Taking into Account Linguistic Diversity in the Context of African Schools: The Difference Between Discourse and Implementation

Abstract

Since independence, the question of how to integrate the schools inherited from colonization into community life in Africa has always arisen, and with acuteness. Likewise, the question of how to integrate endogenous knowledge into the curriculum of this so-called modern school system also still arises. These questions certainly arise from the desire to make systems more effective and efficient, but above all, they are dictated by the concern to strengthen national cultural identities, to legitimize state policies that want to assert their intellectual and cultural independence in relation to the old metropolises, and to make this so-called modern school system responsible for the future that Africans wish to give themselves through the education of younger generations. The article aims to demonstrate the necessary dynamic symbiosis between the endogenous knowledge that has been transmitted from generation to generation in African traditions and the exogenous knowledge that is being imported from the West and the East. This cannot be done without integrating national languages ​​into educational systems and significantly improving the quality of education.

After more than half a century of independence, African countries have yet to have found the right way to consider the cultural and linguistic diversity of their students. Curricula should value local cultures and endogenous knowledge so that learners rooted in their cultures can learn and connect to other cultures while recognizing universal values and nurturing their own local and global citizenship. This ambition involves the promotion of African languages and multilingual education through curricula. Currently, eight out of 10 children in Africa begin their schooling in a language other than their mother tongue. This is a major barrier to learning and the acquisition of knowledge and skills, as well as a key factor in the exclusion and frustration that leads learners to drop out of the education system. In addition to the cultural benefits, the use of one’s mother tongue and local languages as a medium of instruction in education has clearly proven to be one of the most effective ways to accelerate knowledge acquisition and skills development and to improve the overall quality of learning outcomes.

In recent years, interesting experiments in educational practices have been carried out in Niger, Burkina Faso (with bilingual schools), Mali, Burundi, and Madagascar, to name but a few. They have demonstrated that not only do children who have been taught in their mother tongue achieve better results at school in subjects such as mathematics and science but also gain a better command of foreign languages.

This article is an attempt to shed light on this issue lying at the heart of contemporary African educational policies. This article first analyzes the ambiguity of the African school model, which oscillates between colonial heritage and the main tool of modernization. The second section addresses the obstacles to considering the languages and cultures of students, both at the level of the main school stakeholders (e.g., teachers, parents) as well as at the level of public education policies. The third section will present successful experiences of multilingualism in schools in certain regions of the continent, and the last section will suggest ways to rethink school education in Africa.

Some Initial Observations: The Predominance of Foreign Languages Despite Timid Experiments

First Observation: What have schools done to (1) mother tongues and (2) local languages in Africa? The schools have largely excluded these languages implicitly or explicitly from their space.

Globally, the generalization of the school format and massification of schooling, both in Northern and Southern Africa, have led to a global reduction in linguistic diversity and to a hierarchical classification of the languages, cultures, and dialects in the world.

The official languages that are predominantly used in schools as languages of instruction and schooling have gained legitimacy, visibility, and power. Some linguistic minorities that speak languages different from the official or de facto dominant languages are considered culturally distant from the school format.

In Africa, this process was further reinforced by colonization and consolidated by the first decades of independence. For fear of ethnic or ethnolinguistic divisions and a desire to stick to the international languages (i.e., English, French, Portuguese, Spanish) that are reputed to bring modernity and openness (including in their anti-colonial and Marxist versions), many African countries chose the status quo and inertia in terms of linguistic and school policies.

Even when the Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire, champion of the pedagogy of emancipation, worked in the former Portuguese colonies in Africa, he mainly used Portuguese in his literacy projects, despite it being the language of colonization. The national elites, particularly in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, were the ones who pushed for the adoption of this paradoxical and at the very least ambiguous pedagogical option for a pedagogy of reference for the oppressed in the world (Freire, 2014).

Second Observation: Reforming the language of instruction used in schools by transforming local languages that have been ignored and minorized for a long time into languages of instruction and schooling is difficult for many reasons, such as means (costs) and the priorities of the educational system (everything is a priority in Africa!).

In Europe, the formalization and imposition of a national language of instruction took several centuries and required the mobilization of considerable means of nation-states, such as the introduction of compulsory schooling and compulsory military service. Africa needs to move faster than this to reform its languages of instruction, all with fewer resources and more fragile and weaker states.

Making the language of instruction coincide with the mother tongue is a technically and pedagogically difficult and long process, but not an impossible one. The example of Catalonia is instructive. While Catalan had been excluded as a language from schools and institutions under the Franco dictatorship in Spain, it is now the main language of schooling and daily communication in Catalonia.

Other examples include Burundi’s performance with Kirundi in the fourth year of primary school, or the interesting results in mathematics in Madagascar with the subject being taught in Malagasy in the first two years, and then in French. The bilingual schools of the Œuvre suisse d'entraide ouvrière (OSEO) in Burkina Faso complete their entire school curriculum in five years instead of six with significant results.

Third Observation: What is probably most limiting to changing language and school policies in the case of sub-Saharan Africa or any language context where vernacular languages are not used in schools is the lack of social or political consensus on the choice of language(s) of instruction. For example, the vast majority of the population in the Central African Republic speaks Sango; however, it is not widely used in school.

The fracture line is not necessarily linked to ethnolinguistic, social, or regional affiliations. Some postures may even be paradoxical. For example, rural communities in Africa are not always as enthusiastic about the use of their mother tongues in school as one might think. This has been observed in the field, particularly in research in Madagascar and Niger. Even though these local communities have little daily exposure to or practice French, they want their children to be proficient in the language as early as possible.

Languages are what carry the economic, political, or symbolic power that allow themselves to be imposed as languages of instruction and schooling.

Curiously, African languages are alive and not in danger of disappearing despite their notable absence from modern institutions (schools, administrations, formal economy, mass media, Internet). They are everywhere in Africa, in families, in traditional ceremonies, in markets, in the street, and in cultural or musical productions. The desire for their entry into the school system is more related to the imperatives of teaching, learning, education, and literacy and less to threats of disappearance or identity issues. In other words, African languages and dialects are culturally and socially in the majority, but institutionally, politically, economically, and of course academically in the minority.

Learning is difficult when children enter a classroom for the first time and hear a language they have probably never encountered, do not speak at home, and have had almost no opportunity to practice outside of these contexts. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) studies, eight out of 10 children in Africa start school in a language other than the one they speak between the ages of zero and six. In many cases, English is a language with which the teachers themselves are not very familiar; this is the reality for many teachers in rural and peri-urban areas, which makes explaining even the most basic concepts to a child difficult for these teachers (Bah, 2022).

Multiple Explanations for the Exclusion of Mother Tongues in the Context of African Schools

Currently, just over a third of children worldwide have a language of instruction other than their mother tongue (UNESCO, 2015). However, when analyzing the global context, sub-Saharan Africa is observed to have the most systematic exclusion of local and mother tongues from schools. This section attempts to provide some main explanations for this exclusion of mother tongues and local languages.

First Explanation: School and Their Format Are Always an Ambiguous Adventure in sub-Saharan Africa

We use this notion of ambiguity by borrowing it from Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s novel L'Aventure ambiguë published in 1961. It was awarded the Grand Prix littéraire d'Afrique noire in 1962 as a semi-autobiographical novel tracing the cultural and spiritual upheaval of young Samba Diallo, the son of a Diallobé [knight] who’d been entrusted at the age of 7 to a very strict Qur’anic master who ensured his Muslim spiritual education. Two years later, however, his aunt, the pragmatic Grande Royale, made the difficult decision to send the children to the new school to “learn the art of winning without being right” (p. 47), even at the risk of losing their ancestral cultural values.

Schools will remain an ambiguous adventure for a long time if no African culture or language occurs in formal education. Moving from ambiguity to creolization is much more difficult but more culturally and pedagogically interesting (Glissant, 1997).

Ambiguity and tension do not necessarily mean that French or English being maintained in independent Africa is negative. As the Algerian Kateb Yacine stated at the end of the Algerian war, the French language is one of the “spoils of war.” The difficulty is in how to handle this “spoil” and its effective investment in a relevant and emancipating bi- or multilingual education. The massification of access to basic education and the conditions in which this massification has been implemented (i.e., overcrowded classes, untrained teachers, limited access to pedagogical resources) make learning even more difficult for students being schooled in an unfamiliar language.

Second Explanation: A Major Effort Is Needed to Standardize African Languages

The use of a language in schools presupposes several processes: the priority of writing over speaking, the existence of a large and varied written production, the training of specialists in African languages, and standardization (e.g., grammar, spelling, adopting new words). The standardization effort is costly and only bears fruit in a delayed manner. One should also remember that the standardization effort may initially focus on the languages with several million speakers (e.g., Hausa, Wolof, Lingala, Fulfulde) in Africa rather than on languages with only a few thousand speakers. This may seem unfair, but it is pragmatic and realistic, remembering in this regard that Africa has the second highest linguistic diversity in the world after the Indian Ocean and Pacific region. Africa is characterized by a large linguistic diversity with about 1500 languages. Depending on what is considered the boundary between language and dialect, this number can easily be doubled.

Third Explanation: International Cooperation Has So Far Instead Acted to Maintain a Linguistic Status Quo by Excluding Mother Tongues and Minority Languages, Regardless of These Lines Beginning to Move

International cooperation has had a long and massive presence in Africa in the formal education sector and in development cooperation. Traditionally, it has contributed little to the consideration of mother tongues in education. International organizations such as UNESCO or the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) appreciate that their official languages are used by African education systems, even if they may promote local languages occasionally. Just imagine a time when terms of reference (ToRs), policy documents, and minutes of international meetings must be in the national languages. This would inevitably have a cost but also send an important symbolic and political message.

Interesting Current Changes Despite Persistent Constraints

So far, we have described the many challenges that have prevented the use of African languages in schooling. Nevertheless, the lines and orientations are currently moving, and international cooperation is beginning to call for the consideration and valorization of mother tongues in education in Africa. We can cite the recent initiatives of the UNESCO International Bureau of Education (IBE) for the integration of national languages in curricula and would like to give two illustrations of this change:

First Illustration: The PASEC 2019¹ study conducted by Conférence des Ministres de l'Education des Etats et gouvernements de la Francophonie (CONFEMEN) on the academic performance of primary school students showed that Burundi has better academic performance than other countries, as measured by standardized tests. While teaching conditions (e.g., overcrowded classrooms, shortage of textbooks, inadequate teacher training, poor infrastructure) are not radically different from those in the other countries participating in the study, the inclusion of the mother tongue as the first language of instruction in primary school in Burundi is what has made the difference (CONFEMEN, 2020).

Second Illustration: According to the recent World Bank (2021) “Loud and Clear: Effective Language of Instruction Policies For Learning” report on language of instruction policies, children learn better and are more likely to stay in school when they begin in a language they use and understand. Still, an estimated 37% of students in low- and middle-income countries are forced to study in a different language, which puts them at a significant disadvantage throughout their schooling and limits their learning opportunities.

The World Bank’s new approach to language of instruction is guided by five principles:

• 1. Provide children with instruction in their first language from the early childhood care and education stage through at least the first six years of primary school.

• 2. Use students’ first language to teach subjects other than reading and writing.

• 3. When children need to acquire a second language in the primary grades, teach it as a foreign language with an initial emphasis on oral skills.

• 4. Continue instruction in the first language even after the second language has become the primary language of instruction.

• 5. Systematically plan, develop, adapt, and improve the implementation of language of instruction policies by taking into account the national context and educational goals.

In brief, the minoritization and exclusion of African languages in the school context is a complex process linked to many explanations that we have tried to summarize. We would like to add that this minoritization and exclusion has had concrete pedagogical consequences in African classrooms. We can illustrate this with a photo from a recent field trip to Niger. The use of French, a socioculturally unfamiliar language, leads to a hyper-formalization of teaching, even with academically weak primary school students (the photo was taken in a class of educational alternatives supported by international cooperation) (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

A photo taken by Akkari in a Nigerian primary school classroom

As Ki-Zerbo (1961) well stated over 60 years ago:

When we were asked at school for a commentary on the description of the beech tree by a 19^th-century French author, having never seen a beech tree, we had no other resource than to hold on by memory to the same terms used by the teacher in the classroom explanation. Hence the development of a certain verbalism without substance. The Africanization of programs will place pedagogical work at its most appropriate level for the training of students, because their intelligence, their powers of observation and invention will be directly solicited. Thus, the description of the baobab would have inspired the best of us. (Ki-Zerbo, 1961, p. 56)

The changes in the orientation of international organizations will give a new boost to the consideration of African languages in schooling. In this regard, the IBE as a UNESCO body specializing in curricular reforms has given increasing importance to the question of the local and cultural roots of curricula. In this process of accompanying countries, the linguistic issue and the development of programs in national languages will be accompanied by action research and anchored in evidence to be produced.

The Erroneous Theses

Many erroneous theses are found about taking linguistic diversity into account in the context of African schools. The issue of promoting multilingualism continues to be a challenge with questions. However, no pedagogical, cultural, or cognitive question has been able to answer it in a scientifically convincing way so as to contradict the relevance of the integration of national languages in educational systems. We wish to expose these theses to challenge them.

Thesis 1: Bringing National Languages to School Will Cause Ethnic Conflicts!

Ethnic conflicts have long existed in Africa, as elsewhere in the world. However, to attribute a potential for aggravating ethnic tensions to the integration of mother tongues in schools and official institutions is questionable. The case of Rwanda is instructive: Linguistic cohesion did not prevent genocide.

The only violent linguistic conflict in Africa that has currently turned into an armed conflict is in Cameroon, where the dispute is between French and English, two colonial languages. English-speaking Cameroonians have long complained about the almost total domination of public life by their French-speaking compatriots. Elites from this group have allegedly used their power to marginalize the Anglophone regions when allocating resources for economic development (Orock, 2022).

The fear that recognition of linguistic diversity will lead to further ethnic conflict is consistent with the broader fantasy that multiculturalism produces communalism and racial and ethnic division. In terms of ethnic or ethnolinguistic conflict, we would like to point out here that the experiences of countries that allow minority languages to flourish in schools are often linked to the territoriality of minority languages. For example, the maintenance of French or Italian in Switzerland as a language of instruction in a predominantly German-speaking country is linked to the fact that the French- and Italian-speaking territories are well-demarcated; these two languages are in the majority in these territories and are the languages of administration, education, and political and social life. Of course, a federal system of government allows for decentralized management of schools, and tensions often arise at the language border.

In Africa, the intensive internal rural exodus and regional migrations over the decades have produced an unprecedented mixing of languages and cultures. As a result, finding a monolingual territoriality is difficult in most cities. The decentralization of education has also been poorly developed, hence the need for an inclusive language policy for minority languages.

Thesis 2: Mother-Tongue Instruction Is Currently a Luxury and Not a Priority

We often hear in the field and have even mentioned earlier in the text that the important cost of standardizing and preparing a language to leave its status as a dialect for the status of a language of instruction and writing remains significant. This thesis states that opening the debate on the language of instruction is a luxury in an African context where schools lack everything for teaching and learning, including basic infrastructure and trained teachers. Having well-equipped classrooms and trained teachers is not enough for learning if children do not understand the language used in school at the beginning of their schooling.

Thesis 3: Teaching in French or English Worked Well During the Colonial Period and the First Years of Independence

The third erroneous thesis circulating is that the non-use of mother tongues in the school context did not prevent Africans from learning during the colonial period and the early years of independence. We believe this thesis to be erroneous because it fails to take into account the massification of basic education. When schools were reserved for a select few (the elites), their social and cultural backgrounds allowed them to adapt to the ambiguous cultural adventure and to navigate easily between the traditional family cultural universe and that of the modern school. And one should not forget that the colonial school heritage only concerned 5%–10% of African children at the time. Nevertheless, when a school system becomes massive and wants to be universal, one is then confronted with other challenges. The system must reach rural and poor areas where foreign languages are practically absent. And nothing can be built in education and literacy without the mother tongue.

In Cape Verde, for example, Rosa (2010) showed the systematic prescription of Portuguese and the consequent proscription of the Cape Verdean language throughout the school career of Cape Verdean students to have undermined their academic performance. This is a legacy of colonization that still manifests itself in classrooms today through implicit language policies.

Thesis 4: Linguistic Diversity and the Large Number of Languages Are Not Conducive to Learning

The case of Papua New Guinea, with nearly 8.9 million inhabitants and nearly 850 languages, 450 of which are used in schools, shows that having several languages of instruction can be used for successful learning. It is also a way of valuing local cultures while associating them with student learning, and this will certainly develop research on these languages.

All of these erroneous theses that have been disproved by research are circulating and influencing decision-makers. Of course, this does not mean that schooling in mother tongues will be a long, quiet river.

Important Challenges: Transitions, Time, and Learning Achievements

The thesis we have tried to defend so far is that the exclusion of mother tongues from instruction in Africa has been detrimental to the quality and relevance of school education. This is not to say that many challenges to including these languages don’t exist.

The question is also found on how to transition from school levels where the mother tongue is used in instruction to levels where foreign and international languages (i.e., French, English) are used. For example, Burundi, which we mentioned earlier as a good lesson in terms of taking the mother tongue into account at the primary level, was seen to have lost its comparative advantage at the end of primary school in the PASEC study (CONFEMEN, 2020) because the students were tested in French, a foreign language that the students had not mastered.

This transition between school levels is often poorly negotiated and planned and results in the aggravation of school inequalities according to social origin. In Morocco, for example, the Arabization of primary and secondary education while maintaining French as the language of instruction in the private sector and in higher education for prestigious subjects has fueled the parents who can afford it to seek recourse in private education for primary and secondary schools.

Taking mother tongues into account in the African school context will necessarily result in bilingual and multilingual education models. These models will face another major challenge: the time devoted to learning non-language subjects in school. How can one ensure that children do not spend most of their school time on language learning?

In the Maghreb countries, for example, which succeeded in reintroducing Arabic after their independence, primary school students spend 40%–50% of their school time learning Arabic and French! How, then, can they find time for other school subjects, such as mathematics, science, history, geography, or music? This is why some in these countries have raised their voices to substitute French with English, the international language par excellence.

In a school context where more and more discussion occurs around a learning crisis recently aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic, finding a balance between the need to take mother tongues into account and the necessary need to improve learning achievements is not easy.

Conclusion: Pragmatic and Ambitious Solutions

To conclude this paper, we want to emphasize that the status quo of excluding African languages or confining them to an eternal experimental status in the context of African schools is not an option for the future. While this status quo has prevailed for a long time, this is not to say that alternative solutions will be easy to implement or that the challenges will be easy to overcome. These future solutions must be driven by both pragmatism and ambition.

Pragmatism means taking into account the balance of power in society and not engaging in ill-prepared reforms with strong ideological overtones: The Arabization, Malagachization, and Africanization of education have left lasting damage because they were ill-prepared, poorly financed, and above all, reserved for the poorest.

Ambition means looking ahead, anticipating difficulties and foreseeable failures, and multiplying research-action. Ambition also means betting on the future of multilingual schools in Africa, betting on the local mother tongues as well as the languages inherited from colonization, in addition to the vernacular languages that are widely spoken or have a regional scope in Africa, such as Swahili or Hausa.

Relying on teachers is also essential. The importance of teachers as actors in language policy thus becomes central. What we see clearly in all the contexts we’ve discussed is that teachers are under immense pressure. Responding to factors such as curriculum requirements, parental expectations, and the practical realities of managing classroom spaces that include individuals with diverse repertoires all influence how teachers implement language policy in classrooms. While we have found that different teachers take different stances toward adopting students’ language repertoires, we have also found that teachers are actively engaged in language practices that disrupt the monoglossic nature of the official policy and are ultimately much more responsive to the needs of learners and communities (Reilly et al., 2022).

Ambition also means that minority languages should not be confined to the status of a transitional value toward the dominant languages at school when moving from preschool to university. We believe that this is a challenge that concerns not only Africa but all minority languages in the world. If the valorization of minority languages in the educational system stops at the primary level and is not pursued at the secondary and university levels, they will end up stagnating and going backward. The valorization of multilingualism and plurilingualism in schools is a long-term project that must be carried out from preschool to university, otherwise, it will lead to a dead end. The results in terms of improving the quality of the education system are not immediate, and the significant impacts will appear in the long term.

Furthermore, having African countries look at successful experiences on the continent and elsewhere in the world is also important. For example, countries in West Africa that are not yet engaged in reforms that generalize instruction in students’ mother tongues should look to East Africa and post-apartheid South Africa, which have had a head start. Implementation will only be successful if this project is integrated into national education policy.

As a dialect language of the inhabitants of the East African coasts and then as a creolized and standardized language used in schools in both Kenya and Tanzania, Swahili constitutes an interesting laboratory for the whole of Africa. Edouard Glissant (1997) defined creolization as the encounter, interference, clash, harmonies, and disharmonies between cultures in the realized totality of the world-earth.

The implementation of bilingual education in Africa will allow for the articulation of:

• 1. Appeased identities: mother tongues, first languages, and traditional and religious values, and

• 2. Modernity: widely spoken vernacular languages and international languages inherited from colonization.

Finally, one element remains that we have not been able to develop in this text, and that is the importance of valuing both linguistic and cultural diversity. If Africa remains within a school framework that considers linguistic and cultural diversity to be a disruptive factor or even a handicap in teaching and learning, then it cannot undertake linguistic and educational policies or structural changes that will benefit all students. However, if Africa engages in intercultural approaches to education, its linguistic and cultural diversity will become a social and pedagogical added value for more justice and equity in education (Akkari & Radhouane, 2022).