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| Maidei |
Language is the principal apparatus in the laboratories of culture. It is the interface by which a culture finds expression, transmission, diffusion, sustenance, development, perpetuity and regeneration.
When language slouches towards obscurity, culture, as the corporate repository of knowledge, values, meanings, experience, customs, relations, roles, attitudes, beliefs and intellectual achievement, faces extinction.
The patriarch of linguistics, Edward Sapir, observes that language does not exist apart from the socially inherited assemblage of practices and beliefs that determines the texture of our lives.
Our peculiar identity, distinctive lore and understanding of the world are embodied in our languages. Indigenous languages, therefore, can only stagnate at the peril of our culture.
The viability of local languages, however, currently oscillates around zero as English continues to hold sway in the virtually all the pillar sectors of our society.
English occupies an elitist prism, facilitating the core functions – professional, political, educational and developmental – while our languages are, by and large, confined to phatic communication.
Indigenous languages still have their nominal space in home, school curricula and performing arts. However, there is need to aggressively extend the spheres of influence for our local languages, especially through the utilisation of information and communication technologies.
As demonstrated in some of our previous instalments, there is urgent need to streamline our local languages, with special emphasis on literature, into the trending digital facilities so as to regain their edge in a dynamic terrain.
On an encouraging note, my attention has been directed to a number of mouth-watering digitisation initiatives in the basket.
Interestingly, the country’s premier literary festival, Zimbabwe International Book Fair, this year runs under the theme “Indigenous Languages, Literature, Art and Knowledge Systems of Africa” concurring with a fistful of initiatives meant to crop indigenous literature on the digital map.
Director of electronic resources hub Chishona.info Sasha Robinson shared on the work in progress. The platform, currently under development with the help of Government, was created to warehouse and ensure the survival of the Shona language and its cultural aspects in the face of an imperial eclipse.
The site will feature downloadable Shona novels in e-book format, proverbs and idioms, sentence construction, grammar, set-texts, short stories, dramas, poems, translated works from other languages, the history of Zimbabwe, historical and current images of Zimbabwe, heritage sites and legends, folklore and an image database.
The success of the model will see it being extended to the other officially recognised languages of Zimbabwe, Chewa, Chibarwe, English, Kalanga, Koisan, Nambya, Ndau, Ndebele, Shangani, Sotho, Tonga, Tswana, Venda and Xhosa, capturing school curricula, literature, multi-media, heritage and history in each case.
Literary notables such as Aaron Chiundura-Moyo, Charles Mungoshi and T.K Tsodzo and some major publishers have agreed to come aboard and have their work digitised for greater visibility and accessibility.
Some works are being translated from Shona into English in consultation with the authors. An online Shona dictionary will be freely available.
“Chishona.info is immortalising all literary works from the past, the present and into the future. The cyber-based repository will ensure we will never lose any of our indigenous languages as they will stored and also re-enacted through video and audio storage,” said Robinson.
“Full-length books will be stored and retrieved from an internet based library for use by schools through e-learning based curricula or retrieved for printing and use in all schools on Zimbabwe and abroad,” he said.
Robinson said that the venture will also be valuable in countries such as the United Kingdom where Shona has been introduced as a subject in schools where Zimbabweans are many.
“We have had consultations with Longman and College Press. We have also had talks with authors of certain works whose digital rights are being held by the publishers.
“We have sought intervention through the ministry and have another meeting with the Primary and Secondary Education Minister Lazarus Dokora this week to finalise the cooperation and assistance we need.
“Considerable progress has been registered and we have the endorsement of the Ministry Sports, Arts and Culture. We are on target to launch in a few weeks with surprisingly good cooperation from publishers and other stakeholders,” he said.
Whereas piracy continues to blight the book value chain, resolutions recurrently come across as lame-duck sessions for lack of perceptible change. Replication of copyrighted literature is increasing by the day.
Bulawayo-based academic Blessing Jona suggested in a previous interview with The Herald that local authors might end up having to resort to highly encrypted electronic books with powerful codes such that they are only accessed online by the subscribers.
The Chishona.info model promises a similar way around the piracy problem.
“E-books will be encoded such that they are not printable without password access. Schools will have a protected portal for set books,” Robinson said.
“All hard copies will be captured into soft copies by data capture clerks and then rebound as e-books and encoded. Encoded Relay Module (ERM) protection ensures that.
“For example, if you download an e-book from Amazon, it is PC-specific and can only be read from that computer or phone that downloaded it after payment or password access. It can’t be attached on email or transferred by memory stick. The only way to share it is to retype the whole thing.
“However, the schools portal will allow them print rights which we can set in the parameters of ERM. This way we can severely curtail piracy but can’t eradicate it completely because the encoding can be decoded by persistent pirates who can download decoding software but nevertheless the book will be available directly in the school, it won’t be worth their while to bother with it,” he said.
“Yes, almost the whole writing community is keen to be on board and get something rather than lose to pirates,” Robinson explained.
“Our literary works need to be ubiquitous and at a competitive price in order to make it non-feasible for pirates to reprint the works.
“Pirates will have no incentive to reproduce any works and the government will contribute to ensure viability of the site and authors will get paid from proceeds and downloads of their works,” he said.
The real snag is the issue of payment. As demonstrated in one of our earlier instalment, Zimbabwe is not big on online transactions because relatively few people use credit cards.
“Chishona.info would not be possible without mobile convenience and mobile payment platforms which are, in effect, our own answer to credit cards. The online store requires such flexibility of payment methods,” Robinson said.
“The site has its own billet code and the subsequent reference will be a password to enter onto the site and trigger download access,” he said.
With the cooperation from Government and publishers, the non-profit hub will expects to hit the ground with data typists, graphic designers, translators, authors, poets, elders, story tellers, language tutors, dramatists, actors, videographers and more to capture a whole century or more of heritage, art and language.