Editor,

This is in reference to the letter, "Promote English, French in nursery and primary schools” published on February 20.

Children in Korea, Japan, China, Germany, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, France, and Italy study in their national language up to university, and they are among the most developed countries. Rwandan children should study in the language they know best and that is Kinyarwanda.

Gilo

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I beg to defer; case in point is the Boat people of Vietnam. These people were dispersed during war, many of them landing in places like Germany, US, Canada, UK, and Australia.

They were obviously being taught in a language which was not their mother tongue, yet in all these countries, the Boat people’s children were in the top 10 of their classes no matter where they were. The only constant in their situation is that Vietnamese culture values education almost above everything else.

Rashid Swaleh

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Mr. Swaleh, even in diaspora, for Vietnamese and other Boat people, plus all those people cited by Gilo, they jealously guard their respective cultures. Any foreign input is taken as a beneficial addition.

For us Africans, at home and abroad, we take pride in despising and disparaging ourselves and anything of our own, including the language spoken in the country where we are originally from. A language that, for many among us, is no longer a mother tongue!

To my knowledge, except the African, the Amerindian, and the south-pacific languages, all so-called ‘tribal dialects’, no other language and culture in the world have ever been labelled as, and believed to be ‘savage’, ‘pagan’, henceforth inferior, shameful, and systematically forbidden and suppressed!

Francois-Xavier Nziyonsenga