Colonialism...

gave people a language with which to talk to one another. If it failed to give them a song, it at least gave them a tongue, for sighing. (Chinua Achebe)

Colonialism changed a lot for the African people. It changed their culture and also their language, but for most of them it didn’t just bring the development of their culture and their living standards.

In connection to this change in 1964 Chinua Achebe said ‘Colonialism gave people a language with which to talk to one another. If it failed to give them a song, it at least gave them a tongue, for sighing’.

In this comment I want to comment on this quote by Chinua Achebe.

On the one hand the new language offered new opportunities.

Africa is a big continent where many people with different cultures and different languages live. Some people could communicate with others because their languages were similar to each other, but other people weren’t able to communicate with them because their language was too different.

The new language connected all the cultures in Africa and it gave them the chance for communication.

People from Nigeria could go to other parts of Africa and there they were able to go for example to the market and buy some food or other things which they couldn’t get in Nigeria.

Moreover, the English language brought education to Africa because everyone had to learn the language and it also were built schools.  In schools African children learned English and also the English standards and rules. Before colonization in Africa, the people were very uneducated. They lived their typical African life, for example they were very lazy people and they spent their time sitting in front of the house, playing with the children or talking to some people. Some of them planted some plants or cared for their fields but they weren’t able to do more things like that. There were also few rules and everyone did what he wanted to. Education brought a structure in their life. African people learned the language and the rules of the British. Some of them learned to read and to write and others even learned Math.

On the other hand the African were forced to hide their mother tongue and some of them lost it because they had to learn the new language. For old people it was very difficult to learn this language. It was their habit to communicate in their mother tongue and it was also a tradition for them to learn this special tongue. Young people and children could learn the new tongue easier than the older ones. Some of them weren’t able to speak their mother tongue because they still had to learn it. But they had to learn the English language and so they didn’t spend much time with learning the mother tongue and they spent more time with learning English because they were forced to do so by the British.

As a result, the mother tongue and in connection to that their culture and traditions got lost.

Furthermore, the new language brought acculturation and that not only brought advantages because different cultures got in a conflict.

In this regard one can see these circumstances in the story ‘Dead Men’s Path’ written by Chinua Achebe.

The young man Michael Obi lives together with his wife Nancy in Nigeria. He was the headmaster of a school there because he was educated in the Western tradition.

Michael Obi tries to improve the school. He knows that soon a British person will come and visit the school and the will write a report about it. Obi wants to read a good report about his school, so he decides to follow the British standards for schools.

He notices that a small path connects the school yard with the shrine and the burial place of the natives and he is annoyed about it and wants to eradicate superstition. For this reason he builds a fence, so no one of the natives can go to school. One day later a priest comes to him and he tells him that the path is a very traditional thing for the natives because they believe that their souls go along this path after their death. But now they can’t because of the fence. Obi just ridicules the priest and he tries to make his dream of a good report come true.

As a result the school compound, some hedges and some flowers and also a part of the school building are destroyed.

That story shows the negative of the English language and its connection to acculturation. Obi is influenced by the English culture and tradition. He tries to enforce the English standards at his school and at the same time he ignores the Nigerian traditions.

To put it in a nutshell, the new language gave the Africans new opportunities and an education, but it brought also a clash of cultures and led to the loss of African traditions.

To return to the statement of Chinua Achebe, I want to say that I think the new language destroyed more than it improved. People were forced to learn a language, they didn’t want to learn.

Some people accepted this fact, so they were able to communicate in English. It gave them ‘a song’. Others didn’t accepted the new language, they learned it, but they didn’t like it, so the language is just useful to ‘sigh’ about the British colonization in Africa.

by Sandra