In sighted by the most terrible of accents that I had possibly ever heard ....I found myself thrown deep into thought ,into a world of intellect that I had even forgotten the Einstein encrypted code to .How could it be ? I asked myself should such conversations be had with someone who does not sound remotely like me , when I say “me” I self loathe to even utter that I mean the colonised mind and tongue that has been whipped into shape by inferior complexes that have blood lineage as long as the nile.Why did I find it so hard to believe that I was being stimulated by a man who I had never even cared to look twice at unless I might need a stepping stone ...well simple it’s because for some reason we have attached intellect to the way one delivers their ideas mainly how eloquently they deliver them in a language that is not theirs in the first place , primarily being English.
What is a shame the most though is that many whilst reading this article will grumble and moan about the irrelevance and conjure up many arguments about their shameful behaviours in defence but the truth lies bare in its birthday suit ...Africans shall never be on par with all other civilisations as we shall forever be moulding ourselves into something’s other than bettering our own. It took me eight mental self smackdowns to get me out of noticing the accent that the boy mentioned earlier was speaking in or worse to judge him in all of his worth , are we that pathetic as a race that we find ourselves associating anyone who does not sound European as uneducated or worst find ourselves cringing at the thought of the shack they must have rumbled out of, using myself as a subject of example , I ought to have been intrigued by the argument and conversation that was brought before me ,in which he in his bantu tinted accent delivered to me. I ought to have not even cared as to what the pronunciation of his vowels were. But I am a product of those before me who should have whipped the colonisation out of me and instilled a sense of black pride that would reshape the intellectual shape of Africa into the driving engine it ought to have been ...many a times I found those before me poetised and put in trances by my young naive European oiled sound that I had been unconsciously forced to ,how many of us did our parents have glistening eyes of pride when they heard our accents flourish to as far off as to us sounding like ill educated Americans?.
If it is then my adolescent scented mind feels sorry for us and our bleak future...and I’m not even as traditional as I ought to be and just as bad as the next reader. I guess what scares me the most is that we all are gravitating towards the same thing and no one is being bold enough to say “ey I want to preserve our own” the generation before us who were the chefs of this little dilemma we in ,were fortunate enough to have greats such as JOHN LANGALIBALELE DUBE, WILLIAM NGIDI, NDIYANE whom fought the battle of preserving our culture and most of all language. Sad enough it is too near when we shall all wake up in a monotone society where the only link we shall have to our cultural purity is going to be the “bad accent boy” and even with him what is to make us say we will have not ridiculed him into washing the last trace of it from him just to adapt to a root less blind generation. Yet again this all just a thought
p.s i pick no wars....but just plant seeds of thoughts.......
IBANATHI NGCOBO
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