Many years ago, while living in South Africa, I watched a brief exchange that taught me something about the importance of language. A white lawyer was representing his client at a hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a panel investigating human rights abuses during the country’s apartheid era. His client’s name included the distinctive click of languages such as Xhosa and Zulu. He struggled to make the sound and finally gave up.
“No, man, now I’ve had enough,” said the panel’s chair, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, rebuking the man in Afrikaans, the language of South Africa’s erstwhile system of racial oppression.
“I am sorry, sir,” the lawyer pleaded. “It is not possible for me to pronounce that sound.”
“If you take her money, you respect her surname,” the archbishop instructed. “Put your tongue behind your teeth: ‘x!ili.’”
The man tried once again – and as the poet Antjie Krog later recounted in her book “Country of My Skull,” “Tutu smile[d] benevolently.”
Learning another language, the folk singer Pete Seeger used to say, was like peering into the soul of another people – into their patterns of thinking and ways of making sense of the world. For societies emerging from external domination like colonialism, reclaiming language is an act of restoration. It is a way “to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves,” observed Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, and to relearn the art of self-governing.
Languages are also about a sense of place, their timbres and cadences giving soundtrack and tempo to the locales where people live. Reading verse in adulthood, the former national poet laureate Robert Hass wrote in his book “Twentieth Century Pleasures,” had the power to evoke “an imagination of early childhood, dusty fig leaves and sun and fields of wild fennel.”
During more than three years of war, Ukrainians have responded to the invasion and occupation of their lands by neighboring Russia by reclaiming – through music, democratic ideals, and the uprooting of corruption – a sense of national identity that their aggressor has sought to deny. Yet their most powerful act of defiance, writes Howard LaFranchi in this week’s cover story, may be the reclaiming of their own language.
In Dnipro, Howard met Tetiana Heienko, who was serving on the town council of her village outside Melitopol when Russian forces occupied the area. She recalled what stirred in her when she was summoned by Russian soldiers and urged to recognize their authority.
“She thought of her garden, where she grew beets for borsch,” Howard writes. “She thought of Melitopol’s annual cherry festival, which had been such a glorious success the previous June.”
And then she responded to the soldiers in words that seemed even to startle herself. “When I spoke in Ukrainian, it was total shock in the room, but they understood,” she said. “I was answering these invaders and killers in the language of my home and my heart.”
This column first appeared in the April 21, 2025, issue of The Christian Science Monitor Weekly. Subscribe today to receive future issues of the Monitor Weekly magazine delivered to your home.
