Language dilemma a stumbling block to African development

By Ken Ramani

Africa is not developing as fast as we would like because we use foreign languages we barely understand to implement foreign technologies we least comprehend.

This is a verdict by Unesco Institute for Lifelong Learning and Unesco Institute for Lifelong Learning and the Association for the Development of Education in Africa in a policy brief titled: Why and how Africa should invest in African languages and multilingual education.

Africa is the only continent where the majority of children start school using a foreign language. "Africans have been brainwashed to believe that the "international languages" — Arabic, English, French, Portuguese and Spanish — are the only means for upward economic mobility."

What seems to complicate matters in Africa is the fact that many students encounter the official language of their country — often a foreign language — as the medium of instruction in school, but do not encounter it in their everyday lives.

Often African students are immersed in several languages for their day-to-day communication, but not in the official language. In contrast, in industrialised countries, migrants and ethnic minorities live in environments where they encounter the official language on a daily basis.

This makes learning and comprehending issues quite easy.

Research points to the negative consequences of the language policies: low-quality education and the marginalisation of the continent, resulting in the creeping amnesia of collective memory.

Achievements and lessons learned from both small steps and large-scale studies carried out across the continent and elsewhere have yielded ample evidence to question current practices and suggest the need to adopt new approaches in language use in education.

According to the international language survey commissioned by Unesco in 2004, only 176 African languages are used in African education systems, and mainly in basic education.

Beyond basic education, only 25 per cent of the languages used in secondary education and five per cent of the languages in higher education are African.

Although most African education systems focus on the use of international languages, only between 10 and 15 per cent of the population in most African countries are estimated to be fluent in these.

Nevertheless, these languages, besides their strong weight in governance, dominate the educational systems, with the result that there is a serious communication gap between the formal education system and its social environment.

The document says Africa’s marginalisation is reinforced by its almost complete exclusion from knowledge creation and production worldwide. It consumes, sometimes uncritically, information and knowledge produced elsewhere through languages unknown to the majority of its population.

Danger of isolation

Unsurprisingly, 95 per cent of all books published in Africa are textbooks and not fiction and poetry fostering the imagination and creative potentials of readers.

There are brilliant African elites that have "tamed" formerly colonial languages so masterfully that they have appropriated these languages and contribute skilfully and creatively to the development of new knowledge, integrating sometimes, African reality or reading the world from the African perspectives.

But, an African Renaissance calls for a deeper understanding of and greater resort to African know-how, values and wisdom, and a new lens through which to read the world and participate in sharing of knowledge and use of technologies to open up new paths and ways of living.

The number of languages spoken in Africa varies between 1,000 and 2,500, depending on different estimates and definitions. Monolingual states are non-existent and languages are spread across borders in a range of different constellations and combinations. The number of languages varies from between two and three in Burundi and Rwanda, to more than 400 in Nigeria.

Such a multiplicity is perceived as a communication barrier and viewed as synonymous with conflicts and tension.

It is assumed that managing so many speech communities is problematic and costly.

Others argue that the dominant use of the mother tongue carries the danger of isolation. It is seen as an interference in the promotion of international language, leading to inadequate proficiency and linguistic wastefulness since any time devoted to learning mother tongues is to the detriment of the ‘widely spoken’ languages, especially the international ones. This language dilemma explains why most African countries will never adopt African languages as medium of instruction past the elementary level of education.

—The writer is commentator on social issues.