Trevor Noah and his grandmother
A dear friend gave me a copy of Trevor Noah’s book, Born a Crime, for Christmas this past year. Whatever you may think about Trevor and his views, the book is a series of one poignant story after another, told from the viewpoint of a mixed-race young man growing up in apartheid South Africa. (…although a language alert might be in order…) Trevor lived in a perpetual no-man’s land – at home neither in his mother’s black community or his father’s white community. In fact, he saw very little of his father, and was subjected instead to the whims and tantrums of a sometimes violent stepfather.
Growing up alternately between the black townships outside Johannesburg and the colored suburbs, Trevor learned to become a linguistic chameleon. His mother had made a choice to speak only English to him, the language of the white man, even though her native tongue was Xosa, one of Southern Africa’s tribal languages. But Trevor picked up Xosa from the community, as well as Zulu, the most widely spoken tribal language, Tsonga, a small minority language, and Afrikaans, the hybrid language of the descendants of the Dutch colonists. So even though Trevor never felt completely at home in any of these communities, he developed the ability to circulate fluidly from one community to another, be it at school or in the marketplace.
One day the teenage Trevor made the unwise decision to “borrow” one of the cars in his mechanic stepfather’s garage, slap on a fake license plate, and take it out on some errands. Soon enough he was pulled over by a policeman – not for having bogus tags, but because he was not white. His license plate offense, however, was quickly discovered, and he was jailed in short order. On his third day in jail, the cops brought in the largest man Trevor had ever seen. Hardened face, dark skin, huge muscles. Trevor and his fellow prisoners were afraid they were done for. The giant went and sat in the corner, not speaking to or looking at anyone.
Then a black policeman came in and started questioning the man. He responded by simply shaking his head and muttering unintelligibly. The cop was speaking to him in Zulu, but he was a Tsonga speaker. Black man to black man, and neither could understand the other. Then Trevor stepped in, having picked up Tsonga from his stepfather. As soon as the big guy heard Trevor speaking in his mother tongue, his expression immediately softened, and he began to thank Trevor profusely for intervening and translating the conversation. Not only was the tension of the situation diffused, but the man’s true, gentle-hearted self was revealed. Whereas most would assume he was in jail for murder or other violent crime, he was in for shoplifting a Playstation game.
Nelson Mandela, the great South African statesman and leader of the movement that brought apartheid to an end, once said:
“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”
I can personally attest to this fact. My wife and I spent ten years in Europe as “musicianaries”, working primarily in the French-speaking world. When we moved to the Swiss city of Lausanne, we made the acquaintance of another “giant”. His name was François, and he was engaged to one of our colleagues in the music ministry we were part of. Like our Tsonga friend, François had a rough exterior. While he understood some English, he had some amount of resentment toward Americans who assume everyone in the world will learn English and speak it with them. But as I spoke French to him from the start, I noticed how he opened up so much more quickly than he had with other English speakers he had encountered. Not only did a close partnership develop that produced multiple musical collaborations, many hours of writing, recording, and performing songs together, but most importantly, a level of friendship that continues to this day, thirty years later. I count François among my closest friends not only in Switzerland, but in the world.
We English speakers have no idea how spoiled we are. And if we’re honest, there’s a part of us that does expect the world to learn our language – which it is doing, in large part. This makes it even more of a challenge to take the initiative to learn another language, to actually speak it. But when we do…if only I could express the gratification, the fruit, of such efforts. It can make a night-and-day difference, not only in working relationships, but in all kinds of relationships – and open untold doors we may not even know exist.
I am not the person I used to be because of this.