Makasa Kasonde Boeken

This study shows that countries in the Third World face the challenge of development from various angles, including language. Human rights in general and linguistic rights in particular, have come to play in an increasingly central role in the mobilization of human and material resources both locally and internationally. Judging from the practice of Language Law in South Korea, the study argues that successive governments in Zambia are to a large scale responsible for the abuse and violation of the linguistic rights of the vast majority of the people of the country. The historical transition from agrarian society to global civilization must be realized within the context of the rule of law and democracy.

In Lexicology in Zambia (Kasonde, 1981), the author argued that quality and quantity of published works were a measure of the level of development in any given society. He lamented that poverty as such could not justify lack of literary creativity in Africa where, unlike the industrial world with modern libraries, oral traditions were the only valuable bibliographies available. The author now avails himself of the opportunity to offer a practical albeit limited response to the need for written lexicons which he then clearly identified. The present work is not the first lexicon of Icibemba language. Earlier lexicons include Bemba-English Dictionary (White Fathers, 1949), Bemba Pocket Dictionary (Hoch, 1960) and A Vocabulary of Icibemba (Mann, 1995). The original contribution of this particular lexicon lies in the application of the concept of vocabulary classification based on A Tentative Questionnaire for the words of Bantu Languages (Yukawa, 1979), also found in A Classified Vocabulary of the Luba Language (Yukawa, 1992). In writing this lexicon, the author knows that there is bound to be disagreement about the right meaning and spelling. The problem of dialectology notwithstanding, he has used the official orthography of Zambian languages (Chimuka, 1977).