How Generations of African Parents Didn't Teach Their Children the Mother Tongue

There's a question that sits quietly in the chest of almost every African millennial and Gen Z person, whether they grew up on the continent or somewhere far from it:

"Why didn't you teach me our language?"

Some of us have asked it out loud. Most of us never did. But we all felt it at family gatherings where we understood every joke and every command, yet couldn't get a single sentence out without switching back to English, French, or Portuguese. We became a generation of in-betweens. We hear in our heritage. We speak in someone else's.

It's tempting to blame our parents for this. To see it as a choice they made carelessly, or worse, out of shame. But when you actually look at the history, something heavier comes into focus. Our parents didn't withhold our languages out of self-hatred. They were responding to something that had been done to them, something systematic, deliberate, and deeply cruel. They were trying to protect us from a wound they never fully healed from themselves.

The "Vernacular" List

If you went to school in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, or Zimbabwe, you probably already know what I'm talking about. The system had a name: vernacular punishment.

It worked like this. A teacher would appoint one student as a monitor, hand them a sheet of paper, and give them one job: write down the name of anyone caught speaking their mother tongue on school grounds. That list had consequences.

The word vernacular itself tells you everything you need to know about how colonial powers saw African languages. It comes from the Latin vernaculus, meaning the language of house-born slaves. That was the lens through which rich, tonal, mathematically complex languages like Yorùbá, Igbo, Twi, Hausa, and Gĩkũyũ were classified. Not as languages. As dialect. As noise. As something to be punished out of children.

And the punishments were designed to humiliate. Public floggings in front of the whole school. Heavy fines sent home to parents who could barely afford them. Wooden boards and pieces of cardboard hung around children's necks, reading: "I am a donkey." "I am stupid."

Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o wrote about this in his 1986 book Decolonising the Mind. What he described wasn't just discipline. It was a deliberate rewiring of a child's sense of self. The native tongue became linked, neurologically, to pain and shame. English became linked to safety and praise. That doesn't disappear when school ends. It follows a person home. It follows them into parenthood.

So when our parents had children of their own, that response kicked in almost automatically. I will not let my child go through what I went through. I will give them the language that opens doors before anyone can shut them.

The Economics of It

We also have to be honest about what post-independence Africa actually looked like, and still looks like.

When colonial powers left, they didn't dismantle the structures they'd built. The courts, the civil service, the banks, the universities — all of it remained in English, French, or Portuguese. Our parents weren't choosing European languages because they preferred them. They were choosing them because the system made everything else a liability.

A child who spoke English with a thick local accent, or who struggled with European grammar, faced real consequences. Doors closed. Opportunities evaporated. Society had quietly decided that fluency in a colonial language meant intelligence, and anything else meant you were falling behind.

That's not a choice made out of cultural betrayal. That's survival. Our parents were navigating a world that had been deliberately arranged to punish them for being themselves, and they were trying to spare us from the same trap.

The Lie About Language Learning

On top of the trauma and the economics, there was one more layer: a pseudo-scientific myth that got passed down through colonial-era education systems and somehow never fully died.

The claim was that teaching a child two languages at once would interfere with their development. That it would confuse their brains, corrupt their English grammar, hold them back.

Modern cognitive science says the opposite is true. Children's brains are not only capable of handling multiple languages, they actually benefit from it. Learning a tonal language like Yorùbá or Mandarin, where pitch alone can change the meaning of a word entirely, strengthens auditory processing, cognitive flexibility, and problem-solving skills.

Our parents didn't sacrifice our mother tongues to make us smarter. They sacrificed them because they were told to. And because, by then, the groundwork of shame had already done its job.

Where That Leaves Us

The trauma didn't stop at our parents' generation. It just changed shape.

For many of us today, the fear isn't the class monitor with a list. It's the raised eyebrow when we try to speak our language with an accent that sounds "too foreign." It's being told we sound fake, or that we're performing a culture we don't really know. The gatekeeping moved from the schoolyard to social media, to family gatherings, to the quiet voice in our own heads.

So we go silent. We understand, but we don't speak. We absorb, but we don't respond. And the language quietly fades, not because it was forgotten, but because speaking it out loud felt like too much of a risk.

What Comes Next

Two generations of deliberate erasure is a long time. But it didn't work completely, and the fact that so many of us are even asking this question, tracing it back, trying to understand it, is proof of that.

The longing is real. The connection is still there, even when the words aren't. And recovering what was taken doesn't have to mean starting over from scratch. It means understanding why the silence happened in the first place, and deciding, with that knowledge, to break it.

Did your parents speak to you in their native tongue growing up? Or did the "vernacular list" shape your family's story too? We'd love to hear from you in the comments.