Speaking English is not a mark of intelligence

Now that the election dust has settled, it is time to refocus on other matters of national importance that affect public life in South Africa.

This week our spotlight turns to the critical matter of African language and identity. This is necessitated by the disturbing behaviour of some stupid black people in our communities.

This columnist has often attended funerals and religious sermons in rural villages and townships, where black people congregated either to bury their loved ones or to praise the Lord.

One such funeral was particularly grotesque. Some local dolts went out of their way to address the multitude in English, in a 100% Tsonga-speaking village, at a funeral where there was no single white man.

The comical thing is that almost all the fools who went on and on in English broke the Queen's language beyond repair, in their misguided belief that speaking English is a mark of intelligence.

After the funeral, one granny expressed concern that children who go to institutions of higher learning return to the village speaking a language their parents cannot understand. The poor granny had not understood 90% of what was said at the funeral.

This phenomenon is widespread in South Africa. There are many township churches in which preachers use English, as if the Holy Spirit cannot speak Zulu or Sotho.

What most people don't realise is that the behaviour of the black priests who preach in English to their own black people is fundamentally ungodly.

It is God Himself who made black people and their languages. The Lord wanted to look upon his people from the high heavens and derive joy from the beauty of their diversity.

In an attempt to sound clever, some misguided black priests distort God's design by trying to convert South African diversity into a drab English monolith.

In the process, God is deprived of the beauty of the African languages He has created. His ears are pelted with broken English words by confused black priests.

This is not to say that, in linguistically diverse congregations, black priests must not use English as a lingua franca. The real question is: why address people in your village and township in English when you all speak the same language?

This question is certainly not confined to religion; the attitude that English is a mark of intelligence permeates all branches of black life. Even in shebeens there are black drunkards who try to sound better by speaking broken English.

What such stupid blacks don't realise is that the real owners of the English language view them as a joke. Imagine how you would feel seeing a dog that brags because it is wearing your expensive jacket.

After the Anglo-Boer War, Alfred Milner, the then British governor in South Africa, introduced what became known as Milner schools. These were schools built intentionally to anglicise Afrikaner children.

At Milner schools, Afrikaner children were not allowed to speak their language - Dutch. Any child heard speaking Dutch on school grounds would be made to stand in front of the class to chant: "I am a monkey, I spoke Dutch."

This experience - of forced anglicisation - galvanised Afrikaners, and deepened their nationalistic fervour. They vowed to build their own schools, and to make their children appreciate and love their language.

To this day, Afrikaners continue to invest heavily in the development and promotion of their language. Don't be misled by AfriForum's public outcry, ostensibly in defence of Afrikaans. There is no single black language in South Africa today that receives the kind of torrential money that pours into Afrikaans.

In a comical twist of political events, some black people after 1994 have been behaving as if Milner has instructed them to chant: "I am a monkey, I spoke Xhosa."

The reason why Milner targeted Afrikaner children is that he well knew that a child's mind is easy to mould. He thus wanted Afrikaner children to grow up hating their own language.

Today, it is very disturbing to witness grown-up black people at funerals and in church displaying a self-imposed hatred of their own languages.

What such black people don't realise is that, by behaving the way they do, they are teaching their children that English is superior to black languages. When they grow up, the children will think that black tongues are the languages of monkeys.

Black people who associate English with intelligence must be reminded that, in London, there are white hobos who sleep under bridges. Those hobos speak their native English, but they remain uneducated and stupid.

Indeed, a national dialogue is more than urgent - to save lost black souls among us: the ungodly priests who think English is heavenly, and the black idiots who force their unaccustomed tongues to pronounce difficult English words at funerals in our villages and townships.

Such people are enemies of African identity; their minds need to be decolonised.