Going Native: Language of Instruction for Education, Development and African Emancipation

GOING NATIVE: Language of Instruction for Education, Development and African Emancipation

Kwesi Kwaa Prah.
The Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS).
Cape Town.
Keynote Address presented to the Launch Workshop of Language of Instruction in Tanzania and South Africa (LOITASA), Morogoro, Tanzania:22nd to 24th April 2002. In, Birgit Brock-Utne, Zubeida Desai and Martha Qorro (eds). Language of Instruction in Tanzania and South Africa (LOITASA). E & D Limited. Dar-es-Salaam. 2003
Introduction
Africa has had almost 50 years of post-colonialism.During this period, we have seen both positive and negative features in the evolution and transformation of African society.There is often a tendency to dwell inordinately and a trifle masochistically on its trails and tribulations.Indeed, much of this experience bears little triumphant to write home about, and unfortunately much to lament. The suffering of the masses in Africa is easily perceptible by anybody who has eyes to see and ears to hear. Relentless hunger, entrenched illiteracy,HIV/AIDS, and other epidemic health conditions, undergirded by crushing poverty, tin-pot dictatorships and political tyrannies define the realities of contemporary African life. The existential trials, which face the masses of Africans on a daily basis, dehumanises African humanity. African governments are most of the time merely muddling through the processes of government and service delivery. Hardly ever do their rhetorical promises and pontifical extravagancies match what is practically available to Africa’s teeming millions.
However, the African experience over this past, almost, half-century, has also some positive highlights.It is certainly not all darkness and gloom. Some areas of African life have improved, if only limitedly. Most post-colonial governments in Africa, at least initially, created greater opportunities for people to go to school.Indeed, almost all sub-Saharan governments, in the immediate post-colonial period, expanded education to an unprecedented degree. During the 23-year period of 1960 – 1983, the expansion of education in many African countries was impressive.
Table 1 (Education Enrolment for Primary and Secondary Schools Growth Percentages in Selected African Countries; 1960-1983) (1)
CountryGrowth in PrimaryEnrolments (%)Growth in Secondary enrolments (%)
Tanzania781%370%
Kenya553%1988%
Zambia415%230%
Lesotho204%96%
Zimbabwe440%148%
Swaziland382%145%
Botswana550%250%
Malawi297%80%
Nyerere provides illustrative figures for Tanzania during its early years of independence.Writing in 1967 in his document Education for Self-Reliance he informs us that:
There has been a very big expansion of educational facilities available, especially at the secondary levels.In 1961 there were 490,000 children attending primary schools in Tanganyika, the majority of them only going up to standard 4.In 1967, there were 825,000 children attending such schools and increasingly these will be full seven-year primary schools.In 1961, too there were 11,832 children in secondary schools, only 176 of whom were in form 6.This year there are 25,000 and 830.(2)
African countries on the whole have not done badly on gross educational expansion. In this respect, remarkably, South Africa, the last and the richest of African countries has been possibly also the poorest in education expansion record particularly at the tertiary level, since the Apartheid regime was brought to a formal end in 1994. Generally, in the early post-colonial period most African states have also been able to improve the health status of their citizenry.However, in one country after the other, as economic conditions have deteriorated on this continent, both health and educational facilities have rapidly and grievously deteriorated and standards have gone into a tailspin.At the beginning of the 21st century, we can say with little fear of controversy that, in both areas of education and health, Africa is manifestly retrogressing, a one step forward two backward record of neo-colonialism prevails.
If in the sphere of education, facilities have considerably expanded over this period, clearly, the quality of education provided and the quality of the product is declining.A range of societal afflictions is wearing down Africa’s capacity to sustain its educational challenge.There is, for a start, the “book famine”, which has scoured Africa over the past three decades.Books are difficult to come by and where they are available, they are at a price very few can afford. Where three square meals a day are difficult to come by, the choice between bread and a book is not a realistic one. People under such circumstances have little consideration for books.Many spend their days chasing “essential commodities” (rice, flour, cooking oil, soap etc) as they are described in West Africa.Thus, poverty and the hunger of the belly have affected the availability of books and other materials needed in the education system.
Teachers in Africa today, generally, earn so little and enjoy such increasingly diminishing prestige that, the teaching profession has lost its allure and the status it enjoyed in the colonial period.Few of the emerging generation want to be teachers.Indeed, a Tanzanian academic friend of mine whose children reached university age and were faced with, amongst others, the choice of becoming professional academics, like their father and mother, announced firmly and with conviction that they have no time for the academic option.The material rewards for a teacher or academic are not in the minds of many, commensurate with the requisite investment, in time and money.It is arguable that, in today’s Africa, the overwhelming majority of teachers do not exclusively survive on the remunerations they receive, as teachers.
In too many African countries a good number of children still go to school under trees, without proper teaching equipment and with all too often poorly trained teachers.Excessive pupil/teacher ratios make effective teaching impossible.Children continue, daily, to walk endless miles in order to reach schools.Invariably, children who have to walk long distances to school are those who come from poverty-stricken homes and are likely to be doing this on near empty stomachs.
Most observers would agree that in recent years both academic institutions and the product of these institutions are beginning rapidly to deteriorate to near collapse in some cases.School and university graduates have mounting difficulties in finding work. As I have elsewhere indicated, in Nigeria there are cases of graduates who end up as taxi/kabukabu drivers because they cannot find employment.Recently, there was the publicised case of a graduate architect who became a fruit seller on the streets of Lagos because he could find no openings to practice his metier.Similar cases have been reported in Kenya, where a young lady graduate had to accept work as a bar-tender and a young male graduate became a security guard in order to earn a living.(3) With the ethos of corruption and graft affecting much of African society, both education and the educated have declined in importance in the reckoning of mass society in Africa.
The issues I have so far raised relate to questions of resource-allocation; inputs and outputs, which follow from this. They are largely, more quantitative than qualitative in meaning and expression. However, there are other issues relating more to policy and philosophy; issues which guide and underpin the principles on which the practice of education is constructed. One of the most important of these is the thinking behind the selection of one or the other language of instruction.
LOI; from Yesterday to Tomorrow
Language of instruction (LOI), or the language in which education is principally conducted is one of the most far-reaching and significant features of any education system. The language of instruction, the language of educational formation, in any society is also the language of hegemony and power. It is the language in which basic skills and knowledge are imparted to the population, and the medium in which the production and reproduction of knowledge is taught. Implicit in this is the acknowledgement that, it is in this medium that knowledge is accumulated and deposited.
Where, LOI is the same as the mother tongue/home language, it not only affirms the developmental capacity of the mother tongue to grow as a language of culture, science and technology, it also gives confidence to a people, with respect to their historical and cultural baggage.LOI in the home language or mother tongue is an instrument for the cultural and scientific empowerment of people. Its denial signifies the social and cultural inferiority of the culture and people whose mother-tongue-use is denied. Therefore, in free societies knowledge transfer takes place in the language or languages of the masses; the languages in which the masses are most creative and innovative; languages which speak to them in their hearts and minds most primordially. Cultural freedom and African emancipation therefore cannot be cultivated, expanded or developed where the LOI is different from the languages or language the people normally in their everyday lives speak. Where the language of instruction is different from the languages of mass society, those who work in the language of instruction, foreign from the languages of the masses, become culturally removed and alienated from the masses. Indeed, where the language of instruction is different from the mother tongue of the people there is almost always a history and persistence of patterns of dominance, over-lordship or colonialism.
Liliana Mammino makes the point as follows; “the use of a second language as a medium of instruction is a heritage of colonisation.In all those countries where such a heritage is not present, students use their mother tongue throughout the whole instruction career.
From a pedagogical point of view, the use of a second language is an objective disadvantage affecting both the easiness and, one might say, the comfort with which knowledge is acquired by students, and the extent and depth of the acquisition”.(4) Where a colonial language becomes the language of instruction, with all knowledge and education fed into the people in the language of the former colonial overlord, this removes and negates the development of confidence in home or original cultures.The removal from cultural and linguistic primordial moorings assumes the form of denial of the home culture, a creeping amnesia of the collective memory. This memory is rejected or regarded with a mixture of comic relief and derision. In South Africa, many people of Khoisan historical descent who have been culturally and linguistically Afrikanerized and who were in the past classified as Coloured under the Apartheid scheme, publicly, only acknowledge European roots. “My grandfather was Greek/ My grandfather was Irish” would be announced. The ostensibly acknowledged grandfather is invariably unknown and there is silence about grandmother; total silence about African cultural and linguistic antecedents. As John Mutorwa, Minister of Basic Education in Namibia said in 1995, the “ …. San people received so little attention that no education was available for them in any language except Afrikaans”.(5) I have seen and heard in both Angola and in South Africa young people and migrants say without any sense of loss or shame, the fact that they cannot speak their native languages. Brock-Utne notes the view of an informer, about Khoekhoegowab speakers in Namibia that, “the young ones don’t want to speak their own language, they all want to be Americans. They watch TV and get all this American stuff. They want to be like Michael Jackson and look down on their own culture”.(6)
Such effective cultural and linguistic denationalisation is a mark of the success of the colonial project seen from the viewpoint of the colonialist. Bgoya has made the point that, “constant bombardment of societies in the South with European languages, and the aggressively marketed notion of the superiority of things and ways western, can only lead to pressures on the societies in the south to accept to abandon their cultures and to adopt the American way.”(7)
As Obiechina put it, “the supreme sin of colonialism” was the crass devaluation of African culture and the alienation of the educated elite from their native traditions and historical belongings.(8) But, at least formally, in its classical form, colonialism is buried, so its persistence reflects the entrenched nature of neo-colonialism in Africa. In our generation few have exposed the cultural legacy of colonialism on the African mind, as eloquently as Ngugi Wa Thiongo.(9) Brock-Utne’s view is that, “Some may ask if Africa was ever intellectually decolonized.No, probably not.However, attempts were made at independence in one country after the other of building education in Africa on African roots.I claim that these attempts have been stifled over the past ten to fifteen years.”(10) In my understanding, this view is too charitable.African countries never seriously got started culturally decolonizing.Many of the elites who inherited the post-colonial state displayed a schizophrenic attitude to the question of culture.Invariably, they rhetorically rejected indiscriminate westernism and extolled “Negritude” and the “African personality”, but at the same time they in practice succumbed to the dalliance and overkill of western culture in a neo-colonial setting.
Phillipson usefully points to the fact that English in many post-colonial societies has served to maintain western interests.(11)In his textLinguistic Imperialism,Phillipson exposes the connection between language and neocolonialism.(12) Advancing the concept Linguicism, which means; the collection of ideas, rationale, structures and practices which are employed to justify and legitimise the production and reproduction of resources and power differentials between groups defined on the bases of language and language-use; Phillipson shows that English in the developing world is an instrument of imperialism . Bgoya’s diagnosis of the tension between globalisation and language-use is that, “English is the language of globalisation and English serves fundamentally the interests of those for whom it is both an export commodity and a language of conquest and domination”(13)
Struggles and processes for the revision of LOI policies mirror larger political and social struggles. Changes in the status planning for languages are not infrequently a parallel cultural response to political and socio-economic transformation.A good example of this is provided by the South African case.Nkonko Kamwangamalu has explained that, the pre-apartheid years were culturally and linguistically defined by the struggle of the Afrikaners against the British policy of Anglicisation.(14) The dominance of the English in all areas of social life was contested with slow but steady erosion of this dominance until 1948, when with the ascendancy of the Afrikaner political elite, the doors to Afrikaner supremacy were opened. The apartheid years saw the formulation and institutionalisation of the policy of Bantu education, which, among other things, sought to bring Afrikaans to equality with English by using both of these languages as a media of instruction in all black schools. This was resoundingly challenged in full view of the whole world in Soweto, June 1976 when African school kids in Soweto rejected Afrikaans and took to the streets to register their protest.This protest against LOI under Apartheid marked a watershed in the history of Apartheid fascism in South Africa.It announced the coming demise of Apartheid.The rest is history.The post-apartheid years have seen the limited but principled dismantling of the administrative structure of apartheid-based education and the adoption of a new education system, which reflects better, at least on paper, the cultural and linguistic interests of African language speakers. In the Sudan, when in the late 1920s the British decided to ensure that the South should maintain its African identity unchallenged by Arabic cultural influences from the North (Southern Policy), one of the first moves made to consolidate this policy position was to adopt at Rejaf, in 1928, six African languages to be used as languages of instruction in schools.
What this illustrates is that each junction in the evolution of society which registers in the partial or larger transfer of rights and resources to broader sections of the population, at the cultural level, registers in an changing language policy which raises the status and power of equally broader sections of the society. Frequently, this translates as a LOI, which draws on the languages of masses who had hitherto been unempowered. The lessons of the Afrikaner linguistic and cultural struggle against Anglicisation should usefully inform present-day African efforts at cultural self-assertion and renaissance in South Africa. In 1908, the Afrikaner far-right politician Dr. D.F. Malan is reported to have exhorted his audience that, “raise the Afrikaans language to a written language, make it the bearer of our culture, our history, our national ideals, and you will raise the People to a feeling of self-respect and to the calling to take a worthier place in world civilisation … A healthy national feeling can only be rooted in ethnic [volks] art and science, ethnic customs and character, ethnic language and ethnic religion and, not least, in ethnic literature”.(15)He understood what was needed to rescue Afrikaners from the inferiorities of second class whites in an English dominated society.Later Malan’s party, the National Party, tried to use language to ultimately bring Africans culturally under their thraldom.They have been unsuccessful.