TjiKalanga to Become a Language of Science and Technology Like Hebrew.
Submitted by Ndzimu-unami Emmanuel Moyo. We the People Shall Overcome
Aramaic Displacement of Hebrew.
After the Roman General Titus Flavius Vespasianus Augustus and his 2IC Tiberius Julius Alexander overran Jerusalem and Judea in AD70 during the Siege of Jerusalem and completely ransacking it (and later being overrun by the Turkish Ottoman Empire), Hebrew almost got wiped out, being replaced by Aramaic and later Arabic in Judea and Samaria (later called Palestine).
However, when the Zionist Movement began with the World Zionist Congress in Basil, Switzerland chaired by Dr. Theodore Herzl in 1897, the long road toward the revival of the Jewish State and the Hebrew Language began.
About the same time, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda began the work of reviving the Hebrew Language with the establishment of the _Va'ad HaLashon_ (Committee of the Hebrew Language, which would later become the Academy of Hebrew Langauge).
He would later write some 100 volumes of the Hebrew Dictionary from scratch, digging up old words, coining new ones, borrowing and adapting from Arabic, Yiddish, French, English, etc. So had begun the long journey of the Hebrew Language.
As we speak today, Hebrew is spoken by 9 million people worldwide, 6 million of them in Israel. It is the language of Government, Business, the Courts, Education and Science & Technology in Israel. Even English is *not* an official language in Israel.
*IsiNdebele Conquest and Displacement of TjiKalanga*
So, what am I saying? About the same time the Jews began the long road toward revival of the Hebrew, the Ndebele had consolidated their power over the Kalanga and TjiKalanga was suffering a daily assault which, almost 200 years later, it has been pushed out of almost all of Matebeleland (it previously swept from Gweru, Gokwe and Mberengwa all the way to Serule and the Makadikadi Salt Pans), has been pushed to border lying fringes of the country, left without even a major town or city where it is the dominant language.
With the ascendancy of the Matebele Homeland Society post the Ndebele State and its unholy alliances with the Southern Rhodesia Missionary Conference (SRMC), the Rhodesian Government, and the Missionary Churches, TjiKalanga was destined for death and extinction.
Unfortunately, post-independence a new oppressive Gukurahundist Regime arose and cemented the obliteration of TjiKalanga through its 1987 Education Act that promoted only English, IsiNdebele, and Shona. As we speak, TjiKalanga is now under a direct assault from three late arrival languages: Shona, IsiNdebele, and Setswana!
*The Rise of TjiKalanga is not just Cultural, it's about a Future of Prosperity*
So, about 200 years later after the Ndebele Conquest, we find ourselves at a crossroads: do we let TjiKalanga die and allow complete assimilation into Ndebelehood (or even, God forbid, Shonahood), or do we mount a strong defense and fight to the point that TjiKalanga shall ascend again and become a major world language of Science & Technology, Government and Business, and Education and the Courts?
Hebrew fought back from ashes after almost 2000 Years of destruction and being driven to extinction. But today, it is one of the world's most dominant Education, Science & Technology languages, so strong that it has led to an education system that has attracted the world's second-largest Research & Development Center in the world outside the USA (Silicon Valley), i.e., Silicon Wadi, with such great companies as IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Akamai HD, etc having their second-largest R&D Centers in Israel.
So you see, the rise of TjiKalanga is not just about culture. It's not just about history. It is about a vision to rebuild a powerful Nation that will out-educate just about anyone else in Africa and beyond (yes, TjiKalanga shall one day replace English in our Education Systems and English shall be taught just as a Second Language just like in Israel, South Korea, Taiwan, China, etc), and produce Africa's finest Scientists & Engineers, Entrepreneurs & Business Leaders, etc.
The rise of TjiKalanga means a rediscovery of the People that were responsible for one of the world's Greatest Civilizations, in fact, one of the three greatest in Africa: the Maphungubgwe - Nzimabgwe Civilization, the Axumite Civilization in Ethiopia, and of course, the Egyptian Civilization.
TjiKalanga shall once again arise, and students will be attracted to the greatest of our Universities teaching in TjiKalanga (and some courses obviously in ChiNambya and Tshivenda), and students will find themselves with no option but to learn TjiKalanga first the same way they learn Deutsch for German Universities, Mandarin for Chinese Universities, French for French Universities, etc., or as is now the case, find TjiKalanga compulsion the same way IsiZulu is now compulsory at UKZN.
*_Half of this we shall have achieved by 2050AD, and all of it by 2100AD.
<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-sa/4.0/88x31.png" /></a><br />This work is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License</a>