of the 11 groups that are meant to promote each of the official languages, even after years of ‘austerity measures’ and ‘budget cuts’.

Now, in the face of new strictures on their blood-and-nutrient-supply, they seek to strangle the units and take what they have so carefully put to use to keep their languages alive.

“Don’t worry,” they claim, “we will research and publish and promote the languages”.

“Don’t worry,” they claim, “the future of your language is in good hands”.

They say this with suppurating mouths filled with cancerous sores, their desire leaking from every orifice. They don’t care about languages. They care only about their continued existence. They have no other purpose, after all, other than to grow and feed and grow and take over more of what is left of the body that was once a diverse country.

Out of sight of the ever-growing cancer, people begin to be aware of it. Some try to reason with the entity – they are absorbed before they can fight back. Others refuse to reason with them, and die fighting.

What happens next, in this imagined country? Who knows?

If you haven’t yet guessed, I think you should know that this imagined country is South Africa. This is a true story, rendered metaphorically because the truth just doesn’t seem to get through. You can try to quibble with the details, but the truth is clear.