When Haig first began to attrit English, little did we know how it would impact us

I get this uncanny feeling that someone somewhere is trying to sow confusion in our midst through non-communication induced through the use of conventional words and phrases.

You must have read something long ago to the effect that a certain community in the Middle East, probably drunk on Arak or hemp, got the brainwave to build a tower so tall they would reach God in the sky.

Why they wanted to reach the Great Wizard was not stated, but most likely they had drawn up a long list of grievances, demands and proposals for His better management of the world as they knew it then.

The Almighty was not impressed by this idea and he looked for ways to thwart the earthlings’ enterprise. Now, he could have sent a mighty flood as he indeed is known to have done in other circumstances. Or, he could have sent another favourite instrument of His, fire. Or a great wind that would tear off roofs and uproot trees and lay the land bare. Or an earthquake. Or a pestilence.

Instead He chose a much simpler and subtler tool, language. As they constructed their tower block by block, they had a lot of communicating to do. Hey, bring some more bricks over here! You, where is the mortar I asked for? Come on, Akhmet, don’t stand there doing nothing! And such like.

The Big Man decided this was going too far and decided to stop it. So he withdrew the language of their communication, and all was chaos. Each man on site spoke in his own tongue, completely incomprehensible to the next man.

They could no longer order cement or give instructions concerning the architectural drawings. In the end, the whole undertaking stopped, the entire edifice collapsed and the people went their separate ways, mumbling what nobody could understand.

They call the failed enterprise the Tower of Babel, and I think the story was designed to show how God’s powers are beyond man’s ken, and how futile it is to try to get into his secret. The uppity community was effectively checked and kept in its place.

But a bigger message concerns the power of language as a tool of communication. There would be precious little to be achieved by any society if it did not communicate and communicate correctly and adequately. Indeed, good communicators are leaders in their societies.

There is thus the imperative to watch over the language we speak and write, the words we employ, the phrases we turn. That is why I get worried every time a language I am using gets treated shabbily. That is what happens with Kiswahili in this country. That is what happens with the English we speak and write. That is what happens when our mother tongues get shenged.

At least the French have the Academie Francaise, literally a language Gestapo that patrols the use and misuse of their language with fanatical dedication. Even they have not quite escaped the encroachment of rogue English, Wolof or Gikuyu words and expressions.

But we are under siege, whatever we do. Time was when “gay” meant happy and when “queer” could be said of people without raising eyebrows. We also had a clear separation between verbs and nouns. We did not access things, rather we had access. We did not impact processes, rather we had an impact on them. Also we did not speak to issues, we addressed them.

The verbing of nouns continues unabated, despite the departure of General Alexander Haig, the American secretary of state who was considered illiterate in English. All he did, the poor guy, was to be a pioneer by using the same language we are now comfortable with, only 30 years or so too early.

Haig was literally laughed out out of town long before he died, but now everybody is happily haiging the language without fear of being ridiculed, and even students can now write essays in which they connectify with theories and justificate their concludings! In Kiswahili, it’s much worse.

I wonder whether this trend is being temporaried or whether it has been permanented.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]