Our culture, our heritage II

Culture is basically the way of living of a people within a geographic setting, it encompasses their food, names, clothing, language, festivals, music among others; cultures defines who we are, and helps in designing the future of a people.

The advent of the Europeans before and during the colonial era has largely influenced and even altered the elements of our culture to date; The English language which belongs to the people of the United Kingdom became our official language because of colonial rule and is used through our education system and it’s even our official language.

Language as a culture plays a very important role in human endeavors, its serves as a means of communication, a medium of transferring history from one generation to the other and most pertinently bestowing on us a sense of belonging and identity.

Ghana, of the ten administrative regions has more than one hundred spoken languages; a person born Ghanaian is bred with the mother tongue and any other language thereof becomes a second language for that matter.

Transferring language as a culture from parents to the next generation is not a thing chance, it takes conscious efforts to speak the native language to the child until it grows up to speak same; here the child grows to know his identity and will be armed with sufficient knowledge about his culture to relay it unto the next generation.

My Parents, natives of Larteh-Akuapem in the eastern region, did a wonderful job by exposing our memories to the words of our language from infancy; even though a strong advocate for education, my father spoke less of the English language with us and on major occasions he communicated through our native dialect, he being an educated man himself. We grew up to the knowledge and practice that at all times our culture comes first before any other. It is our pride, our identity and what makes us unique from the rest of the world.

The preceding statement has been the calls of pan Africanists for the need for Africans to hold on tight to their culture, resist the imperialist forces of the west in their attempt to impose their identity on us; it is sad to note that, the British have achieved considerable success by the imposition of their language as a major means of communication on us Ghanaians and other colonial states.

This is evident in the fact that, close to majority of Ghanaian parents use the English language as the first means of communication with their wards even at home, I was saddened to know that a relative’s children born and bred in Ghana, could not put words together in the Twi dialect talkless of our native language, on the reverse they flawlessly spoke the English language; apparently both parents communicated with these kids more often in English language, this is not an isolated case, I have come across several Ghanaian parents who prefer communicating in English over the local languages.

There is a perception in Ghana that when you speak English fluently it connotes intelligence, I must state that intelligence in no way has a direct relationship with the language a person speaks, language is only a means of communicating what is in the mind and intelligence is strictly based on brain conditions; people are tempted to think that way because the English language is the official way of determining success in our school system and even industry, and so when a person cannot speak English he/she is described as a retard in Ghana.

The previous assertion cannot hold because the British have set that standard for us, and that is what we have lived by all these years, The Chinese, French, Germans, Arabs, Portuguese and other western countries communicate officially in their native languages and so the success or otherwise of their people does not depend on ability to speak another country’s language.

I seem not to understand why a Ghanaian child needs to pass the British language before gaining access to senior high and tertiary institutions; the current system prints on the minds of our young people and adults alike the fact that English is more important than our own languages; for this, I will not blame so much parents who dialogue with their wards in the British language, the system demands that.

The risk we face as a people however, is that, gradually we are losing our identity to the British in terms of language, and then I fear that in the next 30- 50 years, some of our local dialects will go extinct; the reason being that leadership and the people of Ghana have surrendered the fight to hold on to our languages instead of the British English.

As more parents train the next generation in English, supported by an educational system dominated by the same language, we are gradually raising the next generation to be an English speaking people born by Ghanaians, a complete mismatch for our identity.

We cannot take away our British colonial history of the past, but we have control of our future in ensuring that gradually we work towards restoring and maintaining our identity especially, our languages.

I specially want to commend the local dialect-speaking TV and radio stations who have braved the odds to present news items in the Ghanaian languages; believe me, in the long run these media outlets are contributing to preserving the Ghanaian culture, and they need all the patronage available to continue in this manner.

Ghanaian parents must cultivate the habit of raising their kids by communicating with them in their native languages, through this, we shall preserve our language identity;

It will be a great service to us, if some of our local dialects are properly document and made official, this will help expose Ghanaian minds to more of our languages and subsequently ensure the next generation are handed over smoothly our culture, our heritage.