Abstract
This concluding chapter extends the definitional understanding of the notion of tribalism and uses it to probe the limits and pitfalls of mainstream sociolinguistic methodological and conceptual approaches that bear the hallmarks of colonially invented or -imposed notions of ‘tribes,’ ‘tribalism’ and ‘standard languages.’ The overall intention is to suggest alternative and quite contemporary theorization on language and society, which could help scholars push back the frontiers of colonially inherited understandings of language that do not sit well with the real language practices of real people in everyday real life in southern Africa. A major line of argument advanced is that the genealogy of all ‘named’ (i.e., officially recognized and shaped as entities in its own right, or Einzelsprache) African languages, including those covered in the preceding chapters of this volume, takes us back to the colonial archives of western knowledges about Africa and African identities and of indigenous knowledges that were suppressed, erased or lost under colonial rule. The chapter concludes by calling for a conscious epistemological turnaround in scholarly debates and research on the social and political histories of African languages.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Following decolonization, colonies were mechanically made into nation-states in emulation of the European model of one state for one nation that would ideally speak and write a single language. Other ethnic groups than the dominant one were construed as ‘minorities,’ and their ‘old fashioned’ or ‘incorrect’ languages or dialects were to be eradicated for the sake of ‘national unity’ (i.e., ethnolinguistic homogeneity) through universal compulsory elementary education and obligatory military service for all males. In the decolonized sub-Saharan Africa, all the population of a given colony-turned-nation-state was construed as the nation, but instead of making the language(s) of the dominant ethnic group(s) official and national in the postcolonial nation-state, typically, the erstwhile colonial language was adopted by the postcolonial (indigenous) elites as ‘national and official.’ In turn, the desire for the employment of indigenous languages in public life, especially state offices and schools, was sternly branded as seditious ‘tribalism.’ Such ‘tribalism’ invariably seen as a danger to ‘national integration’ (among others, through the medium of the colonial-turned-postcolonial language) is invariably suppressed (cf. Justice 1977; MacGaffey 1982). Unlike in Europe, in sub-Saharan Africa’s nation-states, indigenous ethnic groups with their languages and practices are seen as ‘tribes.’ Hence, they are not even ‘minorities,’ for whom—since the interwar period—some cultural and linguistic rights have been guaranteed by international law in Europe. Paradoxically, those who speak ‘tribal’ (indigenous) languages and have not gained fluency in the postcolonial (Western) language and university education constitute the overwhelming majority in sub-Saharan Africa. Due to this insidious cultural imperialism, their knowledge of indigenous languages is a liability, and they are excluded from full participation in public life, thus made into ‘postcolonial neo-natives.’
- 2.
It is even hardly realized in the west that the concept of a discrete language (Einzelsprache) is not a reflection of the naturally continuous linguistic, but an instrument for shaping the linguistic as developed and employed for the purpose in Europe. Prior to the colonial expansion of the west, the linguistic was construed of and practiced in a variety of ways across the non-western areas and in the west’s ‘non-modern’ rural areas located far away from state capitals (cf. Kamusella 2016).
- 3.
Intelligibility, though often proposed in this role, is not the basic principle for creating and separating languages. In reality, this function is served by politics, as clearly exemplified by the story of the now defunct Serbo-Croatian language. It was created in the late nineteenth century from the merger of Croatian and Serbian, but in the wake of the breakup of Yugoslavia, this language split, thus far, yielding Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian as separate languages in their own right (Greenberg 2004). The story is very similar to the fashioning and refashioning of Nguni and Sotho/Tswana, and Shona and Thonga. The crucial difference is that while in southern Africa these languages are impositions of the erstwhile colonial administrations, in the case of Serbo-Croatian, the creation and the subsequent breakup of this language were decided by the indigenous elites.
- 4.
Interestingly, the interwar Soviet Union, officially dubbed as ‘language engineers’ (iazykovoie stroitele) (Isaev 1979), or colonial agents-cum-experts dispatched from Moscow, created a multitude of brand-new languages (Einzelsprachen) in the former tsarist empire’s far-flung areas (cf. Asimova 1982; Bergne 2007). Subsequently, on the basis of these newly produced languages, such experts developed numerous ethnic identities which served as a justification for the creation of national union republics (Hirsch 2005; Martin 2001). In the wake of the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, this federation’s union republics became independent nation-states, where (unlike in southern Africa) the invented languages were elevated to the status of the sole official and national language, to the rapid exclusion of the imperial tongue of Russian (cf. Kellner-Heinkele and Landau 2012).
- 5.
We bunch up northern Africa with Eurasia only tentatively, because when peering underneath the unifying blanket of the singularly named Arabic language, the situation is rather similar to that in sub-Saharan Africa. Standard Arabic (Fusha) based on the language of the Quran is not an indigenous language of any contemporary speech community. Arabic speakers acquire it, alongside literacy in Fusha, at school, but in everyday life, they speak varieties construed as ‘dialects of Arabic’ that are as different from one another as German from English, or French from Italian. Fusha in northern Africa is a legacy of the Arab conquest of this region during the second half of the seventh century. A colonial language has failed to become a vernacular of the population, but to this day serves as a badge of difference and distinction for the narrow elite who use Fusha (alongside some more recent postcolonial languages, usually French or English) to separate themselves from the masses with no adequate access to education. The situation would be similar if in today’s France or Portugal Latin had continued as the sole official language of administration and literate culture (Bassiouney 2009; Ferguson 1959; Holes 2004).
References
Asimova, B. (1982). Iazykovoe stroitel’stvo v Tadzhikistane, 1920–1940 [Language Engineering in Tajikistan, 1920–1940]. Dushanbe: Donish.
Bassiouney, R. (2009). Arabic Sociolinguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bergne, P. (2007). The birth of Tajikistan: National identity and the origins of the Republic. London: I.B. Tauris.
Blanchard, P., Boetsch, G., & Snoep, N. J. (2011). Human zoos: The invention of the savage. Arles/Paris: Actes Sud/Musée du Quai Branly.
Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brutt-Griffler, J. (2006). Language endangerment, the construction of indigenous languages and world English. In M. Pütz, J. A. Fishman, & J. A. N. Aertselaer (Eds.), Along the routes to power: Explorations of empowerment through language (pp. 35–54). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Burke, P. (2012). A social history of knowledge (Vol 2: From the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia). Cambridge: Polity.
Canagarajah, S. (2013). Translingual practice: global Englishes and cosmopolitan relations. London/New York: Routledge.
Chimhundu, H. (1992). Early missionaries and the ethnolinguistic factor during the invention of Tribalism in Zimbabwe. Journal of African History, 44(1), 87–109.
Chimhundu, H. (2005). Introduction to the photographic reprint of the report on the unification of Shona dialects. Harare: ALLEX Project, African Languages Research Institute.
Codes for the Representation of Names of Scripts. (2016). unicode.org/iso15924/iso15924-codes.html. Accessed 1 Aug 2016.
Doke, C. M. (1931). Report on the unification of Shona dialects. Hartford: Stephen Austin and Sons.
Errington, J. (2008). Linguistics in a colonial world: A story of language, meaning, and power. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ferguson, C. A. (1959). Diglossia. Word, 15(2), 325–340.
Forkl, H., & Frenken, W. (1989). Kitaba und Nsibidi Schriftsysteme und Mnemozeichen aus Afrika und dem Orient. Katalog zur gleichnamigen Ausstellung bei Buch Julius. Stuttgart: Buch Julius.
Greenberg, R. (2004). Language and identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and its disintegration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hirsch, F. (2005). Empire of nations: ethnographic knowledge and the making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Holes, C. (2004). Modern Arabic: Structures, functions, and varieties. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Isaev, M. (1979). Iazykovoe stroitel’stvo v SSSR [Language Engineering in the USSR]. Moscow: Nauka.
ISO 639. (2016). Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639. Accessed 1 Aug 2016.
Justice, M. C. (1977). Biafra: A study in national self-determination and tribalism in Nigeria. MA thesis, Texas Women’s University, Denton.
Kamusella, T. (2012). The global regime of language recognition. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 218, 59–86.
Kamusella, T. (2014). Creating languages in Central Europe during the last millennium. Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot.
Kellner-Heinkele, B., & Landau, J. M. (2012). Language politics in contemporary Central Asia: National and ethnic identity and the Soviet legacy. London: I B Tauris.
Kuper, A. (1988). The invention of primitive society: Transformations of an illusion. London: Routledge.
Likaka, O. (2009). Naming colonialism history and collective memory in the Congo, 1870–1960, Africa and the diaspora: History, politics, culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Lynch, J., Ross, M., & Crowley, T. (2002). The Oceanic languages. Richmond: Curzon.
MacGaffey, W. (1982). The policy of national integration in Zaïre. The Journal of Modern African Studies, 20(1), 87–105.
Makoni, S. (1998). African languages as European scripts: The shaping of communal memory. In S. Nuttall & C. Coetzee (Eds.), Negating the past: The making of memory in South Africa (pp. 242–248). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mamdani, M. (2012). Define and rule: Native as political identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Martin, T. (2001). The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Ndhlovu, F. (2006). Gramsci, Doke and the marginalisation of the Ndebele language in Zimbabwe. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 27(4), 305–318.
Ndhlovu, F. (2008). The conundrums of language policy and politics in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 21(1), 59–80.
Ndhlovu, F. (2009). The politics of language and nation building in Zimbabwe. Oxford/Bern: Peter Lang AG.
Ndhlovu, F. (2010). Language politics in postcolonial Africa revisited: Minority agency and language imposition. Language Matters, 41(2), 21–38.
Ndhlovu, F. (2013). Beyond neo-liberal instructional models: Why multilingual instruction matters for South African skills development. International Journal of Language Studies, 7(3), 33–58.
Ndhlovu, F. (2014). Becoming an African diaspora in Australia: Language, culture, identity. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ndhlovu, F. (2015). Ignored lingualism: Another resource for overcoming the monolingual mindset in educational linguistics. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 35(4), 398–414.
Ndhlovu, F. (2017). Language, diaspora, immigrants: Challenging the big battalions of groupism. In O. García, N. Flores, & M. Spotti (Eds.), Oxford handbook of language and society (pp. 141–159). New York: Oxford University Press.
Otsuji, E., & Pennycook, A. (2010). Metrolingualism: Fixity, fluidity and language flux. International Journal of Multilingualism, 7(3), 250–254.
Pennycook, A. (2000). Language, ideology and hindsight: Lessons from colonial language policies. In T. Ricento (Ed.), Ideology, politics and language policies (pp. 49–66). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Pennycook, A. (2010). Language as a local practice. London: Routledge.
Pennycook, A., & Makoni, S. (2005). The modern mission: The language effects of christianity. Journal of Language, Identity and Education, 4(2), 137–155.
Piccardo, E. (2013). Plurilingualism and curriculum design: Toward a synergic vision. TESOL Quarterly, 47(3), 600–614.
Piller, I. (2011). Intercultural communication: A critical introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Ranger, T. O. (1985). The invention of tribalism in Zimbabwe, Mambo occasional papers: Socio-economic series (Vol. 19). Gweru: Mambo Press.
Ranger, T. O. (1989). Missionaries, migrants and the Manyika: The invention of ethnicity in Zimbabwe. In L. Vail (Ed.), The creation of tribalism in Southern Africa (pp. 118–150). London: James Currey.
Stoll, D. (1982). Fishers of men or founders of empire? The Wycliffe Bible translators in Latin America. London: Zed Press.
Tollefson, J. W. (1991). Planning language, planning inequality: Language policy in the community. London: Longman.
Žemaitis, A. (2012). Pasaulio raštų sistemos [The world’s writing systems]. Vilnius: Vaga.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ndhlovu, F., Kamusella, T. (2018). Challenging Intellectural Colonialism: The Rarely Noticed Question of Methodological Tribalism in Language Research. In: Kamusella, T., Ndhlovu, F. (eds) The Social and Political History of Southern Africa's Languages. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-01593-8_22
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-01593-8_22
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-01592-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-01593-8
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)