P.L.O. Lumumba asked a question that still stings. Why must Africans speak foreign languages to be seen as intelligent, while Koreans speak Korean and Chinese speak Chinese without apology?
He was not attacking English or French as tools. He was attacking the hierarchy that treats them as the only valid measure of a mind. China teaches in Chinese. Korea teaches in Korean.
Japan teaches in Japanese. Scandinavia teaches in Danish, Norwegian, Swedish. Africa teaches in English, French, and Portuguese — and then calls its own children uneducated when they struggle to think in a language that was forced on their grandparents.
European powers did not just take land and minerals. They took the vocabulary of thought itself. When a child in Kinshasa or Lagos or Nairobi is punished for speaking Lingala, Yoruba, or Swahili in the classroom, the lesson is not about grammar.
The lesson is that their mother’s voice is backward. That their grandfather’s proverbs are not knowledge. That their own mind is illegitimate until it translates itself into someone else’s frame.
The result is a continent of mentally fractured people. Parents in Accra brag that their daughter no longer speaks Twi.
A professor in Nairobi is taken more seriously in broken English than in fluent Kikuyu. A scientist in Dakar must publish in French to be cited, even when his research is about soil in Senegal.
This is not partnership.
It is conquest by softer means. The gun left. The examination board stayed.
The fix is not to stop learning other languages. It is to stop requiring Africans to abandon their own to be treated as human.