2007-07-12
Prince Kum'a Ndumbe III
'You have not mastered the white people’s foreign tongue? Then you do not have the right to education in your own country, not even at primary school. You have no right to any worthwhile education, however brilliant you are.' Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III calls on Africans to re-appropriate their own languages or face intellectual genocide.
Lo si kodise bato matoi na bwambo bwa bakala mo na mo ! O si bi te nja we no, sele o ko mbuke ! O ma be o mboa ngo nya wamene, o si bie ndand’a ngo nya mbia, o si bie neni o ma kema no ná o bele ba mbambe bongo e? O pimbedi te, baise, mota ndedi a ma leye oa ngea mboa!
Translation: Do not deafen yourself with the white people’s language all the time! If you do not know who you are, then first be silent! You are truly at home, yet you do not even know how to recite your genealogy. You do not know the words in which to invoke your ancestors! If you are lost, then you may ask. Forgiveness will show you the way home.
So why do I speak Douala in this era of globalisation? But of course I do. It is what keeps me going, walking with my head held high whilst I converse with the West in its languages.
Universities in African countries are still not African universities. Mostly, they are universities in thrall to the foreign, the West, Europe and North America. Their conception, philosophy, orientation and research, even their academic rituals and ceremonies, are more often than not a bad, if not grotesque, copy of the ancient and modern metropoles.
It is imperative that universities in Africa become African universities; that universities in Cameroon become Cameroonian universities. Intellectual genocide has already massacred enough in Africa. It is time to stop.
My argument is neither anti-white nor xenophobic. The issue at stake is how to uncover the mechanisms behind this lethal mindlessness, which is depriving the whole of humanity of precious scientific knowledge acquired by the black peoples over millennia. My discourse also challenges white people to ask themselves: what has it meant to be white for the last five centuries? What are the repercussions for white people themselves, and for others?.........
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/current/
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