Reclaiming Our Mother Tongue, Our Stolen Dignity

We often use the term "mother tongue," yet we must speak of our mother's tongue—and the profound dignity it carries. This matter transcends language itself. It strikes at our right to walk through the world with our heads held high. Colonial powers did not simply impose their languages; they orchestrated a theft of the spirit. They convinced us that the very cadence of our mothers' voices signified inferiority. They sold us a lie: that to become educated and modern, we must abandon the essence of our being.

Consider the cost of that lie. Imagine your daughter, studying in the UK, calling home. Her voice cracks as she tells you, "Maman, I attended our national independence day celebrations. Everyone was speaking our vernacular… and I could not. Why did you never teach us our mother tongue? I felt out of place. I did not belong."

This question, echoing across continents from a child to a parent, captures the profound consequence of that colonial legacy. It is not merely about words; it is about a stolen sense of belonging, a dignity interrupted.

This loss of dignity echoes here at home in the most personal of spaces. My hairdresser, a brilliantly articulate woman in her mother tongue, shared her story with me. She studied in a rural school and never learnt English. Now, serving multilingual customers, she must struggle to speak it, a process that humbles and silences her vibrant intellect. The deepest cut came from her own children. She used to try and help with their homework, but often could make "no head or tail" of the English questions. When her eldest child discovered she could not read or understand the language of his education, his reaction was not empathy but disdain. He met her inability with ridicule and dismissal, despising the very knowledge she lacked.

This is the ultimate perversion: a colonial system that not only robs a parent of their voice but can turn a child against them, severing the sacred parent-child bond with the weapon of a foreign tongue.

Yet, in direct response to this pain, a quiet revolution now stirs. From rural villages to university halls, I have witnessed a powerful movement of return—a collective act of reclaiming the dignity stolen when our mother tongues fell silent. The most poignant evidence of this often appears in the most unexpected of places: humble adult literacy classes.

The dignity we inherit

Before we learn to understand the world, we learn to feel it through a specific voice. Our mother's tongue is our first introduction to love, comfort, and belonging. It is the sacred vessel of our inherited dignity, carrying the weight of our people—the proverbs that hold our wisdom, the lullabies that calm our fears, the folktales that map our moral universe. This language is the bedrock of our selfhood.

But when we replace this foundation, we lose more than words; we risk a piece of our very selves. I have seen it myself: parents, desperate for their children to grasp the colonial language of opportunity, decide to speak only English or French at home. The painful, unspoken truth is that for many of us, these colonial languages are not our own. We speak a stiff, classroom version, and the result is a heartbreaking paradox. Children grow up speaking what we call "broken" English, caught in a linguistic limbo. They cannot access the deep well of their native tongue, yet they also lack true fluency in the colonial language they were supposed to master. They are left fluent in nothing, forever translating their thoughts in their own head, robbed of a home in any language. This is not just a linguistic crisis; it is a fracture of the soul.

The cry that echoes: "Where is my dignity?"

During a recent evaluation of an adult literacy programme, I noticed something that defied all expectation. The programme’s core aim is to provide basic literacy and numeracy in the local language for socially excluded adults. Yet, sitting alongside those first-time learners were participants who were already highly literate. Among them were PhD holders, university professors, and professionals in posts that required a minimum of a bachelor’s degree.

Their presence was both a puzzle and a revelation. When I asked why they had joined a basic literacy circle, their answers were unanimous and profound. They had come to learn from facilitators who, while often possessing no more than twelve years of formal schooling, held a deep and fluent command of our mother tongue. The professors were not there to teach, but to be taught. This reversal of the usual hierarchy speaks volumes; these accomplished individuals were seeking a different kind of knowledge to restore a fundamental part of their identity.

This quest finds its voice in a conversation from my fieldwork. I sat with a brilliant, university-educated young woman. As we discussed modern pressures, her composure broke when she spoke of her inability to connect with her own grandmother. Through tears, she uttered a question that has haunted me since: “If I cannot speak, write, or read my own mother’s tongue, where is my dignity?”

Her cry lays bare a painful truth. Academic degrees and professional success cannot fill the void that a disconnected cultural soul creates. It acts as the catalyst for the quiet revolution I witness in these literacy circles.

The professors and engineers are not there to earn a certificate. They sit on those benches to reclaim what their formal education stripped away: the ability to read and write the language of their hearts. A professor who deconstructs complex theories in English but cannot write a simple letter in his mother tongue knows a deep shame. An engineer who designs national infrastructure but cannot read a folk story to her child in their native language feels a profound loss. They seek to heal the fracture between their educated selves and their cultural souls, answering that young woman’s cry for themselves.

Mending the fracture in our fellowship

This fracture extends beyond the individual, poisoning the well of our community. Picture a large family gathering. To manage the beautiful complexity of multiple tribes, the family defaults to English. But this practical choice becomes an act of exclusion. The elders, our living repositories of wisdom, sit in silence. The colonial language, intended as a bridge, becomes a wall that sidelines the very people who anchor us.

And so, the gathering splinters. In one corner, relatives converse animatedly in one language. In another, a joke is shared in another language. Laughter erupts in one language, leaving others curious and left out. A deeply-felt point is made in another, its meaning lost to those outside the circle. The choice to use a colonial language does not create unity; it merely formalises exclusion, pushing true, organic connection into hushed, segregated clusters. It robs our communities of their collective dignity.

We are reclaiming our dignity

The path forward is not to ban global languages, but to dethrone them from their position of supreme authority in our own minds. The movement has already begun in those humble literacy circles. It starts with the conscious, powerful act of reclamation.

We must all become linguistic bridges. At community gatherings, let us translate for our elders. Let us ensure a proverb spoken in Yoruba is shared with everyone in English or French. This simple act dignifies every language present and honours every person.

Let us champion the powerful examples we already have. Look to Tanzania, which consciously built its identity dignity around Swahili, and Rwanda and Burundi, powered by Kinyarwanda and Kirundi. These are living testaments to the power of an African language to unite a people and affirm their collective dignity.

To speak your mother's tongue today is an act of defiance and self-worth. It is a reclamation of your right to think, dream, and innovate in the language of your soul. It allows us to master global languages as tools, but from a position of unshakable strength and dignity, not as desperate mimics.

Let us then cast aside the shame that was never ours to carry. Let the cry of that young woman—"Where is my dignity?"—be our rallying call. Let us speak our languages with pride, teach them to our children, and use them to write our future. For our mother's tongue is not just the language of our soul; it is the foundation of our inherent and inalienable dignity. We are taking back what is ours.