My Disappearing Ugandan history.

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Photo: Victoria Nile - in Jinja City(Uganda)

Ancestral languages throughout the world, are conduits of human heritage from which community songs, stories and poems are conveyed. These languages convey wealth of wisdom about geography, zoology, mathematics, navigation, astronomy, and more. They also provide insight into distinct forms of thinking and solving problems. All of these things convey a culture; a way of interpreting human behaviour and emotion that is not conveyed the same way as in the other language. Therefore, without language our identity and origins are bound to disappear. There is increasing awareness that the last native language fluent speakers continue to edge. This has posed a threat of extinction of languages such Ateso, Acholi, Samya and so on  in Uganda as there no sustainable mechanism to revitalize and archive ancestral languages. Most of the Ugandan native languages are oral and their literature is oral. 

There may be a translation of the Old and New Testaments, Religion Movie translations, a formal grammar, and a small dictionary. What most of these languages do not have is a literary tradition——the kind that produces indigenous written works of poetry, fiction, biography, history, ethnography, and so on. The children may be taught in ancestral languages in the early primary grades. However, this is to facilitate the transition to English and consequently wean them of their ancestral languages. The misconception that being monolingual in either English or Swahili language is being literate and privileged has further rendered indigenous languages largely useless and prone to extinction. 

Owing to the danger faced by the Uganda’s ancestral languages, there is a need to develop a program to help get rid of such problems. That program must contribute to the revitalization and development of culture in Uganda thereby delivering the social, health and community benefits that are well recognized as resulting from cultural nest programs such as sports, music, art and literature, Skills development, Education and outreach and cultural-tourism.

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