Mozambique’s Indigenous Tongues Fading

Along a boulevard lined with flowering acacia trees, young people in designer clothes and high-heeled shoes chatter on the sidewalk, struggling to be heard over the driving Latin rhythms spilling from a nightclub.

Maputo’s vibrant nightlife lets people forget that it is the capital of one of the world’s poorest countries. Here you can eat Italian, dance like a Brazilian and flirt in Portuguese.

One thing that’s in ever shorter supply -- and perhaps even less demand: Mozambique’s own indigenous languages, the storehouse for the accumulated knowledge of generations.

“Sons no longer speak the language of their fathers ... our culture is dying,” said Paulo Chihale, director of a project that seeks to train Mozambican youths in traditional crafts.

Although Mozambique has 23 native languages, the only official one is Portuguese -- a hand-me-down tongue from colonial times that at once unifies a linguistically diverse country and undermines the African traditions that help make it unique.

The United Nations estimates that half the world’s 6,000 languages will disappear in less than a century. Roughly a third of those are spoken in Africa, and about 200 have less than 500 speakers. Experts estimate that half the world’s people now use Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Portuguese or French.

The U.N. Conference on Trade and Development’s report about protecting traditional knowledge argues that beyond a devastating effect on culture, the death of a language wipes out centuries of know-how in preserving ecosystems, leading to grave consequences for biodiversity.

In Maputo, Chihale looks up from his cluttered desk at MozArte, the U.N.- and government-funded crafts project, and complains bitterly about how his nation’s memory is fading away.

“Our culture has a rich oral tradition, oral history, stories told from one generation to another. But it is an oral literature our kids will never hear,” said Chihale, who speaks the Chopi language at home.

Anthropologists speculate that tribal people whose ancestors have lived for tens of thousands of years on India’s Andaman and Nicobar islands survived Asia’s tsunami because of ancient knowledge. They think signs in the wind, sea and flight of birds let the tribes know to get to higher ground.

But finding economic reasons to keep tradition alive can be a challenge.

In Mozambique, cheap imports have destroyed the market for local crafts beyond what can be sold to tourists. Horacio Arab, the son of a basket weaver who learned his father’s trade, said he improved his skills at MozArte but then abandoned weaving because he could not make a living.

Linguist Rafael Shambela, who works for Mozambique’s National Institute for the Development of Education, says the pressures from globalization are often too great to resist. To conserve native languages and culture will require societies to find ways to cast them with an inherent value, he said.

At a small campus on a dirt road south of Maputo, Shambela has joined a government effort to write textbooks and curriculums that will allow public school students to learn in 16 of the country’s 23 languages. But the program is limited by Mozambique’s poverty.

“A language is a culture,” Shambela said. “It contains the history of a people and all the knowledge they have passed down for generations.”

The trade-off in settling on Portuguese as a unifying force after independence in 1975 has been an erosion of the rites and rhythms of traditional life.

“From dating to mourning, the rules are becoming less clear,” Shambela said.