Silent witnesses

Hugh Brody is an anthropologist and film-maker. He has lived with hunter-gatherers in the Arctic and subarctic, and is now working with the San community of the southern Kalahari.

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This, say the linguists, is the sum of the vocal elements of all the world's languages. English, one of the more complicated vocal systems, has about 55 of these sounds. Norwegian has 75. The Bushman or San languages of the Kalahari have more than 145. In the words of Tony Traill, an expert on southern African linguistics, the San are the great acrobats of the mouth. In their campaigns against tribes, in particular against hunter-gatherers, the colonists have despised them for the very sounds of their voices and have sought to eradicate their languages. As if the mind of the tribe were itself the enemy.

Some linguists estimate that some 5,000 languages or distinctive dialects have faded away this century. In the Americas alone there are more than 1,000 languages that have disappeared or reached the brink of extinction in the past 30 years. With the expansion of schools and other homogenising social processes, the pace of this loss has accelerated, and it continues. The loss of these ways of speaking and of knowing the world is a diminution of the collective human mind: a loss of genius that may well be irrecoverable. It is also a cause of intense grief and disorientation to hundreds of thousands of tribal people, who struggle to be themselves without the words to say what that means.

In southern Africa, Dutch settlers dismissed the KhoiSan ways of speaking as "gibberings of monkeys". In the forests of India, missionaries noted that much of the language was "gifted with a clicking, harsh, heavy pronunciation peculiar to all barbaric tongues". In Australia, Aboriginal ways of speaking were often described as "less than human". In both the US and Canada, those concerned to deal with "the Indian problem" in the 19th century resolved that "those barbaric tongues" would be eradicated, making way for the English that "all who are civilised can understand".

Wars waged by settlers against tribes, by farmers against hunters, have been a grim part of the history of human settlement for thousands of years. Ethnic cleansing has been the experience of indigenous and tribal peoples wherever agricultural colonialism has advanced. Using steel, horses, germs, guns, courts, churches, schools and parliaments, those in the old world hungry for new lands have invaded the territories of the peoples of the new world. New only to us, of course.

The Europeans' assault on tribal languages is well documented, and most persistent when its victims have been hunter-gatherers. These were the tribes whose ways of life meant they were spread far and wide across settlement frontiers. There seems to have been a compulsion to achieve, in these places, a final and decisive silence. Their barbaric tongues would cease, to be replaced by English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Afrikaans - any language of "civilisation".

Tribal people often say that to have stories about a land is to own it. The stories that hold the knowledge and sustain the links with the spirits, are a permanent challenge. A rival title deed to the territory.

The voices of the tribes of our "new worlds" contain their own way of owning, knowing and caring for their lands. Their stories are both a form of resistance and a record of what has taken place. Their ways of speaking and their forms of knowledge represent some of the oldest and richest expressions of the human mind. Their silence has a poignancy that reaches deep into the history of the world and the fate of the human mind.

On the one hand, these are people whose presence in particular lands reaches back to a time when nation states did not exist: they are the original, indigenous dwellers and can claim priority and rights that transcend those of all who are relative newcomers to their lands. But they live at political, legal and geographical margins, deprived of many of their richest resources and denied rights to their heritage, if not to life itself. This paradox, the depth of historical claim alongside extreme colonial exploitation, defines the tribal peoples of the world.

Land claims movements, cultural revival, anti-colonial protest, a refusal to disappear. Tribal voices are making themselves heard, talking within their families, to their children and grandchildren, about their own lives. Their stories celebrate distinctive kinds of knowledge and speak of everyday events in their own lands. They are assertions of pride and rights: to know their place is to claim it, whatever the colonists might say.

In Australia, Aboriginal groups are defending every part that remains of their heritage and lands, bringing their stories to the courts as well as to one another. Throughout Latin America, indigenous peoples are raising their voices in order to keep their voices - defying the genocidal process that began with the arrival of the first Europeans and has reduced their numbers and languages by about 90%.

Perhaps we can all claim some form of tribal membership, some community to which at times we say we belong that is not our national identity. In many countries there are populations, subcultures, that are stigmatised by a dominant group as dark, unclean and dangerous. These are the "other" who have the task of defending their heritage and, at times, their homes against many forms of aggression.

They include, of course, the people for whose fate the modern expressions "final solution" and "ethnic cleansing" were coined. In many ways, and at particular points in their histories, Kosovans, Bosnians, Kurds, Armenians, gypsies and Jews (to name but a few) have suffered brutal forms of prejudice and dispossession. And their voices also have been suppressed. Perhaps they can make common cause with the tribes who live the paradox of earliest claim and least status.

For tribal people, the connections between language and land are self-evident: they have always been there; their knowing these places is inseparable from their economic strength and their right to be there. They are where the battle takes place. From the point of view of settlers and their nation states, these are marginal, infertile territories. They are the lands where tribal peoples have been able to endure, beyond the most aggressive incursions of the colonists. They are languages that somehow "belong to the past".

So it may seem that the battle for tribal land and language is a peripheral issue, a quaint skirmish at the very edges of relevance. But these voices speak for a vast sector of human history, reaching into aspects, if not the histories, of us all.

Rather, they seek to have their own resources with which to prosper in the present. With the lands and languages that are theirs, their lives can be full of opportunity and the strength of cultural and individual health. This is true for Nunavut, the new Inuit territory within Canada, as it is for the Khomani deal with South Africa in the southern Kalahari. Even at the margins of modern nation states, in the regions that are left to them, they, like everyone, need to live from the centre of themselves.

(From The Guardian, July 28, 1999 http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/1999/jul/28/ guardiansocietysupplement3)

5. Paraphrase the following extracts from the article and explain what the author means. What is your opinion?

1) With the expansion of schools and other homogenising social processes, the pace of this loss has accelerated, and it continues.

2) Using steel, horses, germs, guns, courts, churches, schools and parliaments, those in the old world hungry for new lands have invaded the territories of the peoples of the new world.

3) The voices of the tribes of our "new worlds" contain their own way of owning, knowing and caring for their lands.

4) Their stories are both a form of resistance and a record of what has taken place.

5) In many countries there are populations, subcultures, that are stigmatised by a dominant group as dark, unclean and dangerous.

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