A Eulogy for Dead Languages

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October/November 2025Zambia
Languages

Photo Illustrations by Ezinne Osueke/ THE REPUBLIC.

THE MINISTRY OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS

A Eulogy for Dead Languages

‘At 16 every Zambian gets a green National Registration Card (NRC). On my NRC, much of that information is either a lie, a slight fabrication, or, as with many things in life, a well-intentioned truth turned false.’
Languages

Photo Illustrations by Ezinne Osueke/ THE REPUBLIC.

THE MINISTRY OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS

A Eulogy for Dead Languages

‘At 16 every Zambian gets a green National Registration Card (NRC). On my NRC, much of that information is either a lie, a slight fabrication, or, as with many things in life, a well-intentioned truth turned false.’


And because I cannot speak my mother’s tongue, there are phrases I may never say.
Verses I may water down with ignorance,
Words that my mouth cannot make the shape of, 
I am half a woman,
Untranslated, raw, unfinished. 

                               —Tukiya Fundafunda, Photographs of Dead Lovers 

At 16 every Zambian gets a green National Registration Card (NRC). Proof of life. Evidence of identity that will open doors to banks, voting booths and (hopefully, maybe) land ownership.  

Name:
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Kabwe
Village: Kajimina
Chief: Mukumbi 

On my NRC, much of that information is either a lie, a slight fabrication, or, as with many things in life, a well-intentioned truth turned false. This was my confession. Voice quivering amongst a group of strangers as we discussed the evolution of Zambian culture, charting its transformation since independence, at once marvelling at and decrying its fluidity. The conversation was all-encompassing—art, literature, attire, and most pertinent for me, language. A garbled cultural debate extolling indigenous knowledge. ‘But what is indigenous?’ I implored. And more to the point, ‘Who?’  

I took the picture for my NRC outside the local government office of my hometown, Chingola. A white cloth shielding the dust-smeared cream soda-coloured wall. The image on the card is faded now, a tiny black and white face intently staring at me, hair slicked back, lips pursed in new-found adulthood. Had I known that face would follow me this long, across continents, slipped in ever-changing wallets, I might have smiled a little. The year was 2000, seven days after the world was supposed to have been irreversibly altered by a mysterious computer bug. We were for a moment a species at the precipice.  

The details are hand typed onto the card. Off-kilter letters sometimes spilling out of their designated sections. My right thumb was dipped in blue ink and then with a final flourish, I sealed my fate with an overly elaborate, much-practiced signature. The bane of many a bank manager.  

IDENTITY POLITICS

My name is not in dispute, but I have only ever used the middle one under duress from a flustered English college tutor who advised me it was ‘easier’. My mother tells me I was born at 11 a.m. on the stated date and I have a picture of me in a hospital in Kabwe swathed against the elements, cradled in my grandma’s arms. But after that, the questions begin. I have never lived in Kajimina and do not speak Kaonde, the language of Chief Mukumbi’s people. And even if I did, my mother continuously reminds me that our tribes are matrilineal. So, it can be said that my father, who took charge of my registration, stole me from the Lunda of Mwata Kazembe. Then, the lies continue because the only Zambian language I speak is Bemba which belongs to neither of my claimed tribes. All of these, of course, is under the assumption that identity equals tribe which equals language. 

Growing up, our household was the perfect embodiment of Zambia’s first republican president Kenneth Kaunda’s ‘one Zambia, one nation’. A chant for which he is widely renowned. The father of the country promoting peace and harmony, sparing us the fate of many other clan-obsessed African nations whose elites battle for the spoils associated with seats of authority. Kaunda opted to greyify Zambia. Too much colour would be blinding, he argued. And so, he cloaked our eyes in the dark veil of English, mollifying us and neutering a vibrant, mind-boggling 72 tribes at the expense of their languages.  

My parents, newly educated, upwardly mobile youths were born and brought up in their local villages before moving to towns and cities across the country to serve a young nation pulsating with optimism and opportunity. They came from opposite ends of the country and met in that melting pot of modernity, the Copperbelt Province, where occupation is far more useful than tribe. My father a Kaonde engineer, mother a Lunda nurse, both now simply Zambian.  

We were always aware of our roots and went to visit our grandparents in the village often. Visits that I remember with distinct fondness, making pets of pot-bound goats, frolicking in rivers among tickling fish and staring bug-eyed as my grandmothers’ narrated tales beside crackling orange-red flames. But amongst all the adventure there was one frontier that we did not dare venture past. At home, we spoke English, and that was that. So, though I loved my grandmother’s stories, I could only understand them, never pass them on as they were told to me. Due to a series of possibly unfortunate events, that was also the case in the schools I attended from nursery until secondary school. A rule prescribed and discharged with fervour. No vernacular allowed. And it wasn’t just the teachers. The surest way to guarantee relentless teasing from peers was to display ignorance of a phrase or word. Broken English was a shudder-inducing, finger-pointing offense. But it wasn’t always thus.  

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NATION BUILDING

In 1925, before colonialism but during governorship by the British South African Company, the Phelps–Stokes Commission whose remit was to survey schools in Africa and advise the British colonial office on education reform, stated that indigenous languages were, ‘part of the cultural heritage and a chief means of preserving whatever is good in African customs, ideas and ideals, and above all, for preserving the self-respect of Africans.’  

The policy, at the time, was to use local languages as the medium of instruction in the first four years of school after which there would be a switch to English. By 1950 the policy had evolved. Local languages were the primary means of instruction for the first two years after which it switched to one of the four chosen prominent Zambian languages for the next two years and then English from the fourth year until completion. This system, it was determined, would yield the best results for children who were often shell-shocked by going straight from speaking familiar languages at home to having to learn English in English.   

At Independence in 1964, the slate was wiped clean. Masters of our own destiny, by 1966 English was proclaimed the sole official language and therefore deemed the language of instruction from grade one onwards. Yes, the newly formed, highly patriotic nation of Zambia decided that English was paramount to all other languages, and if you wanted an education, you had to get with the program.  

This decision was not without detractors. In 1965 Simon Mwansa Kapwepwe, freedom fighter and one-time right-hand man to Kaunda, said that the policy of teaching in English was, ‘tantamount to robbing Zambian children of their cultural heritage and alienating them from their parents.’ And there were also calls for more literature to be made available in local languages. But in the end, nation-building prevailed and it is of particular interest that, to my knowledge, Kenneth Kaunda never once made an important speech in any local language.  

The 1977 educational reforms called for the use of seven major local languages as the primary medium of instruction in the first four years of school, and in 1996, the calls were expanded to recommend the use of familiar local languages citing the ease of teaching English under those circumstances. None of these calls were heeded and it wasn’t until 2014 that the language policy was changed to allow for the use of familiar language for instruction from grades one to four. The uproar was significant and in 2024 the syllabus was once again changed to encourage the teaching of English exclusively. 

It was thanks to these series of decisions that when my college application form curiously enquired what my mother tongue was, my father instructed me to write English and I timidly acquiesced. I got the scholarship, travelled to England for college and then university. Successful completion of the experiment. I was now a global citizen.   

One Zambia, one nation, urbanization and the erosion of tribal identity had led to significant migration and intermarriage. So, I learnt Bemba from friends, even though the Copperbelt is, strictly speaking, Lamba country. Bemba being a language spoken by people in the north of the country whose industriousness allowed it to spread alongside its speakers. 

A NEW CULTURAL IDENTITY

Indeed, the Copperbelt is a classic example of how language evolves to suit the economic needs of a population. As more copper was discovered, towns grew around the mines and labour migrated from the poorer rural areas to this now bustling metropolis. To communicate, a new lingua franca emerged, not just English because that is the language of work, but English stirred through with the dominant Bemba and sprinkled with doses of everything else. Today this melting pot has bubbled over into a new cultural identity. Kopala. A word used to describe the place, people, music and a Bemba that my grandparents would not recognize should they miraculously resurrect.  

This is the alternative to English that I am most familiar with. A pervasive locomotive language that itself threatens to derail others. Kopala Bemba is to the Copperbelt what Nyanja is to the capital city Lusaka—a watered-down amalgamation of what is spoken amongst the tribes of the Eastern Province. A Lusaka resident, my Kopala seeps through and I speak to the lady who sells me vegetables at the market, or my local plumber or the gardener and even the lady from Mongu (a Lozi speaking area) who sells me rice in Bemba while they respond in Nyanja, and we are perfectly happy to not assert linguistic authority.  

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COMPETITION VERSUS COMPLEMENTATION

Across Africa mining digs up more than minerals and this economic linguistic evolution has happened before. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Southern Africans were recruited from as far north as Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe to work in the shafts of South Africa, they also developed their own tongue. Kisettla was spoken to bridge the gap between nations and apart from the fact that many of our languages have Bantu roots, I am always amazed by some of the similarities between bastardized foreign words that still prevail among Southern Africans. Don’t, as a social experiment, decide to go around shouting futseki in any of these countries. I can’t help but muse about that other forced displacement—slave trade—and its implications on language and culture. John Simwinga, a Zambian scholar, dubs this a shift from ‘languages in competition to languages in complementation.’ A state of being that most Africans who are fluent in more than one language will be familiar with.  

Zambia with its seven official local languages has been less successful at this complementation than say South Africa with their eleven. In Zambia, we chose those seven as a feel-good device, a nod to our much-lauded peaceful disposition; so, we do not learn our anthem in all our languages and we do not allow for these local languages to be spoken or translated in parliament like they do. Have you ever read a juicy tweet with a punchline in a South African language? That is because at the end of apartheid that nation decided that rather than drop either Afrikaans or English as their national languages, they would elevate nine others and now lots of South Africans speak a combination of tongues, much to the chagrin of eavesdropping Africans across the continent. They don’t do it to leave us out. It is a culture developed through deliberate policy.  

So often I have marked myself a foreigner while travelling through South Africa by my failure to answer a greeting in a local tongue. By that standard I’m not quite a foreigner in Kajimina, I know how to say hello and clap my hands in greeting but beyond that it all gets muddled.  

Competition versus complementation. Author and academic, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, has called for the primacy of indigenous languages and took to publishing his work first in Gĩkũyũ, with a period of delay before English translation. Fellow writer, Chinua Achebe, famously disagreed with him, arguing that English allowed for greater inclusivity, more opportunities for publication and wide dissemination. My shelves are filled with the work of both these writers and those of other Africans who have been translated such as Okot p’Bitek or even Afrikaans authors like Dalene Matthee. And while I love the clear, dulcet tones of Achebe’s writing, there is a lyricism about translated text, an African turn of phrase that permeates and animates. I do not speak the mother tongues of any of these writers and yet I feel them, there is no other way to describe it, it is an intangible quality. But what about compromise?  

In Nottingham scanning my university ex-boyfriend’s sparse bookshelf looking for something to do in between meals of defrosted leftover Egusi and tear inducing chilli-filled Indomie noodles, while he played Call of Duty, I came across a gem. It was, he said, his favourite book so of course it soon became one of mine but not for the reasons you imagine.  

THE GIFT OF SOZABOY

Sozaboy, A novel in rotten English, by Ken Saro-Wiwa. The copy on his bookshelf was green, a cover with an illustration of a young couple, their wide eyes filled with sadness. Floating words inscribed around them, ‘water don pass gari’, ‘person, wey no get power make é no go war’, ‘make strong head’—clues to the novel’s content.  

The story of Saro-Wiwa is well known. Even before I immigrated to England for college and university, I knew and was shocked by it. What I did not know was his work. The book Sozaboy is described as the tale of a young, naïve recruit in a civil war and all that he endures, but it wasn’t the story that captivated me, it was the language. It begins: 

Although, everybody in Dukana was happy at first. All the nine villagers were dancing and were eating plenty maize with pear and knacking tory under the moon. Because the work on the farm have finished and the yams were growing well well. And because the old, bad government have dead, and the new government of soza and police have come. 

I was hooked. Intrigued. Delighted. In awe of the ingenuity. The book energised me. The audacity of the experiment to write in what Saro-Wiwa called ‘rotten English’, a cross between Pidgin and broken English and proper English. But beyond that, the audacity of a nation to create a language that works for them.  

Sozaboy was borne of a story Saro-Wiwa wrote called ‘High Life’. The publisher, a Mr Dawthorne, who placed it in a collection for the Penguin African Library in 1969, remarked that the piece was ‘…not true Pidgin which would have made it incomprehensible to the European reader’ and said that the story was ‘…an uninhibited gamble with language.’ He went on to opine that he did not think it wise or possible to write in this manner for an entire novel. Saro-Wiwa set out to prove him wrong and did. Beyond Nollywood, I have no working knowledge of Pidgin, but I loved this book and love it still. There is a glossary at the back which to me was an enhancement, not a necessity. My fingers flutter across the keyboard as I remember how this book made me feel. An African language borne of the remnants we were left, a foreign tongue turned on its head. If nothing else, that ex-boyfriend gave me the gift of Sozaboy. Literally. I still have it on my bookshelf here in Lusaka. That same copy with a stamp from City College, Port Harcourt, Nigeria.  

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CULTURE IS NOT STATIC

I am enamoured of this idea of words and phrases bungled together creating something unique to place and culture. Pidgin. Creole. My own name is Swahili, marking me as other, contradicting the claims on my NRC. These lingua francas remind me that culture is not static, that no one is left behind but instead amalgamated into something new.  

Why, then, did I find myself trawling through a croaking throat, telling strangers how, at my father’s funeral, I could not speak to our people in my stated language? How, though I thought I knew them well and called them mine, I had become a person apart, unable to convey the full weight of my emotion in a way that could be heard. As I ended my story and sat down, a fog of muffled opinions swirling around me, I remembered other aspects of those trips to the village. Glee glinting through my father’s eyes as he teased his sisters about his chickens and I looked on, smile plastered on my face, unable to participate but still enjoying the frivolity of a moment only accessible through the bonds of language.  

I listen to the radio often. The World Service has diversified, the voices and languages representing the BBC have increased. No longer confined to stiff lipped, sharp toned Englishmen, now you hear all sort of accents, some more decipherable than others. A Ghanaian man, Justice Baidoo, is on. He is teaching his two children Ahanta, a language they would otherwise not learn at school. Baidoo is determined, he has no syllabus and when he forgets a word he rings his mother in the village to remind him. His children giggle as he chants words at them, they stumble over pronunciations, reluctant to forego their playtime. I chuckle at the wriggling children, eager to escape their fathers need to pin them down.  

* 

A sombre chant of dead words rings throughout the world. Each one listed with solemn precision. Date, language, area of origin and the name of the last known speaker; a final nail in the coffin. Here lies Pauline Stensgar last known speaker of Columbia-Moses from Washington, United States. Date of death 2 May 2023. And so, the chant continues: 

5 October 2022 / Mednyj Aleut / Russia / Gennady Yakolev
16 February 2022 / Yahgan / Chile / Christina Calderon
25 September 2021 / Wakuchummi / California / Marie Wilcox  

Crypts containing not just libraries but entire cultures.  

There have been some revivals. Languages snatched back from the claws of history, muted heartbeats narrowly escaping flatlines. Hebrew, the Biblical pulse of a resurrected nation, Cornish, the language, not the pastry, and Welsh, a proud red dragon defying slaying by the tongue that has lashed many across the globe.  

Africa, a continent with over 3,000 languages has about 200 that are endangered, some already no more. There are video games and apps and organizations seeking to remind and restore. Ouma Katrina Esau is a Khomani San woman who is the last fluent speaker of the endangered N|uu language. She was born in 1933 and has made it her mission to teach others. Her story inspires the rest of us. 

But the funeral march continues. More than half of all world languages are currently endangered. That is 3,500 groups of unique words and phrases denoting family, love, loss, ancient rites, ancestral names and quirky inside jokes all facing possible extinction. Linguists say a fifth of all languages will be dormant by the end of the century. Dormant—sleeping, resting, hidden⎈

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