Roll back Chirwa (Setswana) language; un-mute the nation.

 On Friday, August 1st a local newspaper “The Voice”, reported a harrowing story about a young couple, an eighteen (18) year old girl and her twenty-four (24) year old lover, being each jailed for twenty years, after being convicted of performing anal sex on an eleven year old girl. Evidently, the 18 year old girl was not prepared to take her lover’s dick into that part of her own anatomy! The incident, and subsequent trial took place in a town that is traditionally NOT a Setswana speaking region of the country. Like most of our country however, the people who live there were forcibly de-linked from their language and culture by the Setswana speakers following the declaration in 1971 that henceforth, ONLY Setswana language would remain official. 

What these two young people did was horrific. They deserve a harsh punishment. But should our disgust at what they did lead us to lock them away for practically ALL their productive years? Are there no extenuating circumstances? Do we as a society, not share blame for these young people’s criminal behavior?  

I believe that we, as a society are to blame for allowing bad governance to warp these young people’s upbringing. The banning of their language in 1971 meant that they were born into an environment without adult cultural hand-holding. Their grandparents could no longer give them proper moral upbringing. The State, under Seretse Khama, condemned them to cultural and moral orphanage at birth. 

I have witnessed this cultural dislocation among my own people, the Kalangas. Mothers, fathers and grandparents of school going kids do not speak Setswana, even in those rare cases where they have learnt the Setswana language themselves out of necessity. These parents speak to their children in Kalanga, while the children speak to one another in Setswana. The resulting cultural disconnect leads to children growing up as cultural orphans right in the laps of their disgusted parents! 

This state of affairs is no accident. It was meticulously planned by Setswana speakers as a vehicle of subjugating the majority to the minority. At independence in 1966, the number of Tswana speakers in the country could not possibly have been more than the number of Kalanga speakers, given that the Tswana speakers, as we now know, were just transitioning from being Kalanga speakers anyway. The role played by the missionaries in spreading the Tswana language was critical. The missionaries such as Robert Moffat learnt the Setswana language from the Dutch Boers who had been in southern Africa since Jan Van Riebeck landed there in the seventeenth century. The Dutch Boers in turn had learnt the Setswana language from their domestic servants whom they had pacified, while the Huta-Ntota (Hottentots) were fighting gallant but futile battles against the European invaders! When the missionaries subsequently moved northwards, their working language was Setswana and everything in their path had to be converted to Setswana. So at Independence a large southern part of what is now called Botswana was Tswana speaking, hence the country’s name. 

Fearing that the Kalanga language would reassert itself after independence, the Tswana speakers persuaded the British colonizers to craft a constitution that FORCIBLY RENDERED THE COUNTRY AN EXCLUSIVELY Tswana country by declaring that the Tswana-speaking tribes were the MAJOR tribes, while the rest were subject tribes. The Kalanga-speaking remainders of the so-called MAJOR tribes were bundled together into ONE “subject” Kalanga tribe. The same was done to all other non Tswana-speaking tribes, such as Bakhwe, Bayeyi, Bambukushu etc. With the stroke of a colonizer’s pen, the majority had been reduced to a minority! To further their stranglehold on the new nation, the Tswana-speakers, through the colonizer’s hand, established a Parliament with AN UN-ELECTED “HOUSE OF CHIEFS” which house was composed exclusively of the people whom the colonizers had converted into Tswana speakers. Over the years since Independence, attempts by the so-called subject tribes to change the Tswana-centric constitution have at best, been met with cosmetic changes such as translating the name “HOUSE OF CHIEFS” into Setswana “Ntlo ya dikgosi”, which change some argue, further entrenches Tswana hegemony.  The Tswana push for complete dominance over other tribes is relentless. To completely kill the Kalanga language for example, they forbid Tribal secretaries to speak Kalanga language in Kgotlas. The Kgotla is a village communal gathering place where village issues are discussed. In Kalanga-speaking areas it is not uncommon to find a gathering of a hundred people, all Kalanga-speaking including the Chief, having to discuss everything in Setswana just because the Secretary is alleged to be non-Kalanga-speaking. On closer examination one finds that even the Secretary is Kalanga speaking but under strict orders not to do so. 

Now Tswana bigots have gone a step further. They have translated online search engines into Setswana language and applied those throughout the country. Setswana language needs to be rolled back before it leads to irreparable damage to our country. Only recently, the President Advocate Duma Boko revealed that he has a pet project to source books from his overseas friends, to come and stock libraries for young people in our country. But the truth is that because Setswana language was allowed total dominance over the English language, people do not read anymore. Just this week it was reported that a company specializing in printing and publishing was starting to shed jobs because business was bad. Of course in a country where people no longer read, this is to be expected. 

Setswana language is almost identical to ancient Sumerian language. As a human language Sumerian is newer than Kalanga language, but arguably, Sumerian influence is more widespread. In southern Africa, Sumerian-like languages such as Setswana, Sesotho etc. are conducting an aggressive campaign to obliterate all other languages. This has to stop.