Obsession with English language indicates identity crisis among Ugandans

Many Ugandans with a good classroom education cannot sustain a meaningful text chat in their mother tongues. Many of them think it is not even important to be able to do that.

Their mother tongues have no place in the schooling system that has molded them. These tongues also offer no prospects in the career mill to which school has attached them. Their schooling has been mainly conducted in English their entire classroom lives.

They, therefore, attach intellectual value to one’s ability to weave a flawless flow of the English language, both in speech and in writing. It is no wonder, of course, since they have had to sit examinations to test their English language abilities. In some instances, the grades they have scored in this language have been used to place them in positions of privilege at some point in their lives.

It has not been uncommon for students’ capabilities to be, to a large extent, judged on the basis of their academic grades in just two subjects; English and Mathematics. As such, our society places a premium on one’s ability to speak and write perfect English.

This is simply a regrettable fixation. It even appears worrisome that a grammatical error flashing against a television station’s broadcast becomes an engaging topic on social media, especially in a society where the majority of the people would not be able to offer a summary translation of the same broadcast in their mother tongues.

It indicates that people consider that perfect English is possibly a measure of good intellectual standing, or something else but equally important. The truth though is that the primary use of English is to facilitate communication, as any other language.

If we do not find anything strange about being unable to write good Luganda, we should not be bothered about isolated errors in English, as long as we can pick the communicator’s message. After all, we are not even as good at Swahili as Ugandans, and yet it is the most commonly spoken African language. We find nothing strange with our inabilities regarding Swahili even when sister countries around us have a fair command of the language.

In Uganda, English serves an important purpose as a unifying language given how multilingual we are. We cannot wish it away. However, no Ugandan needs a reminder that we are not English. Our cultural identity cannot be separated from our mother tongues since culture and language are inseparably interrelated.

Our society’s glorification of English therefore, which is seen through such incidents as social media reactions against errors in the language, indicates an identity crisis. In our subconscious minds, we are staggering between a British identity and our real African identity.

We can credit colonialism for that, along with the fact that we have failed to disentangle our mindsets from the relevant trap. We thus in some way assume a dual personality as people, which some experts have linked to a prevalent crisis of conscience that impinges greatly on African self-emancipation.

By striving to appear like white men and women in black skins, we throw ourselves into a terrible psychological complex. We end up involuntarily endorsing and reinforcing a hurtful state of servitude.

The above challenge though does not relate to just Uganda. Overall, an African who cannot express himself in one of the colonial languages is considered illiterate. It does not matter what kind of education, knowledge, or skills they possess, considering that education is not only a classroom matter. This state of affairs rests in the psychological dominance generally associated with a people whose language is dominant. The colonial system necessarily imposed English and other colonial languages on the African landscape.

The above dominance and related adulteration of the African cultural identity, therefore, sit on firm ground. It requires deliberate effort to free our minds. We will not stop using English any time soon, but we will be able to judge its place in our society – as simply a facilitator of communication, and nothing more special than that.   

I am not ignorant of the fact that many among us would consider such an issue unimportant. In any case, we are not short of very pressing and urgent issues that may overshadow such seemingly far-flung ones. In my opinion though, one of our biggest challenges as Africans is to do with partly caged mindsets. A lot of undesirable conditions in our societies are linked to that.

 Raymond is a Chartered Risk Analyst and risk management consultant

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