Abstract
English meant different things to different people in British India. For Ram Mohan Roy, a prominent Indian intellectual in the early 1800s, the English language was “the key to all knowledge-all of the really useful knowledge which the world contains.” A century later, the Indian nationalist leader Mohandas K. Gandhi felt it “a matter of deep humiliation” to have to address an Indian audience in English rather than a vernacular language and charged that the time spent learning English was a waste of six years for Indian youths. In Africa, such principled resistance to using English was much rarer, though the reason was not due to African nationalists’ lack of passion. Rather a dozen former British colonies there (plus Ethiopia and Liberia) chose English as a necessary and powerful tool for uniting their disparate populations and modernizing their societies. As Edward Wilmot Blyden, an Afro-Caribbean educator in Liberia, had predicted in the mid-1800s, when colonies were still few, “English is, undoubtedly, the most suitable of the European languages for bridging over the numerous gulfs… caused by the great diversity of language” among the peoples of Africa. In a postindependence essay in 1965 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe voiced a similar theme:
Let us give the devil his due: colonialism in Africa disrupted many things, but it did create big political units where there were small, scattered ones before… And it gave [Africans] a language with which to talk to one another.
Similarly, Tanzanian professor Ali A. Mazrui celebrated the role English has played in building pan-African unity, playfully referring to the great number of black English speakers as “Afro-Saxons.”1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Roy’s remarks are in James W. Massie, Continental India: Travelling Sketches and Historical Recollections (London: Thomas Ward, 1840), II: 439;
Gandhi’s speech is quoted in Raymond Leslie Buell, The Native Problem in Africa (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 2:60;
Edward Wilmot Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 2nd ed. (London: W. B. Wittingham, 1888), 243–44;
Chinua Achebe, “The African Writer and the English Language” (1964), in Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1975), 95;
Ali A. Mazrui, The Political Sociology of the English Language: An African Perspective (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 9–11.
Thomas Jesse Jones, Education in East Africa (New York: Phelps-Stokes Fund, 1925), 20.
Poromesh Acharya, “Education in Old Calcutta,” in Calcutta: The Living City, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1990), 1: 85–94;
Rajat Kanta Roy, “Indian Society and the Establishment of British Supremacy, 1765–1818,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 526–27.
Stephen Evans, “Macaulay’s Minute Revisited: Colonial Language Policy in Nineteenth-Century India,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 23.4 (2002): 262–70; Roy, “Indian Society,” 526–27;
Suresh C. Ghosh, History of Education in India (Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2007), 303–4.
Syama Prasad Mookerjee, “Schools in British India,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 233 (May 1944): 30–38.
R. K. Agnihotri, “Identity and Multilinguality: The Case of India,” in Language Policy, Culture, and Identity in Asian Contexts, ed. A. B. M. Tsui and J. W. Tollefson (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007), 194–95.
Paul R. Brass, The Politics of India since Independence. New Cambridge History of India, part 4, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 140.
Ryhana Raheem and Hemamala Ratwatte, “Invisible Strategies, Visible Results: Investigating Language Policy in Sri Lanka,” in Language Policy, Planning, & Practice: A South Asian Perspective, ed. Sabiha Mansoor, Shaheen Meraj, Aliya Tahir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 93–98.
Stephen Evans, “Language Policy in British Colonial Education: Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Hong Kong,” Journal of Educational Administration and History 38. 3 (December 2006): 293–312;
Stephen Evans, “The Making of a Colonial School: A Study of Language Policies and Practices in Nineteenth-Century Hong Kong,” Language and Education 22.6 (2008): 346–47.
David Northrup, Africa’s Discovery of Europe, 1450–1850, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 64–69;
Stephen D. Behrendt, A. J. H. Latham, and David Northrup, The Diary of Antera Duke: An Eighteenth-Century Slave Trader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Lugard and Burns cited in Michael Crowder, The Story of Nigeria, 4th ed. (London: Farber and Farber, 1978), 219–20.
Marjory Perham, Lugard: The Years of Authority, 1899–1945 (London: Collins, 1960).
Kevin Ward, “Christianity, Colonialism and Missions,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 9, World Christianities c. 1914–c.2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 77–78.
Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa, 1450–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 449–51.
Richard Gray, “Christianity,” in The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 8, c. 1940–c. 1975. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 184;
Frederick G. Guggisberg, The Keystone (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton and Ken, 1924), 5–12.
Michael Crowder, “The White Chiefs of Tropical Africa,” in Colonialism in Africa, 1870–1960, ed. L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan (Cambridge: L. H. 1970), II: 321;
Thomas Jesse Jones, Education in Africa (New York: Phelps-Stokes Fund, 1922), 156;
Melville J. Herskovits, The Human Factor in Changing Africa (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 237.
David B. Abernathy, “Education and Integration,” in Nigeria: Modernization and the Politics of Communalism, ed. Robert Melson and Howard Wolpe (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1971), 404.
Sir Harry Johnston, “Report by His Majesty’s Special Commissioner on the Protectorate of Uganda,” Parliamentary Papers: Africa, No. 7 (1901).
Cecil K. Dotts and Mildred Sikkema, Challenging the Status Quo: Public Education in Hawaii, 1840–1980 (Honolulu, HI: Hawaii Education Association, 1994), 19–25.
David P. Barrows, “Report of the Director of Education, 1908” in Report of the Philippine Commission, 1908 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909), 815–17, 853, 855–56.
Arthur L. Carson, The Story of Philippine Education (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1978), 6, 36–37; Iluminado Nical, Jerzy J. Smolicz, and Margaret J. Secombe, “Rural Students and the Philippine Bilingual Program on the Island of Leyte,” in Tollefson and Tsui, Medium of Instruction, 155–59.
Roland Oliver, Sir Harry Johnston and the Scramble for Africa (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959), 182.
Copyright information
© 2013 David Northrup
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Northrup, D. (2013). English in Imperial Asia and Africa. In: How English Became the Global Language. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303073_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303073_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-30306-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-30307-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)