Of English-speaking children and Africans . . .

South Africa and I suspect Africa, is an interesting place to live in the 21st century; even more interesting to raise children. I was on the phone the other day when my youngest child came running towards me, shouting "hello daddy!" and proceeded to tell me something or another that her brother was doing and presumably to her exclusion. All of this happened in english. The voice on the phone teasingly said: " . . . your children speak english . . ."

The debate about what Black children speak is one that is common among South African black parents. It has been the subject of radio talk-shows, newspaper articles and spirited conversations over a drink. I recall one such talk-show chastising every single one of the "detribalised" (mainly professional) black parents who allow their children to speak english at the consequential expense of their home language, mother tongue, vernacular, etc. The presenter of the show and the majority of the callers were up in arms about how the black nation has lost its way, thanks to the schools that we are now all sending our children to. The solution to this deterioration of Blackness or Africanness was for the parents to insist that the children only speak their home language at home and not to have any black family speaking english among themselves. Anything else amounts to us trying to be white, so the argument goes.

From the debate conducted on this show, raising children came across as a fairly straightforward exercise. The parents tell the children what to speak, when to speak it and then the children will grow up to be good Black or African children. During this debate both the callers and the presenter made a lot of the fact that when they grew up, they would never be caught speaking english to their parents or to other black people, period! It was one of those "good old days" arguments that says the generations before were so much better at things - purely because they were the generations before.

I found all of this both amusing and annoying and found myself wondering how many of the callers, and whether the presenter himself, had children that they lived with and were raising. The propositions of the participants in the debate were amazing considering that the majority of the callers were from Gauteng. Now, parenting in that province is even more difficult than you can imagine, especially if you have never lived in Gauteng. As an illustration, imagine how many hours an average Black family in Gauteng spends together - Awake? How many hours a day does an average Black child in Gauteng or anywhere else in South Africa, spends in the place where she lives, be it township or surburb? How many of these children spend the most of any day in a unilingual environment?

In the good old days we went to school where we lived. Even when we were sent off to boarding school, it was to a school with other Black children in a Black school. This of course excludes the multi-racial schools of those years, the Saint this and Saint that. It is dishonest and self-serving to suggest that a concerted and deliberate effort was made by our parents and elders of those days to "teach" us our various home languages at least in the urban setting. Our context, our way of life and our environment taught us our languages and then some. Those days in my case, were the days without television and only one transistor radio in the house - contrasted with DSTV and your child having their own hi-fi in their own room. The choice of the radio station you listen to was made by the good old father and head of the house. So, our generatin grew up on Mathubadifala, Mopheme and others. After school our townships and villages were our playgrounds - the games were those handed down to us from the ones who played them before us, our brothers, neighbours children, cousins and so on. To play you have to learn from others, no manuals for morabaraba or diketo, all taught and learned in the good old oral tradition. Meanwhile the parents were at work in the houses of white people and in the factories, while others were in the offices and classrooms and hospitals and so on and so forth. We learned, we lived and we grew most times oblivious to what we were doing - where the lofty ideals of Black pride and language survival is concerned. Besides, the versions of the various Black languages that are spoken in the townships bore average (at best) resemblance to the languages they were meant to be. At least we did not speak english among ourselves, so the argument has to go. With honesty contrast our context with that of our children and their plethora of electronic gadgets.

Then came the liberation and the choice to live and work wherever you well choose. The measure of ones success came to be where one lives. The further from the squalor and the noise and the violence and the smog of the township, the better. We drag our children with us, find them a nanny, a minder, a helper and so on and off to a 14 hour work day we go. When they are not being nannied or minded the children are in a school where they are a part of 40 Black children in the entire school and in their neighbourhood, theirs is the only Black family, as far as they can tell. Back at school, there is a solitary Black teacher, the "Zulu" (sic) teacher.

This is the context and environment that our children are expected to learn to be good Black children who do not speak english among themselves or to their parents.

These truly are interesting times, especially for the Black child. Less so in the rural areas than in the metropolitan areas and less so in the uni-cultural and monolingual provinces than in Gauteng. Our children, the spoiled ungrateful brats that they are - are only a reflection of what they grow up; and ironically we see to that! It is often in the name of giving them the best possible chance of survival and better prospect of success in the not so good world of today that we are their accomplices in the crimes that we accuse them of committing.

Inspite of us and their environment, the children learn with time, who they are and what it means to be who they are. Thankfully, being them, they come to learn, does not mean unwanted pregnancy, jail term, poverty and all those negative stereotypes that we grew up with. The very stereotypes that make us so angry with these english-speaking children. Strangely, they are the living testimony of our success as we have come to define it - by moving out of an environment that taught us our languages and our ways of doing things.

I judge not the adults. I hope the adults chastise the children less but teach them more; whatever happens, their Blackness is the one thing the world will always remind them of. As we defined ours, they too will continue to define and redefine their Blackness and being Black will grow beyond the colonial pictures of ferocious spear wielding loin-cloth clad caricuture, to the real people we are today, tomorrow. Remember, there were once Vikings.