Mozambique in the Ibero-American Space

The beads of communication

Mozambique in the Ibero-American space

Armando Jorge Lopes

Emeritus Senior Professor, Eduardo Mondlane University

Introduction

Reflecting on themes encompassed by beadwork is not a simple task. Language, globalization, interculturalism, intraculturalism, Lusophonia, Hispanophonia, among others, are themes which I understand as beads or beadwork. Without necessarily being Mia Couto’s 2008 beads, even though we are dazzled by them, Mozambican beads, which aim to be universal and shared, present themselves as unlimited. It is these that we are going to introduce in the line of communication, those strings of coloured glass and other materials – Mozambican beads which are also beads of the world (Lopes, 2013ª). I reflect here on some beads of language, of culture and of inclusivity.

Not belonging directly to the Ibero-American space, that is to say, the history of this country with Portuguese as its official language and, above all, its hybrid situation with its previous existence within the Portuguese world, and its recent and intense experience also shared with the Hispanic world, makes Mozambique a privileged place for thinking about and problematizing this very space, and ensures that the African nation will be part of it, even though in an indirect form. In accepting that a language is not an isolated part of a complex ecological system, but also and necessarily an integral part of the same, in understanding the importance of the Ibero-American system’s ecological space and the fact that the languages spoken within it are pluricentric, not identical in their metropolitan varieties, and recognizing that each of these centres creates pressure in the direction of its variety – not only in phonological, morphological, syntactical, semantic and lexical terms but also in discursive terms – and that these pressures are exerted both diachronically and synchronically, it can be deduced that the influences of Portuguese and Spanish on all these other varieties, including the emerging varieties from various states, and even on the indigenous languages spoken therein, will be profoundly complex and diverse. It is in this sense that I understand Mozambique to be an integral part of Iberophonia.

I thank Senior Professor Moisés de Lemos Martins, President of this Second World Congress of the Ibero-American Confederation of Associations of Scientific and Academic Communication (Confibercom 2014), for the opportunity given me to share with all present here some reflections on the principal theme of the event, Challenges of Internationalization in the Ibero-American communication space. I also thank Professor Madalena Oliveira who, in a kind and efficient manner, supported me in the preparations which brought me across the Indian Ocean.

My argument is around linguistic-cultural diversity as supports for the framing and development of the Portuguese and Spanish languages, an important component of contemporary living. With the real acceptance of these concepts, today’s world will begin to be truly bilingual, but, still tenuously, multilingual and multicultural; the condition of being monolingual and monocultural in the future could come to be the same as being illiterate today. Portuguese is Mozambique’s official and link language, working jointly with twenty two Bantu languages as the mother tongues of the vast majority of the population, as well as language of Asian origin (Gujarati and Memani, among others) and Arabic (Lopes, 1999).

1. Language and globalization

The beads here united by the thread of communication are language, the universal, the global, the particular, the Other and solidarity. I will begin with the question of language.

At the time of Mozambique’s independence there was a project running in the Department of Modern Letters at the Eduardo Mondlane University entitled Fundamental Portuguese which, among other objectives, aimed to construct a matrix of 2000 words. The local project to develop Fundamental Portuguese shared many of the characteristic traces of the methodological approach of earlier experiences, particularly that of French. We hardly need reminding that in order to neutralize the harm done by Babel, or the complexity which the multiplicity of languages created, in their terms, the advocates of a universal language argued the necessity of introducing a common language which would be used by the speakers of different languages.

The first exercise in simplification, by means of an artificial human language, was attempted with Esperanto, a language constituted in 1878 by Zamenhof, who used the pseudonym of Dr. Esperanto. Esperanto, created from Roman, Germanic and Slav roots, enjoyed and enjoys (there are still today about two million people who understand the language) a high degree of predictability due above all to its frequent and stable use of suffixes and infixes.1 But not all linguists of the day dreamt about the invention and consequent imposition of a universal and manufactured idiom. Some proposed the adoption of an already existing language – naturally their own—with usual reference to English or, in the case of that not being possible, even French.

It was argued that the Graeco-Latin base of English vocabulary (about 900 basic words) would turn it into a rich, widespread language that could be relatively easily learnt by westerners, and that a grammar lacking complicated verbal conjugations would make it relatively accessible to Asiatic and African learners. And there was one moregood thing that all agreed on: the fact that English did not have accents, tildes or cedillas, which would certainly facilitate its written and typographical use.

But as in nearly all cases, the good things also bring with them more complex characteristics which would make it difficult for mother tongue speakers of other languages to

learn English. There is the question or orthography and its relationship, often hardly systematic, with dozens and dozens of sounds in the language, and the question of idiomaticity which requires knowledge of an enormous quantity of idiomatic constructions. The linguist Ogden undertook the task of simplifying English and published the work Basic English in 1930 with a grouping of about 850 words and 18 verbs.

And what about the idea of a simplified form of French for international use? Where did it come from? In 1951 a French UNESCO commission, which included Guggenheim, began to develop a project called Basic French, a designation which did not find favour, and which was later changed to Elementary French, and which ended up finally being called Fundamental French. And as had already happened with Basic English, neither French nor English, as major languages of widespread communication, were able at the time to resolve the problem of the existence of a universal language, following the failures, with the same aim of communication, of the attempts to introduce and use artificial languages as universal languages.

With these historical episodes as background, I have to ask myself whether the desire and incessant search for universal linguistics does not arise from the same logic as attempts to ‘de-Babelize’ language? In his search for a better understanding of universals, Édouard Glissant proposed the theory of Relation to explain an important part of human behaviour:

I call into question, in a formal manner, the idea of the universal. The universal is a sublimation, an abstraction that enables us to forget small differences; we drift upon the universal and forget these small differences, and Relation is wonderful because it doesn’t allow us to do that. There is no such thing as a Relation made up of big differences. Relation is total; otherwise it’s not Relation. So that’s why I prefer the notion of ‘Relation’ to the notion of the universal. (Barson & Gorschlüter, 2010, p.62)

I fully agree with this position, at the same time as I relate it to the concept which in the past I called the naturalisation of language, in particular, “…the admission of an alien language to citizenship by the community of the indigenous” (Lopes, 1997: 37). The naturalisation of Mozambican-Portuguese has come to be developed in a localised fashion, always understood as difference, and not as deficiency. We are dealing with a linguistic and cultural variety which is fed on small differences and which behaves as a single and multiple form simultaneously. Like a story, with its own beginning, it develops, and one day it will reach its port of destination. A story always has a point of arrival, one which could be special, as Édouard Glissant notably understands and articulates to his interviewer, the Malian Manthia Diawara, during a trans-Atlantic voyage in 2009 on board the liner Queen Mary II:

For me, the arrival is the moment when all the components of humanity—not just the African ones—consent to the idea that it is possible to be one and multiple at the same time; that you can be yourself and the Other; that you can be the Same and the Different. When that battle—because it is a battle, not a military but a spiritual one—when that battle is won, a great many accidents in human history will have ended, will be abolished. (Barson & Gorschlüter, 2010, p.59)

In the book entitled The Battle of Languages, originally written in 2004 (Lopes, 2013e; 2004), I reflected on the linguistic and cultural influences to which Mozambique and other countries in the Community of Countries with the Portuguese Language (CPLP) were and continue to be subject, reflecting on the need to carry out studies on the various forces which produce historical changes, so as to understand better the nature of the power which makes Portuguese and Spanish function as world languages, and in this way acquire greater analytical capacity and rigour in the description of new varieties of language and their contexts.

The importance of these elements is appropriately highlighted by Lemos Martins in his evergreen work from 1996, in the following terms:

What is fundamentally at stake, when we investigate the meaning of nation, region and local community, is the interpretation of the social logic of the language employed. (…) Linked to the question in the language, it means also that its specific logic is present as social reality. That is to say that what is involved is investigating to what point language is a power, in a struggle for the power to interpret, censure, affirm, deny; to what point does language, which speaks to the divisions of reality, contribute to the reality of the divisions.2 (Moisés de Lemos Martins, 1996, pp.16-7)

It is clear that notions such as global village and world culture mean very little or almost nothing for people whose only culture is subsistence or who see no improvement in their daily lives. Will we have the will to overcome the practice of survival of the fittest? Or will citizens of the world continue to pretend that they are passionately interested by the ‘Other’, and to imagine the world of the other in a way in which the other is no longer so? Personally, I particularly like the idea that I can transform myself through interaction with the other without distorting myself, without loss. Thus, and again in tune with what Glissant says:

You can change, you can change with the Other, you can change with the Other while being yourself, you are not one, you are multiple, and you are yourself. You are not lost because you are multiple. It’s difficult to admit this because we’re afraid of losing ourselves. We tell ourselves: if I change, I lose myself. If I take on something from the Other, my own self disappears. We absolutely must abandon this error. (Barson & Gorschlüter, 2010, p.61)

In fact, I prefer a world of sharing, of the union of cultures, of hybridisation, to a world of

globalization with its reductive uniformity and marginalisation or even extermination of minority cultures.

Many native speakers and others take a certain natural pride in the fact that Portuguese in the world is recognized as an international language and is expanding. But in truth, Portuguese is losing its more localised status, that is, its parochial nature, and is taking on international and intercontinental statusfor the simple reason that this language is not the property of any single state and people, for the fact that it is not under the guardianship of any single state, region or community which it serves, for the fact that nobody has the right to claim proprietorship of the language, and further for the fact that it belongs simply to all who take pleasure in it and identify with it(Lopes, 2013d).And as happened with the fragmentation of Latin in the Romance languages, the whole process of heterogenisation appears to always lead to other simultaneous homogenisation and heterogenisation processes in its core. Mosquera’s (2001: 32) view supports, in this regard, the idea being outlined, when he says that:

It should be obvious that globalization does not consist of an effective interconnection of the whole planet by means of a woven grid of communication and exchange. Rather, it is a radial system extending from diverse centres of power of varying sizes into multiple and highly diversified economic zones. Such a structure implies the existence of large zones of silence, barely connected to one another or only indirectly, via the neo-metropolises...Globalization has certainly improved communications to an extraordinary extent, it has dynamised and pluralized cultural circulation, and it has provided a more pluralist consciousness. Yet it has done so by following the very channels delineated by the economy, thus reproducing in good measure the structures of power.

In Brazil, not so long ago, policies to spread Portuguese did not receive any special attention; the idea persisted that a language policy should be, in the first place, a policy aimed at preservation and consolidation of the language as a vehicle of culture. In Brazil, before 1940, policy to spread Portuguese was restricted above all to the translation of books. Then came the CEBs (Brazilian Studies Centres) which aimed (and aim) to promote the language and culture in foreign countries, and more recently, in the context of continued restructuring, at least in the case of Mozambique, the so-called Brazil-Mozambique Cultural Centres (CCBM). As for Portugal, in the 1970s, its language policy shifted attention to the children of Portuguese emigrants in more developed countries such as France, where 10% of Portugal’s population lived. This type of policy was aimed at language maintenance and as such was not a policy for spreading it more widely. More recently, through the Camões Institute, the Portuguese authorities and Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo have formed a partnership, using the medium of visiting lectureships, aimed at stimulating the development of the Portuguese language in universities in Zimbabwe, Swaziland and South Africa, three countries where English is official or co-official language.

Most recently, starting in 2004, and as part of ongoing cooperation between the two countries since the 1970s, AECID, the Spanish Agency for Cooperation and Development, started assisting Mozambique with the introduction of a visiting lecturer to teach Spanish language and culture at Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM) in Maputo. This sparked great interest among Mozambicans, with the post receiving continued support since then from the Spanish and Cuban Embassies in Maputo.

The Moz-hispania Cultural Association was also started, at the same time that Spanish courses multiplied from 2011 at another important higher education institution, the Higher Institute of International Relations (ISRI) and at another private institution, the French School of Maputo.

At UEM Spanish is taught at different levels through open courses, but at ISRI it is an optional language in the Licenciate curriculum. Today more than five hundred students in the three institutions are learning Spanish as a foreign language. The specialist teachers of Spanish as a foreign language, as well as translation, are Spanish, Cuban and Argentines and there are already a considerable number of students who have taken las pruebas del DELE, the examinations for the Diploma in Spanish as a Foreign Language. Various Mozambican graduates, with a reasonable command of Spanish, have benefitted from Masters’ and Doctoral study bursaries at different Spanish universities through assistance rendered by MAEC, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation.

The interest in learning Spanish as a foreign language, and in some cases as a second language, rests in, among other motives, the linguistic and cultural proximity which learners feel between Spanish and Portuguese, and in the historical and friendship relations with Cuba, forged in the context of the Southern African liberation struggles, when thousands of students went to study, about twelve thousand students who finished their high-school studies, and five thousand others who completed their licentiate degree programmes in various fields of knowledge. It all began with a friendship visit between the leaders Samora Machel and Fidel Castro in 1977 in the city of Beira, which led to a veritable diaspora. After a period of about 16 years, the time taken from primary to tertiary education, the Mozambicans had to come back and involve themselves in many fronts at home, in short supply for some time, particularly following the exodus of professionals which occurred immediately after national Independence. The same context of liberation and international ideological solidarity brought many Brazilians, Chileans, other Latin-Americans, Europeans of varied origins, Asians and Africans. The internationalists, as they were known, active in the country on varied developmental fronts, came to write pages of internationalization, creating relations such as those which the Mozambican poetSónia Sultuane experienced during her recent visit to Cuba: