Abstract:
Essentially, in the human kingdom language is regarded not only as a medium
of communication, but also as a carrier of culture. As a carrier of culture
language is of paramount significance in that it controls the way a people,
individually and collectively, perceive themselves in relation to other selves in
the world, and initiate and sustain their creativity. Unfortunately, for European
cultural hegemony language also became a mechanism for launching strategies
of domination and alienation of the African personality. The psycho-social
effect of the type of displacement that followed this action, as it is described in
this article, especially by Biko (1978), Ngara (1985), Ngugi wa Thiongo (1986)
and Pityana (1995), is such that the processes of subjugation and domination
did not only have to do with the colonised having to inherit alien syntax or
lexicology, but also the ways in which they ultimately perceive self and the
world, and how to relate with Europeans in their assumed superior status. In
this relation, the main aim of this article is to briefly reflect on the history of the
use of language as a mechanism that was used to assert European cultural
domination in the space of power relations and the disorientation and
marginalization of African indigenous languages and cultural heritage, and
ultimately the sabotaged the socio-economic development of the geo-south The article advocates for the reversal of the de-centering of African languages in ear
of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
