People are telling you they started with BASIC and then waving you off Python, something incredibly more powerful. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. ?
Python is not my favorite language, but it has enough resources, is good enough for beginners, and can scale up into "useful" programming. It would be a fine starting place for learning how to program.
C on the other hand is full of sharp knives. I program in C and like it, but it is not particularly nice. As others have pointed out, managing memory manually is a challenge and, really, is a huge security problem. People are explicitly creating memory-managed languages like Rust that are attempting to "kill C" in order to stop these classes of errors but retain speed.
If you want to get into directly contributing to FreeBSD without any C experience as fast as possible, that's going to be a very difficult road. I would suggest creating a roadmap that will eventually lead you to where you want to go. Do you prefer quick results or long periods of study? First you need basic concepts like loops. Then you'll need more involved stuff like composition and other large program organization concepts. Basically, a compressed Computer Science course. In the meanwhile, you'll have to actually practice what you've learned, so you'll need some kind of program to work on. Again, I would suggest something in Python so you don't cut yourself on stuff that will just get in the way of learning. All code is garbage, eventually. Don't get too hung up on what you make.
Pivoting to C will be easy if you don't lean too hard into Python-specific stuff. It will be kind of like going on a campout and realizing all you have are sticks and twigs to work with. Then you'll learn the value of libraries.
What do you do as your day job, anyway? How much time will you have to devote to this?
