Found on Leadership Nigeria.com on 8 May 2009
By Isaac Aimurie, Abuja
The Director/Chief Executive of the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation (CBAAC), Professor Babatunde Babawale, yesterday in Abuja, blamed Africa’s under-development on the adoption of foreign languages for socio-economic transactions.
Babawale, who spoke at this year’s CBAAC public lecture with the theme; ‘African Languages, African Development and African Unity’, noted that while it is true that Africa and her people “spread all over the world occupy a place of special importance in world history, it can be rightly argued that Africans seem to be the primary architects of their misfortunes in the areas of development and unity given our collective preference for and our willingness to celebrate, at the slightest opportunity, the pre-eminence of foreign languages against sustained interest in our very rich languages”.
Continuing, he said, “the long-standing decline in the usage and patronage of African indigenous languages accounts for widening communication gap between the governors and the governed, as well as the noticeable disparity between potentials, development policies and the ends to which policies are committed”.
The CBAAC boss observed that indigenous languages harbour within the socio-cultural, agricultural, medical, scientific and technological knowledge “which our ancestors bequeathed to our generation and those after us”, regretting that African languages face extinction and preference for foreign languages “is a clear manifestation of the triumph of forces of domination”.
In his address, the Minister of Tourism, Culture and National Orientation, Senator Bello Gada, noted, “what is left of our language due to the displacement it suffered under colonialism is endangered by globalisation. We have failed to discover that the foundation of our problems in the educational sector lies in the absence of our mother tongue, for instruction in schools and at developing curriculum. Similarly, our desire for technological advancement and greatness can only be driven by the use and development of our indigenous languages”.
Citing the examples of China and Japan which made remarkable progress in technological advancement, through the preservation of their language and other aspects of their culture, the minister urged Nigerians to see the and proclaim the goodness in their mother tongue.
Guest lecturer at the event, Professor Kwesi Kwaa Prah, of the Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society in Cape Town, South Africa, submitted that African cannot make progress unless she takes indigenous language seriously. The imposition of English language on Africans by the colonial masters, in his view, was to serve their selfish interests.
