United Kingdom’s East African settlers hit by language crisis

Former East African residents at a social gathewring in Leicester, Midlands.  [PHOTOS: SHAMLAL PURI/STANDARD]

Senior British citizens with East African roots are fighting a losing battle over demands that they converse in English in public. SHAMLAL PURI takes a closer look at the problem and asks: Do they really want to speak English?

Immigration and immigrants have always been a vote-catching issue in the United Kingdom. Politicians fete them for their achievements or slate them for their shortcomings.

Labour Party leader Ed Miliband recently took a swipe at the immigrant communities in the UK, including elderly East Africans, criticising them for failing to speak English, the language of the land.

In a high profile speech in Tooting, southwest London, Miliband, the leader of the opposition, set his party’s policy on immigration by saying his party would expect migrants to learn English.

However, not wanting to alienate traditional Asian Labour voters, Miliband praised them for their contribution to society: “We should celebrate multi-ethnic diverse Britain. We are stronger for it.”

He admitted that previous Labour administrations were overly optimistic in assuming integration would happen automatically when people from different backgrounds got together, saying they did “too little to tackle the realities of segregation in communities”.

Miliband outlined his plans for a future Labour government on this issue, saying it would put English language teaching for immigrants ahead of funding for translating non-essential information into their mother tongues. Currently, such information is translated into many languages.

Suburban ghettos

People from more than 60 countries live in the UK, and more than 50 foreign languages, including Swahili, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi, Somali and Urdu, are spoken. In some parts of Britain, including London, Reading and Luton, Kikuyu is spoken by Kenyan immigrants.

Miliband stressed that parents of foreign-born children would be required to take responsibility for agreements in which they would learn English at home. The number of public sector jobs requiring mandatory proficiency in English would be increased.

The 2011 census figures released recently show the overall population of England and Wales as 56.1 million — an increase of 3.7 million since the 2001 census. Of this increase, 2.1 million were migrants.

Some 100,000 Kenyan Asians have settled in the UK since 1968. In later years, their families split, with some younger ones staying in Britain while many others, attracted to the scenic beauty and good life in Kenya, returned to resume business. A majority still hold British passports.

FOREIGN PASSPORTS

The younger members have looked after their elderly parents in Britain. They live largely in the Greater London suburbs of Wembley, Ealing, Southall, Hounslow, Greenford, Tooting, Hendon, Newham and Ilford. They are also spread out in Leicester, Birmingham and Bradford.

A total of 7.5 million residents of England and Wales were born outside the UK and of this, 3.8 million arrived in the last decade. Some 2.4 million held foreign passports. The reality is that immigrants are concentrated in the suburban ghettos, where very few or no English people live.

English is not spoken in many Asian households. They speak their ancestral languages — Punjabi, Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu, Kutchi, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali, Telugu, Sylheti, among others. They even speak their mother tongue in public.

Pritpal Singh, a retired Royal Mail worker who lived in Kenya in the 1960s, says, “I don’t see any reason for my children and grandchildren to talk in English at home. We all speak Punjabi. It is important to speak our mother tongue at home. The children can speak English outside.”

And Rawjibhai Patel, a senior citizen in Wembley, says, “I forbid my children to speak English at home. They have to speak in Gujarati because my wife does not speak English and would not understand them. I send my grandchildren to Gujarati classes — they should not forget our culture.”

There are also cultural barriers to accepting Miliband’s proposals. There are Asians whose wives will never speak English, as they are not allowed to leave the house without being chaperoned, and if they do, they are with other women who speak their language. In their free time, they watch Bollywood movies.  These people who will never integrate, as they will not be permitted to.

The other pressing problem is that in the exclusively Asian areas, people speak their mother tongue. Shopkeepers in Southall and Hounslow converse mainly in Punjabi, while Gujarati is the language of choice in Wembley, northwest London.

Rita Chadha of Refugee and Migrant Forum of East London described Miliband’s speech as disappointing and political posturing: “There are plenty of hardworking migrants who would love to learn English in addition to contributing to their community. Under current rules, a hardworking migrant without benefit rights can’t enrol in a course at a local college to learn English.”

They end up relying on organisations such as hers, which have no access to local government funding, resulting in long waiting lists.

In any case, it would be difficult for the uneducated Asians to speak in English, even if the establishment wants them to do so. The older generation who ran shops in East Africa were uneducated. They had a good knowledge of Kiswahili or even Kikuyu and Luo, but they have not been able to master English, even after living in the UK for many years. 

The younger generation, educated here, speaks good English, but the same cannot be said of the elderly East African Asians, who prefer to live in Asian-dominated areas, converse in their mother tongue and do business with each other, effectively isolating the white community.