The prodigal tongue

“Himina, Xhangani girl. I am a Xitsonga girl.” I used to proudly repeat this phrase to anyone who asked. Knowing and speaking Xitsonga, a South African language, is a part of who I am. The first language I learned to speak as a child was Xitsonga. My father’s language was my predominant tongue until I went to preschool, when my mother began teaching me Southern Sotho. I grew up fluent in both. Preschool also introduced me to Afrikaans, a language from South Africa’s colonial history that followed me throughout my school career. However, English, the fourth and final language I learned, was the ultimate eraser of my native tongues.

During the apartheid era, Black people were forced out of cities and into Bantustans, or homelands, spread across the country. From these homelands grew a tree of many different cultures — and languages. Xitsonga and Northern Sotho were spoken in the north, while the Nguni tribes that spoke Zulu and Xhosa were spread in the eastern parts of the country. The rich cultural landscape is what makes Africa a unique continent. When a language is lost, the culture can disappear with it. Preserving language, however, carries on the customs, traditions and rituals of that culture.

Language is the bridge that connects me to my father’s tribe and my mother tongue. Black language is a celebration of my birthright as an individual; it remains untainted by colonialism and modernism. It is a reminder of my childhood, my grandmothers and the villages that they raised me in. Hearing the familiar sounds of Xitsonga takes me to my grandmother’s four-room house in Malamulele, a small village in northern South Africa, where I could eat freshly picked mangos on hot sunny days and bathe outside in a plastic tub while neighbors wandered by.

Our white teachers would condemn anyone who spoke their native language in primary school, whether on the playground or inside the classroom. Anyone who struggled to adapt to this rule would be forced to sit by the teacher’s feet

during recess. Not speaking fluent English was enough to deem a child slow, even if they understood and spoke four other languages.

“Ja Baas, Nee Baas.” “Yes Boss, No Boss.” In apartheid South Africa, Black people who worked as domestic workers or under any Afrikaner were expected to know and speak the Afrikaans language. To this day, it is not rare to find older Black people who are fluent in Afrikaans but barely know English, similar to residents of former European colonies in Africa who still speak French or Belgian. It seemed to me that language was organized in some sort of hierarchical system. Books in the bookstore were never in my native language, only in English or Afrikaans. In high school I was never given the choice to study a native South African language, only English or Afrikaans. English was prioritized, while the languages of our heritage were not tolerated in formal spaces. It was unacceptable if someone did not speak English but somehow all right if they couldn’t communicate with their own Zulu grandmother. I was unaware of it then, but as my teachers reprimanded us for speaking our home languages, they forced us into this invisible hierarchy.

Soon enough, I could not speak any language other than English. Black music and culture became something I was no longer a part of, even as my family continued to speak to me in our native languages. My school life affected my home life, and when I couldn’t find the balance between speaking English at school and Northern Sotho at home, it made sense to only speak English. As my friends played Diketo, a popular game among Black girls that involves throwing and catching stones, and chatted animatedly in their mother tongue, I remained unwilling to speak anything but English, so much so that I was labeled a coconut — brown on the outside, white on the inside. Blackness was something I hid and strayed away from in all forms, including music and dance, to fit into what was deemed the norm. Somehow I’d become convinced that English was good and intelligent while anything else was not.

As the years passed, words that should have come to me easily — like eggs, knife and fork in Xitsonga — disappeared from my vocabulary, and the languages I had once spoken so fluently were now foreign to my tongue. The way one’s tongue moves when speaking is different according to the specific language. Venda requires one to roll their tongue, while Nguni languages such as Zulu and Xhosa require a clicking tongue. However, English does not require such gymnastics of the tongue, and a lack of use allows the muscle memory to fade.

It was on my first high school camping trip that I realized that the language hierarchy was not a figment of my imagination. I had boxed myself into only speaking English instead of leaning into being multilingual. Although teachers only enforced speaking English at school, I had allowed that to overshadow the fact that at home, I had the liberty to speak the languages of my mother and father. I chose to be influenced by those who could only speak one language, English, rather than my family, who could speak multiple languages.

For my high school classmates, language served as a form of companionship. Teenagers could use cuss words I’d never heard of to tease each other or mock the teachers in secret. I was finally surrounded by people who spoke their native languages with pride. I watched as the white children envied the languages and made it a point to learn the language, especially the swear words, so they could understand us. No matter what tribe you were from — Tsonga, Venda, Northern Sotho — language brought us together. As I grew closer to my friends, I realized how freely they spoke their native languages. They could read and write in their native languages — something I had never been able to do. I was learning that native South African languages could also be used to compose prose, write love songs and tell stories. Knowing English did not make us more or less smart than someone who only spoke a native language. The only difference between the kids who swore so loudly in Northern Sotho on the camping trip and me was that they had never bought into the idea of a language hierarchy. In our dorm rooms, dancing to “Hita Famba Moyeni” (“We will travel in the sky”), the child who had been proud of her heritage, who had introduced herself as a Xhangani girl, was finally returning.

When I finally began to leave English in the classroom and speak my language, friends would endlessly tease me and beg me to stick to English, because when speaking Sotho or Tsonga, I sounded “wrong.” My accent was “too English,” they said, and my Xitsonga sounded broken and confused. When my mother was asked if her only child speaks and understands her mother tongue, she answered, “My child speaks both mother and father tongue, albeit in an English accent.” Even then, it had never occurred to me that my accent was something of a problem. This was until I arrived in the United States. A friend always spoke to other Africans and me in his standard South African accent; however, the minute he spoke to any American, he would change his accent. When I asked him why, he said, “So they understand me better.” “Everyone” — all Black people — “code switches when talking to a certain type of people.”

It seemed that I had overcome the language hierarchy at home only to face the accent hierarchy in the United States. I feel that there is always a part of us that tries to conform to some imaginary standard in the world. Being able to speak to either of my grandmothers in their native language is one of my favorite things. Even far from home, listening to music in my native languages or tuning into a Xitsonga-speaking radio station makes me feel connected to my homeland and my heritage. The younger me may have seen English as the only desirable language to speak, but as I have grown older, I have been putting aside the English words and just enjoying my conversations in Northern Sotho with the people that matter the most to me.

Language is at the heart of what unites us, and I am glad that I met people who taught me that our languages are something to be loved, celebrated and spoken out loud as much as possible. While I will always appreciate English for allowing me to communicate on a global scale, the Xhangani girl in me is always glad to return to her father tongue.