Granny Chidzonga has a complaint. Whenever she visits her children in Harare she is forced to speak to her grandchildren in English, instead of Shona.

“They can’t utter a word in Shona despite the fact that their mother teaches it at Advanced level at a nearby high school and has produces the best examination results in the country!”, she says.

Some parents don’t hide their deep annoyance with friends and visitors who attempt to speak with their children in their Ndebele language. They always quickly interrupt and direct them to respond in English.

Such seems to be the growing attitude among many young black Zimbabwean middle class couples. They have completely Anglicised their family lifestyles and seem to regret that they should ever speak their mother tongues.

Some still prefer to send their children to top English-only nursery schools where kids are reprimanded for saying a word in a local language. When choosing the ‘best’ schools, it seems that the most commonly used criteria is that a school has white teachers or children, where undiluted English is taught and spoken.

Black “English” couples
During my ongoing, not-so-scientific research, I have drawn some startling conclusions. I have discovered that many young couples, which I’ve closely observed during shopping trips in suburban malls, mostly speak to their children in English while they themselves talk to each other in vernacular languages.

When I am together with my children, friends usually greet me in the local language and then automatically switch to English when they address the young ones. And when I phone home to check on different things, my young workmates will usually speak to the house maids and gardeners in Shona or Ndebele and switch to English when their children are brought to the telephone. These young parents will then pitch the tones of their voices to sound like young English mums and dads!

Politicians are no different
“We are highly impressionable and react to peer pressure and changing circumstances. We feel great when our children can speak English since that puts us in a higher class” explained my niece Zanele. “Even our politicians who preach national pride and bombard us with hate rhetoric against our former colonisers do the same. Away from the public eye some so-called revolutionaries imitate English lifestyles in their homes and secretly send their children to study in Europe and America.”

I quickly get reminded of the writer Frantz Fanon’s book ‘Black Skin, white masks’ in which he asserts: “The black man who wants to turn his race white is as miserable as he preaches hatred for the whites”.