MWENE NYAGA
Member
- Joined
- Jan 9, 2024
- Messages
- 235
Many among our race still fail to grasp the profound power of language. But those who colonized us understood it perfectly, and they weaponized that knowledge from day one.
One of their first and most strategic actions was to forcibly mix people from different African nations, tribes, and cultures, deliberately severing linguistic ties. The goal? To ensure we’d lose our native tongues and adopt broken, inferior versions of European or Arab languages. This was not random. This was psychological warfare.
They understood what many of us do not: that language is not just communication, it is cognition. This is what psychological linguists call the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. It holds that the language we speak determines the boundaries of our thinking. Words do not merely describe the world; they shape how we see, categorize, and interact with it.
Different language families do not simply offer different “words” for the same things; they encode different realities. A culture's language reflects its values, priorities, metaphysics, and ancestral experiences. When we lose our ancestral language, we lose the capacity to think like our ancestors. And when we adopt the language of a colonizer, we often begin unknowingly to think like them.
This is exactly what has happened to the African mind.
Today, even when African languages “survive,” they’ve been reduced to informal use, casual conversation, gossip, jokes, and romantic talk. All formal domains, education, governance, economics, and technology are conducted in the colonizer’s language. And this distinction is not superficial.
The brain distinguishes between formal and informal language. “Formal” means language that creates form, that builds, codes, and structures higher levels of thought. “Informal” means language that exists without that constructive force. In short: Africa no longer has a Formal Language.
This is not just a linguistic crisis; it is a civilizational one.
Without a formal, constructive language rooted in our ancestral worldview, we are being mentally programmed to serve foreign paradigms. Linguists project that by 2100, most indigenous African languages will die out not because no one loves them, but because they no longer serve as the primary interface between African minds and the world. Already, most Africans admit they can barely speak to their grandparents fluently. What they speak is often a creolized hybrid with colonial grammar, syntax, and thought-forms.
What does this mean in practice?
Even when exposed to African history, culture, or spirituality, the African mind often defaults to interpreting it through a European or Arab framework, because it no longer has a native mental structure to hold and understand it. You can give them books about traditional Ifá, about ancient Ethiopia or Nubia, and they’ll still think about them like the colonizer would.
So what must be done?
If we are serious about liberation, true liberation, not slogans, we must commit to linguistic resurrection. Not a broken pidgin or a shallow token of pride but a structured, formal, constructive language with the capacity to think, build, and evolve in our terms.
This is not impossible. It has been done before with Modern Greek, Tamil, and Sanskrit studies, all proof that sacred languages can rise again when a people will it.
It must be done for us.
It must be done for our children.
It must be done so we may resurrect as a people.
Language is not just speech. It is our weapon, our shield, our mirror, and our bridge to the divine. Reclaim it.
One of their first and most strategic actions was to forcibly mix people from different African nations, tribes, and cultures, deliberately severing linguistic ties. The goal? To ensure we’d lose our native tongues and adopt broken, inferior versions of European or Arab languages. This was not random. This was psychological warfare.
They understood what many of us do not: that language is not just communication, it is cognition. This is what psychological linguists call the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. It holds that the language we speak determines the boundaries of our thinking. Words do not merely describe the world; they shape how we see, categorize, and interact with it.
Different language families do not simply offer different “words” for the same things; they encode different realities. A culture's language reflects its values, priorities, metaphysics, and ancestral experiences. When we lose our ancestral language, we lose the capacity to think like our ancestors. And when we adopt the language of a colonizer, we often begin unknowingly to think like them.
This is exactly what has happened to the African mind.
Today, even when African languages “survive,” they’ve been reduced to informal use, casual conversation, gossip, jokes, and romantic talk. All formal domains, education, governance, economics, and technology are conducted in the colonizer’s language. And this distinction is not superficial.
The brain distinguishes between formal and informal language. “Formal” means language that creates form, that builds, codes, and structures higher levels of thought. “Informal” means language that exists without that constructive force. In short: Africa no longer has a Formal Language.
This is not just a linguistic crisis; it is a civilizational one.
Without a formal, constructive language rooted in our ancestral worldview, we are being mentally programmed to serve foreign paradigms. Linguists project that by 2100, most indigenous African languages will die out not because no one loves them, but because they no longer serve as the primary interface between African minds and the world. Already, most Africans admit they can barely speak to their grandparents fluently. What they speak is often a creolized hybrid with colonial grammar, syntax, and thought-forms.
What does this mean in practice?
Even when exposed to African history, culture, or spirituality, the African mind often defaults to interpreting it through a European or Arab framework, because it no longer has a native mental structure to hold and understand it. You can give them books about traditional Ifá, about ancient Ethiopia or Nubia, and they’ll still think about them like the colonizer would.
So what must be done?
If we are serious about liberation, true liberation, not slogans, we must commit to linguistic resurrection. Not a broken pidgin or a shallow token of pride but a structured, formal, constructive language with the capacity to think, build, and evolve in our terms.
This is not impossible. It has been done before with Modern Greek, Tamil, and Sanskrit studies, all proof that sacred languages can rise again when a people will it.
It must be done for us.
It must be done for our children.
It must be done so we may resurrect as a people.
Language is not just speech. It is our weapon, our shield, our mirror, and our bridge to the divine. Reclaim it.
