‘Why Do You Need a Dictionary?’ Written vs. Oral Languages
My first inklings regarding African languages arose from a conversation with students in Nigeria about a coconut in a tree. How would you say where the coconut was – e.g., that it was about halfway up the tree? You couldn’t say that; all you could say is that it was ‘up!’. Right at the top? Nope; just ‘up!’. In other words, no gradations.
A few years later in Nairobi, two women expressed surprise that I had an English dictionary. Isn’t English your language? Yes, I said; it’s my only language. Then why do you need a dictionary? They were puzzled that I needed an English dictionary and I was puzzled by their puzzlement. There are always times, I said, when you come across a word you’re not sure about and so you look it up. But if English is your language, they said, how can there be words you don’t know? What? I said. No one knows all the words of his language.
But we know all the words of Kikuyu; every Kikuyu does. What? (even more surprised).Eventually it dawned on me: being entirely oral, their language existed only in the minds of its speakers. But given blacks’ lack of curiosity and the absence of any external input, the overall size of such a language will remain more or less constant – and, pretty much stagnant. And since such a language exists only in the minds of its speakers, they must know all its words, because if they don’t know them, where else could they be? A written language, on the other hand, existing as it does partly in the written word, can grow beyond the capacity of anyone to know it in its entirety.
Important Consequences
But if the size of a language is limited, it follows that the number of concepts will also be limited and hence that both the language and the thinking will be impoverished. African languages were, of necessity, sufficient in their pre-colonial context, and are impoverished only in contrast to Western languages and in an Africa wanting to live like the West – which, for better or worse, they certainly do. While numerous dictionaries have been compiled between European and African languages there are few intra-African dictionaries, precisely because native speakers have no need for them. (I once had a Zulu-Zulu dictionary – more like a lexicon, really; it was a small format paperback 252 pages long.)
The Concept of Precision
My queries into Zulu began when I rang the African Language Dept at the University of Witwatersrand and spoke to a white guy. I asked him whether ‘precision’ existed in Zulu prior to European contact. “Oh” he said, “that’s a very Eurocentric question!” and refused to answer. I rang again, spoke to another white, with the identical result.
So I called the University of South Africa (UNISA), the large correspondence university in Pretoria, and spoke to a young black man. What was the Zulu entry for ‘precision’. ‘To make like a straight line’, he said. Was this part of indigenous Zulu? No; this was added.
As has been my experience in Africa, we got along like a house afire. I explained my interest in Zulu. He understood and found my questions of great interest.
The Nature of Abstract Entities
Before going any further, let us consider the nature of abstract entities. First, they are usually intangible and can’t be perceived by the senses. The number seven is prime; this primeness, however, cannot be seen, felt or heard; it can only be perceived by the mind. Further, abstract entities are often things which do not exist. ‘What would happen if everyone threw rubbish everywhere?’ refers to something that could happen but hopefully will not happen. Nevertheless, we can think about it.
Everything we observe occurs in time and everything we see exists in space; yet we perceive neither with our senses, but only with the mind. Precision is also abstract; while we can see and touch things made with precision, precision itself can only be grasped by the mind.
Acquiring Abstract Concepts Requires Self-Consciousness
How do we acquire abstract concepts? Is it enough, e.g., to make things with precision to have the concept of it? Africans make excellent carvings, made with precision. So why isn’t the word in their language? Well, to have the concept of precision we must not only deal with precision but must become aware that there is such a thing and then give it a name.
How, e.g., do we acquire such concepts as belief and doubt? We all have beliefs; even animals do. When a dog wags its tail on hearing his master’s footsteps, it believes that he is coming. But it has no concept of belief because it has no awareness that it has this belief and so has no awareness of belief per se; in short, it has no self-consciousness.
A rat conditioned to expect food after pressing a bar but who then finds that sometimes it doesn’t come, will begin doubting whether the bar will bring food; but it does not have the concept because it lacks the self-consciousness needed to become aware of the state of mind we call doubt.
The Concept of Promising In Zulu: ‘I’ll try’
After discussing ‘precision’ (with the black guy at UNISA), he assured me it was otherwise for ‘promise’. Hmmm? How about ‘obligation’? We looked it up. The Zulu entry means ‘as if to bind one’s feet’. No, he said; that was added. But if Zulu didn’t contain the concept of obligation, how could it contain the concept of a promise, since a promise is simply the oral undertaking of an obligation? For him this was a ‘light-bulb’ experience. I was interested in this, I said, because Africans so often failed to keep promises, and, never apologized – as if it didn’t warrant one.
Yes, he said; in fact, the Zulu word for promise – isithembiso – is not the correct word. When a black person ‘promises’ he means ‘maybe I will and maybe I won’t’. But, I said, this makes nonsense of promising, whose very raison d’être is to bind one to a course of action. When one is not sure he can do something he will say, ‘I will try, but I can’t promise’. He said he’d heard whites say that and had never understood it till now. In other words, as a young Roumanian friend so aptly summed it up, when a black person ‘promises’ he means ‘I’ll try’!
The problem here is clearly not linguistic. If it was, blacks would long since have learned the correct meaning; nor can it be a coincidence that the exact same ‘problem’ happens to occur in Nigeria, Kenya and Papua New Guinea. Much more likely is that they lack the very concept and hence cannot give the word its correct meaning. And that almost certainly reflects an intellectual incapacity.
FW de Klerk Addresses This Very Issue
In his decidedly milquetoast-quality book The Last Trek (1998), the last white president of South Africa, FW de Klerk, pointedly mentions the ANC’s consistent failure to keep solemn commitments and agreements. Referring to a speech during the pre-1994 negotiations, he says:
… Mandela was coldly furious about my sharp attack on the ANC and its failure to honour its agreements, and insisted on a second turn to speak. His speech, labeled a tirade by the press, was one of the most vicious personal attacks on a political opponent that most of those present … had ever heard. He accused me of being the head of an illegitimate, discredited minority regime and of being incapable of upholding moral standards … [a]s he piled insult on insult [p.233; emphasis added].
Mandela Responds In Typical African Fashion: BDO and Arrogance
Note how this illustrates an apparent failure to understand the very concept of a commitment and its attendant obligations. Mandela acts as if he doesn’t realize he’s even made agreements and shows no indication of understanding their significance. He never, however, denies that such agreements were made nor does he claim they were (somehow) kept; all of that’s irrelevant. Nor – of course – does he admit not having kept them. Instead, he attacks, demonstrating that the best defense is an offence (BDO).
Mandela’s intemperate outburst illustrates the arrogance of a black elite: I am an important person and am not to be criticized! If this is the attitude of tin-pot academic tyrants in backwater-African-universities, what can you expect from a man, said to be of royal lineage, about to become president of the most powerful country in Africa? Finally – and true to form (and as a corollary of the-BDO) – Mandela accuses De Klerk precisely of which he himself appears guilty, viz., ‘being incapable of upholding moral standards’!
‘Good-Cop-Bad-Cop’: Black Psychological Shrewdness
The next day Mandela acts as if all this never happened. Instead, like children with their mercurial temperaments and short memories, Mandela [began], once again, to adopt a reconciliatory tone. He played down his attack on me as something which had to be said, but was now over and done with. The following morning he and Ramaphosa made a special point of walking across the hall to shake my hand (p.224) illustrating, I believe, not magnanimity but the absence of any genuine anger in the first place and instead, typically shrewd black psychological manipulation through sham anger. I suspect that this ‘hot-and-cold’ routine is (instinctively) meant to wrong-foot one’s opponent, a bit like the good-cop-bad-cop technique, making the ‘victim’ pathetically grateful for any behaviour even remotely reasonable.
Making the Abstract Concrete
Note the huge significance of the Zulu definition of ‘obligation’ — as if to bind one’s feet. An obligation binds you, but it does so morally, not physically. It is abstract: you can’t see it, hear it, or touch it – which of course is precisely why there is no such word in Zulu. So what have the dictionary’s authors done? They have taken an abstract concept and made it concrete: feet, rope and tying are all tangible and observable – and therefore things that (all) blacks will (fully) understand, precisely as they will not (all) understand what an obligation is. The fact that they had to define it in this way is, therefore, all by itself, compelling evidence for my thesis that Zulu thought lacks abstract concepts and, indirectly, for my claim that blacks are deficient in abstract thinking.
A woman working with severely retarded children, mentioned, without any prompting, that these children’s thinking was extremely ‘tangible’: to understand something they had to see it and touch it – in other words, it had to be present to their senses – meaning that they were incapable of thinking of things which did not exist.
But if these children with IQs of 50 are less capable of abstract thought than those with IQs of (say) 70, it follows that the latter would be less capable than those with IQs of 100; etc.. And since the concepts of time and the future are amongst the most abstract, people of lower IQ will have less grasp of the future than those with a higher IQ, and that there must be a significant correlation between IQ and the ability to understand time and the future. Hence, if blacks have a lower average IQ than whites, it would follow that they have less of an understanding of time and the future.
Blacks and Time
My thinking about this began in 1998. As I pulled into my garage (behind my apartment building), several Francophone Africans drove up and stopped right in front of my garage. ‘Hey’, I said, ‘you can’t park here!’ Perfectly friendly and respectful, they asked ‘Oh, are you leaving [now]?’ ‘No’, I said, ‘but’ (stating what one would think was the utterly obvious) ‘I might later.’ ‘Park over there’ – and they did.
The point is, their thinking seemed to encompass only the here and now: if you’re leaving [now], we understand; but otherwise, what’s the problem? I had further such encounters and the key question was always ‘Are you leaving [now]?’
Future, Time and Space All the Same Word in Zulu
The future doesn’t exist; it will exist but doesn’t exist now. People who have difficulty in thinking of things which do not exist, will ipso facto have difficulty thinking of the future.
It appears that the Zulu entry for future – isikhati – is the same word as the word for time, as well as the word for space. In other words, none of these concepts exist in Zulu thought, period. It also appears that there is no word for the past – meaning, the time preceding the present. This should not be surprising since the past no longer exists, just as the future does not yet exist. Hence, people who have difficulty in thinking of things which do not exist will have difficulty in thinking of the past as well as the future. This has an obvious bearing on things like gratitude and loyalty – both of which are noticeably uncommon in blacks.
The reader may wonder why it took me more than twenty years to notice these things. Briefly, I think it is because our assumptions about time are so bed-rock that we’re not even aware of having them and so are equally unaware that anyone might not have them. Consequently this possibility is simply not on our radar – and so of course we don’t see it even when it stares us in the face.
A Metaphysical Argument Regarding Time
Imagine the universe as an absolute void containing not a single particle of matter and in which, therefore, nothing ever happened and in which there was hence no change (since there was nothing to change). In such a universe (the reasoning goes) there would be no time, since time requires change.
Now consider traditional African society as it existed for millennia before any outside contact. It was essentially static: On a macro level, little if anything happened and there was little if any change. A visitor returning after hundreds of years would hardly notice a difference: the habits, the customs, the food, the dress, the medicines, the language, the (absence of) technology, science and literature would be the same. In terms of human development there would be a void.
But if the absence of change means the absence of time passing, then to the extent that African society remained static it would be fair to say that in fact there was indeed neither past nor future. With no real history, and no reason to anticipate the future, such concepts would have had little if any purchase, and hence would have been unlikely to have arisen in their mental repertoire. As is still largely the case, there would only be the here and now.
Where Blacks Do Pay Attention To Time
Interestingly, there are areas where blacks do notice time. They see crops planted, growing and then harvested; they see children born, grow old and die; and, they plan for their funerals, because death is a certainty, while ill health is only a risk. (The Zulu entries for ‘risk’ mean ‘danger’ and ‘a slippery surface’.) Furthermore, death is concrete and observable. In short, blacks tend to be aware of time when it is manifested in concrete, observable objects and events.
Math and Geometry: A Problem for South African and American Blacks
A quote from an article noting the problems South African blacks have with mathematics (“Finding New Languages for Maths and Science”, The Star [Johannesburg]; 24-Jul-02, p.8):
[Xhosa] is a language where polygon and plane have the same definition; … where concepts like triangle, quadrilateral, pentagon, hexagon are defined by only one word.
In other words, it is a language in which these concepts simply do not exist. In America blacks are said to have a ’tendency to approximate space, numbers and time instead of aiming for complete accuracy’. In other words, they are also poor at math. Notice the identical triumvirate of abstract concepts – space, numbers and time – none of which can be seen, heard or touched. Is it just a coincidence that these are the concepts with which blacks – everywhere – seem to have such difficulties?
The Zulu entry for ‘number’, by the way – ningi – means numerous, which is not the same as the concept of number. It is clear, therefore, that there is no concept of number in Zulu.
Maintenance
White rule in South Africa ended in 1994. It was about ten years later that power outages began, which have now (2007) reached crisis proportions. Part of the problem is the government’s failure to build more power plants, in spite of being specifically warned about this in 1999. More generally, it is the breakdown of existing power plants due to lack of maintenance. Maintenance is future-oriented, the Zulu entry for which is ondla, which means: ‘1. Nourish, rear; bring up; 2. Keep an eye on; watch (your crop)’.
In short, there is no such thing as maintenance in Zulu thought, and it would be hard to argue that the absence of this concept has nothing to do with the fact that throughout Africa, the phrase ‘nothing works’ is only an exaggeration.
Motivation and Ambition
An article in The New York Times (“Schools Plan to Pay Cash for Marks”, by Jennifer Medina, 19 June 2007) reveals that New York City is considering a plan (since implemented) aimed at getting blacks to do ‘well on standardized tests and to show up for class’, which could ‘earn [them] as much as $500 a year’. Adults would be rewarded for ‘keeping a full-time job ... having health insurance ... and attending parent-teacher conferences’. Students would be paid for doing well on tests and sometimes just for taking them, as well as for regular attendance and for each book they read.
The clear implication is that blacks are not very motivated. Motivation involves thinking about the future and hence about things which do not exist. Given black deficiencies in this regard, it is not surprising that they would be thus lacking, and having to prod them is further evidence for this.
The Zulu entry for ‘motivate’ is banga, under which I find ‘1. Make, cause, produce something unpleasant; … to cause trouble ... . 2. Contend over a claim; … fight over inheritance; … 3. Make for, aim at, journey towards …:’. But when I ask blacks what banga means, they have no idea, which tells me that whatever it means it does not mean motivation. Clearly this is a substitute definition – choosing the ‘closest’ Zulu word – as opposed to a constructed definition (‘as if to bind one’s feet’).
In fact, no word in Zulu could refer to motivation for the simple reason that there is no such concept in Zulu; and if there is no such concept there cannot be a word for ‘it’ – precisely because in Zulu there is no ‘it’. Hence the need to entice blacks into behaving as if they were motivated.
The entry for ‘ambition’ is langazela, which simply means ‘desire’ or ‘longing’. Compare this to the Encarta Dictionary: ‘desire for success: a strong feeling of wanting to be successful in life and achieve great things’ [in the future], which is a good description of precisely what blacks tend to lack.
An Evolutionary Explanation
One explanation for this lack of abstract thinking, including the diminished understanding of time, is that blacks evolved in a climate where they were able to live day to day without having to think ahead; they never developed the ability to think of things which didn’t exist because there was no need to. Whites, on the other hand, evolved in circumstances where they did have to develop this ability – like thinking about what would happen if they didn’t build stout houses and store enough fuel and food for the winter – since otherwise they simply would not have survived.
Moral Shamelessness
The same New York Times article mentions a Darwin Davis of ‘the Urban League’ as ‘caution[ing] that the … money being offered [remember, this is for attending class] was relatively paltry … wondering … how many tests students would need to pass to buy the latest video game’!
Instead of being shamed by the need for such a plan, he bitches that it’s not enough! If he is unaware of how gross his remark is, he is morally obtuse. Even so, you would still expect him to know that most people would find it offensive. In fact, however, this is precisely how blacks often do ‘understand’ morality – as what others tell them or expect them to do. Yet for many blacks even this externally-based morality has failed to take hold – which makes sense, because this ‘morality’ is dependent on enforcers, and since these have disappeared, there is nothing left, neither internalized morality (the ‘real thing’) nor the external. One result is moral opacity.
GRUESOME CRUELTY EVIDENCE OF BLACK MORAL OPACITY
Jeering, Mocking and Laughing at Agony and Death
In a book review of Driving South (David Robbins [Johannesburg: Southern Books], 1993), ‘A Cape social worker sees elements that revel in violence ...
“It’s like a cult which has embraced a lot of people who otherwise appear normal. Young people in particular. At the slightest provocation [NB re the volatility of black emotions], their blood-lust is aroused. And then they want to see death, and they jeer and mock at the suffering involved, especially the suffering of a slow and agonising death.” [The review is in The Citizen, July 12, 1993, p.6.] A letter-writer describes ‘necklacing’ (The Citizen; “SA’s New Nazis”, August 10, 1993, p.18):
‘The petrol-filled tyre is jammed on your shoulders and a lighter is placed within reach of your hand. Your fingers are broken, needles are pushed up your nose and you are tortured until you put the lighter to the petrol yourself.’ In May 2008 Johannesburg’s black townships erupted in mayhem and murder. A headline read “FLAMES OF HATE: Reiger Park local laughs after ‘necklacing’”:
One plump woman in a knitted cap and overall couldn’t contain her laughter as she pointed to the barbarous scene and related the events to locals. [The Star, 19 May 2008, p.1.] This is all so unspeakably vile and repulsive, so beyond depravity, the human brain recoils. This is not merely the absence of human empathy, but the positive enjoyment of human suffering, enjoying it all the more when it’s ‘slow and agonising’. Can you believe – jeering, mocking and laughing at this?
Rwanda: ‘Ecstasy of Killing Beyond My Reach’
From the Chicago Tribune (“Hutu killers danced in blood of victims, videotapes show”, 14 September 1995, p.8, Sec 1) this from UN investigator Alain Siggs regarding the 1994 massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda: “The ecstasy of killing, the lust for blood; this is the most horrible thought. It’s beyond my reach” (emphasis added); and there is no reason to think these were ‘abnormal’ Africans. As further evidence of their lack of moral consciousness, the murderers videotaped their crimes, ‘apparently want[ing] to record their actions for posterity’. It truly beggars belief. Unlike (e.g.) Nazi war criminals, who tried to hide their deeds, indicating that at least they realized what others would think, even that was lacking in these blacks.
Amy Biehl Trial: ‘Laughing At Woman Groaning In Pain Impossible To Explain To Rational Minds’
The following, from a book by a retired senior South African jurist, Rex van Schalkwyk, reports remarkably congruent behaviour (One Miracle Is Not Enough [Johannesburg: Bellwether Publishers], 1998 (pp.188-89):
… Amy Biehl, the American Fulbright scholar brutally murdered in Guguletu [near Cape Town] – for being white, when she had wanted only to assist in the transition to democracy – will be remembered for the tragic irony of her death. … it is impossible to explain in terms accessible to rational minds this extract from a report of the trial … : ‘Supporters of the three men accused of murdering … [her] burst out laughing in the public gallery of the Supreme Court today when a witness told how the battered woman groaned in pain’ [The Star, 25 November 1993; my emphasis].
These incidents – and the responses they evoke (‘the human brain recoils’; ‘beyond my reach’; ‘impossible to explain … to rational minds’) – point to traits that cannot be wished away and further confirm my claim that blacks are deficient in moral consciousness.
from the book Gedaliah Braun Racism Guilt Self-Hatred and Self-Deceit
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