Kwesi Kwaa Prah
The Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS),
Cape Town

Published in TRIcontinental, Havana, Cuba, No. 150, 2002

Colonialism triumphed through the perpetration of various degrees of ethnocide. The cultural world of the colonized was condemned in the names of inferiority and irredeemable primitivism. The languages installed by the colonial overlords dethroned the supremacy of African languages in the affairs of Africans. These languages of conquest and empire slowly formed the linguistic basis for the creation of an indigenous elite, which in the language of the time was “acculturated" and was in “culture contact” with an overwhelming western colonial culture. Western languages did not triumph on account of their innate or inherent superiority. They were culturally and politically installed only after the armed and forcible subjugation of native peoples. 

The experience in post-colonial Africa has been that, in almost all the states, in either the immediate wake of independence or in some instances years later, African languages have been consitutionally accorded, rarely, “official” status. This latter status implies that they are not languages of high-level social transactions. Only official languages have this position, and in Africa official languages are almost always colonial languages. But nowhere has this effectively translated at the active policy level to practice of any consequence. In all these states, the colonial forms of speech have reigned supreme and in time entrenched. In places like Tanzania and Madagascar, the colonial languages have been replaced for a while, respectively by KiSwahili and Malagache, only to have the colonial languages reinstated again at a later stage. The ostensible reason for this is that the governments concerned could not fund the production of materials in the local languages. Enticements and offers of support if local authorities reverted back to the colonial languages are likely to have been important factors in the decision-making.

It is indeed amazing that at the onset of a new millennium, Africa represents today the only major historical and cultural area of the world where despite their indigenous socio-cultural majorities, countries prefer to use the languages of their erstwhile masters in their attempts to develop and make social progress. The result of this neo-colonial approach to culture and democracy is that the scientific and technological culture of Africans is hardly advancing.

Actually, Africa, by and large, is retrogressing or stagnating. Mass society and its culture is shut off, and condemned to cultural backwardness and alienation from the life of the elite. The elite in turn is bent on what many social critics regard as mindless imitation of the colonial and metropolitan cultures of the west. This is an orientation, which in effect integrates the elite more into the culture of the former colonial masters than the indigenous cultures from where this elite historically and socially derives.

The Myth of an African Babel

One of the most stubborn myths in the study of African society is the idea that Africa is the supreme example of the biblical Tower of Babel, that linguistic variation and diversity in Africa are of such dimensions that Africans cannot share or work in their own languages. In an age of enlightenment when we can circle the globe in twenty- four hours; in an age in which every point on the compass is well within reach, it is a matter of great interest why this spurious myth persists with such a glibly accepted status of veracity, both in Africa and the wider world. This myth like all myths has little or no basis in truth. The truth is that, most of what are counted as distinct languages in Africa are acutally dialects of what I call “core languages”.

What the Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society’s (CASAS) work has so far revealed is that as first, second or third language speakers (we need to remember that most Africans are multilingual), over 75% of Africans speak no more than twelve core languages these being, Nguni, Sotho-Tswana, Swahili, Amharic, Fulful, Bambara, Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, Luo, Eastern Inter-lacustrine and Western Inter-lacustrine (Kitara). Fifteen core languages will take us up to about 85% of the African population of the continent; the three additions being the Somali / Oromo / Rendille / Borana cluster, the Akan cluster and the Gur group. For a population of 600 million to 700 million people, these languages cannot be described as small speech communities. There are some of us who have come to the conclusion that this idea of an “African Tower of Babel” has, intentionally or unintentionally, become a useful tool in the hands of those who want to see Africans work permanently in the languages introduced by the colonials.

In order to turn this scenario round, viable and more democratically targeted language policies will need to be put in place. Policies which re-center the languages of the majorities into the central area of the social life of the majorities, and which serve as vehicles for their empowerment with knowledge, modern science and technology.

To do this we need first to bring order into the ambiguities of the numbers of “different languages”. We need to identify speech forms that share such high degrees of mutual intelligibility that they can and must be regarded as the same language in each instance. This will secondly, permit the identification of large speech-communities which on the economies of scale make it possible for us to develop literatures for mass society on a viable economic basis. The technical work crucial to this is the harmonization of the orthographies of mutually intelligible speech forms; so that instead of, for example, producing a book for 1 million people one can produce the same book for 30 million people.

The roots of the confusion of identities of speech forms in Africa are simple. In their enthusiasm to translate the Bible into African languages, different and sometimes competing or rival missionary groups and Christian confessions fairly idiosyncratically in as far as the choice of orthography and spelling were concerned translated the Bible the way they saw fit. Sometimes the same speech form in translation used different spellings and orthographies according to the missionary group involved. French missionary groups would choose spellings that leaned on French derivations. Likewise the English or German would do what came close to what they knew. In the end a century and a half later we have a forest of different spelling systems for languages that are practically, in terms of their mutual intelligibility, more or less the same. Colonial administration also had a hand in elevating district names and sometimes even village names to the status of ethno-cultural and linguistic identities. Especially when such territorial designations coincided with purported linguistic definitions, it became easy to elevate such identities to the status of separateness. Where resource benefits and economic factors coincided with these identities, they assumed even more prominent features in the social, cultural, political and economic lives of the people and with time, became rigid symbols of solidarity with tied interest of the groups involved.

Neo-colonialism and Contemporary Language Policies

African language policies, which have emerged in the post-colonial era, bear remarkable formal and substantial resemblance. The key reason for this is not difficult to identify. These policies represent the thinking and aspirations of very similar ascendant classes and social interests. They have from one country to the next been particularly ineffectual in serving as viable bases for both literacy training and societal development. Without a structural revision of its character, it is difficult to see how effective literacy programs and societal development can be achieved.

Most observers who have looked at the issue of language policy in Africa are agreed about the fact that there is a big gap between intended policy (planned policy) and action or implementation. Since the beginnings of the colonial era, with variation, it is possible to identify different phases in the evolution of language policy on this continent.

Initially Christian missionaries preferred to work in African languages for purposes of Bible translation and other related evangelical material. In agreement with the early colonial authorities they also favoured the use of African languages for elementary education, their idea being that after the initial stages African pupils would switch on to the language of the colonial power. To different degrees this policy was shared, across the board, by the different colonial powers. Till today, the idea of education in the mother tongue for the first three years of primary school remains the most popular position held by educational researchers and institutions like the UNESCO.

While the British colonialists tended to be a little more flexible, the French, and especially the Portuguese, were seriously prohibitive of the amplitude to which African languages could be employed in education. The thinking behind this early policy is not too obscure to fathom. In order to “win souls” for the church it was considered best to go through the mother tongue, close to the heart and comprehension of the people. But, in order to develop a cadre capable of serving as intermediaries and interlocutors, for the purposes of colonial administration and practice, it was considered necessary to educate in the colonial language. Such early cadre served as clerks, interpreters, messengers, petty bureaucrats and primary school teachers. Within the colonial order they became the early intelligentsias with possibilities for vertical social mobility. They enjoyed positions of privilege and were more immediately enmeshed in the colonial cash nexus. They acquired the material hallmarks of Western modernity, and in societies, which were under colonial imposition, they came to represent a reference category and role models in the eyes of their less materially fortunate and illiterate kinsfolk. Thus in the colonial setup a number of features converged to define the social and economic characteristics of the early colonial elite. These were Christian confession, literacy, wage employment, the limited acquisition of Western consumption patterns and the rudimentary paraphernalia of Western domestic culture.

During the later colonial period, with the establishment of first, secondary and later tertiary institutions, the language policy of the colonial powers were further entrenched basically along the same lines as their initial formulations. However the relative size of the educationally Westernized products increased and as the colonial economy and administrative needs expanded, this elite likewise grew.

The emergence of tertiary institutions stimulated further the growth of this elite but it was an elite which, as it grew in size and quality, became increasingly removed from its original African cultural moorings. As this happened their attitudes towards African languages became increasingly disdainful, adopting many of the rigs and comportment of the colonial master. They not only adopted “his master’s voice” and language, but also accepted the master’s like’s and dislikes, as part of the package. The emergent elite became part of the colonial cultural army for denigrating and pulling down the value of the cultures and languages of the hoi polloi. Again here the explanation for this is not difficult to find. In circumstances where material success, high status and prosperity were societally routed through the use of colonial languages and where this pattern had for decades been well established, it is not difficult to understand why the new elite so definitely favoured the linguistic policies of the colonial powers. In short, the use of colonial languages for the colonized became a safe route to material benefits and social power in the colonial order.

The use of Western languages, under colonialism in Africa, went far beyond service of simple vehicular kind. Indeed, the cultivation and utility of Western languages represented the approbation of the supremacy of the cultural package borne in the usage of the literature and mind; values and ethos represented in these received speech forms.

In the post-colonial or neo-colonial era the scenario has altered only slightly with the advent of political independence. Most of the African countries have, in principle, and, on paper, attempted to rehabilitate and reclaim the status of African languages. All African countries have acknowledged, to various degrees, the status of what is described as “national languages,” What is, however, remarkable, is that policy and formulated intent has nowhere been seriously applied or translated into viable practice. Rather what we see is, what I have elsewhere described as a “mood of indecision and the rudderlessness of language-policy pursuits by the relevant authorities in Africa.”(1) My central thesis is that, without the use of African languages there can be no development in Africa.(2) 

Language and Development

Language is the central feature of any culture. It relates to all areas of the social, economic and political lives of the people. It is in language that the genius of people is ultimately registered at both the individual and collective expression of people and societies. It is in the language of the masses that social transformation in its most far-reaching sense makes an impact. A society cannot develop if language is the monopoly of a small and restricted minority whose orientation is directed outside, towards cultures that have had an imperial or colonial relationship with the society that is endeavoring to develop. Education for the masses must be done in the languages of the masses so that development becomes a mass phenomenon, which is part of mass culture. Only then will development translate relevantly in the lives of the broad and major sections of the population. It is my view that language is the key to the challenge of African development.

 

Notes

1.    K.K. Prah. Mother Tongue for Scientific and Technological Development in Africa. Deutsche Stiftung f·r internationale Entwicklung.

Bonn. Germany. 1995. P. 6. See also footnote no. 1 in K.K. Prah Ibid. P. 10. Ayo Bamgbose. Language Policy in African Context. Paper presented to the 19th West African Languages Congress. University of Ghana, Legon. 2-6 April, 1990. Quoted here from K. Karikari. The Role of the Media of Mass Communication in the Diffusion of Science and Technology in Africa: Emerging Challenges. In K.K. Prah (ed) Culture, Gender, Science and Technology in Africa. Windhoek. 1991. P. 141. See also, Ayo Bamgbose. Mother Tongue Medium and Scholastic Attainment in Nigeria. Prospects. Vol. 14. No. 1.

2.      The argument has been made in some detail in K.K. Prah. African Languages for the Mass Education of Africans. Deutsche Stiftung f·r internationale Entwicklung. Bonn. Germany. 1995.