In a village in the Eastern Cape, a gogo tells her grandson a story about the stars in isiXhosa. She uses a word for a constellation that holds the history of her people, Isilimela: The “Digging Stars”: The appearance of isiLimela in the dawn sky in June signals that it is time for the community to begin hoeing the ground for the new planting season.
Now fast forward….
In a lecture hall a , that same boy is now a university student. He learns about the same stars, but the lecture is in English. The word his gogo used? Isilimela, It doesn’t appear in the textbook… It doesn’t appear in the exam… And slowly, quietly, that word –isilemela – —and the entire way of seeing the world that came with it—begins to die. This is not just a tragic story. It has a name. It’s called epistemicide.- the killing of our systems of knowledge and it is happening in this university, right now, every single day.
Our mother tongue is not the language of the classroom, the lecture hall, of the textbooks we learn from, our mother tongue is the “other tongue.”
The Language We Dream In
For many of our students, particularly those from rural and township areas who enter university with limited English proficiency, the statistics are brutal. They are set up to fail before they can even begin. Yet research consistently shows that mother tongue instruction improves comprehension, critical thinking, and retention.
When the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote “the limits of my language is the limits of my world”, he captured the epistimicide that comes with English hegemony. When we ask a student to use English only, we are not merely asking them to translate. We are asking them to shrink their world. We are asking them to cram the vast, sprawling landscape of their thoughts—shaped in Sesotho, isiXhosa, or Afrikaans—into the narrow cage of a borrowed vocabulary.
In Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, he recounts his schoolboy days in Healdtown, a mission school ….. The principal of Healdtown was Dr Arthur Wellington, a stout and stuffy Englishman who boasted of his connection to the Duke of Wellington. At the outset of assemblies, Dr Wellington would walk on stage and say, in his deep bass voice, ‘I am the descendant of the great Duke of Wellington, aristocrat, statesman, and general, who crushed the Frenchman Napoleon at Waterloo and thereby saved civilisation for Europe – and for you, the natives.
At this, we would all enthusiastically applaud, each of us profoundly grateful that a descendant of the great Duke of Wellington would take the trouble to educate natives such as ourselves.
We were taught that the best ideas were English ideas, the best men, Englishmen, and the best language, English.
Today, we must look at our curriculum and ask, What progress have we made from this position?
Colonialism did more than exact tribute, loot, and plunder African resources. By effacing African culture, by erasing African ways of knowing, by ordering “linguistic genocide,” colonialism bred alienation. Indeed, we have come to internalise our oppression, to valorise self hate and see our dehumanization and assault on our culture and languages as something benign and natural, as something in the interest of progress and a better future. Today, our curriculum remains a site that alienates, a site of unapologetic indoctrination into English hegemony and Eurocentric perspectives of the world.
Indeed, much of what is taken for education in Africa is not African, but rather a reflection of Europe in Africa. Our curriculum is a site where the English language is sacralised, and the internalisation of bourgeois European values in our curricula is interpreted as an index of progress. African values, philosophies, knowledge construction and sharing, including its research methodologies have been ignored, marginalized, devalued and overwritten by colonialism and its insidious effects. Burton, the British explorer, translator, and orientalist’s supercilious diatribe about indigenous knowledge, “Poetry there is none…there is no meter, no rhyme, nothing that interests or soothes the feelings, or arrests the passions”. is typical of the uninformed prejudice of scholars trapped in their own Eurocentric and colonial ethnographic filter bubbles.
We need more than to just speak in our mother tongue, we need to intellectualize African languages. Consider this, you can speak colonial lies in 13 languages, it would still be lies about the social and cultural world of black people. Linguistic justice goes beyond translation.
Our universities must adopt the mindset that multilingualism is not an abstract ideal but a lived institutional commitment. Precisely because language is the heart of culture. Teaching in a mother tongue affirms students’ identities, instilling pride in their heritage and chips away at the colonial indoctrination that devalues African languages, African culture and histories. Your mother tongue is a resource, not an obstacle. Nelson Mandela once said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”
Let us be honest with ourselves. Many of our language policies are what Professor Linda du Plessis of North-West University calls “window-dressing” . We have beautiful documents that recognize diversity, that flout multilingualism. We have constitutional provisions. We have framework policies, the works!
But walk into a Physics lecture. Walk into a Law lecture. An Education lecture. How many are being taught in isiXhosa? In Sesotho? In isiZulu?….
More Than Translation: Transformation
I am asking for more than translation. I am asking for transformation.
Not just the right to speak my mother tongue on campus, but the right to think in it in the classroom. The right to write essays in it. The right to have my indigenous knowledge treated not as folklore, but as legitimate scholarship.
A Call to Action
It is time for policymakers, educators, and communities to champion our mother tongues—not as an option, but as a necessity for a brighter, more inclusive future. Let’s make education work for every child, in the language they know best.
I challenge you today:
Speak it. Don’t apologize for using your mother tongue in the lecture rooms,
When you hear a language you don’t understand, don’t feel excluded—feel curious. Recognize that you are in the presence of a different way of seeing the world.
Write it. Let’s push for more research and creative writing in African languages. Write poetry in it. Write your secret thoughts in it. Publish in it. Let our languages carry the weight of scholarship.
Demand it. Our university should sound like the country it serves. Not just another five year plan, but now!
Let us be the generation that stops treating mother tongues as “other tongues.”
Let us build universities in which every language is a language of knowledge. A university where, when we greet each other in the morning—Sawubona, dumelang, molweni—we are not just saying hello.
We are saying: I see you. I see your language. I see your knowledge. And you belong here!
Prof Ayub Sheik
HOD: Language Education
Chair: Decolonising Pedagogies and Critical Literacies
Faculty of Education
University of the Western Cape
Speak it: Normalise the use of African languages in classrooms and academic discussions.
Write it: Encourage research, publishing, creative writing and academic assessment in African languages.
Demand it: Build universities that reflect the linguistic diversity of the nations they serve.
This is not about nostalgia. It is about academic justice. It is about ensuring that future generations do not inherit universities where their languages and the knowledge they carry are treated as “other”
Let us imagine a University of the Western Cape where isiXhosa, Sesotho, Setswana, Afrikaans, isiZulu and all our languages live fully in lecture halls, laboratories and research. A university where students greet each other not just with a hello, but with a recognition of identity, culture and belonging: Sawubona. Dumelang. Molweni.
I see you. I see your language. I see your knowledge. And you belong here.
Multilingualism is not a luxury. It is a responsibility and a pathway to a more equitable, more intellectually vibrant future.