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Using African languages for democracy and lifelong learning in Africa: A post-2015 challenge and the work of CASAS

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Abstract

Africans speak African languages in their everyday lives while lessons in school are delivered in an exogenous language. In many places adult education is also carried out in a language the majority of people do not speak. The exogenous languages, which are the languages of the former colonial powers and mastered just by a small African elite, are used in most parliaments in Africa and in most newspapers. This problem is largely ignored by the international community. An argument often put forward against using African languages as Languages of Instruction (LOIs) is that there are so many of them, and it may be problematic to select one as an LOI. But is this really the case? And does one need to select one language? The main work of the Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS) located in Cape Town has been to harmonise the written forms of most African languages so that these languages can be used as LOIs and as languages of government and the press. This paper examines in some detail the work undertaken by CASAS, its successes and challenges. It shows that the political process of getting the harmonised languages adopted is more difficult and unpredictable than the linguistic work itself.

Résumé

Exploiter les langues africaines pour la démocratie et l’apprentissage tout au long de la vie en Afrique: un défi pour l’après-2015 et l’action du CASAS – Les Africains utilisent dans leur quotidien leurs langues locales, alors que l’enseignement dans les établissements scolaires est dispensé dans une langue exogène. Dans de nombreux cas, l’éducation des adultes est réalisée dans une langue que la majorité des apprenants ne parlent pas. Les langues exogènes, celles des anciennes puissances coloniales maîtrisées par une petite élite africaine, sont utilisées par la majorité des parlements et des journaux. La communauté internationale ne tient presque aucun compte de ce problème. Un argument souvent avancé contre l’usage des langues africaines dans l’instruction est qu’elles existent en très grand nombre et qu’il serait difficile d’en choisir une comme langue d’enseignement. Mais en est-il vraiment le cas? Et est-il nécessaire de sélectionner une seule langue? La mission principale du Centre d’études avancées sur les sociétés africaines (Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society, CASAS) basé au Cap consiste à harmoniser les formes écrites de la majorité des langues africaines, de sorte à pouvoir les utiliser comme langues d’instruction, des gouvernements et de la presse. Les auteurs de cet article examinent d’assez près le travail accompli par le CASAS, ses réalisations et ses défis. Ils montrent que la démarche politique de faire adopter les langues harmonisées est plus difficile et imprévisible que le travail linguistique lui-même.

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Notes

  1. Furthermore, several of the authors of the book (Klees et al. 2012) were present at hearings of Education Strategy 2020 held by the World Bank prior to its publication and were able to voice their criticism of earlier drafts. They have, however, noted that their criticism hardly changed anything in the original draft.

  2. Such fragmentation would have occurred for the many different dialects in Norway had the missionaries done their linguistic work there instead of going to Africa. Under the 400 years of Danish colonisation, Danish was the official language of Norway. After Norway’s independence in 1814 and entry into a looser union with Sweden, a Norwegian written language built on the Danish written language and on the language spoken in the major towns, especially Oslo, developed. This language, called “bokmål” (book language) in Norwegian, seemed unfamiliar and colonial to people in rural areas who spoke many different local dialects. A Norwegian linguist and author, Ivar Aasen (1813–1896), travelled the country, listened to the various dialects and came up with a harmonised written language built on the many rural dialects. This language is called “nynorsk” (New Norwegian) and is the second written language of Norway, a language all school children must learn.

  3. Moore (2004, p. 55) notes the theologico-linguistic difference between Christianity and Islam in this regard. In the Muslim faith, the Qur’an is accepted as authoritative only in its original Arabic version. Thus, the great spread of Islam across Africa was not generally accompanied by translations of its holy text into local tongues, nor by the commitment of those tongues to print. Christian missionary work, by contrast, has been quite zealous in translating the Bible, leading in many cases to an orthography for the local tongues for the very first time.

  4. SIL is a US-based, worldwide, Christian non-profit organisation with its headquarters in Dallas, Texas. The organisation was founded by Presbyterian minister William Cameron Townsend, an American missionary to Guatemala. He also founded SIL’s sister organisation, Wycliffe Bible Translators.

  5. Structurally cognate languages have a similar grammatical structure, as they share a common ancestry.

  6. Used in descriptive linguistic writing (for instance in a dictionary entry), diacritics are phonetic symbols which indicate which sound to give to a letter unit when saying the word out loud.

  7. More information about the work of CASAS can be found at: http://www.casas.co.za.

  8. The seven official languages of Zambia are: CiNyanja, ChiTonga, IciBemba, Kikaonde, SiLozi, Luvale and Lunda.

  9. In Uganda the official languages are: Runyakitara, Ateso/Karimojong, Dhopadhola, Lango and Luganda/Lusoga.

  10. The four underlying original languages are: Lingala, kiSwahili, kiLuba and kiCongo. The countries covered are: Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Republic of Congo and Tanzania.

  11. Prof. Sozinho Francisco Matsinhe (personal e-mail communication, 23 August 2012).

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Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank the staff of CASAS, Prof. Kwesi Kwaa Prah, Prof. Lazarus Miti, Prof. Silue Sassongo and the Administrative Head of CASAS, Ms Grace Naidoo, for the hospitality and cooperation we experienced in August 2012 and September 2013.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Education, University of Oslo, Blindern, P. B. 1092, 0317, Oslo, Norway

    Birgit Brock-Utne

  2. British Association for International and Comparative Education (BAICE), Powys, SY, 16 4JJ, UK

    Malcolm Mercer

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  1. Birgit Brock-Utne
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Correspondence to Birgit Brock-Utne.

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Brock-Utne, B., Mercer, M. Using African languages for democracy and lifelong learning in Africa: A post-2015 challenge and the work of CASAS. Int Rev Educ 60, 777–792 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-014-9448-7

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