My mother made our house in Harare an English-speaking house. I recall when requesting that we speak some Shona so that I could increase my vocabulary (I also attended an English-speaking school), my mother saying: "Shona is going nowhere. So, if you want to go nowhere, if you want to be stuck in this country, learn all the Shona you want. I would prefer we speak Chinese in this house before we speak that useless language." I hid many of my mother's opinion about Shona and African men ("whatever you do Charles, do not become one of them; they only wake up when it's time to slow a woman down") from my close friends.

As you can imagine, my mother left me with a major complex.

Anyway, all of this came to my mind when I noticed the number of Wikipedia entries for English was approaching 4 million and the number of entries for Shona only managed to pass 100.