Kwesi Kwaa Prah
Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS)
Cape Town
Paper
presented to the International Conference on "Visionen
für das berufliche Bildungssystem in Africa." Loccum.
Germany. 13th-15th February 2002.
In, Lawford Imunde (ed). Reflections on Education
Systems in Africa. Loccumer Protokolle 05/02. Germany. 2002
Introduction
Africa appears to
be caught between the reality of a social, economic, political
and cultural legacy inherited from its former masters, and visions
and hopes for a new order which are still conceptually vague
in the minds of those engaged in shaping its future. With
almost fifty years of post-colonialism there is a loss of a
convincing sense of direction, in most areas of social life. This
has created a realisation of the pressing need for a new vision
of where we want to get to. Few areas of this crisis are as
marked by this bankruptcy of vision as the field of education
in general, and the language of education in particular.
The indistinctness of the vision is not however altogether premised
on conceptual or philosophical limitations. To a considerable
degree, current material and social interests of the dominant
groups in African society, whose immediate interests are closely
tied to the maintenance of the status quo, induce the vagueness
and inertia. So that, although, many may very well understand
the rationale for alternatives to the present scenario, and could
possibly also visualize credible options, existential realities
act as fetters on decisive action. The result is that we appear
to be lost in the woods, like pilgrims with no progress, swimming
with the tide, “hoping for a hope to hope for hope”,
struggling in the middle of an ambiguous adventure, with no clear
vision of either where we want to get to, or how to get there.
For a start, the questions one needs here to respond to are firstly,
what is the nature and depth of this legacy, this heritage? Secondly,
who are these dominant groups, I have referred to, and what are
their social interests? Thirdly, how does all this bear on the
issues of educational policy, practice and the relevance of mother-tongue
education, in Africa’s search for a way forward?
The Janus-faced heritage
Depending largely on
their philosophical dispositions and political colouring,
the colonial interlude in African history has been appraised
in different ways by scholars and observers. Left-leaning scholars
have been fiercely critical about its exploitation, dehumanization
and in some instances genocidal record. More right-inclined
analysts have tended to emphasize the stimulus the colonial
experience provided Africans to be propelled into the beginnings
of westernized modernity. These interpretational dichotomies
were inherent in the way the western encounter and colonialism
were conceived of and rationalised by the westerner. On
one hand, the westerner claimed to be on a “civilising
mission”, a mission to uplift the native from conditions
of savagery and barbarism in the name of a Christian confession
and conscience. The social instrument for this crusade
was the missionary. This intention was conceived and articulated
as altruistic, and ostensibly guided by the highest Christian
ideals. On the other hand, the object of the colonial project
was to exploit colonial territories for the profit of individuals
and interests in the metropoles. In this latter endeavour,
ruthless exploitation and unbridled self-interest guided and
advised practice, and colonial administration acknowledged and
served this interest. This schizophrenia in policy and
ideals, the Manichean contestation between God and mammon has
been characteristic of the westerner’s record in the lands
beyond the seas around Europe. The conundrum of the westerner
is captured in the words of Dostoyevsky in his The Brothers
Karamazov that, “God and the Devil are always fighting,
and the battle-place is the human soul”. In effect, the
colonial experience comes across as a Janus-faced experience,
which accommodated espoused altruistic ideals with human cruelties
and exploitation at the same time. In a robust study done
by Leon De Kock, Civilizing Barbarians: Missionary Narrative
and African Textual Response in Nineteenth-Century South Africa,
De Kock in post-modernist mould reduces issues regarding the
record of westerners and missionary influences on Africans to
practically a “no victims and no perpetrators”, “pox
on both your houses”, interpretation of things. Summoning
a great deal of scholarship in aid of his argument, he writes
that:
In some of the best
recent work on colonialism in various disciplines, one finds
admonitions against the closure inherent in theories, which
posit an enduring moral and descriptive antagonism between coloniser
in binary terms. In history, for example, Elizabeth Elbourne
cautions against making the converts of missionary Christianity
appear as ‘the duped and agentless victims of processes
beyond their control’, since this approach has the effect
of ‘occluding agency’. Although many people were
to some extent victims, Elbourne writes that, there should also
be recognition that ‘mission Christianity was used constructively
by many individuals seeking positively to reconstruct a broken
world’. Similarly, historian Richard Elphick, following
the Gambian missiologist Lamin Sanneh, offers a non-binary model
of ‘translation’ (which he aligns with a post-modernist
orientation) as a way of explaining Christianisation in Southern
Africa. Elphick avers that ‘two systems of thought
do no “collide”; rather, real people negotiate their
way through life, grasping, combining, and opposing different
elements which the scholar (but not necessarily the actor) assign
to different origins’. For Elphick, ‘differences
over meaning involve struggles for power, but … power relations
are multiple, widely diffused through society, and often do
not correspond neatly to the “big” divides of class
vs. class, nation vs. nations, or sex vs. sex’. Elphick
also emphasises ‘mutual incomprehension, selective hearing,
and struggle over meaning’. These features compel
one to question monolithic models such as a theory of class
struggle, which foregrounds the broad processes of domination
at the expense of local and individual struggles over meaning. In
a similar spirit, the Comaroffs comment that in studies of the
great evangelical encounter in Africa, the implicit question
‘Whose side were the Christians really on?’, which
underlies much early work reduces complex historical dynamics
to the ‘crude calculus of interest and intention, and colonialism
itself to a caricature’.(1)
This sort of post-modernism
is in the end too clever by a half. It tries to introduce
a notion of caution and the need to be relativistic in the assessment
of historical and sociological data. Can anyone seriously find
fault with this sentiment? However, in practice and argument
it pushes this position to absurd degrees, where historical
meaning and reality can be interpreted in one and a million
ways. Reality ceases to be real, only narrative, as individualised
argument is real. The victim ceases to be a victim and the perpetrator
is exonerated. In sum, it is a clever and eloquent apologia
for colonialism. Such minds need to be reminded of the
sense in Isaiah Berlin’s point that; “scepticism driven
to extremes defeats itself by becoming self-refuting”(2)
Without denying the validity of some of the implications of both
types of assessment (the left/right spectrum of interpretations
I suggest above), it is possible to say that colonialism wreaked
untold havoc on the fabric of African society and African humanity.
It tore to bits the logic of African culture and trampled underfoot
anything or anybody who stood in the way of the extraction of
colonial produce or the benefits and profits of the colonial enterprise;
but at the same time, it introduced modern ideas and techniques
to a pre-industrial and pre-capitalist social and economic system.
Colonialism was part of and a stage in, the globalizing process
of western expansion, which started in the 15th century. Globalization,
as the term is used today is, in fact, the historical process
of the emergence and rise of what has become imperialism since
the late 19th century. It was a system, which enabled groups in
the west to siphon off value and commodities from the wider world
for their enrichment. While its foundations were pre-eminently
economic, it was in practice a total system, which affected all
areas of the social life of the colonized. When political independence
came to Africa, the structure of the relation between colony and
metropole was largely inherited, but an African elite was left
in charge of the system which has over the past four decades proven
to be faithful guardians of western interests. This has been the
basis of contemporary neo-colonialism in Africa. Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s
punchy language on this issue is spot on:
the economic and political
dependence of the African neo-colonial bourgeoisie is reflected
in its culture of apemanship and parrotry enforced on a restive
population through police boots, barbed wire, a gowned clergy
and judiciary; their ideas are spread by a corpus of state
intellectual, the academic and journalistic laureates of the
neo-colonial establishment.(3)
Ngugi Wa Thiongo also
makes the point that it is from within mass society that effective
resistance against neo-colonial culture in Africa can be contested. Brock-Utne
suggests amongst others three strategies towards the decolonization
of the African mind; “the strategy of local appropriation,
having to do with the restoration of local knowledge, languages
and culture; the strategy of diversification including South-South
cooperation and the strategy of counter-penetration which has
to do with the influence of the South on the North, the restoration
of cultural trade, the saving of the world from excessive Euro-centrism
and Americanism.”(4) All of this makes sound sense
but the initial movement towards the creation of a voice for
this process will have to arise as an intellectual contradiction
within the elite. In other words, there needs to be the
emergence of an alternative vision, which intellectually effectively
contests and contradicts the prevailing ethos. This counter-elite
needs to formulate and articulate from within the mass movement,
a position on the basis of which social movements for the dismantling
of the neo-colonial order can be worked out.
Much of the discourse
on colonialism focuses on the economic and political consequences
of the western encounter. However, one of the most deleterious
consequences of colonialism was registered in the cultural life
of Africans. The effect on African languages has been one
of the most significant in this respect. As the South African
jurist Mxolisi Shongwe spelt the matter out; “we should
remember that colonialism was aimed at destroying all aspects
that distinguished Africans as a people”.(5) The point
could not have been more simply and more ably made. With the
forced superiority of the language of conquest, the cultural
superiority of the western overlord in Africa became also what
needed to be acquired in order to unravel the magic of the science
and technology of the colonizer. The colonial experience
and education in the colonizer’s language in effect suggested
that knowledge was available only in the colonizer’s language,
that the languages of the colonized were by nature and destiny
pre-logical and pre-scientific and by implication eventually
doomed to extinction.
Language, from Colonialism to Post-Colonialism
In practice, during
the colonial period, the language policies in education, followed
closely some of the broader philosophical tenets espoused by
the different colonial powers. The colonial powers educated
Africans, or for that matter Asiatics, primarily with the object
of creating a class of natives which could serve as a bridge
into wider native society for the purposes of the colonial powers
and colonial administration. While this was the broad thrust
of the approach, there were differences between British, French
and Portuguese approaches to colonial education in Africa in
general, and the use of language in education in particular.
The British, in principle
wanted to create African cadres who would serve as interlocutors
between colonial administration and mass society, but who were
sufficiently educationally anglicised, and who would be able
to play complementary roles in the establishment of the Pax
Britannica in Africa. They made greater, if grudging, use
of the indigenous languages, than the French who preferred to
make black Frenchmen (citizens of France) out of Africans and
therefore applied a policy of, more or less, zero tolerance
to African languages in education. The British view was
that education should begin in the African languages for the
first very few years and then branch out into the use of English.
In practice, in British colonial Africa, very limited resources
were put into early education in African languages. The French,
anxious to make Frenchmen and women out of Africans preferred
from the start to favour almost total immersion except in the
“initiation schools” which provided limited early
primary education in African languages. As I have elsewhere
pointed out, the Portuguese were the most hard-nosed in this
colonial policy of cultural and linguistic de-nationalization. In
Angola, Decree 77 of 1921, required that all missionaries in
Angola had to be bona fide ministers of religion and not laity; they
were obliged to teach exclusively in Portuguese and not in any
other foreign tongue; they were proscribed from any indulgence
in commerce of any sort and were not to print, write or teach
any African language except at the level of catechism classes.
In Mozambique where Protestant missionaries had permanently
entered in 1879, Mozambican languages had been taught almost
uninterruptedly for years and this had been instrumental in
the creation of a small literate group in the African languages
in the extreme south of the country on the eastern lakeshore
of Lake Malawi. But again here, 1921 saw the banning of
the use of African languages in education.(6) When the
French educated Africans to read and accept the idea of nos
ancetres les Gaulois, (our ancestors, the Gauls) they were systematically
undermining not only the primacy of the African language to
the African but even more seriously, effacing the identity of
the African and replacing it with a mythology of Frenchness. Therein,
lies the foundation of the confusion which present day francophone
and francophile elites in Africa still carry. In colonial
Africa, in the schools created by the authorities, the usage
of African languages even amongst the pupils was treated as
a reprehensible affair. It is widely known that children
were made to feel ashamed of their own languages, and were often,
literally, unable to speak in these languages at school amongst
themselves. In some cases, speaking your mother tongue
became punishable business. This phenomenon was not restricted
to Africa under western colonialism. Nubian colleagues
from the Northern Sudan at the University of Juba during the
early 1980’s told me that similar experiences were known
to them in the North of the country, in the Arabic-speaking
areas of the region. Arabic was insisted on especially
at school. The usage of Nobijn (the Nubian language) was
seriously frowned upon and regarded as a sign of backwardness
and low social standing. Some years ago a Senegalese friend
and colleague informed me that all the Ministers in the Senegalese
government during the 1980’s sent their children to secondary
schools in France. In Anglophone Africa, a similar ethos
pervades the culture of the elites. Today, the so-called
international schools are the flag-bearers of this ethos. What
in West Africa, during the 1950’s and 1960’s, was
described as been-to-ism, that is, having been to Europe or
better still lived and been educated there, became the hallmark
of superior status and social arrivisme. Again today, there
are many members of the African elites who as man and wife may
speak their own mother tongue but insist on speaking only English,
French or Portuguese to their children. The result of such practices
is that their children grow up unable to speak the languages
of their ancestors. In effect, the object of the policy behind
“nos ancetres les Gaulois” is achieved today by African
elites.
Thus education under colonialism created an elite culturally
oriented towards western society and values, and psychologically
determined to be as quickly as possible removed from the culture
and roots of pre-western Africa or mass society. The educated
or so-called civilised African became assimilé in the French
system, evolué in the Belgian order and an assimilado in
the Portuguese empire. Literally, he or she had evolved from primitivism,
or been assimilated into “civilised culture”. Davidson
summarises the hard figures on these policies thus:
In practice, assimilation
was impossible for nearly all Africans in French empire. Throughout
French West Africa in 1926, for examples, there were more than
13 million Africans. But fewer than 50,000 of these were
French citizens, and most of that small percentage were in the
single colony of Senegal. All the rest were ‘natives’
(indigènes’) subject to forced labour and other
racist laws; as late as 1945, the number of assimilated
West Africans was still below 100,000. The assimilated
number was even smaller in other French colonies in Africa.
… The Belgians ran their vast Congo colony as a stiff dictatorship. The
Portuguese, Italians and Spanish did the same. All of them
talked of having a mission to help Africans. But their
words were even emptier than those of the British and French. The
Portuguese colonialists, for examples, repeatedly claimed to
be doing a great deal to ‘civilise Africans’. But
as late as 1970 the number of blacks in their colonies who were
treated as ‘civilised’, because they had the status
of assimilated persons, was less than one in every three hundred
in Guiné (now Guinea-Bissau); while the numbers
of ‘civilised blacks’ were not much greater in Angola
or Mozambique. All the rest were treated as the objects
of unlimited colonial exploitation. Even the few assimilated
Africans were arrested, beaten, or exiled if they launched any
serious anti-colonial protest.(7)
Colonial education,
in this way, ensured limited social elevation and access to
better social rewards in the colonial order. Indeed, education
in both colonial and post-colonial Africa has been the surest
and quickest way to socio-economic elevation.(8) In an
outspoken text The Case for African Freedom, written by Joyce
Cary (1944), the famous writer of the novel Mister Johnson,
he writes that:
What is to be the
language of higher education in the African colonies: Hausa,
Swahili, or English. We are about to set up new schools
and universities on both sides of Africa. We know that
mass education cannot be more than elementary; and that it will
by itself create a need for more secondary schools, to be filled
by the cleverer and more ambitious boys released from primitive
discouragement by its action. We know also that more men
and women of first-class education will soon be required by
the new social advance. More doctors, teachers, instructors,
inspectors, clerks and foremen will be wanted for the new schools,
new social services, and new industries. That work is already
being planned by directors of education. It has had more
attention than mass education, which should have preceded it. But
no one has yet decided the fundamental point of language; whether,
for instance, the object shall be to produce in Africa, as in
India, an educated class, reading, speaking, and thinking in
English as readily as in their mother tongues; or Swahili speakers,
Baganda speakers, Hausa speakers, to whom English, if they know
it at all, will be a grammar-book subject, useless for real
intercourse. This was the old idea, to give a native language,
where possible, the first place. It sprang from the same
root conception of imperial duty as that which sought to maintain
native institutions for their own sake. But it did not
ask two important questions: “What is the object of
our education? What do the Africans want?” If
the object of education is to maintain the traditional character
of native states, then native languages help to secure it. But
it must be said that the natives themselves do not see it in
that light. They think of it as an attempt to put them
in an inferior position. The war, by bringing Swahili –
and Hausa-speaking troops in contact with English speakers,
has increased that suspicion. It is in historical fact a wrong
suspicion. But it has for the African logic not always
perceived by the European. For he looks upon Europe and
its civilization as things far superior to anything in his own
inheritance; and he thinks of the English language as a sign
and agent of that superiority; a key to power and prestige.(9)
Cary’s observation
that Africans want to be educated in English was right but unfortunately,
he was silent about why this is so. Obviously, Africans did
not prefer from Adam to be educated in English. The colonial
order rewarded better English speakers. Chastising some
of his fellow missionaries in a book which appeared at about
the same time Cary’s book was published, Smith noted that; “You
see the same thing in the insistence on the English language
in the schools. Some people seem to imagine that when our
Lord said, ‘Go into all the world and preach the Gospel
to every creature’, he really meant, ‘Go into all
the world and teach the English language’ ”.(10)
In Babs Fafunwa’s paper African Education in Perspective
he writes that: “ ‘What is African education?’
asked a sceptic. ‘Is it the second-rate education
imported from France, Britain, or Spain – the imperial
powers that dominated the political and commercial life of the
African continent for well over three hundred years?”(11)
I agree with the sceptic. Fafunwa makes the point
that cultural and historical relevance alone weaken the effectiveness
of a colonially imported educational system.(12) But even
more pointedly it should be indicated that educational systems
should be thoroughly home-grown answering to all the specificities
of a given society and culture.
African Education, National Culture and Christianity
Education is at heart
a system of inculcating ideas and bequeathing the heritage of
knowledge and cultural practices in a given society to its people. Generally,
a process like that needs to be started from as early as possible,
as soon as young members of a society are deemed to have the
ability to respond meaningfully to teaching and systematic influence. In
sociological usage, education cannot be separated from socialisation. The
effect of education is to adapt members of the society, steadily,
to the norms, beliefs and usages of a given culture. But,
up and above this, an educational system seeks to teach its
target group skills, which enable such groups to operate skilfully
in the production and reproduction of life in the society, and
the circumstances surrounding this. In this sense, there
is a degree of specificity in the content of education for any
society. Issues of societal relevance are thus important
in the formulation and development of educational systems and
content.
It is now common knowledge that education is best conducted and
most effective when undertaken in the mother tongue. Furthermore,
we also know that the acquisition of knowledge is most successfully
developed when it builds on what people already know, that is,
knowledge that is indigenous. The neo-colonial educational
process bypasses indigenous knowledge systems and attempts to
construct new knowledge systems without respect and acknowledgement
of the viability of the knowledge which Africans already have,
and which has been passed on from generation to generation over
the centuries. One of the correctives which need to be made
in African educational systems is the acceptance of the need to
build on African indigenous knowledge systems with these latter
as the starting points. New and modern knowledge is socially
best absorbed if adapted to the cultural and knowledge basis of
the people.
Educational systems
generally reflect the dominant thinking and value system in
a society, and are expressions of the society’s interests
as perceived by the ruling or influential groups in the society,
in a given historical period. In other words, educational
systems are not constructed to negate the values or interests
of the dominant groups in the society. The educated are
expected to be products that adjust to the value systems that
prevail. Conformity and social functionality are therefore
implicit goals of educational systems, although, history is
replete with examples of individuals and groups whose historical
records demonstrate that the revolt against authority and the
challenge of canon is often the intellectual hallmark of the
best educated. Closely related to education as institutionalised
systems in society is the notion of “national culture”
as shared heritage of a society. Some thinkers have found meaning
in the allied notion of “national character”; the
view that, as Mead suggested, there are possible “regularities
to be found in the character of all those who have been reared
within, or have immigrated into and been re-educated within
a given nation-state”.(13) I have no doubt that socialisation
or educational processes produce shared values among people
but the extent to which these are sufficiently integrated to
produce a “national character” or volksgeist as gestalt
needs to be pronounced on with great caution. For any specific
culture or society, its definition invariably congeals into
a gross and reified stereotype. It is in fact close to a Weberian
ideal type concept which helps us to understand reality but
is in itself more cerebral than real. It is a conceptual instrument
which has historically, all too easily, been turned into a rally
and ploy for the pursuit of chauvinist objectives; therefore
“handle with caution”!
The relevance of African culture to any system of effective education
in Africa needs to be particularly emphasised not only because
of its bearing on the development of a ‘national culture’
but also because of the logic of building on what people have
with respect to their history, and not denying their histories
and cultures and operating as if they are entirely creations of
colonialism. Fafunwa writes that:
In old African society
the purpose of education was clear: functionalism was the main
guiding principle. African society regarded education as
a means of an end, not as an end in itself. Education was
generally for an immediate induction into society and a preparation
for adulthood. In particular, African education emphasised
social responsibility, job orientation, political participation
and spiritual and moral values. Children learnt by doing,
that is to say, children and adolescents were engaged in participatory
education through ceremonies, rituals, imitation, recitation
and demonstration. They were involved in practical farming,
fishing, weaving, cooking, carving, knitting, and so on. Recreational
subjects included wrestling, dancing, drumming, acrobatic display
and racing, while intellectual training included the study of
local history, legends, the environment (local geography, plants
and animals), poetry, reasoning, riddles, proverbs, story-telling
and story-relays. Education in Old Africa was an integrated
experience. It combined physical training with character-building
and manual activity with intellectual training. At the
end of each stage, demarcated wither by age-level or years of
exposure, the child was given a practical test relevant to his
experience and level of development and in terms of the job
to be done. This was a continuous assessment which eventually
culminated in a ‘passing out’ ceremony, or initiation
into adulthood.(14)
The point has been very well made. Obviously, cultural divergences
existed not only synchronically but also diachronically. But,
by and large, Fafunwa’s description is apt. Colonialism did
not build education on this heritage, rather, it usurped, undermined
and dismantled this.
Perhaps the even more important problem in my discussion here
relates to the idea of national culture in the contemporary African
context. In my view, the present political entities in Africa,
that is the countries, are states, post-colonial or neo-colonial
states very arbitrarily created and drawn up by the departing
colonial powers. Initially they were created as part of the
colonial territories, which emerged out of the scramble for Africa
and its partition in Berlin in 1885. In the post-Second World
War era with the emergence of the Independence Movement and its
political results, the departing colonial powers re-divided these
old colonial territories and created new ones in their wake. In
terms of their borders, some of these territories had remained
largely unchanged, since the beginning of the 20th century. But
others, particularly in French-Africa were only created in the
forms that we know them today, in the 1950’s and ’60’s. These
countries are, in fact, states, neo-colonial states, which have
hurriedly, in much the same way as flags and national anthems
were quickly created, accepted the idea that they, like the European
states of the 19th century are nation-states or nation-states
in the making. This process inherently denied the reality
of African history, cultures and ethnicities on the ground, which
predate the arrival of the westerner and colonialism. To
talk about national cultures in the neo-colonial states of Africa
is to assume that these national cultures represent the peoples,
ethnicities, histories and cultures as captured in the borders
of African states, as we know them today.
Over the past, 40 – 50 years in one state after the other
feverish attempts have been made to create the semblance of unity
and socio-political homogeneity in these states. However,
the record of this period demonstrated by the continuously fissiparous
tendencies we see in African states points to the fact that the
political, social, cultural and economic basis of the assumed
unity of these states is spurious. Masai in Kenya and Tanzania
share culturally greater commonality than they do with a great
number of the other ethnicities in the two countries. Borana
in Kenya have culturally much more in common with Oromo in Ethiopia
than with Kalengin or Kikuyu in Kenya. Ewes in Ghana have
more in common culturally with Ewes in Togo and other Gbe language
speakers like the Fon in Benin, Mina in Benin, Gun in Benin, or
Mina in Togo, than they have with the Ashanti or Gur speakers
in Northern Ghana. The Yoruba in Nigeria cannot culturally
be separated from the Yoruba in Benin. The examples are endless,
this is the reality of Africa. To use the term “national
culture” in the context of existing African states is an
unfortunate misnomer, and by just designating cultural conditions
in African states as national and unified, does not and cannot
make them so. African cultures on the ground are more continuous,
transcending existing borders, than meets the eye.
In Africa, from the
beginning, for a great part of the continent, western education
went hand-in-hand with the acceptance of Christianity. For
one thing, it was the missionaries who started most of the schools
and opened educational doors in colonial Africa. Many Africans
became Christians. Years ago, the missionary Edwin W. Smith
perceptively observed that; “ the power and material resources
of the European civilization impress the people. The glamour
of western culture hangs about us. The Mission is identified
with all the benefits that civilization brings. The young people
flock to the schools. They do not come because they want our
religion. They come because they want the good things that civilization
seems to offer: that magic which is education”.(15) The
South African linguist A. C. Jordan establishes the linkage
between Christianity and the emergence of literacy in South
Africa in these words:
In all speech communities
of the Southern Africans, what literacy exits is inseparably
bound up with the Christian missionary enterprise. To be
able to ‘preach the Word’ the missionaries had not
only to learn the languages of the people, but also reduce these
languages to writing. Translators, interpreters, preachers,
and teachers had sooner or later to come from among the aborigines
themselves. And so some of the apt converts had also to
be introduced to the rudiments of modern learning through the
language of the missionary body concerned. But since, outside
of the missionary bodies, no one undertook to educate the Africans,
acceptance of ‘the Word’ remained the only means of
access to any form of modern learning, and literacy became the
exclusive privilege of a few Christian converts and their progeny.(16)
Writing about African
education in Kolwezi in the Belgian Congo during the 1950s,
Davidson remarks that missionary education turned out “children
knowing a great deal of catechism but precious little arithmetic”.(17) But
often, this Christian confession remained largely nominal, because,
under pressure Africans frequently found greater solace and
confidence in their own belief systems and resorted to their
pre-Christian beliefs and practices. Westerners usually
saw this phenomenon, in Africans, as a tendency to lapse back
into “primitivism”. For some western observers, this
was proof of the incorrigible nature of African backwardness.(18)
African religious beliefs were described as “superstitions”,
while the doctrine of immaculate conception and the reality
of angels were of course, to such observers, beyond superstition;
indeed, truth.
Christianity once
it has partially replaced African belief systems has particularly
for the masses tended to open the way to marriages of form and
content in the social and political lives of Africans. The
upper levels of educated Africans have tended to want to replicate
most faithfully the received religion of the Westerner, and
generally accepted the Bishop of Rome or the Archbishop of Canterbury’s
version of Christianity with little or no revision. The
masses of Africans till today display a different reaction to
the Christian impact. What is described in the literature
variously as Syncretism, Zionism, Ethiopianism, Prophetism and
Apostolicism is the preferred option because these marriages
of western ritual and theology with African religious culture
satisfies better the accommodation of the cultural and religious
baggage of the masses. In Africa today, most ‘Christians’
would be those who belong to such Afro-European blends of theology,
ritual and liturgy. In most African countries these African
Christian churches are marginalised by the establishment and
kept out of the Christian Councils. These latter consist
of groups, which accept the authority of Rome or Canterbury. The
overwhelming majority of African Christians prefer Africanized
versions of Christianity, which do not violate the foundations
of their traditional cultures. But the higher levels of African
elites generally reject Africanized Christianity. For example,
in South Africa the Zion Christian Church (ZCC) is home for
the majority of Christians in the country but is not represented
in the South African Council of Churches.(19) It is regarded
with disdain by the elites who see it as the Christianity of
the poor, illiterate and semi-illiterate masses.
Africanised Christianity
has also from the late 19th century till the present day provided
a political platform for the mass movement. Davidson calls this
type of politico-religious reaction Biblico-nationalism.(20)
In my understanding, it is a proto-nationalist reaction of largely,
pre-industrial, pre-capitalist, predominantly peasant or semi-urban
under-classes threatened by encroaching industrialising and
modern capitalist influences. They reject not only the socio-economically
unhinging effects of the modern cash economy; equally, they
oppose the centralizing political effects of the modern state,
and the erosion of the traditional patterns of order and rule
they know and have. They represent in African history, cultures
of resistance to foreign intrusion and domination.
The legitimisation
of African Christianity and its achievement of the status of
mainstream Christian confession will mean greater social and
cultural power to the masses. The process towards this represents
part of the struggle for democracy at the cultural level in
Africa. But even more crucial for the regain of cultural confidence
for the African is the need to rehabilitate the status of the
historical African belief systems. African will need to treat
their own heritage, in this respect, as equal and on par with
the imported belief systems.(21)
Smith’s half-century
old admonition and warning to some of his fellow missionaries
is as true now as it then was. He warned that, “Christianity
and our civilization are not identical; but we often act
as if we believed them to be identical. We expect our converts
to conform to our mode of life, to adopt our institutions, our
conventions, to worship God with our forms of ritual, to take
over our architecture, our music, and even perhaps our language.”(22)
If for 50 years the reality of this danger has not become
manifest it is in my view only because the inheritors of the
colonial order, that is the African post-colonial elite has
largely carried on without too much introspection about the
cultural impositions of this heritage. Smith added that,
Some peoples may be
captured by the glamour of foreign ways but sooner or later
the glamour fades and even in African they ask: “Have
we no traditional culture of our own? Why should we surrender
our heritage and make ourselves imitation white men?” So
they question; so they doubt; and that is a time of
peril for the Church if Christianity has been identified with
western civilization. The almost inevitable consequence
is that in rebelling against the imperialism of western culture
they will refuse to entertain Christianity: it is a foreign
religion.(23)
The Missionary Invention of African Languages
Apart from the implantation
of Christianity, the most significant impact missionaries have
had on African society, flows out of their work with African
languages. Missionaries in Africa, more than any single
group, have been responsible for the rendering of African languages
into written forms. Invariably, the first book produced
by missionary groups has been the Bible. In a large part
of Africa, languages remained as oral forms until the intervention
of missionaries. There were some areas of Africa where
written languages had histories predating the arrival of missionaries. In
the Horn area of Africa, particularly in Ethiopia, Geez and
its allied forms and also Amharic far predate the impact of
western missionaries. Indeed, Christianity here predates
much of the Western European experience. In West Africa,
amongst the Vai, and a few ethnicities all the way down to Cameroon,
symbolic expressions, ideographics and some concepts were developed
long before the arrival of missionaries. In the Sahel,
various types of Ajami, that is African languages written in
Arabic script, were developed centuries before missionaries
came into the picture. In all these forms of writing religious
literature was the most predominant product of literary endeavours. Recently,
there has been a report of significant finds in Mali dating
from the 16th century. These have been turned over to John
Hunwick, the historian, for analysis and transcription.(24)
It is important to note that, the linguistic endeavours of missionaries
have however in numerous instances left a legacy of chopping-up
African languages and creating a semblance of differences between
dialects of the same language. This has happened inadvertently
as a result of the fact that the orthographic conventions adopted
by different missionary groups varied greatly from group to group.
Fairly idiosyncratically, missionaries translated African languages
as they found them in the areas in which they found themselves
without due cognisance of the phonological, phonetic, syntactic
and grammatical continuities of the speech forms on the ground. So
that, today rival forms of written Sesotho, Nguni, Akan, Bambara,
Pulaar, Yoruba and many other languages exist. All of this
has gone very far towards creating an appearance of differences
where they do not exist, feeding into the notion of Africa as
a Tower of Babel. What is most unfortunate in this situation
is that in spite of the argument which some of us have been making
that this line of work and approach is not helping Africa but
rather complicating the situation, there are a large number of
missionary groups for example, the Summer Institute of Linguistics
(SIL), which persist in this line of approach.
The argument we have been making is that instead of fragmenting
African languages further, there is rather the need to harmonize
and unify the spelling and orthography of speech forms which are
not structurally divergent, and which enjoy mutual intelligibility
so that on the economies of scale it becomes rational to produce
literature in them for the benefit and enlightenment of mass society.
The Languages of African Elites
Emerson makes some
perceptive remarks regarding language in colonial Africa:
All the colonial peoples
have been brought into the modern world under the aegis of an
imperialism, which superimposed a European language on the native
tongue. This imperial language served three principal purposes,
which have an obvious bearing on the effort to secure national
cultural identity. It was the language of instruction at
least for higher education, it was the instrument through which
intercourse of all varieties could be maintained with the advanced
European and European-descended peoples, and it was frequently
the lingua franca within each of the several nations and between
them. … The imperial languages were, of course, tied to
the prestige system of the whites since the white man, with
the partial exception of missionary and scholar, generally learned
the local languages only as an act of grace or better to rule
or trade with the subordinate peoples, whereas it was assumed
that the natives who wanted to advance must rise to the level
of the foreign language.(25)
This scenario is of
course not limited to the Euro-African relationship. Indeed,
it is inherent in the structure of imperialism and herrschaft
as a historical phenomenon. Emerson informs us further
that “the Japanese adopted the same attitude in Korea and
Formosa, and particularly in Korea ruthlessly pressed Japanese
as the one accepted language.”(26) In a recent reading
of Sun Yat-Sen’s The Three Principles of the People, I
came across a passage which resonates with this phenomenology
I am here alluding to. He wrote that:
When one race conquers
another, it naturally does not allow the subject people to have
independent thought. Japan, for example, now that it has
control of Korea, is trying to convert the minds of the Koreans. All
nationalistic ideas are expunged from Korean school texts, so
that thirty years from now Korean children will not know there
is a Korea or that they are Koreans. Manchuria once had
the same design on us. The conquering people try to destroy
that precious possession of the subject people. The Manchus,
with this purpose in mind, used the most artful methods. K’ang
Hsi imposed the ban on certain books, but Ch’ien Lung was
more tricky in crushing the national spirit.(27)
In Africa, the post-colonial elite, in effect, became cultural
cross-overs of the colonizer. Through the effect of the educational
system put in place, originally by the colonizer they became caricatured
copies of the real thing. Escaping their historical points
of departure located in traditional society, in pursuit of an
ostensibly superior cultural reincarnation, they arrived at cultural
points, which neither gave them the character of their masters
nor the universal acceptance of the authentic copies they imitated. Because
the African elite, in education imitated the westerner, they have
been, in inspiration and values, continuously beholden to the
West, and endured a psychology of inferiority to the westerner. It
is for many Africans difficult to admit this psychology of inferiority
which affects and infects the social and cultural life of the
elite. Curiously, the more western-educated they become, the more
they acquire the trappings and habits of western culture, the
more entrapped they become in the psychology of inferiority, the
psychology of the ape. As is said in West African pidgin
English “monkey see, monkey do”. As elites, they
direct and supervise the cultural lives of the masses, but regard
the cultures of the rural and urban masses as a heritage that
should be buried and forgotten in favour of guidance from London,
Paris or New York.
If African languages in Africa are the languages of the masses,
colonial languages are the languages of the elites. The use of
Western languages in Africa serves as the cultural basis for dominance
of the elites. Those who rule and control Africa today are those
who speak the western languages inherited from the colonial experience.
In other words, today, (as was the case under colonialism) the
language of power is the colonial language. It is even possible
to argue that generally those who speak these languages best are
those closest to the heights of power. The premium put on
the usage of colonial languages is not with respect only to its
effective reading and writing, but also speaking like the westerner;
speaking in ‘his master’s voice’. The acquisition
of accents and expressions which are as close as possible to the
Queen’s diction or French á la academie Francaise
are not only profoundly valued, but also enormously admired. In
the heteroglossia of the colonial language in Africa, yesterday
and today, the diction of the metropolitan upper and middle classes
have become the equivalents of Bakhtinian “posited unitary
language” or Gramsci’s “normative grammar”;
in short, the voice of superiority, power and hegemony. In the
colonial and neo-colonial situations of Africa, a further complicating
dimension is the fact that the ultimate physical association to
the diction of power is the white skin, a small minority of the
elite are able to partake of and appropriate part of this culture.
Because the elites serve as a reference group for the teeming
masses, indirectly and almost inadvertently, they ensure in one
blow the dalliance of both his “master’s voice”
and skin colour in “Darkest Africa” (to use tongue in
cheek the language of Henry Stanley).
I remember a friend, whose father for years worked with the International
Labour Organization (ILO) in Rome, tell me that on one occasion
during a visit to Ghana from Rome for holidays, some of his father’s
friends were surprised by the fact that in their case they
had not lost their facility in Akan. This is because there
have been cases of people who after two or three years absence
in Europe would claim that they can no longer speak their mother
tongue or, people who adopt bizarre versions of accents used in
Europe. So valuable is the use of the western language in
Africa that, many Africans, speaking indigenous languages would
code-switch and intersperse their language with English or French
words and phrases to indicate the level of their “sophistication”.
In recent years, it
is fairly noticeable that the mastery of colonial languages
in neo-colonial Africa is slowly weakening. Teachers of
French in the Ivory Coast suggest that the quality of spoken
and written French in the country is deteriorating. In
the University of Ghana where I have been for the past 4 years
External Examiner in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology,
it is remarkable that falling standards in written English are
clearly perceptible. In a report which appeared recently
on the quality of English in Malawian primary schools it was
noted that: “This study has indicated that the level
of reading in Malawi primary schools is low, and that in particular
it is difficult to see how the majority of children are able
to read to learn from Standard 5 onwards when the medium has
switched to English.”(28) In all likelihood with diminishing
resources, economic stagnation and the expansion of mass society,
standards in the use of the western languages will fall even
further. Further complicating the situation is the increasing
popularity of the belief that it is not worthwhile learning
your mother tongue because this provides no social and economic
advantage.
Language is a cultural
package, which provides more than a simple means of communication. It
provides a window onto the culture of the speakers of the language. It
contains images of the history of the speakers of the language
and is the main instrument to gain entry into a given culture.
It is the repository of values, beliefs attitudes and tastes.
Speaking a language engages the speaker in a dialogue with the
owners of the language, and where the language spoken becomes
the main language of the user, he or she, in effect, is culturally
co-opted into the culture of this main language. I find myself
in agreement with Bakhtin's idea that the essential dynamic
of language is that it dialogically involves one person speaking
to another or a group, an audience, from within a situation.
This latter is historically pegged, but is also constantly changing.
Our historical and situational points of reference, even when
we are engaged in a dialogue are never the same, although, they
may be proximate. (29)
It was Franz Boas
who first drew attention to the fundamental relationship in
anthropological terms between culture and language.(30) He developed
this argument through the analysis of the lexicon of two languages,
showing how language differently describes and captures the
socio-cultural and environmental realities of different peoples
and cultures. The Inuit languages would have many different
ways of describing snow in its different states and conditions.
The Maasai have about sixteen ways of describing or referring
to grass in its varied growth cycle. Whorf took the argument
further by suggesting that language, in each and every case,
actually demarcates, delineates and moulds the perceptual realities
of its users.(31) For Edward Sapir, Whorf’s teacher;
It is quite an illusion
to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the
use of language and that language is merely an incidental means
of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The
fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to
a large extent built up on the language habit of the group.(32)
For Africans because our languages have very limited literature
and for the most part, of fairly recent vintage as written forms,
it is in the spoken everyday forms that the vitality and hope
for continued existence are premised. It is in these languages
that the cultures of Africans are deposited and transacted. It
is in the languages that the strength for cultural advancement
and development are located. If we are to advance through the
usage of these languages they would need to be developed, and
time is not on our side. The oral character of our cultures
need to be rapidly transformed into literate systems. The extinction
of African languages would mean in effect the death of African
societies as cultural entities.
It is in my view wrong that most donor agencies, the World Bank
and UN structures continue to peddle a latter-day version of the
colonial language policy suggested by the British in Africa. The
position then, as I have earlier indicated, was that Africans
should work in their own languages for the first few years of
education and then branch out into English for their late primary,
secondary and tertiary education. This position has been
inherited through the transition from colonialism to post-colonialism,
and has with very little revision been accepted as favoured policy
by a wide number of local and international agencies. The
view I am advancing is that Africans should work in their languages
from the beginning to the end of their educational process, as
all other developed societies do. The policy of switching
from mother tongue to western languages in education, in all its
forms, represents a foundation for the maintenance of a neo-colonial
culture and the entrenchment of cultural backwardness in Africa.
It is worthwhile pointing out that, the popular idea that words,
ideas and terms of non-African origin cannot, or must not, be
introduced into African languages; that Africans should in the
development and improvement of our languages invent new terms
which are totally derived from African usage, hardly bears up
to the evidence of the experience of other languages in the quest
for their development and modernization. Modern Japanese
draws heavily on English and other Western languages. Listening
recently to General Musharaf of Pakistan speaking Urdu with English
translation sub-titles, it was striking to note the extent to
which English words and terms have been freely borrowed and injected
into Urdu. Bahasa Malayu provides another example in the
Indonesian-Malaysian archipelago.
Closing Remarks:
African Languages and African Development
I have over the years
been arguing that, indeed, the missing link in efforts at African
development is the question of language. Without the use
of African languages, Africa is not going to be able to develop
and would be for long condemned to stagnation, inferiority and
lack of cultural confidence.
The fact that the indigenous cultures on which national cultures
have to be constructed transcend the existing borders of African
states implies that such construction would need to go beyond
the inherited colonial borders. It is, in other words, not possible
to develop “national cultures” on the basis of the existing
neo-colonial arrangement. This in turn implies that contemporary
African states would need to facilitate the creation of institutions
which permit “people to people” relations; institutions
which respect Africa’s cultural and historical heritage and
allow ethno-cultural affinities to be democratically celebrated
across borders. Following the logic of this argument further would
suggest that processes of African unity are crucial for the emergence
of an African national culture. So also is the need to acknowledge
and implement such plans and policies on the basis of democratic
principles.
Notes
1. Leon De Kock. Civilizing
Barbarians. Missionary Narrative and African Textual Response
in Nineteenth-Century South Africa. Witwatersrand University
Press. Johannesburg. 1996. P. 12 – 13. The
references of De Kock in this quotation are the following: Elizabeth
Elbourne. Early Khoisan Uses of Mission Christianity. Paper,
Conference on People, Power & Culture: The History
of Christianity in South Africa. 1972 – 1992. University
of the Western Cape. 1992. P. 2. Richard Elphick.
Writing about Christianity in History: Some Issues of theory
and Method. Keynote Address, Conference on People, Power
& Culture: The History of Christianity in South Africa. 1972
– 1992. University of the Western Cape. 1992. Pp.
15 – 16. Lamin Sanneh. Translating the Message:
The Missionary Impact on Culture. . Orbis. New York.
1989. And, Encountering the West. Christianity and
the Global Cultural Process: The African Dimension. Orbis. New
York. 1993. Jean & John Comaroff. Of Revelation
and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness
in South Africa. University of Chicago Press. Chicago. 1991. P.7
2 Isaiah Berlin. Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford University
Press. New York. 1969. P.liii.
3. Thiong’o, Ngugi wa. Decolonising the Mind. The
Politics of Language in African Literature. James Currey. London. 1986. P.2. Quoted
here from Birgit Brock-Utne (ed.). Decolonizing the African
Mind. Education in Africa. Vol. 4. Report No. 8. 1997. Institute
for Educational Research. University of Oslo. P.7
4. Birgit Brock-Utne. Ibid. P.8. See also, B.
Brock-Utne. Education for all – In whose language? Oxford
Review of Education. Vol.27, No.1, 2001. Pp.115-133.
5. See, Mxolisi Shongwe. Students Speak Out. In, Towards
a Language Policy for UNISA. Proceedings of the Conference on
Language Policy. 23rd February, 1996. UNISA, Pretoria. P.73
6. K.K. Prah. African Languages for the Mass Education
of Africans. Deutsche Stiftung für Internationale Entwicklung
(DSE). Germany. 1995. P.62. The source of
this information can be found in: M. Newitt. Portugal
in Africa. The Last Hundred Years. London. 1981. P.
127. And, T.H. Henriksen. Mozambique: A History. London. 1978. P.
144.
7. Basil Davidson. Modern Africa. Longman. London. 1983. Pp.
33 – 34.
8. See, K.K. Prah. Jacobus Eliza Johannes. Capitein. 1717
– 1747.Critical Study of an 18th Century African. Africa
World Press. Trenton. New Jersey. 1992. P.102.
9. Joyce Cary. The Case for African Freedom. Secker
and Warburg. London. 1944. P. 124 – 125.
10. Edwin W. Smith. Knowing the African. United
Society for Christian Literature. Lutterworth Press. London. 1946. P.
16.
11. A. Babs Fafunwa and J.U. Aisiku (Eds). Education
in Africa. A Comparative Survey. George Allen &
Unwin. London. 1982. P.9.
12. Ibid.
13. See, Margaret Mead. National Character and the Science
of Anthropology. In, S.M. Lipset and L. Lowenthal (eds). Culture
and Social Character: The Work of David Riesman Reviewed. The
Free Press of Glencoe. New York. 1961. P.19.
14. A. Babs Fafunwa. Op cit. Pp. 9-10.
15. Edwin W. Smith. Knowing the African. Lutterworth Press.
London. 1946. Pp.16-17.
16. A.C. Jordan. Towards an African Literature. University
of California Press. Berkeley. 1973. P.37. Quoted
here from, Leon De Kock. Civilizing Barbarians. Missionary
Narrative and African Textual Response in Nineteenth-Century South
Africa. Witwatersrand University Press. Johannesburg. 1996. P.66.
17. See Basil Davidson. The African Awakening. Jonathan
Cape. London. 1955. P.125.
18. See, K.K. Prah. Jacobus Eliza Johannes. Capitein. 1717
– 1747. A Critical Study of an 18th Century African. Africa
World Press. Trenton. New Jersey. 1992. Pp.
99 – 101.
19. I have had occasion to question the wisdom of this position
of the South African Council of Churches at a meeting in Gauteng
in 1997.
20. See Basil Davidson. The African Awakening. Jonathan
Cape. London. 1955 P.161
21. There are indications that the early beginnings of this
process is underway. Recently, my attention was drawn by
Akwasi Aidoo to the following adverts on the internet: You
are all invited to attend our Nana Asuo Gyebi festival on Saturday
January 12, at 8 pm at the Onipa Abusia Akan Temple in Jamaica,
Queens, N.Y. Nana Asua Gyebi is one of our patron deities
(abosum) in the Akan tradition. The festival is free. Food
will be served following the festival. You are welcome to
bring gifts – Gordon’s Gin, bananas, white yam, eggs,
are some suggested gifts. Onipa Abusia is a cultural organization
based on the traditional religion and culture of the Akan of Ghana,
West Africa. Onipa Abusia conducts Akom (traditional religious
services), as well as naming ceremonies and weddings. Onipa
Abusia also has a chapter in Washington, DC.
22. Edwin Smith. Op cit. P. 15.
23. Ibid. P. 17.
24. Ron Grossman. African Manuscripts Rewriting History.
The Chicago 11th April 2001. See also, K.K. Prah. The Language
Situation in Africa. Paper Presented to the Conference, of
the L’Academie Africaine des Langues, Bamako - 25th - 27th
May 2001.
25. Rupert Emerson. From Empire to Nation. The
Rise of Self-Assertion of Asian and African Peoples. Harvard
University Press. Massachusetts. 1967. P. 136.
26. Ibid. P. 136.
27. Sun Yat-Sen. The Teachings of Sun Yat-Sen. Selections
from His Writings. The Three Principles of People (San Min
Chu I). Sylvan Press. London. 1945. Pp. 67-68.
28. Testing reading in Malawi primary schools. Section
9.2. (Monitoring reading achievement at national level). Available
at http://www.vista.ac.za/vista/library/red/dep04e/ch10.htm
29. For Bakhtin these historical and experientially defined
points or reference are chronotopes; i.e. unique historically
grounded spatio-temporal positions. In his time, Mikhail Bakhtin
with reason criticised the assumptions of what he regarded as
the two dominant schools of modern linguistics, dividing them
into what he called the “romantic individualists” and
“abstract objectivists”. Benedetto Croce and Karl Vossler
were the leading lights of the former, while Ferdinand Saussure
and his disciples, the early structural linguists, belonged to
the latter group, and it was against this latter group that he
directed most of his attack. He questioned their position for
its preference for the study of langue (language as an abstract
system of regularities and rules) above parole (the individual
spoken “utterance”); their preference for synchronic
over diachronic approaches and studying language practically from
the viewpoint of students of dead languages. See, M. M. Bakhtin. The
Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays . University of Texas Press. 1981. Art
and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. University of Texas
Press. 1989. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Seminar
Press. New York. 1973.
30. Franz Boas. Introduction. Handbook of American Indian
Languages. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 40. Smithsonian
Institution. Washington, DC.
31. Benjamin Lee Whorf. Language, Thought and Reality. Selected
writings of Benajamin Lee Whorf. M.I.T. Press. Cambridge. Mass. 1956.
32. Quoted here from, Edward T. Hall. The Hidden Dimension. Anchor
Books Doubleday and Co. New York. 1969. P.93.
