Bilingualism in South Africa: Reconnecting with Ubuntu Translanguaging

Abstract

South Africa has adopted a multilingual language policy, which valorizes multilingualism as a norm in its new sociopolitical dispensation that began in 1994. However, conceptions of multilingualism are still narrowly construed within the aegis of a oneness ideology that characterized the European enlightenment period (Ricento, T., Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4(2):196–213, 2000). Within this framework, languages are treated in isolation and as autonomous sets of skills that are taught and learned in linear and sequential fashion to avoid one language from being contaminated by the other. Yet the cultural value systems that predate European colonialism in South Africa assumed an interdependent worldview of plurality and fluid linguistic system between people of different language varieties. This chapter describes inherent tensions between Afrocentric and Eurocentric ideological notions of multilingualism and bilingual education through a historical overview of South African multilingualism from the precolonial era till the new sociopolitical dispensation. Using the pervasive African humanism concept of being, referred to as ubuntu, and a translanguaging framework (García, O., Bilingual Education in the 21st century: A global perspective. Miden: Wiley/Blackwell, 2009; García, O., & Li Wei, Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), which recognizes alternation of languages as a norm in contemporary societies, the chapter couches the view that a reorientation of multilingual and bilingual education toward the African value system of ubuntu will be a catalyst for restoring social justice for the people whose languages were historically denigrated to the lowest social status. In the end, it offers insights on rethinking the South African multilingual space to accommodate fluid discursive resources where interdependence is highly valued over independence of language systems.