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In the 1990s, when many exiles returned home, I was quite fascinated by some of the families, who, due to missing home so much during exile, ensured that their children born in foreign lands never forgot their home languages.
One such couple was Dr Motsoko Pheko and his wife, Ntsioua Pheko. To all intents and purposes, Dr Pheko, the former president of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC), was a sophisticated global citizen who may have gone on to pick up many languages in his years during exile.
According to his Facebook page, the former lawyer visited every country on the continent in his travels as an activist and politician, and once served as a representative of the PAC to the UN in New York (US) and Geneva (Switzerland), and also worked in the UK, Zambia and Tanzania.
His global citizenship could secure him a level of success anywhere, and raising kids in exile without the support of his village made it easier to discard his language and culture.
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We know that a young Pheko left for exile in 1963 and spent over 30 years abroad before coming home. His wife first joined him in Swaziland with their firstborn, Mohau, when the couple were expecting their second child, Mamello.
They were blessed with three daughters, with Lebogang the baby of the three sisters. The couple made sure their children not only spoke Sesotho fluently, despite the various countries they grew up in, but also knew their culture and history.
Their pan-Africanist teachings led them to see the world from an African perspective.
I met Mohau in the late 1990s, when she headed one of the most prolific gender rights organisations, and we invited her to pen a column for City Press. A decade later, and by some interesting design, I met Lebohang, whose personal finance column in True Love I also edited. The two have an African optimism and outlook that comes from understanding African politics beyond jaundiced history taught in classes, but one taught and nurtured by their parents.
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Interacting with Pheko’s daughters always challenged me and prompted me to lament that many African parents – unencumbered by challenges of raising kids in exile, and with all the indigenous knowledge systems inherited from our forebears – turned out to be tragically contributing to the death of our culture and languages.
Shamefully, we see nothing wrong when our children cannot speak a single African language.
After celebrating Heritage Day yesterday, a pledge we should make is to nurture our children to not only speak our languages, but seek African knowledge systems to help them navigate life’s challenges.
