Human words and The Word (Part II): African languages and The Word
For all of us, the language that really counts is the one we assimilate from the first community we are immersed in. To fail to learn our native languages is to lose our souls.
(reading time: about 12 minutes)
(In case you missed it, here’s a link to Part I of this article.)
Native Language and the Soul of African Peoples
Every clearly defined community is held together by its language, history and way of life. The profound experiences that shape meaning in living communities, e.g. the experience of God, of love and sorrow, or birth and death, of communion with nature, etc. tend to be expressed not only in language but above all in poetry and song. This would help to explain why some of the most sophisticated cultures in human history have enshrined their fundamental truths and visions in poetry which was nearly always sung. Thus Homer gave us his Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil (in imitation of his Greek forerunner) gave us his Aeneid. That tradition was carried on in the Christian era as well with The Divine Comedy of Italy, the Chanson de Roland of France, the El Cid of Spain, and Beowulf of England.
Each language houses the soul of a people; and just like each person has a unique, unrepeatable soul, so does each language. Each language can say something that another cannot say, a nuance that another cannot express. The soul of a society is that society’s container of meaning or, as Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) so succinctly put it in his Letter on Humanism in 1946, “language is the house of being.” Those who share the same language (or tribe), share the same continuity of consciousness, the same collective memory and, therefore, the same identity.
The soul is not some ignis fatuus or a will-o-the-wisp floating in the ether; it is a being’s radical openness to others. The soul is a relational or dynamic entity, not a “stand-alone” or static one. In a word, it is dialogical. Souls do not subsist in bodies; they subsist in relationships. We get a glimpse of this subtle truth from Aristotle, for example, when he tells us in his Nicomachean Ethics that “a friend is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.” Strictly speaking, then, it is more appropriate to say that it is the body that dwells in the soul and not the soul that dwells in the body. Nothing prevents bodies that are spatially distinct from being united by a separate overarching principle of unity. And this is precisely how communities subsist. They are constituted by persons who are simultaneously constituted in communities; and as we have said, the soul of a people, of a community, is “housed” in its language.
What then can be said of individuals who can speak more than one language as is the case of almost every African alive today? A typical modern-day African knows at least three languages—his mother tongue, the official local language of the country he lives in, and English (or French or, much less often, Portuguese). If a language houses a soul, do we modern-day Africans have several souls? Are we more prone to identity crises? Are we doomed to a type of communal schizophrenia?
The main argument advanced here is that, for all of us, the language that really counts is the first one we ever speak—the one we assimilate from the first community we are immersed in. If this process of assimilation of the first language is done successfully, an individual can then go on to acquire other foreign languages—and other thought systems in the process—without fear of losing his sense of self.
One tends to forget, perhaps because of the rapid adaptability of Africans, that only barely one hundred years ago, this continent was in the early Iron Age. Within this short period, we have had to adopt systems of thought and governance that others have had hundreds or even thousands of years to experiment with. What’s more, we have had to do it in their languages. We have thereby gained and lost at the same time. In having no choice but to learn and be facile in other languages we have had the great benefit of looking into the minds of their great thinkers and have greatly benefited. But often these others have felt no great need to learn our languages and thus be in a position to look into our souls to truly understand why we laugh when we laugh and why we weep when we weep. This is diminishing, for in every language is coded generation upon generation of human aspiration and endeavour. No wonder some great attempts to assist have floundered.
Margaret Ogola, The Teachings of Josemaría Escriva in an African Context, 2002
On the one hand, inhabiting multiple thought systems can enrich an individual’s humanity; on the other hand, it may irreparably damage his sense of self. The constitution of the self is a delicate process that requires time, patience, and personal attention.
Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), a Russian child development psychologist, had a profound insight into the intimate relationship between an individual’s first community, his first spoken language, and the evolution of thinking that takes place within tight-knit communities. Vygotsky observed that thought and language are initially separate systems from the beginning of life, merging at around three years of age in a developing child. He distinguished between three forms of speech:
Social speech—external communication that is used to talk to others in the child’s immediate circle
Private speech—that stage in a child’s development where language and thought unite to constitute verbal thinking and,
Inner speech—that stage wherein silent, internal dialogue leads to cognitive development.
Vygotsky was the first psychologist to document the importance of inner speech.
Inner speech is not the interior aspect of external speech—it is a function in itself. It still remains speech, i.e., thought connected with words. But while in external speech thought is embodied in words, in inner speech words die as they bring forth thought. Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meanings.
Vygotsky, Thought and Language, 1962
In Vygotsky’s view, private speech is more similar (in form and function) to inner speech than social speech. Private speech becomes inner speech at about the age of seven—an age generally referred to as the age of reason. A child becomes capable of independent thinking when they become capable of thinking in terms of meaning, i.e., logos.
Such considerations clarify the connection between the meanings hidden in our human words and The Logos that gives ultimate meaning to history: language is the most basic form of Logos and meaning-making in community life. If we push these reflections to their ultimate conclusions, we as Africans will be forced to realize the folly of jettisoning our native languages in favour of modern European ones. To fail to learn our native languages is to fail to understand ourselves. It is to lose our souls.
For each one of us, meaning-making begins when speech gets assimilated into independent thinking at around the age of seven. This was Vygotsky’s ingenious discovery: the inception of independent thinking in an individual thanks to the speech patterns he absorbs from his first community. The foundational thoughts through which we shape our sense of selfhood are hidden in our native languages, not in the languages we acquire later—however rich these may be in themselves. Despising or entirely casting away our indigenous languages will not help advance the “cause of the Logos” and its development in individual and collective histories. And this is not only because language is the “house of being”, but also because of Africans’ preference for oral tradition over written tradition.
Oral Tradition and the Negro’s Encounter with The Living Word
Letters are artificial symbols; they are twice removed from reality. Words, on the other hand, are natural sacraments; they are immediately in touch with reality. All words are the incarnation of an idea. Words are natural signs; they are not simply contrived or made-up sounds. There is something primordial and essential about them that cannot be reduced to empty utterances as the Nominalists of old used to teach.
Every linguist worth his salt knows how much the pronunciation and articulation of words affect the positioning of the tongue, lips and teeth as well as the muscles that house our nasal and buccal cavities. We can go so far as to say that the structures of our faces are a function of the languages we can comfortably speak. We cannot say the same of the written word.
A culture built around the spoken word is more open to the Logos in which its people understand themselves. A culture built about the written word (understood in a certain way) is dangerous and means a certain closed-ness to the Word and the world. Something about the African people’s preference for oral tradition over written tradition renders them more amenable to the workings of The Word. Cultures steeped in oral traditions can more easily associate human words with The Living Word than literate cultures. They intuitively understand that words are first and foremost meant to be spoken, not written; that language is much more than literature and that tradition is caught, not taught. This might actually be one of the few instances where we as Africans can boast of our illiteracy.
Africa as a continent is definitely coming of age. In many ways we can say that light is being shed on our “dark” history—by which we mean that we are slowly beginning to understand ourselves and to come to an awareness of our unique role in world history. In our own way, we can now boast of being a People of the Preeminence of the Spoken Word as well as a People of the Rich Diversity of the Spoken Word.
But what of the African Americans, who seem to have lost all traces of the languages of their African origins?
If the Word arrived on the shores of sub-Saharan Africa with the Portuguese in 1491; it arrived on the shores of the New World (in the Americas) in 1492 with Christopher Columbus—just one year later. It took about 400 years of interaction between the Negro and his slave master before the blight of slavery was abolished—at least legally. Despite itself, the New World began thenceforth to play its role in the drama of the movement of Logos in human history. At the same time, and unbeknownst to the West Africans who were ferried across the Atlantic, a different variety of the negro spirit was being forged in this new furnace of suffering. On the one hand, the American continent houses a group of estranged Africans who have lost all trace of their original languages. And yet the yearnings for redemption from bondage and the deep piety that characterizes the Negro people as a whole has not disappeared. Only God knows what the future holds for them in particular and for us in general.
If ever Africa shall show an elevated and cultivated race, —and come it must, some time, her turn to figure in the great drama of human improvement— life will awake there with a gorgeousness and splendor of which our cold western tribes faintly have conceived. In that far-off mystic land of gold, and gems, and spices, and waving palms, and wondrous flowers, and miraculous fertility, will awake new forms of art, new styles of splendor; and the negro race, no longer despised and trodden down, will, perhaps, show forth some of the latest and most magnificent revelations of human life. Certainly they will, in their gentleness, their lowly docility of heart, their aptitude to repose on a superior mind and rest on a higher power, their childlike simplicity of affection, and facility of forgiveness. In all these they will exhibit the highest form of the peculiarly Christian life, and, perhaps, as God chasteneth whom he loveth, he hath chosen poor Africa in the furnace of affliction, to make her the highest and noblest in that kingdom which he will set up, when every other kingdom has been tried, and failed; for the first shall be last, and the last first.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852
A final message to whoever else dares to say that Africa has no history because of a want of written records or lack of any development worthy of its name. To such as these we answer that, if history is reduced to written material, then yes, Africa has little or none of that. But if history is living tradition and not a mute and written word—then we disagree wholeheartedly. Our “book” is not static and lifeless but dynamic and living, like an ageless Baobab tree. The cover is not glossy and smooth but textured and rough, like the bark of a tree. The spine that holds the pages together is a gigantic trunk whose “chapters” are its branches. The pages are not written using quill pens or fancy computers but by the daily work of ordinary men and women. The living branches bear fruit for posterity whereas the dead branches (when they fall) serve as “footnotes” and “manure” for the tree’s self-regeneration. Its roots (to appropriate Hegel’s own words) are “wrapped in the dark mantle of night”. They belong to the unconscious past—below the unsuspecting gaze of the ignorant. For is not all life grounded in what is not conscious, and does not the brightness of consciousness emerge from that very root?
Plants can grow only when their roots are in the dark. They emerge from the dark into the light. That is the direction of life. The plant and its direction die when the root is exposed to the light. All life must be grounded in what is not conscious and from that root emerge into the brightness of consciousness. Yet I see consciousness becoming more and more deeply the root of our life. A relation to other lives is seen, one event is brought under the same law as others, and we get closer and closer in our scrutiny to the beginnings, the origins of life. The root of life itself, what is innermost to it, is lit up. Can life sustain this? Can it become consciousness and at the same time remain alive?
Romano Guardini, Letters from Lake Como, Life threatened by consciousness
References
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999)
Guardini R., Letters from Lake Como: Explorations on Technology and the Human Race (Ressourcement: Retrieval & Renewal in Catholic Thought) Paperback – June 10, 1994
Stowe H. B., Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lowly (1852). Waggoner, C. (2007, November 14). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/uncle-toms-cabin-1852/
Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.