NATHANIEL LEE | Mother tongue language is part and parcel of worship

The marginalisation of African languages continues unabated as we approach Heritage Month, with the dominance of English gaining traction.

Recently, we were informed at our lay preachers’ meeting at my church that there were plans under way to roll out a plan to introduce English as a medium of preaching. This was ostensibly to accommodate the youth in our church who presumably are more comfortable with English or cannot understand African languages.

We are talking here of children who were sired from a union of two African parents. The operational premise here was that we needed to accommodate these young people if we desired to keep them in the church. The indirect threat was that they would leave and join the modern charismatic churches where English is in use.

It is a truism that any organisation that does not take care of its young cannot guarantee its continuity when the older generation is gone. For the church, this means the elders have a role to secure and sustain institutional memory by guiding the youth through the church doctrines, practices and traditions.

Language, by its nature, is part and parcel of worship, especially for the transmission of the gospel through the practice of preaching. Like praying, preaching is an activity that involves a lot of passion and inspires spontaneity. Praying is an act of communicating directly to God and most people use their mother tongue to speak to Him.

Equally, preaching can be most effective when the preacher uses the language he or she is most comfortable with to deliver the message with translation provided where some cannot understand the language of the preacher. Many people in SA have attained a relatively high level of communicative competence in both isiZulu and Sesotho owing to the extensive acquisition environment of these two languages.

Some languages such as Xitsonga and Tshivenda are still marginalised with English and Afrikaans as the only languages in the country with real and not nominal official status.

Thirty years after the advent of democracy, most of our languages should have developed to the level they need to be. There is no excuse that there is no policy that stipulates that every public school in SA, should offer at least one African language, which all pupils have to study. This would be one way of promoting our languages and stop paying lip service to notions such as decolonising education.

At church, preachers should be encouraged to use their indigenous languages to preach the Word, with translation done in either isiZulu or Sesotho. English can be used only when necessary as there can be no excuse for any black child to claim not to understand black languages. It is a shame and a disgrace and an indictment on the parents of such children. Such parents should disabuse themselves of the fallacious notion that their children’s mastery of English equates to intelligence.

Depriving children of the right to acquire proficiency in their mother tongue robs them of their cultural heritage and amounts to a cultural crime.

Churches cannot be seen to be aiding and abetting such aberrations. Experts warn that teaching your children in a language that is not their mother tongue appears to disrupt cognitive ability and interfere with the learning process.

The same can be said about preaching in English, which can disrupt spiritual growth and interfere with the salvation process but certainly not at the expense of our languages. We cannot allow the rampant cultural emasculation and capture that reigns in our schools to find a foothold in our church. We have a culture to protect.

Lee is a Sowetan reader