One of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking Gikuyu in the vicinity of the school. The culprit was given corporal punishment – three to five strokes of the cane on bare buttocks – or was made to carry a metal plate around the neck with inscriptions such as I AM STUPID or I AM A DONKEY. Sometimes the culprits were fined money they could hardly afford. And how did the teachers catch the culprits? A button was initially given to one pupil who was supposed to hand it over to whoever was caught speaking his mother tongue. Whoever had the button at the end of the day would sing who had given it to him and the ensuing process would bring out all the culprits of the day. Thus children were turned into witch hunters and in the process were being taught the lucrative value of being a traitor to one’s immediate community.
I took the extract above from a book I am reading; De-colonising the Mind by Ngugi wa Thiongo. I found this paragraph very interesting because I have gone through a similar experience. The only things that my experience and his do not have in common are the location and native language; everything else is exactly the same.
When this policy was announced to us we thought it was a joke and so we laughed it off as usual like the kids we were, but, it was no joke as we later found out. We go serious lashes for speaking our “mother tongues”. Why were they caning us for this? It didn’t make sense to me. We were supposed to speak English 24/7. Can you imagine that? Being forced to speak a language which is not your own as you look over your shoulder just to make sure your poor English does not get mistaken for a local dialect.
See, we lived in fear. The lashes were not too kind to our buttocks and the pain was literary numbing; my behind would swell up so much sometimes I had to seat at an angle or risk hurting the swollen portion. All those lashes were delivered so that we would be able to speak better English and yes, we spoke better English. We developed accents and joined the race of who sounds the queen’s words better.
We became Black English men and women; we purged our native selves, we spoke from our noses and raped our mother tongues beyond recognition.
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