tag:theconversation.com,2011:/africa/topics/african-languages-18544/articlesAfrican languages – The Conversation2024-02-19T13:36:02Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2224032024-02-19T13:36:02Z2024-02-19T13:36:02ZNervous Conditions: on translating one of Zimbabwe’s most famous novels into Shona<p>The publishing journey of Zimbabwean writer and film-maker <a href="https://theconversation.com/tsitsi-dangarembga-and-writing-about-pain-and-loss-in-zimbabwe-144313">Tsitsi Dangarembga</a>’s <a href="https://www.google.co.za/books/edition/Nervous_Conditions/UyZjAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0&bsq=Nervous%20Conditions">Nervous Conditions</a> wasn’t easy. Yet the novel is today considered by many as one of <a href="https://library.columbia.edu/libraries/global/virtual-libraries/african_studies/books.html">Africa’s 100 best books</a> of the 20th century and is studied at <a href="https://africasacountry.com/2020/08/african-literature-is-a-country">universities</a> around the world. </p>
<p>When she submitted the manuscript to publishing houses in Zimbabwe in the early 1980s, they all turned it down. Dangarembga felt <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1345839">at the time</a> that it was “very difficult for men to accept the things that women write and want to write about: and the men (were) the publishers”. It was eventually published to critical acclaim in 1988 by <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803124519397">The Women’s Press</a> in London. This made Dangarembga the first black Zimbabwean woman to publish a novel in English. </p>
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<p>Now a new translation of the book into Zimbabwe’s <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Shona">Shona</a> language has been released, marking another milestone for Nervous Conditions, because African classics are seldom translated into African languages. Translation of African literature happens often, but mostly in European countries. Nervous Conditions itself has <a href="https://search.worldcat.org/formats-editions/1230558464">already been translated</a> into a dozen or more languages including Dutch, French, German, Italian and Spanish. </p>
<p>The new Shona translation, titled Kusagadzikana and released by Zimbabwean publishers <a href="https://houseofbookszim.com/">House of Books</a>, was done by <a href="https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poets/poet/102-7808_Mabasa">Ignatius Mabasa</a>, an acclaimed novelist who also wrote the first <a href="https://www.ru.ac.za/facultyofhumanities/latestnews/africanlanguagesstudentwritesfirst-everchishonaphdthesisatrhodesuniver-1.html">PhD thesis in Shona</a>.</p>
<p>Even more remarkably, Dangarembga’s follow-up novel, <a href="https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/book-not">The Book of Not</a>, has also recently been translated into Shona as Hakuna Zvakadaro by writer and academic <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Tanaka+Chidora&btnG=">Tanaka Chidora</a>. This leaves just the last book in the trilogy, <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/authors/tsitsi-dangarembga">the Booker shortlisted</a> <a href="https://jacana.co.za/product/this-mournable-body/">This Mournable Body</a>, untranslated. </p>
<p>For a reader and <a href="https://www.st-annes.ox.ac.uk/cpt_people/mushakavanhu-dr-tinashe/">scholar</a> of Zimbabwean literature, encountering Nervous Condition’s story of a rural girl called Tambudzai in Shona is like waking up in a dream. I spoke with Mabasa about his translation journey and why it matters.</p>
<h2>Can you describe the process of translating the book?</h2>
<p>I started translating Nervous Conditions around 1999 when I was a visiting Fulbright scholar in the US, where I was teaching Zimbabwean literature. Nervous Conditions was one of the books I was teaching. Coincidentally, 1999 is the year that my first novel <a href="https://www.google.co.za/books/edition/Mapenzi/qLMaAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=Mapenzi&dq=Mapenzi&printsec=frontcover">Mapenzi</a> was published and I used to talk to my students about the sad situation that there was more Zimbabwean literature in English than in indigenous languages. </p>
<p>I pointed out that the majority of the ordinary women whose story Nervous Conditions was telling would not be able to buy, read and understand Nervous Conditions in English, because of their literacy levels. I thought perhaps I could try to translate the book into Shona as a way of repatriating and decolonising the story. I then dived in and started translating the first chapter, tackling one paragraph at a time. </p>
<p>I was intrigued by how beautiful and sincere the story sounded in Shona. Tambudzai sounded more heartfelt in Shona than in English – I guess because Shona was her real voice. As someone who grew up in a village myself, I strongly identified with Tambudzai and, in translating, I faithfully became her in order to capture the pain and injustice in her family and the national politics in the story. I translated the book up to chapter three and had to stop because Dangarembga was involved in a <a href="https://www.change.org/p/ayebia-clarke-publishing-help-tsitsi-dangarembga-regain-the-rights-to-her-novel-nervous-conditions">legal battle</a> for its rights. I only resumed in 2022, but because I had lost the mood and feeling that I had when I initially started, I had to rework the translation from the beginning.</p>
<h2>Were there difficult parts and how did you deal with them?</h2>
<p>The title was one of the most difficult things to translate. Nervousness is something deeper, it’s beyond nerves. It’s a reflection of the physical, the psychological and the spiritual. The level of disturbance in Nervous Conditions is traumatic, immediate and long-term. I had to think really hard about the words that would capture all that. I’m pleased with Kusagadzikana as the final title because when I read Tanaka Chidora’s Shona translation of The Book of Not, I noticed that he uses the term <em>kusagadzikana</em> the same way I did.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/animal-farm-has-been-translated-into-shona-why-a-group-of-zimbabwean-writers-undertook-the-task-206966">Animal Farm has been translated into Shona – why a group of Zimbabwean writers undertook the task</a>
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<p>Another difficulty I faced was to do with the differences in the storytelling style of the two languages, English and Shona. Dangarembga does go into the human psyche in a complex and deep manner that is not usually found in Shona writing, and that needed to be handled delicately – there were times when it was like deboning a fish. An example is Tambudzai’s trauma caused by Babamukuru’s facilitated wedding of her parents. Also Nyasha’s emotional rollercoasters are key to the story – I had to slow down and make sure that I didn’t miss the metaphorically loaded twists and turns. Then there are some very English descriptions including elaborate colours, ways of dancing, fashion designs, foods that I had to deal with cleverly but without aborting the meaning.</p>
<h2>Why was it important for you to translate this book?</h2>
<p>Nervous Conditions is our story as indigenous people. The story had to be decolonised by making it come back to speak to the people who are victims of colonial injustices in a language that would enable them to tell “when the rain started to beat them” (as the saying goes) in order for them to start drying themselves. </p>
<p>The novel is an important documentation of our history and the translation makes it accessible and able to be discussed under a tree by ordinary folk, and not just by academics in air-conditioned conference venues. It is a form of liberation struggle – the liberation of many things that remain colonised, including our minds.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222403/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tinashe Mushakavanhu does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It reads powerfully in the Shona language, and is one of two of her books newly translated into it.Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Junior Research Fellow, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2133702023-09-21T13:27:47Z2023-09-21T13:27:47ZZimbabwean names are still haunted by the ghosts of colonialism<p>In African cultures, the <a href="https://www.africarebirth.com/what-is-in-an-african-name-identity-and-naming-ceremonies-in-african-traditional-culture/">names given</a> to children play an important role because they are often laden with meanings. </p>
<p>As a <a href="https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/5392/professor-tendai-mangena">team</a> of <a href="https://afrikanistik.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/en/people/people/professors/mitchell-alice">professors</a> of literature, linguistics and onomastics (the scientific study of names and naming practices) we have shown in <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00219096221141345">our research</a> that the names parents give their children at birth can help us make sense of many things, including a family’s heritage and events in history. </p>
<p>Our most recent <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21681392.2023.2232053">research paper</a> analyses naming practices in <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/place/zimbabwe">Zimbabwe</a>. It shows that Zimbabweans in the former <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Zimbabwe/The-British-South-Africa-Company">British colony</a> in southern Africa still often choose English names like Robert or Oliver over traditional ones like Vulindlela or Ntombenhle.</p>
<p>We conclude that names make it possible to understand the effects of colonialism and, in more recent years, the importance placed on restoring tradition. Embracing traditional practices matters as a way of keeping culture alive so that people can benefit from its knowledge.</p>
<h2>Relics of colonialism</h2>
<p>English-language names are abundant in Zimbabwe today. This could be one of the effects of the introduction of colonial languages and the displacement of indigenous languages. It demonstrates the difficulty of erasing the mentalities acquired in the colonial era. </p>
<p>We argue that British <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/european-missionaries-southern-africa-role-missionaries">missionaries</a> and colonisers “invaded” the “mental” space of the colonised and significantly changed the way Zimbabwean people use English and indigenous languages to name children.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-schools-use-language-as-a-way-to-exclude-children-64900">How schools use language as a way to exclude children</a>
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<p>“Typical” English names maintain a connection to a time when schoolchildren would often be given new, English names to mould them into British-like subjects. </p>
<h2>Names in literature</h2>
<p>Literary works can help us better understand names and naming patterns. Celebrated Zimbabwean author <a href="https://www.africanbookscollective.com/authors-editors/yvonne-vera">Yvonne Vera</a>’s novel <a href="https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/zimbabwe/veray1.htm">Butterfly Burning</a>, for example, shows how names in Zimbabwe’s <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ndebele-South-African-people">Ndebele language</a> were progressively abandoned for English ones. </p>
<p>This change saw the use of abstract English names such as Gilbert instead of meaningful indigenous ones like Vulindlela, a boy’s name meaning “open the way” that expresses the parents’ hope that the child will bring good fortune to the family. </p>
<p>This cultural shift can be considered a form of erasure of a significant component of indigenous cultures. Such erasure is part of the larger-scale losses suffered through colonisation. This cultural loss was never fully recovered even in the decades after <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/zimbabawean-independence-day">independence</a> in Zimbabwe in 1980.</p>
<h2>Naming practices in Zimbabwe today</h2>
<p>There’s <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21681392.2023.2232053">evidence</a> that, in the last couple of decades, parents in Zimbabwe use both English and indigenous languages to name their children. Naming practices from colonial times live on.</p>
<p>In Zimbabwe these English names fall into different categories. There are typical English names like Ashley and Jean. There are also biblical names, like Isaac and Peter. We also find Africanised biblical names such as Jowero (Joel) and Mateu (Matthew). </p>
<p>And then there are “Zimbabwean English” names like Decent and Choice: English names translated from indigenous names. Zimbabwean English names offer an opportunity to understand the potential of drawing from traditional African knowledge – where names record personal experiences and aspirations – through using English. Colonial entanglements reveal adaptations of traditional forms. </p>
<p>We also notice “religious” names translated literally from indigenous names – like Takomborerwa (We have been blessed). The alterations are clear effects of colonialism, emanating from the establishment of Christianity. Examples of these “vernacular Christian names” include the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Shona-language">Shona language</a> names Tapiwanashe (We have been given by God), Tawananyasha (We have found God’s grace) and Anotidaishe (God loves us).</p>
<h2>Biblical English names and Africanised biblical names</h2>
<p>Like the English language, Christianity was <a href="https://africa.thegospelcoalition.org/video/wasnt-christianity-in-africa-a-result-of-colonialism/">at the heart</a> of colonialism in Africa, spread through missionaries. This saw the increased popularity of biblical English names in Zimbabwe. </p>
<p>“Africanised biblical” names are related to Christian biblical names, adapted to “fit” indigenous language rules of grammar. Since the translated Bible remains an “English book”, Africanised biblical names do not become indigenous names, rather they remain biblical English names. For instance the Shona name Ruka is adopted from the biblical name Luke. Ruka is simply a Shona version of Luke. </p>
<h2>Zimbabwean English names</h2>
<p>Besides typical English, biblical English and Africanised biblical names, a large category of Zimbabwean English names are popular at present. These have also been called “non-standard” English names to disrupt the dominance of British English that created tropes like <a href="https://www.herald.co.zw/strange-sometimes-hilarious-names-of-zimbabweans/">“hilarious names”</a>. Examples of such names are Bastard and Darling – used in Zimbabwean novelist NoViolet Bulawayo’s award-winning novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15852479-we-need-new-names">We Need New Names</a>. </p>
<p>The majority of Zimbabwean English names are literal translations of indigenous personal names, illustrating the enduring power and assumed prestige of the language of Empire. At the same time, translating indigenous names shows a clear interest by Zimbabweans in retaining indigenous values and naming patterns.</p>
<h2>Refashioning imperial debris</h2>
<p>In these uses of English names with and without indigenous equivalents, the long-term effects of the language of colonisation are made visible. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-history-of-zimbabwe-played-out-on-the-countrys-cricket-fields-162035">How the history of Zimbabwe played out on the country's cricket fields</a>
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<p>So, on the one hand, these names tell a story about how indigenous ways of life were looked down on and how this colonial disdain still influences people’s naming choices. This could be a result of an internalised colonial mentality in which the English language continues to index the power and prestige that it accumulated through the violence of the colonial era. </p>
<p>On the other hand, we see how these Zimbabwean English names draw on longstanding indigenous traditions and creatively reclaim the English language for local purposes. From this perspective, we interpret naming trends in Zimbabwe as a creative refashioning of imperial debris that helps keep traditional knowledge alive.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213370/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tendai Mangena received funding from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the project on Names in Zimbabwe and the diaspora on which this work is based. </span></em></p>Variations of English names reveal the enduring effects of British rule - but there’s also a return to tradition.Tendai Mangena, Professor of African Studies, University of LeedsLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2082512023-07-06T10:38:19Z2023-07-06T10:38:19ZKiswahili: how a standard version of the east African language was formed – and spread across the world<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534332/original/file-20230627-17-hl1r78.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jasmin Merdan/Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Kiswahili originated in east Africa, spreading around the continent and the globe. It’s been <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-60333796">adopted</a> as a working language at the African Union and there’s a push for it to become Africa’s lingua franca or common language. Morgan J. Robinson is a <a href="https://www.history.msstate.edu/directory/mjr530">historian</a> of east Africa with a research focus on language who has published a <a href="https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/A+Language+for+the+World">book</a> on Kiswahili called A Language for the World. We asked her how today’s accepted standard version of Kiswahili came into being.</em></p>
<h2>Where is Kiswahili spoken?</h2>
<p>Kiswahili is spoken across eastern and central Africa. Mother-tongue speakers are found mainly along the coast, but Kiswahili is spoken as a second or third language by people around the world. According to Unesco, which in 2021 proclaimed 7 July as <a href="https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/7-july-2023-edition-world-kiswahili-language-day#:%7E:text=7%20July%3A%20The%202023%20Edition%20of%20the%20World%20Kiswahili%20Language%20Day">World Kiswahili Language Day</a>, it’s <a href="https://www.unesco.org/en/kiswahili-language-day">spoken</a> by 200 million people.</p>
<h2>What led to it becoming so prominent?</h2>
<p>Kiswahili’s role as a prominent symbolic and practical language in Africa is the result of <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-story-of-how-swahili-became-africas-most-spoken-language-177259">multiple factors</a>. These range from political and economic to cultural and historical. Already by the 1800s Kiswahili was being used all along the caravan trade network that crisscrossed east-central Africa. In the centuries before this, the language had been used to formulate legal, philosophical and poetic contributions that influenced the entire Indian Ocean world.</p>
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<p>But one of the arguments of my book is that the creation of a standardised version of the language resulted by the mid-1900s in a version of Kiswahili that was more portable than ever before. A standard language is a uniform written version that is generally recognised as the “official” form. This comes with the creation of dictionaries, grammars and literature that allow this version to travel further. </p>
<p>Another important part of the story of the standardisation of Kiswahili is that it was central to a variety of community-building projects across the course of a century. It was used by formerly enslaved students and missionaries alongside native speakers on Zanzibar and was central as a language of administration in Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Kenya and parts of Uganda during the colonial period. Kiswahili also played a political role in the anti-colonial movements of eastern Africa and among southern African freedom fighters who trained in Tanzania in the 1960s and 1970s. It was even embraced by some US civil rights activists. </p>
<p>All these communities used the language at various times to strengthen ties and communicate across barriers that otherwise might have kept people apart. This led not only to an increase in the number of people speaking and writing Kiswahili, but also to its reputation as a potential pan-African and even global connecting language.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-story-of-how-swahili-became-africas-most-spoken-language-177259">The story of how Swahili became Africa's most spoken language</a>
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<p>Many, including literary heavyweights <a href="https://udadisi.com/kiswahili-urithi-wetu-afrika/?fbclid=IwAR1g4MY3MvaTMdMuTVner-_Sfo3M5_KDQ-wNTvI2ZiLO4lv40vtp2BMcus0">Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o</a> from Kenya and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/23/books/wole-soyinka-writing-africa-and-politics.html">Wole Soyinka</a> from Nigeria, have advocated for the embracing of Kiswahili as a pan-African language of communication. </p>
<p>But there’s legitimate concern that the expanded use of Kiswahili in official and unofficial realms could endanger the linguistic diversity of east Africa.</p>
<p>It’s a problem for which I don’t have an answer. Perhaps multilingualism is the key. As Ngũgĩ encouraged in a 2021 <a href="https://udadisi.com/kiswahili-urithi-wetu-afrika/?fbclid=IwAR1g4MY3MvaTMdMuTVner-_Sfo3M5_KDQ-wNTvI2ZiLO4lv40vtp2BMcus0">speech</a> in Mombasa: </p>
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<p>Therefore let us be proud of our mother tongues; let us be proud of Kiswahili as the national language; and on top of that let us add the knowledge of English or Mandarin or French or Yoruba, etcetera. These will only give strength to our proficiency and communication. But our foundation is made of our mother tongues and the language of the entire nation, that is Kiswahili.</p>
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<h2>What exactly is standardised Kiswahili?</h2>
<p>Just as there are many “Englishes” spoken around the world, so are there multiple “Kiswahilis”. That’s to say, Kiswahili is a language of multiple dialects – the Kimvita spoken at Mombasa, for instance, or the Kiamu of Lamu – of which Standard Swahili is just one. It is the version that shapes the textbooks and curricula with which Kiswahili is taught around the world, so that most students learning Kiswahili in classrooms are learning Standard Swahili.</p>
<p>Its history is a long one that did not follow a single, straight path. However, broadly speaking, Standard Swahili is based on Kiunguja, the Zanzibari dialect of the language. It’s also important to note that while Standard Swahili is written in the Latin script – the alphabet used to write English, French, Italian etcetera – Kiswahili has a much longer history of being written in the Arabic script, a tradition that lives on in some communities.</p>
<h2>What were the key moments in the standardisation of the language?</h2>
<p>One of my main arguments is that the standardisation of Kiswahili was a long-term and, by necessity, collaborative process. The standard version was neither wholly imposed by the British colonial regime in the 1920s, nor was it a “naturally” developed tool of anti-colonial resistance. Starting in 1864 with the arrival of Anglican missionaries on Zanzibar, through the independence and early post-colonial eras, multiple communities participated in the process. They all used the language to create their own diverse communities.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/new-kiswahili-science-fiction-award-charts-a-path-for-african-languages-163876">New Kiswahili science fiction award charts a path for African languages</a>
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<p>One of my favourite examples to describe this process is the figure of Owen Makanyassa. He was enslaved as a young man, but before arriving at its destination the ship carrying him was captured by the British Royal Navy and, in the late 1860s or early 1870s, Makanyassa was placed under the care of a missionary society on Zanzibar. He attended the mission’s school and became an invaluable worker at its printing press, producing some of the translations that would go on to form the basis of Standard Swahili. Though Makanyassa and his fellow students and workers spoke a variety of mother tongues, their language of communication very quickly became Kiswahili, and they all participated in this early stage of its standardisation – though they haven’t always been credited for their contributions. </p>
<p>In my book I zoom in on moments like this, moments in which freedom and unfreedom, oppression and empowerment, official and unofficial knowledge production combined, slowly creating a written version of Swahili that would be exported around the world, creating a truly global language.</p>
<p><em>Download a <a href="https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/A+Language+for+the+World">free copy</a> of the book at Ohio University Press</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/208251/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Morgan J. Robinson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>By the 1950s a standard version of the language emerged, today spoken by an estimated 200 million people.Morgan J. Robinson, Assistant Professor, Mississippi State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2082042023-07-05T13:26:30Z2023-07-05T13:26:30ZAfrica’s linguistic diversity goes largely unnoticed in research on multilingualism<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/533665/original/file-20230623-19-z0z2nh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The African continent is home to some of the world's most multilingual societies.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Roxane 134/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Language is a uniquely human skill. That’s why studying how people learn and use language is crucial to understanding what it means to be human. Given that most people in the world – an estimated 60% – <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/life-bilingual/201011/bilingualisms-best-kept-secret">are multilingual</a>, meaning that they know and use more than one language, a researcher who aims to understand language must also grasp how individuals acquire and use multiple languages. </p>
<p>The ubiquity of multilingualism also has practical consequences. For example, in the early schooling years, children <a href="https://theconversation.com/lessons-from-africa-prove-the-incredible-value-of-mother-tongue-learning-73307">learn more effectively</a> when they are taught in their mother tongue rather than a second or third language. Research also shows that <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661316301218">people make different decisions</a> depending on whether they are thinking in their first or second language.</p>
<p>The problem is that much of the published research about multilingualism is not conducted in the world’s most multilingual societies. For example, the African continent is home to some of the most multilingual countries in the world. <a href="https://www.ethnologue.com/country/CM/">Cameroon</a> has a population of around 27 million people; over 250 different languages are spoken as first languages, often alongside English and French or both. </p>
<p>Studies of African multilingual contexts are almost non-existent in high-impact scientific journals, however. This matters because it is research published in these journals that receives the most attention globally and is therefore most likely to shape people’s understanding of multilingualism.</p>
<p><a href="https://academic.oup.com/applij/advance-article/doi/10.1093/applin/amad022/7179911">Our recent study</a> provides new empirical evidence of the geographic bias in multilingualism research published in high-impact scientific journals. We show that the regions most commonly studied are not particularly multilingual. The reverse is also true: the most multilingual regions are massively understudied in research on multilingualism.</p>
<h2>A glaring mismatch</h2>
<p>The mismatch that emerged in our research is neatly illustrated in this map.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/533660/original/file-20230623-29-xdyrbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/533660/original/file-20230623-29-xdyrbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/533660/original/file-20230623-29-xdyrbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=325&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533660/original/file-20230623-29-xdyrbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=325&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533660/original/file-20230623-29-xdyrbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=325&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533660/original/file-20230623-29-xdyrbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533660/original/file-20230623-29-xdyrbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533660/original/file-20230623-29-xdyrbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Two maps showing the disconnect between where multilingual researchers conduct their work (top) and where the world’s most multilingual societies are located.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Authors supplied</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The top panel presents a world map of the most common sites of multilingualism research; regions that are more commonly studied appear in darker colours. The map shows that North America and Western Europe are the primary locations of research on multilingualism. China and Australia are also fairly well represented. </p>
<p>This is a stark contrast to the bottom panel, which represents the extent of societal multilingualism in different countries. In this map, the shading represents a country’s score on the Linguistic Diversity Index – a measure of the likelihood that two randomly selected individuals from a country will have different first languages. The index ranges from 0 to 1, with largely monolingual societies receiving low scores and largely multilingual societies receiving high scores. </p>
<p>The top and bottom panels are near mirror images of each other: for example, the African continent is almost entirely blank in the top panel and intensely shaded in the bottom panel.</p>
<p>Other highly linguistically diverse regions such as the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia are also underrepresented in the sample as sites of multilingualism research.</p>
<h2>Geographic bias is detrimental</h2>
<p>This geographic bias is not unique to multilingualism research. It <a href="https://theconversation.com/global-south-scholars-are-missing-from-european-and-us-journals-what-can-be-done-about-it-99570">echoes concerns</a> raised in many other scientific fields about the lack of representation of scholars and research locations in the <a href="https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2021/09/28/what-or-where-is-the-global-south-a-social-science-perspective/">so-called</a> “global south” (Africa, Latin America, and most countries in Asia and Oceania). </p>
<p>In this case, however, the underrepresentation is particularly detrimental. It is precisely in the global south that multilingualism is most common. The predominance of global north research locations, then, means that much of the knowledge of multilingualism stems from regions that are comparatively monolingual.</p>
<p>This is not to say that no research is being carried out in highly multilingual regions. We ourselves are currently conducting <a href="https://www.psytoolkit.org/c/3.4.4/survey?s=YMxJQ">a large-scale study on multilingualism in South Africa</a>, and we know of several (South) African scientific journals that regularly <a href="https://www.multimargins.ac.za/index.php/mm">publish</a> <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rlms20">studies</a> <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rall20/current">conducted</a> in African countries and other linguistically diverse areas. However, studies published in smaller journals may be less likely to shape the field of multilingualism research. </p>
<p>The reduced visibility of research conducted in the global south has a complex web of causes. These include the unequal distribution of resources (like research infrastructure and research funding), as well as bias in the academic publishing system, which is <a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2119373119">dominated</a> by global north institutions and publishing houses. </p>
<p>As a consequence of this imbalance, the global north is often seen as the “default” site for research, while global south settings are <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-023-01999-w">perceived</a> as specific and a source of knowledge that is not generalisable to other contexts. This is simply untrue.</p>
<h2>Tackling the problem</h2>
<p>To address the geographic bias that we have identified, the systemic inequalities in academia will need to be targeted. In the meantime, we are pleased to see the smaller steps that are already being taken.</p>
<p>One is increasing the visibility of the research that is being conducted in the global south. An example of an attempt to do this is the 2023 edition of the International Symposium on Bilingualism, which has as its theme “<a href="https://www.isb14.com/">Diversity Now</a>”. Furthermore, several high-impact journals have issued <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/annual-review-of-applied-linguistics/article/sampling-bias-and-the-problem-of-generalizability-in-applied-linguistics/5218D7603611D668EFF7B9FC1581E7DC">calls for studies</a> conducted outside of the typical North American and western European settings. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00150-2">Big team science</a>, in which many scientists spread across institutions and locations work together, and collaboration between north and south will also help. With these and similar efforts, the field ought to diversify in the years to come and thus increase the validity of our knowledge of the human capacity for language.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/208204/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Studies of African multilingual contexts are almost non-existent in high-impact scientific journals.Robyn Berghoff, Lecturer in General Linguistics, Stellenbosch UniversityEmanuel Bylund, Professor of General Linguistics, Stellenbosch UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2069662023-06-11T05:58:48Z2023-06-11T05:58:48ZAnimal Farm has been translated into Shona – why a group of Zimbabwean writers undertook the task<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530850/original/file-20230608-30-g3nm04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Alan Hopps/Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Since independence in 1980, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Zimbabwe/Rhodesia-and-the-UDI">Zimbabwe</a> has in some ways become like <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Animal-Farm">Animal Farm</a>. Like the pigs in the classic 1945 novel by English writer <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Orwell">George Orwell</a>, the country’s post-liberation leaders have hijacked a revolution that was once rooted in righteous outrage. In Zimbabwe, the revolution was against colonialism and its practices of extraction and exploitation. </p>
<p>The lead characters in Animal Farm have the propensity for evil and the greed for power found in despots throughout history, including former Zimbabwe president <a href="https://theconversation.com/robert-mugabe-as-divisive-in-death-as-he-was-in-life-108103">Robert Mugabe</a>. Zimbabwe’s leaders have also acted for personal gain. They remain in power with no <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/04/zimbabwe-43-years-independence-commemoration-marred-by-rapidly-shrinking-civic-space/">accountability</a> to the <a href="https://theconversation.com/zimbabwes-deepening-crisis-time-for-second-government-of-national-unity-122726">suffering</a> of the people they claim to represent. </p>
<p>Animal Farm’s relevance is echoed in celebrated young Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo’s recent novel <a href="https://theconversation.com/noviolet-bulawayos-new-novel-is-an-instant-zimbabwean-classic-185783">Glory</a>. Her satirical take on Zimbabwe’s 2017 coup and the fall of Mugabe is also narrated through animals. And visual artist <a href="https://zeitzmocaa.museum/artists/admire-kamudzengerere/">Admire Kamudzengerere</a> founded <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjpVCcDZARQ">Animal Farm Artist Residency</a> in Chitungwiza as a space for creative experimentation.</p>
<p>It’s within this context that a group of Zimbabwean writers, led by novelist and lawyer <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/13/petina-gappah-zimbabwe-writer-interview">Petina Gappah</a> and poet <a href="https://www.herald.co.zw/wait-is-over-for-muchuri/">Tinashe Muchuri</a>, have translated Animal Farm into <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Shona">Shona</a>, the country’s most widely spoken language. A dozen writers contributed to the translation of <a href="https://houseofbookszim.com/product/chimurenga-chemhuka/">Chimurenga Chemhuka</a> (Animal Revolution) over five years.</p>
<p>It’s clear to me, as a <a href="https://www.st-annes.ox.ac.uk/cpt_people/mushakavanhu-dr-tinashe/">scholar</a> of Zimbabwean literature, that too few great books are available in the country’s indigenous languages. This matters particularly because there are few bookshops and libraries where young people can access good writing. But Zimbabwe’s writers are taking matters into their own hands. </p>
<h2>The translation project</h2>
<p>Translating Animal Farm into Shona makes perfect sense. Historically, Shona novelists have used animal imagery to conjure up worlds of tradition and custom, and also to examine human foibles. Great Shona writers – such as <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Solomon-M-Mutswairo">Solomon Mutswairo</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Patrick-Chakaipa">Patrick Chakaipa</a> and more recently <a href="https://munyori.org/2022/04/interview-with-ignatius-mabasa/">Ignatius Mabasa</a> – have written books that use allegory to respond to a range of crises in Zimbabwe. (Allegory is a literary device that uses hidden meaning to speak to political situations – such as using pigs instead of people in Animal Farm.) </p>
<p>Gappah kickstarted the <a href="https://pentransmissions.com/2015/10/22/on-translating-orwells-animal-farm/">translation project</a> in a private post on Facebook in 2015:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A group of friends and I thought it would be fun to bring the novel to new readers in all the languages spoken in Zimbabwe. This is important to us because Zimbabwe has been isolated so much in recent years, and translation is one way to bring other cultures and peoples closer to your own.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530914/original/file-20230608-28-9rmwf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A book cover featuring an illustration of the imprint of a pig's hoof in blood." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530914/original/file-20230608-28-9rmwf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530914/original/file-20230608-28-9rmwf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530914/original/file-20230608-28-9rmwf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530914/original/file-20230608-28-9rmwf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530914/original/file-20230608-28-9rmwf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1090&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530914/original/file-20230608-28-9rmwf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1090&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530914/original/file-20230608-28-9rmwf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1090&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The House of Books</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Eight years later, Chimurenga Chemhuka has come to life. It’s a big achievement, considering that publishing has not been performing well in a <a href="https://theconversation.com/zimbabwes-economy-is-collapsing-why-mnangagwa-doesnt-have-the-answers-104960">dire Zimbabwean economy</a>. Gappah and her friends have ambitions to translate and publish Animal Farm in all indigenous languages taught in Zimbabwe’s schools. </p>
<h2>Chimurenga Chemhuka</h2>
<p>Though Chimurenga Chemhuka is mainly in standard Shona, its characters speak a medley of different Shona dialects – such as chiKaranga, chiZezuru, chiManyika – plus a smattering of contemporary slang. It’s a prismatic translation in one text. As leading UK translation theorist Matthew Reynolds <a href="https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0206/ch6.xhtml">explains</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>To translate is to remake, not only in a new language with its different nuances and ways of putting words together, but in a new culture where readers are likely to be attracted by different themes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The use of dialects activates the book in a comical way that also leaves it open to different interpretations and connections. For example, Zimbabwe’s president <a href="https://theconversation.com/will-mnangagwa-usher-in-a-new-democracy-the-view-from-zimbabwe-88023">Emmerson Mnangagwa</a>, who does not have the same rhetorical gifts as his predecessor, has always tried to distinguish himself with his use of chiKaranga, a dominant dialect of Shona. He adopts a popular wailing Pentecostal style that rises and falls, raising laughter and dust among the rented crowds who attend his rallies.</p>
<p>The title, Chimurenga Chemhuka, is poignant and a direct reference to Zimbabwe’s <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/DC/renov82.10/renov82.10.pdf">liberation war</a>. Chemhuka (animal) Chimurenga (revolution) is not a literal translation of Animal Farm, but here the writers take liberties to connect the book to the country’s larger struggles for independence, commonly known as Chimurenga. </p>
<h2>Why this matters</h2>
<p>This translation project is a significant event in Shona literature. </p>
<p>It’s done by an eclectic group of writers who are passionate about language and literature. They use Orwell’s book and its satiric commentary as a way to creatively express themselves collectively. If this was a choir, the choristers Gappah and Muchuri do a good job of leading a harmonious ensemble.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/noviolet-bulawayos-new-novel-is-an-instant-zimbabwean-classic-185783">NoViolet Bulawayo’s new novel is an instant Zimbabwean classic</a>
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<p>This is also the first of a series of Shona translations from <a href="https://houseofbookszim.com/">House of Books</a>, a new publishing house in Zimbabwe. The book is being promoted via social media platforms, where it is generating conversation about the need for more Zimbabwean translations of classic literature.</p>
<p>Translation was a major activity in Zimbabwe in the 1980s. It was a way for the newly emergent nation to reintegrate into the pan-African intellectual circuit. As Zimbabwe again reels from political and economic oppression, the translation of Animal Farm reveals to the country that what it’s going through is not new. It has happened before, and it will happen again.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/206966/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tinashe Mushakavanhu does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Novelist Petina Gappah’s call for translators on Facebook has resulted in the publication of Chimurenga Chemhuka.Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Junior Research Fellow, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2062422023-06-06T14:41:59Z2023-06-06T14:41:59ZLearning to read is a journey: a study identifies where South African kids go off track<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528565/original/file-20230526-27-lw7lyf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">There are several cognitive processes involved in learning to read.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Monkey Business Images/Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Any parent who has watched a child learning to read knows that it is a journey. Various skills and processes must come together and build “brick by brick” before a child can read a text and answer questions about it. </p>
<p>A child needs at least two kinds of skills before they can comprehend what they’re reading. These are oral language skills (listening, speaking and knowing how spoken words sound) and decoding skills (knowledge of letter-sound relationships to turn a written word into a spoken word).</p>
<p>When decoding is a slow, laboured process this places <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1974-29172-001">demands</a> on cognitive processes like working memory. By increasing speed and accuracy in reading, cognitive resources are freed and the child can begin to comprehend what they are reading. </p>
<p>Reading fluency and expanding vocabulary act as the bridge from decoding to comprehension. Weaknesses in any of these building blocks will limit a child’s ability to read for meaning. </p>
<p>There has been a great deal of concern in South Africa about how the country’s grade 4 pupils fared in the 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS): <a href="https://www.iea.nl/publications/study-reports/international-reports-iea-studies/pirls-2021-international-results">81% did not</a> reach the study’s <a href="https://timssandpirls.bc.edu/pirls2016/international-results/pirls/performance-at-international-benchmarks/low-international-benchmark/index.html">low international benchmark</a>. This suggests they cannot read for meaning. The country placed last out of 57 participating countries.</p>
<p>The study’s findings are a global wake-up call to the <a href="https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/37400">effects of pandemic disruptions</a> on children’s reading comprehension. In South Africa they are also a transparent metric of the education system’s overall performance. The study is conducted every five years and previous results have been useful for <a href="https://www.econ3x3.org/article/education-improving-message-hard-convey">identifying learning improvements</a>.</p>
<p>But PIRLS cannot detect where children are falling behind in their reading. It only assesses written comprehension, which is the final stage in a reading journey. Without knowing which building blocks are not being properly established along the way, the government cannot know where to intervene so that children do not fall further behind.</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.academia.edu/101855664/Foundational_skills_in_home_language_reading_in_South_Africa_Empirical_evidence_from_2015_2021">recent study</a>, we’ve shed light on where the reading wheels fall off. We found that far too many children were entering school with weak oral language skills and were acquiring alphabetic knowledge and fluency far too slowly. This limited their reading comprehension and academic progress through school.</p>
<p>Based on our findings, we advocate strongly for systematic phonics instruction in early grades and a national remediation programme to address reading gaps in later primary school years. </p>
<h2>Key findings</h2>
<p>For the study, we compiled reading assessments for over 40,000 South African learners from six studies conducted between 2015 and 2021. While these data are not nationally representative, they are drawn from over 1,000 no-fee-charging schools across six of the country’s nine provinces. They tell us about reading outcomes in typical South African classrooms. In almost all these schools, children are instructed in their home language from grade 1 to grade 3 before a switch to English instruction happens in grade 4.</p>
<p>Children are struggling to master the most basic reading skills in their home language in the foundation phase (grades 1-3). By the end of grade 1, children should know all their letters, and be able to read words and short sentences. Pre-COVID, only 39%-48% of grade 1s assessed in these samples could recognise and sound out at least 26 letters at the end of the year. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africas-10-year-olds-are-struggling-to-read-it-can-be-fixed-206008">South Africa's 10 year-olds are struggling to read -- it can be fixed</a>
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<p>More than 55% of these grade 1s could not read a single word correctly from a grade-level text by the end of the school year. This <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0738059321001334">worsened</a> during the pandemic. Across two samples assessed at the end of grade 1 in 2021, the majority (62% in one study and 78% in the other) could not read one word correctly from a passage of text.</p>
<p>With serious backlogs in basic decoding skills, large percentages of children do not reach minimum grade 3 African language fluency benchmarks. These benchmarks signal a minimum reading speed and accuracy level that must be reached before children can start making sense of what they are reading. </p>
<p>Pre-COVID, just 11%-48% of samples tested at the end of grade 3 (or start of grade 4) were meeting minimum fluency benchmarks in the <a href="https://www.education.gov.za/Portals/0/Documents/Reports/Nguni%20Languages%20Summary%20Report%20V06.pdf?ver=2020-10-28-141736-203">Nguni</a> or <a href="https://www.education.gov.za/Portals/0/Documents/Reports/ReadingBenchmarks22/7.%20Sesotho-Setswana%20Language%20Group%20Benchmarks%20Report.pdf?ver=2022-11-08-150510-457">Sesotho-Setswana</a> language groups. By grade 6, large percentages (35%-46%) of study samples still did not reach the minimum fluency levels set for grade 3.</p>
<h2>Reading success happens from the starting block</h2>
<p>There are some positive findings. </p>
<p>We found strong evidence that reading success is possible when learners master the basics of reading in the first year or two of school. Learners who knew all their letters at the end of grade 1 were on track with their reading by the time they reached grade 4. Learners with very limited letter-sound knowledge at the end of grade 1 were three years behind, only reaching grade 4 reading fluency levels in grade 7. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africas-reading-crisis-5-steps-to-address-childrens-literacy-struggles-205961">South Africa's reading crisis: 5 steps to address children's literacy struggles</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Learners who met minimum <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0738059321000869">fluency benchmarks</a> in their home languages by the end of grade 3 or 4 were in a much better position to comprehend what they were reading by the end of primary school than their peers who did not meet these benchmarks.</p>
<h2>Addressing the gaps</h2>
<p>Reading comprehension is one of the skills that South Africa needs most. It will be in short supply until basic reading skills are taught correctly.</p>
<p>Beyond grade 3, the teaching of basic reading skills in the home language is not included in the school curriculum. Children with weak foundational reading skills by the end of grade 3 will struggle to catch up. </p>
<p>What should be done about this? As the adage goes, “prevention is better than cure”. We need to understand what prevents basic reading skills from being acquired in grade 1 and 2 classrooms. A systemic programme to improve what teachers are taught at university is needed. In classrooms, diagnostic assessment of early grade reading skills can also help to detect where children are falling behind.</p>
<p>Remediation programmes could also help bridge some gaps in later grades. Additional time and support is especially needed to recover lost ground for cohorts that missed out on foundational grade 1-3 teaching time during the pandemic. </p>
<p><em>Lesang Sebaeng, Assistant Director: Research, Coordination, Monitoring and Evaluation with the Department of Basic Education, co-authored this article and the research it is based on. The findings and conclusions here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect positions held by the department.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/206242/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gabrielle acknowledges funding for the research study from the Economic and Social Research Council (grant ES/T007583/1) and Allan and Gill Gray South Africa Philanthropy. The findings and conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect positions or policies of the funders. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cally Ardington acknowledges funding for the research study from the Economic and Social Research Council (grant ES/T007583/1) and Allan and Gill Gray South Africa Philanthropy. </span></em></p>Reading fluency and expanding vocabulary are the bridge from decoding to comprehension. Weaknesses in any of these building blocks will limit a child’s ability to read for meaning.Gabrielle Wills, Senior researcher at Research on Socio-Economic Policy, Stellenbosch UniversityCally Ardington, Professor at Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape TownLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2055822023-05-23T13:37:18Z2023-05-23T13:37:18ZSign language is set to become South Africa’s 12th official language after a long fight for recognition<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527511/original/file-20230522-19-xyo5r1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Deaf students at the Khulani Special School learning sign language.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Leisa Tyler/LightRocket via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Sign language is on its way to become the 12th official language in South Africa after parliament recently <a href="https://legalacademy.co.za/news/read/sign-language-bill-leaves-parliament-ready-to-be-enacted">agreed to amend the constitution</a> to this end. The move will bring to fruition three decades of a struggle to empower the country’s deaf community. An official language has legal status in a state and serves as the <a href="https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/oecd-glossary-of-statistical-terms_9789264055087-en#page378">language of administration</a> (conducting day-to-day state business). We asked Theo du Plessis, an emeritus professor of South African Sign Language and Deaf Studies, for his insights.</em></p>
<h2>What was the process leading to sign language becoming an official language?</h2>
<p>Numerous attempts have been made since the adoption of the interim post-apartheid <a href="https://www.gov.za/documents/constitution/constitution-republic-south-africa-act-200-1993">constitution in 1993</a> – in which <a href="https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=Xqg8m9Ni&id=4D680A11EA41D8BD1F748B34FA5B0D8113C427A1&thid=OIP.Xqg8m9Ni5UEfWCxD5BjDEAAAAA&mediaurl=https%3a%2f%2fwww.realsasl.com%2fimages%2f2022_Alphabet%2fABC_Alphabet_South_African_Sign_Language_2022.jpg&cdnurl=https%3a%2f%2fth.bing.com%2fth%2fid%2fR.5ea83c9bd362e5411f582c43e418c310%3frik%3doSfEE4ENW%252fo0iw%26pid%3dImgRaw%26r%3d0&exph=335&expw=474&q=south+african+sign+language+-+one+language+or+many%3f&simid=608051667494007872&FORM=IRPRST&ck=54BCF7CD6DEF046473579F152C1151E1&selectedIndex=2&ajaxhist=0&ajaxserp=0">South African Sign Language</a> was not mentioned at all – to make it official. </p>
<p>These included a formal request by the South African National Deaf Association (<a href="http://www.sanda.org.za/">DeafSA</a>) to the Pan South African Language Board (<a href="https://www.pansalb.org/">PanSALB</a>) <a href="https://pmg.org.za/hansard/18063/">in 1996</a>. The board is constitutionally mandated to develop and promote the country’s current 11 official languages, and the <a href="https://www.archaeology.org.za/events/non-bantu-click-languages-versus-khoisan-linguistic-reality-and-ideological-aspirations">non-bantu indigenous click languages</a> – incorrectly referred to as “Khoisan” languages.</p>
<p>The board can’t give languages official status, so nothing came of the request. Eventually another submission was made to the Constitutional Review Committee <a href="https://pmg.org.za/committee-meeting/8091/">in February 2007</a>.
Two further submissions in <a href="https://pmg.org.za/committee-meeting/21459/">2013 and 2015</a> were made to parliament to recommend that South African Sign Language be made official. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.gov.za/speeches/president-cyril-ramaphosa-2020-state-nation-address-13-feb-2020-0000">February 2020</a>, the president announced the pending official recognition of sign language as the country’s 12th official language.</p>
<p>Two years earlier, the United Nations <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/concluding-observations/crpdczafco1-concluding-observations-initial-report-south-africa">had expressed concern</a> about the slow pace of amending the constitution to recognise <a href="https://www.ufs.ac.za/humanities/departments-and-divisions/south-african-sign-language-home">South African Sign Language</a>.</p>
<p>Only on 25 May 2022 did cabinet approve the <a href="https://www.gov.za/speeches/statement-virtual-cabinet-meeting-25-may-2022-26-may-2022-0000">Constitutional Eighteenth Amendment Bill</a> for public comment.</p>
<p>After public hearings <a href="https://pmg.org.za/tabled-committee-report/5263/">in March 2023</a>, the committee recommended the bill for approval. The National Assembly gave its approval to make South African Sign Language official on <a href="https://www.parliament.gov.za/press-releases/na-approves-south-african-sign-language-12th-official-language">2 May 2023</a>. The <a href="https://www.parliament.gov.za/national-council-provinces">National Council of Provinces</a> has also approved and the president must <a href="https://legalacademy.co.za/news/read/sign-language-bill-leaves-parliament-ready-to-be-enacted">sign the amendment as law</a>.</p>
<h2>In what ways will this benefit users of sign language?</h2>
<p>To be honest, not in any meaningful way. The constitution obligates the government to use <a href="https://www.gov.za/documents/constitution/chapter-1-founding-provisions">at least two official languages</a> for the purposes of government administration. <a href="https://www.gov.za/documents/use-official-languages-act">The Use of Official Languages Act, 2012</a> later made this at least three languages. So, there is no legal requirement that all 11 languages must be used. The official languages therefore have only symbolic value at most.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527508/original/file-20230522-27-5n2cn5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527508/original/file-20230522-27-5n2cn5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527508/original/file-20230522-27-5n2cn5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527508/original/file-20230522-27-5n2cn5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527508/original/file-20230522-27-5n2cn5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527508/original/file-20230522-27-5n2cn5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527508/original/file-20230522-27-5n2cn5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">South African Sign Language alphabet.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">RealSasl.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For all practical purposes, the current language regime is in fact dysfunctional. The state primarily uses only one language, English. </p>
<p>One consolation is that the <a href="https://www.gov.za/documents/use-official-languages-act">Use of Official Languages Act</a> requires state entities to accommodate people who choose South African Sign Language as their preferred language when communicating with the state. </p>
<p>Hearing people do not enjoy the same official language right to use their preferred language when communicating with the state.</p>
<h2>What constitutional rights do sign language users currently enjoy?</h2>
<p>First language users of South African Sign Language already enjoy all the same individual language rights that hearing South Africans enjoy – in fact even more – without sign language being an official language. So, making their language official is not giving them access to any new right. </p>
<p>Deaf people and persons with serious hearing loss already have the individual language rights that are guaranteed for all citizens – such as the right to access to information, to cultural association, to non-discrimination on the basis of language and to interpretation in courts. </p>
<p>A provision of the <a href="https://www.gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_document/201409/act84of1996.pdf">South African Schools Act</a> declares South African Sign Language official in public schools for the purposes of education. </p>
<h2>How did the country decide which sign language to use?</h2>
<p>There’s a lot of <a href="https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/124951">lexical variation</a> in South African Sign Language. One of the earliest <a href="https://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/55">publications</a> on the subject, from 1998, poses a similar question: South African Sign Language - one language or many?</p>
<p>The authors, Debra Aaron and Philemon Akach, argue that the variation found in sign language is at most geographical and that these “dialects” all contain the same grammatical structure.</p>
<p>It signifies the existence of one national sign language. The <a href="https://www.gov.za/documents/south-african-schools-act">Schools Act</a> partly answers the question. It stipulates that the sign language to be used for education purposes will be the one approved by PanSALB. Usually, the language variety used in education is considered the standard variety of the official language. </p>
<p>The board is also working towards the further standardisation of the sign language. In collaboration with DeafSA, the <a href="https://www.westerncape.gov.za/news/dcas-and-pansalb-partner-launch-new-online-sa-sign-language-dictionary#:%7E:text=The%20first-ever%20online%20South%20African%20Sign%20Language%20%28SASL%29,in%20Cape%20Town%20on%20Thursday%2C%2001%20September%202022">first comprehensive electronic dictionary</a> for South African Sign Language was made available last year. </p>
<p>The board has also set up a working group to further the standardisation initiative. The idea is not to create “one” sign language; rather to cultivate one standard for using South African Sign Language in higher functions – such as in parliament, government administration, universities and the courts. </p>
<p>In conclusion, making South African Sign Language official is more symbolic than useful.</p>
<p>The justice minister, <a href="https://www.justice.gov.za/legislation/notices/2022/20220719-gg47049gen1156-Const-S6-Comments.pdf">in his motivation</a> for making South African Sign Language official, echoes the claim made by DeafSA way back in 2007. It is that for the deaf (and hard of hearing persons) an official sign language will help this community to realise and enjoy their rights and human dignity, make them an integral part of South Africa and promote inclusivity. </p>
<p>However, the same people who have failed to realise existing rights will be responsible for trying to do so now, in the context of a largely dysfunctional and even more complex official language dispensation. I don’t envisage any significant changes in the lives of a very marginalised community who are being misled into expecting a better life for all.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205582/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Theo du Plessis receives funding from National Research Foundation</span></em></p>Making South African Sign Language official is more symbolic than useful in the lives of a very marginalised community.Theo du Plessis, Professor Emeritus, University of the Free StateLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2049692023-05-11T14:29:12Z2023-05-11T14:29:12ZZulu vs Xhosa: how colonialism used language to divide South Africa’s two biggest ethnic groups<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524909/original/file-20230508-230994-rsgk8o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An illustration of an antique photograph of the British Empire's mission work among the Zulu people of then-Natal province.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">ilbusca/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>South Africa has <a href="https://www.parliament.gov.za/press-releases/na-approves-south-african-sign-language-12th-official-language">12 official languages</a>. The two most dominant are <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Zulu-language">isiZulu</a> and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Xhosa-language">isiXhosa</a>. While the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/zulu">Zulu</a> and <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/xhosa">Xhosa</a> people share a rich common history, they have also found themselves engaged in ethnic conflict and division, notably during <a href="https://africasacountry.com/2022/07/divided-by-the-word">urban wars</a> between 1990 and 1994. A new book, <a href="https://shop.wits.ac.za/product/divided-by-the-word/">Divided by the Word</a>, examines this history – and how colonisers and African interpreters created the two distinct languages, entrenched by apartheid education. Historian Jochen S. Arndt answers some questions about his book.</em></p>
<h2>What is the key premise of the book?</h2>
<p>The beautiful thing about history is that it can help us develop a more complex understanding of the things we consider natural in our daily lives.</p>
<p>People like to believe that their languages have always been there and always played an important role in defining their identity.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524921/original/file-20230508-15-pj1xl7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A book cover showing an old photo of a young African girl in western attire holding a book and a pen and reading from the pages." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524921/original/file-20230508-15-pj1xl7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524921/original/file-20230508-15-pj1xl7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524921/original/file-20230508-15-pj1xl7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524921/original/file-20230508-15-pj1xl7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524921/original/file-20230508-15-pj1xl7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524921/original/file-20230508-15-pj1xl7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524921/original/file-20230508-15-pj1xl7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wits University Press</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But history can show us that what appears to be timeless is, in fact, deeply historical and dependent on the actions of people with ambitions and agendas. My book argues that, as well-defined, standardised languages rather than speech forms (vernaculars), isiZulu and isiXhosa emerged as part of a long historical process that involved a wide range of actors, notably European and US missionaries and African interpreters and intellectuals.</p>
<h2>How did you arrive at the project?</h2>
<p>During the transition from <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-apartheid-south-africa">apartheid</a> to democracy in South Africa between 1990 and 1994, the urban areas reserved for black people around Johannesburg were engulfed in <a href="https://academic.oup.com/afraf/article/112/447/283/79418">violence</a> that killed thousands. Civil wars are always complex, but the <a href="https://academic.oup.com/afraf/article/112/447/283/79418">testimonies</a> of <a href="https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781847012128/township-violence-and-the-end-of-apartheid">participants</a> <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2637187">reveal</a> that many of them understood the <a href="https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/passages/4761530.0004.002/--violence-and-political-action-in-south-africa-five-comrades?rgn=main;view=fulltext">conflict</a> as a war between Zulus and Xhosas. I was struck by how they defined Zuluness and Xhosaness. Many said they were Zulu because they spoke the Zulu language, and Xhosa because they spoke the Xhosa language. One haunting testimony was of a self-identifying Zulu:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Xhosa who were trying to kill us were just looking for your tongue, which language you were.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>My book argues that the historical process that produced isiZulu and isiXhosa as distinct languages began at least two centuries before apartheid. It was the product of colonial encounters and both foreign and African ideologies of language.</p>
<h2>Was there a time when Zulu and Xhosa identities didn’t exist?</h2>
<p>The subtitle of the book is: “Colonial encounters and the remaking of Zulu and Xhosa identities”. I’m not saying that Zulu and Xhosa identities didn’t exist before the languages were well defined, rather that the identities were transformed when these languages came into existence.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-100-year-old-story-of-south-africas-first-history-book-in-the-isizulu-language-178924">The 100-year-old story of South Africa's first history book in the isiZulu language</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Before the 1800s, South Africa’s indigenous people had two key forms of collective belonging: the chiefdom and the clan. There were many chiefdoms and clans, including Zulu and Xhosa ones. The chiefdom was a political entity: a person belonged to a chiefdom because they had submitted or sworn an oath of fealty to a chief. The clan was a genealogical entity: a person belonged because they were born into the clan. </p>
<p>Membership in a chiefdom or a clan had nothing to do with language. </p>
<h2>How did the two distinct languages come into existence?</h2>
<p>I argue that in the 1800s foreign missionaries and their African interpreters together created distinct isiZulu and isiXhosa out of numerous speech forms.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/525056/original/file-20230509-25-q1mqtk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A vintage illustration in black and white of an African man in formal western attire standing next to a table where three other men stand and sit in a lavish drawing room." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/525056/original/file-20230509-25-q1mqtk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/525056/original/file-20230509-25-q1mqtk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/525056/original/file-20230509-25-q1mqtk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/525056/original/file-20230509-25-q1mqtk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/525056/original/file-20230509-25-q1mqtk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/525056/original/file-20230509-25-q1mqtk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/525056/original/file-20230509-25-q1mqtk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">JanTzatzoe, left, was a Xhosa chief who converted to Christianity and served as a translator for the British.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Michael Nicholson/Corbis via Getty Images</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Protestant missionaries arrived in South Africa in the 1820s. Their primary goal was to convert Africans to Christianity. For them the Bible was the source of revelation. To give Africans direct access to it, it had to be translated.</p>
<p>The problem was there was no written language, so written languages and their geographic reach had to be defined. Consequently, missionaries asked themselves: are the speech forms of the Zulu and Xhosa and of the chiefdoms and clans in between them – such as Mfengu, Thembu, Bhaca, Mpondo, Mpondomise, Hlubi, Cele, Thuli, Qwabe – similar enough to represent a single language into which the Bible can be translated, or do they represent multiple languages?</p>
<p>I suggest that the answer to this question changed over time for a host of reasons, perhaps most importantly due to the influence of African interpreters. Missionaries depended on interpreters, who had their own ideas about language. The decision to think of isiZulu and isiXhosa as two separate languages can to some extent be traced back to these interpreters.</p>
<p>Education played the crucial role in people identifying with these languages. It involved Africans and non-Africans, as lawmakers, superintendents of education and teachers, promoting isiZulu and isiXhosa as part of “mother tongue” education in various school settings between the middle of the 1800s and the last decade of the 1900s.</p>
<h2>How did apartheid entrench this?</h2>
<p>Apartheid merely reinforced this trend. Crucial was the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Eiselen-Commission">Eiselen Commission</a> of 1949, which <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/report-of-the-commission-on-native-education-1949-1951/oclc/668118744">claimed</a> that isiZulu and isiXhosa were the “bearer of the traditional heritage of the various ethnic groups”. This was like saying that these languages captured the essence of these groups in particularly powerful ways. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524925/original/file-20230508-213756-74pvcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Close up of hands holding an old, battered document containing an identity photo and personal information." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524925/original/file-20230508-213756-74pvcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524925/original/file-20230508-213756-74pvcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524925/original/file-20230508-213756-74pvcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524925/original/file-20230508-213756-74pvcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524925/original/file-20230508-213756-74pvcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524925/original/file-20230508-213756-74pvcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524925/original/file-20230508-213756-74pvcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dekemani Mzuzwa with his pass book that he is waiting to exchange for a new passport in 1994.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">David Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To reinforce these group identities, the commission expanded mother tongue education in schools. This for a Mpondo child, for instance, meant studying isiXhosa, and for a Hlubi child meant studying isiZulu. Children gradually assimilated Zulu or Xhosa as their language-based identities.</p>
<h2>How is this relevant today?</h2>
<p>Post-apartheid South Africa continues to promote the Zulu-Xhosa divide through its own official language policies in schools. In the Eastern Cape, for instance, African pupils will learn standard isiXhosa because it is assumed that their “home language” is a dialect of isiXhosa. In KwaZulu-Natal the same happens with isiZulu. Under this policy, it is very difficult to revive and strengthen identities such as Bhaca or Hlubi.</p>
<p>The only way out of this predicament for the Hlubi and Bhaca is to make language a battleground of their identity politics. I think this best explains why the Hlubi have created an <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-02-21-amahlubi-battle-to-save-mother-tongue-from-extinction/">IsiHlubi Language Board</a> and why the <a href="https://www.dispatchlive.co.za/news/2015-05-28-respect-bhaca-kingdom-/">Bhaca</a> insist that their <a href="https://ridgetimes.co.za/43364/isibhaca-is-the-language-of-the-bhaca-nation/">speech</a> is not a dialect of isiXhosa.</p>
<p>My point is that we cannot make sense of their need to make these arguments without coming to terms with the long history of the Zulu-Xhosa language divide.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204969/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jochen S. Arndt received funding from the Social Sciences Research Council, American Historical Association, and Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa.</span></em></p>Missionaries and African translators working on local versions of the Bible divided South Africa’s ethnic groups by language.Jochen S. Arndt, Associate Professor of History, Virginia Military InstituteLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1943722022-12-11T08:07:50Z2022-12-11T08:07:50ZWhen did humans first start to speak? How language evolved in Africa<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499312/original/file-20221206-5419-8iau2z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Descendants of the indigenous San people in the Kalahari Desert.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Eric Lafforgue/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Image</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>When did humans first begin to speak, which speech sounds were uttered first, and when did language evolve from those humble beginnings? These questions have long fascinated people, especially in tracing the evolution of modern humans and what makes us different from other animals. George Poulos has spent most of his academic career researching the phonetic and linguistic structures of African languages. In his <a href="https://www.amazon.com/ORIGINS-HUMAN-SPEECH-LANGUAGE/dp/B096ZZ3YKR/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=">latest book</a>, On the Origins of Human Speech and Language, he proposes new timelines for the origins of language. We asked him about his findings.</em></p>
<h2>When and where did human speech evolve?</h2>
<p>Research carried out for this <a href="https://www.amazon.com/ORIGINS-HUMAN-SPEECH-LANGUAGE/dp/B096ZZ3YKR/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=">study</a> indicates that the first speech sounds were uttered about 70,000 years ago, and not hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago, as is sometimes claimed in the <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw3916">literature</a>. </p>
<p>While my research has been primarily based on phonetic (speech sounds) and linguistic (language) analyses, it has also taken into account other disciplines, like palaeoanthropology (the study of human evolution), archaeology (analysing fossils and other remains), anatomy (the body) and genetics (the study of genes). </p>
<p>The transformation of <em><a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Homo-sapiens">Homo sapiens</a></em> (modern humans) from a “non-speaking” to a “speaking” species happened at about the same time as our hunter-gatherer ancestors <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/incredible-human-journey-9781408810910/">migrated</a> out of Africa. </p>
<p>When those early adventurers migrated beyond the African continent, they took with them the greatest gift ever acquired by our species – the ability to produce speech sounds, enabled by the creation of a “speech” gene. It was that ability, more than anything else, that catapulted them into a world in which they would dominate all other species. </p>
<h2>Which speech sounds were first uttered?</h2>
<p>The very first speech sounds ever produced were not just random involuntary sounds. Underlying these speech sounds was a fledgling network that connected certain areas of the brain to different parts of the vocal tract. Various anatomical and environmental factors contributed to <em>Homo sapiens’</em> ability to produce speech sounds for the first time ever. </p>
<p>Another interesting factor was an apparent change in the <a href="https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Human+Brain+Evolution:+The+Influence+of+Freshwater+and+Marine+Food+Resources-p-9780470452684">diet</a> of our early ancestors and the possible effect it might have had on the human brain. The change to what was essentially a marine diet rich in omega 3 fatty acids occurred when those early humans migrated from the interior to the <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-the-sea-saved-humanity-2012-12-07/">coastlines</a> of the continent. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499319/original/file-20221206-16-59tzsq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499319/original/file-20221206-16-59tzsq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499319/original/file-20221206-16-59tzsq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499319/original/file-20221206-16-59tzsq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499319/original/file-20221206-16-59tzsq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499319/original/file-20221206-16-59tzsq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1139&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499319/original/file-20221206-16-59tzsq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1139&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499319/original/file-20221206-16-59tzsq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1139&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">George Poulos</span></span>
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<p>The vocal tract developed gradually over a long period, and the different stages in its development determined the types of sounds that could be produced. At the time of the “out of Africa” migration, the only part of the vocal tract that was <a href="https://www.penn.museum/documents/publications/expedition/PDFs/49-2/Lieberman.pdf">physiologically developed</a> to produce speech sounds was the oral cavity (mouth area).</p>
<p>The only speech sound that could be produced entirely in the mouth at the time was the so-called “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/ORIGINS-HUMAN-SPEECH-LANGUAGE/dp/B096ZZ3YKR/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=">click</a>” sound. The airstream could be controlled within the mouth. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6WO5XabD-s">Clicks</a> are the only known speech sounds that behave in this manner. They still occur today in a few African languages – predominantly in the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Khoisan">Khoisan</a> languages spoken in parts of Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. </p>
<p>Clicks occur in less than 1% of the languages of the world. They also occur in a few isolated instances in East Africa and in certain languages of South Africa that adopted the clicks when they came into contact with the Khoisan. Clicks have also been noted in one instance outside the African continent, in an extinct ceremonial language register known as Damin in Australia. </p>
<p>An example of a click speech sound is the so-called “kiss” (or bilabial) click where the lips are brought together, and the back part of the tongue is raised against the back of the mouth. The lips are then sucked slightly inwards, and when released a click sound is produced.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499301/original/file-20221206-3886-zfofy1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A diagram of the human head showing the mouth and three stages of sound being produced." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499301/original/file-20221206-3886-zfofy1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499301/original/file-20221206-3886-zfofy1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=266&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499301/original/file-20221206-3886-zfofy1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=266&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499301/original/file-20221206-3886-zfofy1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=266&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499301/original/file-20221206-3886-zfofy1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=334&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499301/original/file-20221206-3886-zfofy1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=334&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499301/original/file-20221206-3886-zfofy1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=334&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The production of the alveolar click.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy George Poulos</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>My research suggests that the “kiss” click was probably the first speech sound ever produced by <em>Homo sapiens</em>. As time moved on, the various parts of the tongue became more and more manoeuvrable, making it possible for other click sounds to be produced in the mouth as well. </p>
<h2>So, when did the other speech sounds evolve?</h2>
<p>This study demonstrates that the production of all the other human speech sounds (the other consonants, as well as all the vowels) began to take place from approximately 50,000 years ago. This was dependent on the gradual development of a <a href="https://www.penn.museum/documents/publications/expedition/PDFs/49-2/Lieberman.pdf">well-proportioned vocal tract</a> which included the mouth, the area behind the mouth (the pharynx), the nasal passages, and the all-important larynx with its vocal cords. Three airstream mechanisms evolved for the production of all speech sounds, and they evolved gradually in successive stages. </p>
<h2>How did humans communicate before clicks?</h2>
<p>Before this, the only sounds humans could produce were the so-called “vocalisations” or vocal calls. Those were imitations or mimics of various actions or sounds that humans were exposed to in their environment. </p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-first-ever-dictionary-of-south-africas-kaaps-language-has-launched-why-it-matters-165485">The first-ever dictionary of South Africa's Kaaps language has launched - why it matters</a>
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<p>They may have also been involuntary sounds which expressed various emotions or the involuntary sounds made when yawning, sneezing etcetera. These must not be confused with the very intricate mechanisms that are involved in the production of the speech sounds which form the foundations of what we recognise today as human language. </p>
<h2>And the use of full grammatical language?</h2>
<p>As the different speech sounds evolved, they combined in various ways to form syllables and words. And these in turn combined with each other in different ways to generate the structural types of grammatical sentences that characterise modern languages.</p>
<p>The initial ability to produce speech sounds was the spark that led to the gradual evolution of language. Grammatical language did not evolve overnight. There was no “single silver bullet” that generated language. </p>
<p>The indication is that human language was a fairly late acquisition of <em>Homo sapiens</em>. It is argued in this study that language, as we know it today, probably began to emerge about 20,000 years ago. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499987/original/file-20221209-24-mesb90.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man in traditional hunting clothing crouches to apply paint with his finger on a boy child's cheeks." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499987/original/file-20221209-24-mesb90.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499987/original/file-20221209-24-mesb90.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499987/original/file-20221209-24-mesb90.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499987/original/file-20221209-24-mesb90.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499987/original/file-20221209-24-mesb90.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499987/original/file-20221209-24-mesb90.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499987/original/file-20221209-24-mesb90.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A San elder paints a child’s face.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Hoberman/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>We observed earlier that the first speech sounds were uttered by the ancestors of the speakers of present-day Khoisan languages. In the light of this observation, it would be reasonable to assume that they had a head start in being the first to speak a grammatical language as well. </p>
<p>To date there is no substantial phonetic or linguistic evidence to indicate that other species such as the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Neanderthal">Neanderthals</a> could have ever spoken a grammatical language. They did not have the <a href="https://www.penn.museum/documents/publications/expedition/PDFs/49-2/Lieberman.pdf">required vocal tract dimensions</a> for speech sound production, let alone the morphological and syntactic structures that were required for grammatical language. </p>
<h2>Why does this all matter?</h2>
<p>The utterance of the very first speech sounds about 70,000 years ago was the beginning of a journey that was to lead to the evolution of human language. </p>
<p>Language has provided the medium of communication that has played a pivotal role in the momentous developments that have taken place from the earliest known “written” records that we have access to (some 5,500 years ago), to the highly sophisticated technological advances that we are witnessing today.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/194372/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>George Poulos does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The first speech sounds were uttered about 70,000 years ago and not hundreds of thousands of years ago as is sometimes claimed.George Poulos, Professor Emeritus, University of South AfricaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1841882022-06-23T14:27:56Z2022-06-23T14:27:56ZNigerian historian and thinker Toyin Falola on decolonising the academy in Africa<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467935/original/file-20220609-14-6t06uu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Toyin Falola </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo courtesy Boydell & Brewer</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Nigerian intellectual and historian Toyin Falola’s latest book is called <a href="https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781648250279/decolonizing-african-studies/">Decolonizing African Studies</a>: Knowledge Production, Agency, and Voice. It sets out to respond to the urgent need to eliminate the vestiges of colonialism (the domination of foreign powers) in the academy and in research methodologies where African perspectives continue to be marginalised or excluded, creating the problem of misrepresentation of the continent. The book also critiques the limitations to and failures of decoloniality so far. It closes with a discussion of African futurism. In this interview Falola talks about some key battlegrounds for the decolonisation of knowledge production.</em></p>
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<p><strong>Olayinka Oyegbile:</strong> How do you or other African intellectuals hope to replace the hegemony of Western knowledge systems imposed on Africa in a one-sided world?</p>
<p><strong>Toyin Falola:</strong> I think we can both agree that the side of the narrative preferred by the western world is not that which entirely favours the best interest of Africa. Though the colonial masters have been gone for decades, they left behind intellectual legacies that are not so obvious to many of us in Africa. Such legacies include those that reflect in knowledge and how we acquire it, legacies that permeate the operations of our institutions and have an effect on the means of development of our continent. These are the legacies we are making positive efforts to remove through decolonisation. </p>
<p>My book is one of the materials that help set things straight about decolonisation. I know there are many materials out there, and there are many more that will come from scholars across Africa who understand the patriotic assignment of decolonising knowledge production. But this does not stop here. There is also sensitisation going on across Africa. Seminars and think tank assemblies are being held to develop strategies for fastening the grip on decolonisation in Africa. </p>
<p>An important mission is to integrate indigenous systems into the formal western-education style. What is ours? Our languages, ideas, crafts, stories, including festivals, ceremonies, useful knowledge from elders, and many more. And we must put what we have learned into practice as we play, interact with one another, and build purposeful communities.</p>
<p><strong>Olayinka Oyegbile:</strong> How do you redress the problem of the misrepresentation of how the history of the continent has been told?</p>
<p><strong>Toyin Falola:</strong> If you tell a story or the history of a people from a wrong perspective for too long, people will come to accept it, regardless of how untrue it is, while disregarding the other perspective or even believing that there cannot be any other perspective than the one they have been told. </p>
<p>For a long time, there has been a lot of westernisation of African history, and in return, African perspectives have been neglected or deemed nonexistent. It was not until after the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/World-War-II">second world war</a> that African writers began to decolonise African history. So, yes, if you say there has been a misrepresentation of the continent, I wouldn’t deny it, but at the same time, we are already creating new narratives. We now have people strongly and tirelessly correcting this misinformation and replacing them with our truth. </p>
<p><strong>Olayinka Oyegbile:</strong> What do you mean by “African futurism”? (<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-afrofuturism-an-english-professor-explains-183707">Afrofuturism</a> is a movement in art, literature, etcetera featuring futuristic or science fiction themes that incorporate elements of black history and culture.)</p>
<p><strong>Toyin Falola:</strong> African futurism is the latest stage of decolonisation. It is a movement of the creative world that emphasises the relevance of Blackness, one that displays the energies of our youth to merge technology with performance, to <a href="https://theconversation.com/hip-hop-and-pan-africanism-from-blitz-the-ambassador-to-beyonce-151680">re-imagine Pan Africanism</a> in their own way. It borrows and integrates ideas and practices from various parts of the world and is receptive and adaptive to changes, innovations, enlightenment, reasoning, and many other legacies and concepts in Africa’s best interest. </p>
<p><strong>Olayinka Oyegbile:</strong> In the book you have a chapter on empowering marginal voices, this includes LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) Africans, who many believe are ‘unAfrican’ in nature?</p>
<p><strong>Toyin Falola:</strong> We must accept the reality of change, respect boundaries, embrace other identities, and accept that a new generation will replace the old. LGBTQ people should be considered a sexual orientation and human rights issue, and we need to acknowledge that they are Africans like you and me. We must treat all Africans with respect.</p>
<p>I believe that the obstacle is that the tool needed to advance Africa into a pro-LGBTQ continent is still within the control of the older generation. But I believe that change is constant and that when this change happens, and a new generation of Africans emerges to take positions of power, the animosity towards LGBTQ will be reduced, and there will be tolerance and the political will to implement a pro-LGBTQ agenda in Africa. </p>
<p><strong>Olayinka Oyegbile:</strong> You write about using language as a form of decolonisation as well as decolonising African literature?</p>
<p><strong>Toyin Falola:</strong> I have always believed that beyond being an art, language is also a science. It is a tool of transformation, and as far as decolonisation is concerned, language is a necessary tool. I do not think literature is worth anything without language, and the language in which it is told goes a long way to convey different things that can alter the perspective of a people or transform it. Of course, African literature needs to be decolonised.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/drama-that-shaped-ngugis-writing-and-activism-comes-home-to-kenya-184353">Drama that shaped Ngũgĩ’s writing and activism comes home to Kenya</a>
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<p>Many aspects of African literature cannot be adequately conveyed if you take it away from the African context. Meanwhile, leaving it in the African context means using the African language to properly communicate it. So, yes, language has a huge place in African literature, and we need to do a better job of harnessing it. Language is more than literature; it is an entry to socialisation and education, to people’s well-being, and to the advancement of cultures and civilisations. African languages are an integral part of our march of progress.</p>
<p><strong>Olayinka Oyegbile:</strong> What is the relevance of African history to the world or vice versa?</p>
<p><strong>Toyin Falola:</strong> We need to understand that the history of any people, no matter how small a group, is relevant to them and the world, even at a time of globalisation. Every one of us must be able to distinctly identify ourselves and our histories while being active partakers of the global village. African history is highly important to the world, and not just the history as told from outsiders’ perspective, but as told by Africans. Africans have made significant contributions to the growth of civilisation, from the very early humans to the advancement in technologies and the development of capitalism.</p>
<p><strong>Olayinka Oyegbile:</strong> Although it has been reintroduced, history was phased out of Nigeria’s school curriculum or relegated at some point, what does this portend?</p>
<p><strong>Toyin Falola:</strong> It is a bad idea to ignore the teaching of history because a river that forgets its source will surely dry up. History is crucial for the growth of any nation, and any nation that decides to forget it or undervalues its relevance in the educational system will suffer the consequences. There are no two ways to it. If you desire a better future for yourself or your country, you must consider where you are today, as well as where you have been coming from. The interrelation of these things will birth an encompassing understanding of what to do to reach where you need to be.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/184188/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Olayinka Oyegbile does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Indigenous knowledge, African languages, queer rights and Afrofuturism are some of the issues discussed in the new book.Olayinka Oyegbile, Communications scholar, Trinity University, LagosLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1772592022-02-20T05:50:45Z2022-02-20T05:50:45ZThe story of how Swahili became Africa’s most spoken language<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447271/original/file-20220218-37276-ov27yd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Tanzanian leader Julius Nyerere, a Swahili advocate.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Keystone/Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Once just an obscure island dialect of an African Bantu tongue, Swahili has evolved into Africa’s most internationally recognised language. It is peer to the few languages of the world that boast over 200 million users. </p>
<p>Over the two millennia of Swahili’s growth and adaptation, the moulders of this story – immigrants from inland Africa, traders from Asia, Arab and European occupiers, European and Indian settlers, colonial rulers, and individuals from various postcolonial nations – have used Swahili and adapted it to their own purposes. They have taken it wherever they have gone to the west. </p>
<p>Africa’s Swahili-speaking zone now extends across a full third of the continent from south to north and touches on the opposite coast, encompassing the heart of Africa.</p>
<h2>The origins</h2>
<p>The historical lands of the Swahili are on East Africa’s Indian Ocean littoral. A 2,500-kilometer chain of coastal towns from Mogadishu, Somalia to Sofala, Mozambique as well as offshore islands as far away as the Comoros and Seychelles. </p>
<p>This coastal region has long served as an international crossroads of trade and human movement. People from all walks of life and from regions as scattered as Indonesia, Persia, the African Great Lakes, the United States and Europe all encountered one another. Hunter-gatherers, pastoralists and farmers mingled with traders and city-dwellers. </p>
<p>Africans devoted to ancestors and the spirits of their lands met Muslims, Hindus, Portuguese Catholics and British Anglicans. Workers (among them slaves, porters and labourers), soldiers, rulers and diplomats were mixed together from ancient days. Anyone who went to the East African littoral could choose to become Swahili, and many did.</p>
<h2>African unity</h2>
<p>The roll of Swahili enthusiasts and advocates includes notable intellectuals, freedom fighters, civil rights activists, political leaders, scholarly professional societies, entertainers and health workers. Not to mention the usual professional writers, poets, and artists. </p>
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<p>Foremost has been Nobel Laureate <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1986/soyinka/biographical/">Wole Soyinka</a>. The Nigerian writer, poet and playwright has since the 1960s repeatedly called for use of Swahili as the transcontinental language for Africa. The <a href="https://www.aa.com.tr/en/africa/african-union-adopts-swahili-as-official-working-language/2498467">African Union</a> (AU), the “united states of Africa” nurtured the same sentiment of continental unity in July 2004 and adopted Swahili as its official language. As <a href="https://www.kofiannanfoundation.org/member/joaquim-chissano/">Joaquim Chissano</a> (then the president of Mozambique) put this motion on the table, he addressed the AU in the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3871315.stm">flawless Swahili</a> he had learned in Tanzania, where he was educated while in exile from the Portuguese colony.</p>
<p>The African Union did not <a href="https://allafrica.com/stories/200407060715.html">adopt</a> Swahili as Africa’s international language by happenstance. Swahili has a much longer history of building bridges among peoples across the continent of Africa and into the diaspora.</p>
<p>The feeling of unity, the insistence that all of Africa is one, just will not disappear. Languages are <a href="https://qz.com/africa/996013/african-languages-should-be-at-the-center-of-educational-and-cultural-achievement/">elemental</a> to everyone’s sense of belonging, of expressing what’s in one’s heart. The AU’s decision was particularly striking given that the populations of its member states speak an estimated <a href="https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/5769808/mod_resource/content/1/MAKONI%20and%20PENNYCOOK%20Disinventig.pdf">two thousand languages</a> (roughly one-third of all human languages), several dozen of them with more than a million speakers.</p>
<p>How did Swahili come to hold so prominent a position among so many groups with their own diverse linguistic histories and traditions? </p>
<h2>A liberation language</h2>
<p>During the decades leading up to the independence of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in the early 1960s, Swahili functioned as an international means of political collaboration. It enabled freedom fighters throughout the region to communicate their common aspirations even though their native languages varied widely. </p>
<p>The rise of Swahili, for some Africans, was a mark of true cultural and personal independence from the colonising Europeans and their languages of control and command. Uniquely among Africa’s independent nations, Tanzania’s government uses Swahili for all official business and, most impressively, in basic education. Indeed, the Swahili word uhuru (freedom), which emerged from this independence struggle, became part of the <a href="https://inpdum.org">global lexicon</a> of political empowerment.</p>
<p>The highest political offices in East Africa began using and promoting Swahili soon after independence. Presidents <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julius-Nyerere">Julius Nyerere</a> of Tanzania (1962–85) and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jomo-Kenyatta">Jomo Kenyatta</a> of Kenya (1964–78) promoted Swahili as integral to the region’s political and economic interests, security and liberation. The political power of language was demonstrated, less happily, by Ugandan dictator <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Idi-Amin">Idi Amin</a> (1971–79), who used Swahili for his army and secret police operations during his reign of terror.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/new-kiswahili-science-fiction-award-charts-a-path-for-african-languages-163876">New Kiswahili science fiction award charts a path for African languages</a>
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<p>Under Nyerere, Tanzania became one of only two African nations ever to declare a native African language as the country’s official mode of communication (the other is Ethiopia, with Amharic). Nyerere <a href="https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/shakespeare-goes-to-east-africa">personally translated</a> two of William Shakespeare’s plays into Swahili to demonstrate the capacity of Swahili to bear the expressive weight of great literary works. </p>
<h2>Socialist overtones</h2>
<p>Nyerere even made the term Swahili a referent to Tanzanian citizenship. Later, this label acquired socialist overtones in praising the common men and women of the nation. It stood in stark contrast to Europeans and Western-oriented elite Africans with quickly – and by implication dubiously – amassed wealth.</p>
<p>Ultimately, the term grew even further to encompass the poor of all races, of both African and non-African descent. In my own experience as a lecturer at Stanford University in the 1990s, for instance, several of the students from Kenya and Tanzania referred to the poor white neighbourhood of East Palo Alto, California, as Uswahilini, “Swahili land”. As opposed to Uzunguni, “land of the mzungu (white person)”. </p>
<p>Nyerere considered it prestigious to be called Swahili. With his influence, the term became imbued with sociopolitical connotations of the poor but worthy and even noble. This in turn helped construct a Pan African popular identity independent of the elite-dominated national governments of Africa’s fifty-some nation-states. </p>
<p>Little did I realise then that the Swahili label had been used as a conceptual rallying point for solidarity across the lines of community, competitive towns, and residents of many backgrounds for over a millennium.</p>
<h2>Kwanzaa and ujamaa</h2>
<p>In 1966, (activist and author) <a href="https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/maulana-karenga-39">Maulana Ron Karenga</a> associated the black freedom movement with Swahili, choosing Swahili as its official language and creating the Kwanzaa celebration. The term <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-kwanzaa-means-for-black-americans-88220">Kwanzaa</a> is derived from the Swahili word ku-anza, meaning “to begin” or “first”. The holiday was intended to celebrate the matunda ya kwanza, “first fruits”. According to Karenga, Kwanzaa symbolises the festivities of ancient African harvests.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447275/original/file-20220218-43804-1dt7li6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman sings and dances, dressed in traditional East African fabric with headpiece and holding a wooden bowl, the sides strung with cowrie shells." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447275/original/file-20220218-43804-1dt7li6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447275/original/file-20220218-43804-1dt7li6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447275/original/file-20220218-43804-1dt7li6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447275/original/file-20220218-43804-1dt7li6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447275/original/file-20220218-43804-1dt7li6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447275/original/file-20220218-43804-1dt7li6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447275/original/file-20220218-43804-1dt7li6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A Kwanzaa celebration in Denver, US.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andy Cross/The Denver Post via Getty Images</span></span>
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<p>Celebrants were encouraged to adopt Swahili names and to address one another by Swahili titles of respect. Based on Nyerere’s principle of <a href="https://oxfordre.com/africanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277734-e-172">ujamaa</a> (unity in mutual contributions), Kwanzaa celebrates seven principles or pillars. Unity (umoja), self-determination (kujichagulia), collective work and responsibility (ujima), cooperative economics (ujamaa), shared purpose (nia), individual creativity (kuumba) and faith (imani). </p>
<p>Nyerere also became the icon of “community brotherhood and sisterhood” under the slogan of the Swahili word ujamaa. That word has gained such strong appeal that it has been used as far afield as among Australian Aborigines and African Americans and <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books/about/Swahili_State_and_Society.html?id=-9MwAAByvf0C&redir_esc=y">across the globe</a> from London to Papua New Guinea. Not to mention its ongoing celebration on many US college campuses in the form of dormitories named ujamaa houses.</p>
<h2>Today</h2>
<p>Today, Swahili is the African language most widely recognised outside the continent. The global presence of Swahili in radio broadcasting and on the internet has no equal among sub-Saharan African languages. </p>
<p>Swahili is broadcast regularly in Burundi, the DRC, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland and Tanzania. On the international scene, no other African language can be heard from world news stations as often or as extensively.</p>
<p>At least as far back as <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022495/">Trader Horn</a> (1931), Swahili words and speech have been heard in hundreds of movies and television series, such as <a href="https://intl.startrek.com/database_article/uhura">Star Trek</a>, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089755/">Out of Africa</a>, Disney’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110357/">The Lion King</a>, and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0146316/">Lara Croft: Tomb Raider</a>. The Lion King featured several Swahili words, the most familiar being the names of characters, including Simba (lion), Rafiki (friend) and Pumbaa (be dazed). Swahili phrases included asante sana (thank you very much) and, of course, that no-problem philosophy known as hakuna matata repeated throughout the movie. </p>
<p>Swahili lacks the numbers of speakers, the wealth, and the political power associated with global languages such as Mandarin, English or Spanish. But Swahili appears to be the only language boasting more than 200 million speakers that has more second-language speakers than native ones.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-kwanzaa-means-for-black-americans-88220">What Kwanzaa means for Black Americans</a>
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<p>By immersing themselves in the affairs of a maritime culture at a key commercial gateway, the people who were eventually designated Waswahili (Swahili people) created a niche for themselves. They were important enough in the trade that newcomers had little choice but to speak Swahili as the language of trade and diplomacy. And the Swahili population became more entrenched as successive generations of second-language speakers of Swahili lost their ancestral languages and became bona fide Swahili.</p>
<p>The key to understanding this story is to look deeply at the Swahili people’s response to challenges. At the ways in which they made their fortunes and dealt with misfortunes. And, most important, at how they honed their skills in balancing confrontation and resistance with adaptation and innovation as they interacted with arrivals from other language backgrounds. </p>
<p><em>This is an edited extract of the <a href="https://www.ohioswallow.com/extras/9780896804890_chapter_01_and_toc.pdf">first chapter</a> of <a href="https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/The+Story+of+Swahili">The Story of Swahili</a> from Ohio University Press</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/177259/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John M. Mugane does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Over two millennia, Swahili has built bridges among people across Africa and into the diaspora.John M. Mugane, Professor, Harvard UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1714142021-11-10T14:46:26Z2021-11-10T14:46:26ZHow I reconstructed an unwritten ancient African language<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/431044/original/file-20211109-25-1jnvile.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Hausa is the most widely known Chadic language, spoken by some 80 million people or more. It's harder to grasp the history of other, unwritten Chadic languages.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Irene Becker/Contributor/Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Africa is humankind’s home continent. <a href="https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-sapiens"><em>Homo sapiens</em></a>, with the anatomical and cognitive capacity to have human language as we know it today, originated in Africa between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago.</p>
<p>Then, as an abundant fossil and archaeological record <a href="https://humanorigins.si.edu/education/introduction-human-evolution">makes clear</a>, some of our human ancestors left Africa. They spread to neighbouring continents, taking their languages with them. Others remained behind; their descendants speak what we call “African languages”, pointing to these communities’ long histories on the home continent. </p>
<p>There were also those who migrated out of Africa and whose descendants later returned. These include the ancestors of the so-called <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2215039021000023">Ethiosemitic</a> <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ethio-Semitic-languages">languages</a> in Eritrea and Ethiopia, some 3,000 years ago. The most recent and dramatic returns came with Arabo-Islamic invasions beginning in 614 CE, <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/colonialism">European colonialism after 1492 CE</a>, and the post-colonial work migrations of the 20th and 21st centuries.</p>
<p>One result of all this movement is the geographic spread and continuous development of human languages – most of them unwritten. It is difficult to study and reconstruct them: unlike with excavated finds in palaeoanthropology, human language does not leave fossils behind unless in writing. Very few living or extinct languages left behind written texts. Those that did include the <a href="https://www.worldhistory.org/Egyptian_Hieroglyphs/">Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics</a> dating back about 5,000 years, and languages ancestral to modern Semitic which left written records that also cover several millennia, the oldest from <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Akkad">Akkadian</a> in modern day Iraq in cuneiform script.</p>
<p>For more than 50 years, I have devoted <a href="https://www.koeppe.de/titel_the-lamang-language-and-dictionary-3">considerable research efforts</a> to <a href="https://uni-leipzig1.academia.edu/EkkehardWolff">the study</a> of the so-called Chadic languages. These are spoken west, south and east of Lake Chad (hence their name) in Central Africa. The widely known and best researched Chadic language is <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hausa-language">Hausa</a>, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/hausa">spoken</a> as one of Africa’s major languages across large parts of West and Central Africa by some 80 million people or more. Unfortunately, knowledge about Hausa’s approximately 200 language relatives in Nigeria, Cameroon, and Chad is coming in only very slowly. </p>
<p>What researchers most want to know is how these languages have developed as a family from a common ancient proto-language; they also want to unpack how languages relate to other and better known language families – Ancient Egyptian, Berber (Amazigh), Cushitic, Semitic, and possibly Omotic – with whom they are assumed to form a common language phylum, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Afro-Asiatic-languages">Afroasiatic</a>. </p>
<p>The results of my research will be presented in two books. The <a href="http://services.cambridge.org/in/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/phonetics-and-phonology/historical-phonology-central-chadic-prosodies-and-lexical-reconstruction?format=HB&isbn=9781316519547">first volume</a> focuses on the origin of vowels in these languages. The second and final volume will focus on sound changes affecting consonants in these languages. It is set to be published in 2023. </p>
<p>I used well established linguistic techniques to reconstruct one of the ancestral languages likely spoken a few thousand years ago in the region around Lake Chad in Central Africa and that was ancestral to about 80 present-day languages in the area. Until now, these languages were practically unwritten. </p>
<h2>Proto-languages</h2>
<p>Professional linguists use a number of established tools to unearth language histories even in the absence of written texts. Two of these are <a href="https://www.britannica.com/science/internal-reconstruction">internal reconstruction</a> and the <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781405166201.ch1">comparative method</a>. These were developed some 150 years ago by the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/science/Neogrammarian">Neogrammarian School</a> in Leipzig, whose scholars successfully reconstructed the Indo-European language family relationships that link modern and ancient European languages like English and Ancient Greek to modern and ancient Asian languages like Urdu and Ancient Sanskrit. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-queens-english-has-had-to-defer-to-africas-rich-multilingualism-57673">How the Queen's English has had to defer to Africa's rich multilingualism</a>
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<p>My own research targets the linguistic history of the Afroasiatic language phylum. A phylum, in linguistics, is a group of languages related to each other less closely than those that make up a family. Together, the Afroasiatic phylum consists of approximately 400 languages. Most are spoken in the northern half of Africa from Morocco and Mauritania in the west to Egypt and Tanzania in the east, and in adjacent parts of Asia. They rank among the oldest living languages in terms of traceable records. Experts <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Afro-Asiatic-languages">have estimated</a> that Proto-Afroasiatic emerged in Africa between 12,000 and 16,000 years ago. </p>
<p>My research focused on the almost 200 Chadic languages spoken west, south and east of Lake Chad in Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad. They form the largest family within the Afroasiatic phylum. There are four branches; the Central Chadic or “<a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095509854">Biu-Mandara</a>” consists of about 80 languages. The aim was to reconstruct the sound system and vocabulary of Proto-Central Chadic. </p>
<p>My main source was an <a href="https://www.webonary.org/centralchadic/">online database</a> containing 250 word meanings like “compound”, “cow”, “to eat”, “millet”, etc. with data from up to 66 living Central Chadic language varieties provided by linguist Richard Gravina, who undertook a pioneering effort to reconstruct Proto-Central Chadic in his 2014 <a href="https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/access/item%3A2945012/view">PhD dissertation</a>, though using a different methodological approach. Altogether I ended up analysing about 5,500 words from between four and 50 modern languages. </p>
<p>I meticulously analysed each word to delineate its historical development from Proto-Central Chadic to its present-day forms in modern languages, covering a time-depth of potentially thousands of years. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/new-kiswahili-science-fiction-award-charts-a-path-for-african-languages-163876">New Kiswahili science fiction award charts a path for African languages</a>
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<h2>A profound view</h2>
<p>No language develops in a vacuum. Almost all the words I researched changed sounds over time. This would partly have been because of the language’s own rules and regularities in inter-generational language transfer. But sound changes are also influenced by locally occurring new speech habits adopted by following generations of speakers and forming new dialects, or by borrowing words and expressions from neighbouring languages. </p>
<p>Nonetheless, languages also retain features of linguistic heritage, like from the ultimate proto-language; in this case, Proto-Afroasiatic. </p>
<p>Proto-Central-Chadic only knew one true vowel, “a”. It used “y” and “w” to serve, at the same time, as vowels “i” and “u” when in syllable-nucleus position (the centre of the syllable). Take the modern Mandara word, <em>ira</em> for “head”. In Proto-Central-Chadic, it was <em>*ghwna</em>. I was able to deduce this by understanding vowel substitutions and word sound changes.</p>
<p>Consonants changed, too. The word for “sheep” was <em>*tama</em> in Proto-Central-Chadic; the m became w, and suffixes changed over time too, leading to the modern Mandara word for “sheep”, <em>kyawe</em>. </p>
<h2>New light</h2>
<p>I hope this work will be a step towards unearthing some of the area’s currently unwritten history. By comparing sounds and words of modern languages, it is possible to detect population movements and migrations in the past, since people adopt sounds and words from other languages with whom they have been in contact over a certain period of time. Reconstructed vocabulary also sheds light on cultural items and people’s habitats, including the spread of ideas and the importance of certain concepts.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/171414/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>H. Ekkehard Wolff does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Reconstructed vocabulary sheds light on cultural items and people’s habitats, including the spread of ideas and the importance of certain concepts.H. Ekkehard Wolff, Emeritus Professor of African Linguistics, University of LeipzigLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1638762021-07-07T15:04:17Z2021-07-07T15:04:17ZNew Kiswahili science fiction award charts a path for African languages<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/409866/original/file-20210706-21-17nf4h6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The 6th edition of <a href="https://kiswahiliprize.cornell.edu/">The Mabati Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature</a>, suspended last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, is back. Founded in 2014, the prize recognises writing in African languages and encourages translation from, between and into African languages. Kiswahili is widely spoken across the east coast of Africa. This year’s prize also offers a special award designed to promote and popularise a Kiswahili vocabulary for technology and digital rights. We spoke to the prize founders – literary academic Lizzy Attree, also of <a href="http://shortstorydayafrica.org">Short Story Day Africa</a>, and literature professor and celebrated <a href="http://www.mukomawangugi.com/books.html">author</a> Mukoma Wa Ngugi – on the challenges of growing literature in African languages.</em></p>
<h2>What’s the idea behind the special Nyabola prize?</h2>
<p><strong>Lizzy Attree:</strong> The <a href="https://kiswahiliprize.cornell.edu/special-prize-for-2021/">Nyabola prize</a> gives us the opportunity to work in a new area that is really exciting for us. <a href="https://www.nanjalawrites.com">Nanjala Nyabola</a>, the Kenyan writer and activist, approached us with the idea and the funding to target vocabulary for technology and digital rights. This was particularly interesting to us for two reasons. Firstly, we have long wanted to offer a short story prize, but have stuck with longer works because of the opportunity it gives us to focus on <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Swahili-language">Kiswahili</a> literature as a fully mastered form. But we are aware that a short story prize is a good place to start for those who are only beginning to write. Secondly, Kiswahili is often considered to be steeped in archaic, or historically poetic technical words and forms. These must be updated to accommodate the modern language of science and technology. It has been an interesting adventure to find out which words can be adapted or amended to fit with modern digital and technological advancement.</p>
<p><strong>Mukoma Wa Ngugi:</strong> There is also the idea that African languages are social languages, emotive and cannot carry science. Most definitely not true. All languages can convey the most complex ideas but we have to let them. There is something beautiful about African languages carrying science, fictionalised of course, into imagined futures.</p>
<h2>Mukoma, you also write speculative fiction; what is its power?</h2>
<p><strong>Mukoma Wa Ngugi:</strong> At the height of dictatorship in Kenya under president <a href="https://theconversation.com/daniel-arap-moi-the-making-of-a-kenyan-big-man-127177">Daniel arap Moi</a>, when writers and intellectuals were being <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4186808">detained and exiled</a>, and their books <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1991/02/13/in-kenya-animal-farm-corralled/136feeb9-6d5b-421a-a6a2-72072e15e8ff/">banned</a>, it was the genre writers who kept the politics alive. In fact I dedicated my detective novel <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/212059/nairobi-heat-by-mukoma-wa-ngugi/"><em>Nairobi Heat</em></a> to two such Kenyan writers, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/441171.David_G_Maillu">David Mailu</a> and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Meja-Mwangi">Meja Mwangi</a>. We inherited a hierarchy of what counts as serious literature from colonialism, the division between minor and major literatures. It is important for us to blur the lines between literary and genre fiction – they are both doing serious work but in different styles. And the same goes between written literature and orature (spoken literature). Orature is seen lesser-than but, as writers and scholars have <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3820568">argued</a>, orature has its own discipline and aesthetics.</p>
<h2>How has African language publishing changed since the prize began?</h2>
<p><strong>Lizzy Attree:</strong> Sadly I don’t think African language publishing has advanced very much in the last seven years or that there are enough academic studies focusing on this area. The demise of the <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/award/show/5194-noma-award-for-publishing-in-africa">Noma Award</a> for Publishing in Africa was part of the decline, or indicative of it. However, book festivals are <a href="https://qz.com/africa/1684458/the-rise-of-literary-festivals-in-african-cities-lagos-hargeysa/">growing</a>, and we hope that in time this will lead to more awards and more publishing in African languages. Mukoma’s father, <a href="https://theconversation.com/tipped-to-win-nobel-literature-prize-kenyas-ngugi-misses-out-again-67009">Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o</a>, is a pioneer in this area, and it’s been wonderful to see his novel shortlisted for the International Booker Prize recently. Although there are many other good examples of where changes are happening, considering the size of the continent and the number of languages, there is still a huge gap.</p>
<p><strong>Mukoma Wa Ngugi:</strong> <a href="https://jaladaafrica.org/">Jalada Journal</a> is a good example of how attitudes to writing in African languages have changed for the better. In 2015 Jalada took a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/29/jalada-africa-short-story-ngugi-wa-thiongo-translated-over-30-languages-publication">short story</a> written by Ngugi in Gikuyu and self-translated into English and had it translated to close to 100 languages. This made it the most translated African short story. But the genius of their initiative was that most of the translations were between African languages. The Jalada example is important for two reasons – it shows that innovation can happen when African languages talk to each other. And that for the younger writers, African languages do not carry the same sense of inferiority – English is just another language. All in all I don’t think the Nyabola prize, for example, would have been possible 10 years ago. A lot has changed where it matters the most; the ideology around African languages is shifting.</p>
<h2>Do awards work and why are there so few major literary prizes in Africa?</h2>
<p><strong>Lizzy Attree:</strong> I think awards certainly work in raising the profile of writers and their work, but it is difficult to find funding for these kinds of projects.</p>
<p><strong>Mukoma Wa Ngugi:</strong> It is all about setting up a viable and thriving literary ecosystem for writing in African languages. Literary agents, publishers, readership, critics, literary prizes and so on. Prizes are just one aspect. We realised that from the onset so our winners, in addition to the monetary awards, have also been published by <a href="https://mkukinanyota.com">Mkuki na Nyota Press</a> in Tanzania. We have been trying to get them translated into English but as Lizzy points out, funding is a huge problem. We were lucky to partner with Mabati Rolling Mills and the Safal Group. We have a de facto slogan: African philanthropy for African cultural development. But all the living parts of the African literary ecosystem have to be thriving. In this, we all have work to do.</p>
<h2>Why is African language literature so important?</h2>
<p><strong>Lizzy Attree:</strong> It’s been clearly demonstrated that learning in one’s mother tongue brings huge advantages to students. And where else must we find ourselves reflected if not in our own literature, in our own languages?</p>
<p><strong>Mukoma Wa Ngugi:</strong> You can think of language as the sum total of a people’s history and knowledge. We store history and knowledge in language. To speak only English is to be alienated from your past, present and future. It is a pain we should all feel deeply. In my <a href="https://www.press.umich.edu/9724578/rise_of_the_african_novel">book</a>, <em>The Rise of the African Novel: Language, Identity and Ownership</em>, I give the example of how early writing in South African languages remains outside our literary tradition. I talk about how that leads to truncated imaginations. We write within literary traditions, but what happens to your imagination when you cannot access your literary tradition?</p>
<p><em>The shortlist will be announced in October/November 2021, with the winners announced in Dar es Salaam in December 2021.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/163876/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>There is something beautiful about African languages carrying science, fictionalised of course, into imagined futures.Mukoma Wa Ngugi, Associate Professor of literatures in English, Cornell UniversityLizzy Attree, Adjunct Professor, Richmond American International UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1615032021-06-03T15:04:18Z2021-06-03T15:04:18ZHow young Santomean immigrants in Portugal deal with identity and language<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403590/original/file-20210531-27-1xyyz7e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Street mural by Nomen in Quinta do Mocho, Lisbon, to highlight immigrant experiences in Portugal.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA/AFP via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>‘My teacher always tells me, “Ah Clara, Clara, Claaaara, you have to speak like <em>this</em>!"’</p>
<p>Clara is a young Santomean woman who immigrated to Portugal to pursue her senior high school education. She grew up in <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Sao-Tome-and-Principe">São Tomé and Príncipe</a>, a group of islands in the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa. She was a key participant in my <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15348458.2021.1878359">study</a> on this immigrant experience.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1763/the-portuguese-colonization-of-sao-tome-and-princi/">Colonised</a> by the Portuguese in the 1490s, the islands <a href="https://oxfordre.com/africanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277734-e-183">became independent</a> in 1975. The new republic adopted Portuguese as its sole official language. </p>
<p>Today, Portuguese is the language spoken by over 98% of the Santomean population. The remainder are mostly elders who speak one of four creole languages. In post-colonial times, Portuguese universities have continued to receive students from the Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa.</p>
<p>Clara speaks Portuguese as her first and only language. But, she says, her teachers often comment on the way she speaks it. European Portuguese and Santomean Portuguese are very similar. They could be likened to British and American English. For example, there are some differences in vocabulary, pronunciation and sentence structure. </p>
<p>The fact that Clara’s Portuguese teacher picks her out about her pronunciation is not surprising. It reflects the idea that one variety of language is superior to others. This has implications for people’s identify and sense of self.</p>
<p>In my <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15348458.2021.1878359">study</a> I found that a crucial issue for Santomean students who immigrate to Portugal is that identifying as both Portuguese native speakers and as Black Africans means negotiating two potentially conflicting identities – in a place where most native speakers are white. This means they also have to adapt to deal with racism. </p>
<h2>Forming identities</h2>
<p>As a sociolinguist, my <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15348458.2021.1878359">research</a> set out to explore the use of Santomean Portuguese among young immigrants in Portugal and how this is linked with their identity. </p>
<p>How do Santomeans in Portugal negotiate being both native speakers of Portuguese and Black Africans? Answering this question is key to understanding the role that language plays in racial boundary-making and identity processes.</p>
<p>To address the question, I conducted in-depth interviews with 18 Santomean immigrant youth (7 women and 11 men) in two towns in Central Portugal. Clara was one of them. </p>
<p>Identity is created at multiple levels at the same time. It becomes meaningful only when we engage in processes called alignment (Do I identify with this person?) and authentication (Is this real and genuine?). For example, think about your school or peer group experience and the different cliques that exist – the nerds, the popular kids, the jocks, the loners. All acquire meaning in relation to the other groups. </p>
<p>So how do Santomeans in Portugal self-identify? My research showed that young Santomeans identified on three levels: their language use and practices, racial categorisation, and the PALOP social category. </p>
<p>"PALOP” stands for <em>Países Africanos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa</em>, which means Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa. It refers to the six African countries in which Portuguese is an official language – Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Equatorial Guinea. Santomeans use this term to describe people from these countries.</p>
<p>I examined each level of identity formation. </p>
<h2>Language use and practices</h2>
<p>One could say that Santomeans linguistically align with Portuguese nationals since they speak the same language. But from a Portuguese perspective, the variety of Portuguese spoken by the African students is problematic. For the Santomeans a poor command of the language is often considered to be one of the main elements that hinders their success at school. Not being understood by the Portuguese is detrimental to Santomeans’ integration. </p>
<p>But many Santomeans found strategies to be understood by the Portuguese. The most common is imitation, highlighted by one of the participants in the study: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have to speak in a way that they… like, try to imitate them so they can understand us.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But even so, Santomeans said they were frequently reminded that they spoke differently based on three main characteristics: slang words, speech rate and a different pronunciation of the r-sounds. </p>
<p>Based on these elements, Santomeans did not feel that they aligned with Portuguese nationals even though they spoke the same language.</p>
<h2>Racial categorisation</h2>
<p>When it comes to racial categorisation, Santomeans did not align with the Portuguese either, but with other African students.</p>
<p>For Santomeans, the racial conversations and practices in Portugal differed from their experiences back home. The focus in São Tomé was not on the common Black/white distinction, but rather on distinctions among local ethnolinguistic groups (groups unified by both a common ethnicity and language). All these groups identified as Black. </p>
<p>A few of the Santomean participants expressed how strange and uncomfortable it was for them to be part of a visible minority in Portugal. Santomeans in Portugal learnt that they were seen as Black, and what this meant in a dominantly white society. This process was mainly derogatory, as there are few benefits of being Black in Portugal.</p>
<h2>Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa</h2>
<p>Finally, there was the positioning of identity through the social category of belonging to an African Portuguese-speaking country. Here the affiliation was not as clear-cut. </p>
<p>Sometimes, Santomeans included themselves in the category and sometimes they didn’t. Santomeans often referred to <em>Países Africanos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa</em> students as being Portuguese-speaking Africans who also have a home language other than Portuguese. The Santomeans I interviewed lived together with Guineans and Cabo Verdeans, most of whom spoke a <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/creole-languages">creole</a> as their first language. </p>
<p>In contrast, most young Santomeans typically didn’t have a common language other than Portuguese. As such, Santomeans didn’t always align with other members of the category of belonging to an African Portuguese-speaking country in relation to language use.</p>
<h2>Why this matters</h2>
<p>These findings reflect two main divisions: authentic versus inauthentic speakers of Portuguese; and white versus Black individuals. </p>
<p>What does this mean and why does it matter? </p>
<p>Beliefs, likely perpetuated since colonial times, indicate that “authentic” speakers of Portuguese are white individuals, and “inauthentic” speakers of Portuguese are Black individuals. But Santomeans are Black individuals and speak Portuguese as their first (and often only) language. Therefore, young immigrant Santomeans in Portugal have to adapt to align with different categories according to their needs. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-dimensions-of-human-inequality-affect-who-and-what-we-are-137296">How the dimensions of human inequality affect who and what we are</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>My findings served to highlight the importance of race in the process of identity formation among these Santomeans. It creates challenges which can result in lower achievement in school and lower chances of good employment. Santomeans in Portugal learn that they are being seen as Black, and discover what this means in a dominantly white society.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/161503/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marie-Eve Bouchard received funding from the Swedish Wenner-Gren Foundations and the Department of Romance Studies and Classics at Stockholm University. </span></em></p>Students from São Tomé and Príncipe must negotiate being both native speakers of Portuguese and Black Africans. And how they speak Portuguese is perceived as an issue.Marie-Eve Bouchard, Assistant professor, University of British ColumbiaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1545222021-02-18T13:53:50Z2021-02-18T13:53:50ZReaching African audiences in their mother tongue: one film’s ongoing legacy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/384544/original/file-20210216-13-502ep1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C2875%2C1616&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Copyright Colours of the Alphabet</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Over <a href="https://alp.fas.harvard.edu/introduction-african-languages">2,000 languages</a> are spoken in Africa, with multilingualism a common feature of everyday life. Across the continent, though, millions of school pupils aren’t taught in their mother tongue. </p>
<p>Zambia, for instance, is a country with a <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264824740_One_Zambia_One_Nation_Many_Languages">huge range</a> of languages but just one official language: English. Intrigued by the disconnect between the languages spoken at home by children in Zambia and the English of their education, <a href="https://www.ncl.ac.uk/sacs/staff/profile/alastaircole.html">Alastair Cole</a>, a lecturer in film practice at Newcastle University, and I set out to make a documentary about the linguistic experience of children in the classroom.</p>
<p>We filmed over nine months, following three children as they first discovered that the language they spoke at home would not be the language of their education. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Film poster showing line of children in front of a blackboard." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/384539/original/file-20210216-17-zjr3kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/384539/original/file-20210216-17-zjr3kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/384539/original/file-20210216-17-zjr3kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/384539/original/file-20210216-17-zjr3kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/384539/original/file-20210216-17-zjr3kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/384539/original/file-20210216-17-zjr3kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/384539/original/file-20210216-17-zjr3kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Colours of the Alphabet film poster.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Copyright: Colours of the Alphabet</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Our film, <a href="https://coloursofthealphabet.com/about-the-film">Colours of the Alphabet</a>, intended to convey the children’s <a href="http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2019/09/19/language-lessons/">multilingualism</a> by using multicoloured English subtitles for each language spoken in the classroom. We used orange for Soli, green for Nyanja, pink for Bemba and white for English. This meant that viewers were able to recognise that at any one moment within a classroom, pupils were speaking several languages in an attempt to understand the official one. </p>
<p>However, this approach only worked for an English reading and speaking audience – perpetuating the dominance of English as a global language. We needed to make the film available in a way that reflected the linguistic diversity that we <a href="https://coloursofthealphabet.com/impact-project/">sought to champion</a>. </p>
<h2>New networks</h2>
<p>Making the film accessible to audiences across Africa was a task too big for just two academics. We began to build partnerships. First, we secured distribution with a not-for-profit distribution and streaming network called <a href="https://afridocs.net/about/">Afridocs</a>. Afridocs broadcasts the best African and international documentaries for free to 49 countries in Africa by satellite and online. </p>
<p>We then partnered with <a href="https://amara.org/en/about-amara/">Amara</a>, a free-to-use global subtitling software platform. Together with the UK-based <a href="https://screenlanguage.co.uk/">Screen Language</a> services and the <a href="https://www.iti.org.uk/">Institute of Translation and Interpreting</a>, we created an online workshop to teach translation and subtitling. The process of translation is a highly skilled activity, and our workshops, delivered over two months, included video lessons as well as interactive exercises and feedback sessions with the course leader. </p>
<p>Working with our Africa-based collaborator, Gertrude Kitongo, we set out to recruit mother tongue speakers of 27 diverse indigenous languages in Africa. These ranged from Swahili, spoken by about 100 million people in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan, to the minority tongue of Soli, which, in 1989, was estimated to have around <a href="http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2019/09/19/language-lessons/">54,000 speakers</a> in Zambia.</p>
<p>We were overwhelmed by the response and eventually managed to whittle down the applications to 54 people who took part in the subtitling workshop, and who we paid to translate and subtitle the film. </p>
<p>For one of our subtitlers, Annaliisa Amutenya from Namibia, it was the first time she had ever seen a documentary subtitled into her mother tongue, Oshiwambo. Another, Brighton Lubasi from Zambia, spoke of his pride at having a part in creating a visible affirmation of the literary, not just spoken, richness of the Lozi and Nyanja languages. </p>
<p>Our next step was to collaborate with Unesco to coordinate the first multilingual, continent-wide digital release of a documentary. This took place on February 21 2018, <a href="https://en.unesco.org/commemorations/motherlanguageday">International Mother Language Day</a>. We then made the film freely available across Africa in 30 languages – 27 African languages, plus English, French and Portuguese – thanks to funding from the <a href="https://esrc.ukri.org/">Economic and Social Research Council</a>.</p>
<p>Alongside the online film release, we launched a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ColoursOfTheAlphabetFilm/">campaign on Facebook</a>: #MyTongueMyStory. This encouraged members of the public to write about their experience of a monolinguistic education system in their own language. We kicked off the campaign with personal stories from the film’s translators. </p>
<p>Ultimately, the multilingual film content on the Afridocs platform reached over 200,000 people. The subtitling team now offer their services as the <a href="https://subtitlingafrica.org/about">African Film Translation Network</a>.</p>
<p>This year, we will take our project one step further, including even more languages. On International Mother Language Day, at the request of the UN, the film will be <a href="https://www.ungeneva.org/en/IMLD2021">freely available in 40 languages</a> to a global audience.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/154522/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nick Higgins and Alastair Cole received funding from the ESRC - this is mentioned in the article.
</span></em></p>The documentary resulted in the creation of an active translation network.Nick Higgins, Chair of Screen Practice, Director of the UWS Creative Media Academy, University of the West of ScotlandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1414502020-10-18T08:58:57Z2020-10-18T08:58:57ZSouth Africa needs a fresh national imagination: here are some ideas<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/358595/original/file-20200917-18-1b9oilw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A mural in Maboneng, Johannesburg.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kim Ludbrook/EPA-EFE</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Imagine that during the <a href="https://theconversation.com/africa/covid-19">COVID-19</a> lockdown South Africans woke up one morning to TV shows, radio broadcasts and pamphlets announcing a declaration by “white” South Africans: “WE ARE NO LONGER WHITE!” </p>
<p>In their statement they explain why.</p>
<p>They have come to a realisation that South Africa was the only real home they ever had. That they now felt at home in a country and continent where over a billion people have had to carry the devastatingly false label “black”. All because technologically advanced European nations from the 15th century onwards began to violently acquire, for their exclusive benefit, countries all over the world and the people who lived and worked on their lands. Forthwith, such conquered people existed for Europe.</p>
<p>Buoyed by successful seasons of repeated conquests around the world, Europeans – and where they were in the Americas – finally chose to embody the entire value of their humanity in a colour: “white”. “White” South Africans have been among the vital parts of this violent history.</p>
<p>“No more!” they had now declared. “We are signing out of ‘global whiteness’ and throwing out a false label that never had any human substance to it!”</p>
<p>Unlikely as such a miraculous event might be, it could be a useful reflective metaphor for giving expression to a significant unfolding shift in South African “white” sentiment towards the contemporary human environment in the country. Two historic events may be deemed to have contributed significantly towards signs of what looks like a far more committed unfolding.</p>
<h2>Two historic events</h2>
<p>The first event is one that many South Africans may have forgotten: that 68.73% of “white” South Africans voted in the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/1992/mar/18/southafrica.davidberesford">1992 referendum</a> to give President FW de Klerk a mandate to negotiate with Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress for a new constitutional democracy. In this way they signalled a willingness to contribute to making possible a shared future with all South Africans.</p>
<p>The second one was an unexpected trigger for “white” South Africans to wade into the river of history and cross it as the flood levels of water were rising at the ford. The COVID-19 pandemic has seized the South African collective mind and unleashed a wave of bonding and sentiments of <a href="https://theconversation.com/can-the-philosophy-of-ubuntu-help-provide-a-way-to-face-health-crises-135997">fellow-feeling</a> in the face of the prospect of random collective dying.</p>
<p>If the referendum signal took more than 20 years flashing with urgency, COVID-19 has struck like lightning with the full force of a challenge up to now embraced with some reluctance. The optimism that combined a referendum and a negotiated political settlement now demands to be lived by all South Africans.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/358596/original/file-20200917-18-2e0v42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man walks past a street art mural depicting a blonde-haired woman lying calmly on her back underwater." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/358596/original/file-20200917-18-2e0v42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/358596/original/file-20200917-18-2e0v42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358596/original/file-20200917-18-2e0v42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358596/original/file-20200917-18-2e0v42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358596/original/file-20200917-18-2e0v42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358596/original/file-20200917-18-2e0v42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/358596/original/file-20200917-18-2e0v42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A mural in Westdene, Johannesburg, by Norm Abartig and Nicholas Kerr.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kim Ludbrook/EPA-EFE</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Realignments that are needed</h2>
<p>If the South African <a href="https://www.gov.za/documents/constitution-republic-south-africa-1996">constitution</a> is the supreme law of the land, then there has to be a new covenant to achieve the intended goal of <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-dimensions-of-human-inequality-affect-who-and-what-we-are-137296">equality</a> as a leveller among all citizens. The legacy of race-driven loyalties and solidarities must be pushed out of the way of human equality, fairness, and justice. </p>
<p>The constitution is as a much a life-giving leveller of human beings as the deadly, invisible virus is a leveller in the destruction of human life.</p>
<p>South Africa seems poised to witness major realignments in human congregations. These could also result in realignments in loyalties and solidarities that should now coagulate around vital community interests at the local, regional and national levels. </p>
<p>There are constitutional levers to make such social coagulations desirable, possible and even sustainable.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Human settlements across the land must meet the basic minimum standards. These would ensure healthy living, education, cultural expression, security of family and person and safety in spaces of human interaction.</p></li>
<li><p>All citizens should be required to have proficiency in at least four South African languages. This would enable them to travel easily across ethnic, class, gender, historical, political, social and geographical boundaries. There is much to learn here from the history of South African township settlements about human interactions that have enabled complex social crossings.</p></li>
<li><p>The collective attitude towards the national economy requires a drastic change in attitude. The entire South African population must share the economic space as equals in opportunity and access to enabling knowledge, competencies and skills and in the general sense of collaborative contribution. The South African economy must be seen to be a site of creative, generative and collective endeavours that support and sustain the dignity of all.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>This view of economic and social possibility ought to indicate why the current configuration of formal politics in South Africa, and nature of the economy it supports, have run their course. Political aggregations are still locked in habitual loyalties that routinely reproduce the past, in thought and actions, despite repeated declaration to move away from it.</p>
<p>Broadly the legacies of political and business mobilisations around Afrikaner, English, Zulu, and the multi-ethnic, multi-class African National Congress-Labour-South African Communist Party alliance have all to varying degrees lost the social trust they once enjoyed. They have also lost the competence to midwife a new nation out of the formative experiences of the last 25 years.</p>
<p>If the greatest challenges of the first quarter century of South Africa’s constitutional democracy were to redesign the economy and the spatial urban and rural landscapes across the land to raise the living standards of the vast majority of South Africans, results have been mixed and rather confused. South Africa is in dire need of a fresh national imagination.</p>
<h2>The end of colour coding</h2>
<p>To stimulate imaginations still steeped in racial thinking it might be helpful to proceed from the assumption that from the perspective of “blacks” the residual norms of “whiteness” in general now have a significantly diminished attractiveness. An emergent “black” norm is taking root. It may still lack firm contours but does have a reality that gives far more potent resonance to the phenomenon of “black consciousness” because the notion now has the makings of a state to give concrete reality to it. </p>
<p>Being “black” is now the ambient reality of an overwhelming human presence in the land of all those that the European “whites” from the end of the 15th century onwards had conquered. That reality is far more grounded now and existentially more pervasive, well beyond declarations of “black” pride in the 1960s and 1970s.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-young-people-have-to-say-about-race-and-inequality-in-south-africa-141451">What young people have to say about race and inequality in South Africa</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Some five centuries later, the human reality of all those once conquered and dominated by those who invented “whiteness” and “blackness” as human attributes is re-asserting its presence with ever increasing influence and confidence. In the current context “whiteness” in South Africa will end as “whites” increasingly discover its irrelevance and emptiness as a value system underpinning a state of being that has embodied their humanity over five centuries. It seems destined to end on its own volition.</p>
<p>By the same token “blackness”, having no need to declare “WE ARE NO LONGER BLACK”, will have evolved politically, socially and culturally. From having carried a label of debasement it will have moved towards an inclusive and cosmopolitan demographic norm that is constitutionally non-sexist, non-racial and non-tribal in its humanist orientation. </p>
<p>No longer subject to any <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-need-to-unpack-the-word-race-and-find-new-language-138379">colour coding</a>, it will exert a presence with a normative impact that should stand as the source of much of the formative influences that will shape South Africa in the foreseeable future. </p>
<p>South African “whites” having discarded their “whiteness”, perhaps for real, will be a part of a new sense of being human here, in everyone’s country.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/338540/original/file-20200529-96699-18rjzg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/338540/original/file-20200529-96699-18rjzg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/338540/original/file-20200529-96699-18rjzg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=838&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338540/original/file-20200529-96699-18rjzg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=838&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338540/original/file-20200529-96699-18rjzg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=838&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338540/original/file-20200529-96699-18rjzg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1053&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338540/original/file-20200529-96699-18rjzg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1053&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338540/original/file-20200529-96699-18rjzg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1053&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>This article is part of a <a href="https://theconversation.com/africa/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=RaceSeries&sort=relevancy&language=en&date=all&date_from=&date_to=">series</a>. Other authors include Barney Pityana, Göran Therborn, Nina Jablonski, George Chaplin, Kira Erwin and Kathryn Pillay.</em> </p>
<p><em>The three edited volumes of essays published by African Sun Media in 2018 (<a href="https://stias.ac.za/ideas/publications/volume-11-the-effects-of-race/">The Effects of Race</a>, edited by Nina G. Jablonski and Gerhard Maré), 2019 (<a href="https://stias.ac.za/ideas/publications/stias-series-volume-13-race-in-education/">Race in Education</a>, edited by Gerhard Maré), and 2020 (<a href="https://stias.ac.za/ideas/publications/stias-series-volume-15-persistence-of-race/">Persistence of Race</a>, edited by Nina G. Jablonski) contain the complete representation of the project’s scholarship.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/141450/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Njabulo S. Ndebele is affiliated with the University of Cape Town, University of Johannesburg, University of Pretoria, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, Nelson Mandela Foundation, Mandela Rhodes Foundation, Allan Gray Orbis Foundation.</span></em></p>A realignment is needed as the current systems have lost the competence to midwife a new nation out of the formative experiences of the last 25 years.Njabulo S. Ndebele, Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, Stellenbosch UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1400752020-07-05T08:41:34Z2020-07-05T08:41:34ZSouth African cops need linguistic training – urgently<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344733/original/file-20200630-103668-111p1ay.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Police officers are expected to take statements without any real training in the process.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Roger Sedres/Shutterstock.com/For editorial use only</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>If you have been the victim of a crime, one of the first interactions you’ll have with police is when an officer takes your sworn statement. Language is key to this process: you tell an officer your story, and they record it, usually writing it by hand. </p>
<p>But this becomes complicated in any multilingual society. South Africa, for instance, has 11 official languages and many other spoken languages. This often throws up a language barrier between the officer taking the statement and the victim sharing their story. </p>
<p>And it gets even more complex because despite the country’s diversity of languages, <a href="http://vital.seals.ac.za:8080/vital/access/manager/Repository/vital:37968?site_name=GLobalView">English is the sole official language of record</a>. All sworn statements are to be recorded in English. That means the onus is on the police officer to be as proficient in reading, writing and speaking English as a mother tongue speaker of the language. This, in a country where English is only <a href="http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0318/P03182018.pdf">the sixth most commonly spoken</a> home language. </p>
<p>That makes it highly unlikely that either the officer taking the statement or the victim giving it speak English fluently.</p>
<p>Most South African police officers receive no language or literacy courses before qualifying. In fact, police in the country need only fulfil the requirements of <a href="http://digitalknowledge.cput.ac.za/handle/11189/6297">six months’ worth of basic training</a> – the major elements of which are a driver’s licence and a matriculation certificate that attests to the completion of schooling. There is no need for any post school qualification. </p>
<p>Police officers are also not, and are not expected to be, sworn translators or interpreters. This has serious implications for justice. In South African law, <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13556509.2014.934002">a statement</a> takes precedence over any oral narrative when evidence is led in court. </p>
<p>An officer may misunderstand elements of the victim’s statement, badly paraphrase an accused person’s account of events, or choose to exclude information because they are not properly taught to listen to and sort it. But this flawed written statement will contradict the accused or a victim’s oral testimony, bringing the facts of the case and a witness’s credibility into question, even when an interpreter is present at trial.</p>
<p>The system needs an overhaul. Linguistic training for police officers, as well as proper resources for interpretation services, must be prioritised and implemented.</p>
<h2>A complex process</h2>
<p>Linguistically the process of taking a sworn statement is quite complex. It combines translation, where more than one language is spoken, with retelling and reconstruction. The police officer must synthesise everything he’s being told to ensure the facts are accurately recorded, a process called subjective synthesis. By doing all of this, the police officer is acting as an <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13556509.2014.934002">transpreter</a>: simultaneously a translator of written text and an interpreter of oral communication.</p>
<p>Police officers can hardly be blamed for not being trained in this process. It’s the system that enables the lack of training. The South African Police Services’ <a href="https://www.polity.org.za/article/use-of-official-languages-act-language-policy-south-african-police-service-draft-gazette-notice-r994-2015-11-10">draft language policy</a> makes no mention of properly training officers. Instead, it states that a trained interpreter may be called to a station to assist if it’s practical and money is available.</p>
<p>In reality, this rarely happens. Police officers are largely left to their own devices, acting as transpreters without training. This has real life consequences, as seen in the <a href="https://www.news24.com/news24/southafrica/news/omotoso-trial-this-is-about-justice-cheryl-zondi-prepared-to-testify-over-and-over-again-20190319">high profile</a> rape and human trafficking trial of Eastern Cape pastor Timothy Omotoso. In the first trial (from which the judge eventually recused himself; a second trial has not yet started), one of Omotoso’s accusers, Cheryl Zondi, was continuously asked during cross-examination why her oral evidence did not correlate with her written statement. Zondi suggested that these questions should be directed to the police, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1LvzZTshMh4">saying</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Why don’t you ask the police officer why that was recorded as such in the statement – I didn’t say that.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The current model of translation or retelling and rewriting of pre-statements into actual statements has a <a href="http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1021-545X2015000200010">long history in the South African criminal justice system</a>. Historically, it benefited English and Afrikaans speakers and put African language speakers at a real disadvantage. </p>
<p>Today, it is mostly English speakers who benefit. In the current system English acts to silence speakers who are not conversant in or comfortable enough to speak the <em>de facto</em> language of the criminal justice system. Instead, the (usually untrained) transpreter’s “voice” dominates. </p>
<h2>Towards change</h2>
<p>So, what can be done to begin shifting the system? Police statement taking is problematic in many multilingual legal systems. </p>
<p>In some countries, like Australia, forensic linguists have <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230502932_1">been employed</a> to work alongside the police, helping officers to capture statements and training them on best practice models. </p>
<p>Elsewhere – <a href="http://vital.seals.ac.za:8080/vital/access/manager/Repository/vital:37968?site_name=GlobalView&query=zakeera+docrat+&sort=ss_dateNormalized+desc%2Csort_ss_title+asc&queryType=vitalDismax">for instance</a> in Belgium and the Canadian province of New Brunswick, police officers are trained bilingually. They are then deployed to areas based on their linguistic competencies. Not only are statements captured in two languages: judicial officers must be fluent in those languages, too. So these languages are prioritised at each step of the justice process.</p>
<p>Ideally, South Africa should begin by developing police officers’ current language skills in their mother tongues. Statements can be captured digitally in these languages, then translated into English for trial. This will ensure that the initial statements capture the facts accurately without being lost in translation. Contemporary computer technologies should be considered
when facilitating the translation of sworn statements.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/140075/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Zakeera Docrat receives funding from the National Research Foundation (NRF).</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Russell H. Kaschula receives funding from the National Research Foundation (NRF).</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Monwabisi K Ralarala does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Police officers are also not, and are not expected to be, sworn translators or interpreters. This has serious implications for justice.Zakeera Docrat, Postdoctoral research fellow (Forensic Linguistics/ Language and Law), Rhodes UniversityMonwabisi K Ralarala, Dean: Faculty of Arts, University of the Western CapeRussell H. Kaschula, Professor of African Language Studies, Rhodes UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1375262020-06-02T10:07:04Z2020-06-02T10:07:04ZIntegrating languages should form part of South Africa’s xenophobia solutions<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334331/original/file-20200512-175229-j2ys32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Integrating African languages could help deal with some xenophobia in South Africa.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">MICHELE SPATARI/AFP via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the last decade or so, xenophobic attacks have made headlines a number of times in South Africa. The <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/13/south-africa-punish-xenophobic-violence">most recent wave</a> occurred in August and September 2019, targeting migrants from other African countries in and around Johannesburg. </p>
<p>The government does not gather any data regarding xenophobic attacks. Organisations such as <a href="http://www.xenowatch.ac.za/about-xenowatch/">Xenowatch</a> and the <a href="https://www.unhcr.org/55cb153f9.pdf">UN Refugee Agency</a> bridge that gap. An <a href="http://www.xenowatch.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Xenophobic-Violence-in-South-Africa-1994-2018_An-Overview.pdf">overview report</a> by Xenowatch recorded 529 xenophobic incidents that led to 309 deaths; 901 physical assaults and 2 193 looted shops between 1994 and 2018. More than 100 000 people were displaced in this period. Between January and September 2019 <a href="http://www.xenowatch.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Factsheet-1-Xenohopbic-violence-incidents-in-SA_-Jan-Sept-2019.pdf">Xenowatch</a> “recorded 68 incidents of xenophobic violence, which have resulted in 18 deaths, at least 43 physical assaults, 1449 displaced people and an estimation of at least 127 plus shops looted”. </p>
<p>There are many complex reasons for xenophobia in South Africa. These include <a href="https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1988&context=gc_etds">racial and linguistic diversity, low education levels and lack of service delivery</a>. Sometimes <a href="https://www.accord.org.za/ajcr-issues/linking-governance-and-xenophobic-violence-in-contemporary-south-africa/">local governance</a> is seen to sanction xenophobic attacks or not provide positive leadership. <a href="https://www.accord.org.za/ajcr-issues/linking-governance-and-xenophobic-violence-in-contemporary-south-africa/">Impunity</a> is another issue.</p>
<p>One aspect that has not been explored is the role that language might play in xenophobia. </p>
<p>We suggest that looking at xenophobia from a sociolinguistic angle could contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon, and longer-term solutions. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-south-africa-is-denying-refugees-their-rights-what-needs-to-change-135692">How South Africa is denying refugees their rights: what needs to change</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Three questions should guide this discussion. Firstly, what does the South African government do to integrate immigrants on a linguistic level? Secondly, are immigrants marginalised because of their linguistic backgrounds? Finally, how could linguistic interventions contribute to peace building?</p>
<p>It might be useful here to look at the work done by other countries or regions like the <a href="https://www.coe.int/en/web/lang-migrants">European Union</a>. Germany, for example, makes it compulsory for migrants to pass a German language test to encourage social integration and social cohesion. But South Africa cannot merely copy these examples: something is needed that will work for the country’s multilingual landscape and against the backdrop of its particular issues. </p>
<p>This isn’t to suggest that merely tackling linguistic issues will somehow eradicate the complex social phenomenon of xenophobia. But it is an important element that should be considered. </p>
<h2>Integration</h2>
<p>South Africa is a linguistically diverse country, with <a href="https://www.justice.gov.za/legislation/constitution/chp01.html">11 official languages</a>. United Nations <a href="https://publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/wmr_2020.pdf">statistics</a> put the population of international migrants – most of them from other African countries –at around 4 million. Most, <a href="https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/data/estimates2/data/UN_MigrantStockByOriginAndDestination_2019.xlsx">according to</a> the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs, come from Mozambique, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Namibia and the United Kingdom. </p>
<p>There are no statistics available on what languages these migrants speak. It has been shown by <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02572117.2015.1112997">scholars</a> that migrants tend to use ‘destination languages’ once they arrive in South Africa. But this isn’t an organised or structured process; it’s done by individuals on an ad hoc basis.</p>
<p>South Africa’s <a href="https://www.justice.gov.za/docs/other-docs/nap.html">Department of Justice and Constitutional Development</a> has created a <a href="https://www.justice.gov.za/docs/other-docs/NAP/NAP-20190313.pdf">National Action Plan</a> to combat “racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance”, as well as an <a href="https://www.justice.gov.za/docs/other-docs/NAP/NAP-20190313-ImplementationPlan.pdf">implementation plan</a>.</p>
<p>The action plan asserts that people may not be discriminated against based on language. But, there is only one reference to language in the implementation plan: to </p>
<blockquote>
<p>[p]romote and disseminate accessible human rights information and other materials in a simplified form in national and local languages, safeguarding the rights to equality and non-discrimination. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This focus on national and local languages excludes immigrants from elsewhere in Africa. It means they don’t know their language rights. The plan also doesn’t explore ways in which immigrants can be integrated on a linguistic level. Nor do any linguistic plans exist anywhere else in the public domain. </p>
<h2>Marginalised languages</h2>
<p>The second question is whether immigrants are marginalised because of their linguistic backgrounds.</p>
<p>Research has shown that African immigrants in South Africa refrain from speaking their own languages and try to speak local languages to blend in. In <a href="https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/191c/c8c37523f54ba4b2d23222f243d7bdb35397.pdf">one study</a>, African international students at a Cape Town university said they’d learned basic isiXhosa and Afrikaans to protect themselves.</p>
<p>Immigrants have <a href="https://ssrn.com/abstract=1671003">told researchers</a> they are “victims of stereotypes, prejudices, intolerance and discrimination”. In <a href="http://schools.aucegypt.edu/GAPP/cmrs/Documents/Philip%20Culbertson_Thesis.pdf">a study</a> that focused on Zimbabwean immigrants’ experiences, participants said they’d been marginalised or even attacked by South Africans who accused them of not being able to speak a local indigenous language.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/university-education-in-refugee-camps-must-meet-refugee-needs-137796">University education in refugee camps must meet refugee needs</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>There is clearly a need to destigmatise “foreign” African languages and to give African immigrants safe environments to learn South African languages. This brings us to the last question: how could linguistic interventions in an integration programme contribute to peace building?</p>
<h2>Peace building</h2>
<p>Languages alone will not solve the problem of xenophobia. But they are definitely a part of the solution. As UNESCO <a href="https://en.iyil2019.org">has said</a>, referring to the International Year of Indigenous Languages:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[i]ndigenous languages matter for development, peace building and reconciliation.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A linguistic intervention in South Africa could entail the following:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Educating people about their linguistic and other human rights and obligations in languages that they understand.</p></li>
<li><p>Ensuring that immigrants have safe access to language courses so that they can learn the regional lingua francas (isiXhosa, Setswana, Afrikaans, and so on). English alone will not suffice. Regional lingua francas will let them integrate faster as they might be regarded as “one of us”. This will be a good opportunity for the South African government to develop a truly multilingual society and ensure social cohesion.</p></li>
<li><p>South African officials working with immigrants should be trained to understand and appreciate linguistic and cultural differences. Basic language courses in other African languages might make a big difference.</p></li>
<li><p>South Africans should be made aware of their own prejudices and unfair stereotyping when it comes to languages. Language courses in foreign African languages could be helpful in this regard.</p></li>
</ul><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/137526/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Russell H. Kaschula receives funding from the National Research Foundation (NRF).</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Zakeera Docrat receives funding from the National Research Foundation (NRF). </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Karien Brits does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Research has shown that African immigrants in South Africa refrain from speaking their own languages and try to speak local languages to blend in.Karien Brits, Part-time lecturer, University of JohannesburgRussell H. Kaschula, Professor of African Language Studies, Rhodes UniversityZakeera Docrat, Postdoctoral research fellow (Forensic Linguistics/ Language and Law), Rhodes UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1220872019-09-08T08:11:31Z2019-09-08T08:11:31ZSouth African teachers switch languages in class: why policy should follow<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/289642/original/file-20190827-184202-1mhfdjq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Children benefit enormously from being taught in their own languages.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">JLWarehouse/Shutterstock/Editorial use only</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>If you step into a classroom in South Africa’s Limpopo province during a lesson, you’re very likely to hear the teacher speaking more than one language. She might begin a sentence in English, and then switch to Sepedi – the African language most commonly spoken as a mother tongue in the province.</p>
<p>This is a practice known as code switching or <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07908318.2010.515993">code mixing</a>, which can form part of a translanguaging process. And it is not actually allowed in most South African classrooms. According to the country’s official language <a href="https://www.education.gov.za/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=aIolZ6UsZ5U%20%3D&tabid=767&mid=3184">policies</a>, schools must choose a language or languages of learning and teaching. Most choose English or Afrikaans and not the African language spoken in the area. African languages are then only taught as subjects and are rarely used as a medium of instruction. </p>
<p>But, as <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14664208.2019.1641349">a recent study</a> we conducted in Limpopo showed, the real daily language policy within classrooms differs significantly from the official language policy document of the school. </p>
<p>Teachers use code switching as well as a translanguaging process, alternating and blending languages to help pupils understand concepts. There is a reason for this: research has <a href="https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000002897">proved</a> <a href="https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000188642">many times</a> that pupils learn best in their own mother tongues. </p>
<p>This is, of course, not unique to South Africa – it happens in all multilingual societies to a certain degree. Some teachers who answered the questionnaire in Limpopo said they found value in code switching or translanguaging. They also felt that African languages were undervalued in their schools. This is not ideal in a country with <a href="https://www.gov.za/sites/www.gov.za/files/images/a108-96.pdf">11 official languages</a> that enjoy Constitutional protection.</p>
<p>A much more flexible and open teaching and language policy would help teachers and pupils to enable a meaningful learning environment in a multilingual and diverse classroom setting. Translanguaging should be embraced and supported as a teaching and learning technique.</p>
<h2>Limpopo data analysis</h2>
<p>The research was conducted among 1 094 teachers at about 110 schools across Limpopo. This large scale quantitative study covered public primary and secondary schools and the questionnaire focused on general teaching conditions, language attitudes and teachers’ language practices. </p>
<p>Only 16.5 % of all participating teachers reported never facing any language related challenges in their work. Others had all dealt with some issues related to language – either in terms of their school’s language policy or how they grappled with what languages to use in class. For some, these were strongly emotional issues. One told us:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I feel strongly that learners should not lose their home language in favour of other languages. Home languages are part of their identity.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Others thought code switching was a great idea and <a href="http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2018/13505/pdf/KretzerMichael_2018_01_22.pdf">recognised its value</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I fully agree that it would be good for learners to be taught in their mother tongue or at least allow for code switching in the classroom to allow learners better understanding.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/290276/original/file-20190830-166019-ry8tgi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/290276/original/file-20190830-166019-ry8tgi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/290276/original/file-20190830-166019-ry8tgi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/290276/original/file-20190830-166019-ry8tgi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/290276/original/file-20190830-166019-ry8tgi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/290276/original/file-20190830-166019-ry8tgi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/290276/original/file-20190830-166019-ry8tgi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Setswana in a maths classroom in South Africa’s North West province.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Michael M. Kretzer (from http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2018/13505/pdf/KretzerMichael_2018_01_22.pdf)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Other teachers viewed African languages as having limited use in teaching, especially in subjects like science. They believed these languages were better suited to social situations, and that their use should be limited to these situations. This indicates the importance and influence of language attitudes on language practices and policies. </p>
<p>Importantly, we found that code switching was used in all schools – even those that did not explicitly allow it in their school language policy documents. Teachers used it mainly in oral communication, in classroom situations. Others were afraid to code switch because of their schools’ language policy documents.</p>
<h2>The role of School Governing Bodies</h2>
<p>Individual schools’ language policies are formulated by the School Governing Body (SGB). This is in accordance with the South African legal framework to de-centralise education and also language policies. SGBs consist of the principal and elected members; elected members are the parents or legal guardians of enrolled pupils; teachers; pupils from grade 8 upwards or other school staff members. </p>
<p>Language policies must be set up within the country’s constitutional framework and in accordance with the <a href="http://www.education.gov.za/Portals/0/Documents/Policies/GET/LanguageEducationPolicy1997.pdf?ver=2007-08-22-083918-000">Language in Education Policy</a>, which came into effect in 1997. Its main aim was to increase multilingualism at schools and to consider the languages spoken in the surrounding area of a school to ensure these were central to language policy and teaching.</p>
<p>Parents or other members of the SGB often have a very biased language attitude that only favours English. They feel pupils should have maximum exposure to English – and this hinders a stronger inclusion of African languages at schools. Despite a large, <a href="https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000188642">comprehensive body of research</a> that proves the value of mother tongues, such language attitudes seem to be very deeply rooted and persistent. </p>
<p>A much more flexible and open teaching and language policy would help teachers and pupils to enable a meaningful learning environment in a multilingual and heterogeneous classroom setting. Such an open language policy would and should include code switching or translanguaging to see the unused potentials of teaching in African languages as well as in English in classrooms. </p>
<p>Flexible language policies and teaching approaches should be utilised to put each and every individual pupil and his and her individual learning progress at the centre of classroom interactions.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/122087/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael M. Kretzer receives funding from the NRF</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Russell H. Kaschula receives funding from the NRF</span></em></p>A much more flexible and open teaching and language policy would help teachers and pupils to enable a meaningful learning environment in a multilingual and diverse classroom setting.Michael M. Kretzer, NRF SARChI Chair Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, School of African Languages, Rhodes UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1146512019-04-28T09:17:33Z2019-04-28T09:17:33ZFive ways indigenous languages can be championed for learners<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270499/original/file-20190423-175548-xc0m1f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Learning in their mother tongue facilitates children's ability to learn another language.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Cecil Bo Dzwowa/Shutterstock/Editorial use only</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The United Nations General Assembly has proclaimed 2019 as the <a href="https://en.iyil2019.org/">International Year of Indigenous Languages</a>. In doing this, it says, it wants to acknowledge that </p>
<blockquote>
<p>languages play a crucial role in the daily lives of people… </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Indigenous languages tend to be spoken by politically marginalised groups whose nations were historically colonised and their languages sidelined in favour of the colonisers’. </p>
<p>There are over <a href="https://www.ethnologue.com/guides/how-many-languages">7,000 known living languages</a>; about <a href="https://www.ethnologue.com/guides/how-many-languages">one third</a> of them are in Africa. Most African children grow up in multilingual environments, and are often familiar with more than one language before they enter school.</p>
<p>The UN’s call makes it an opportune time to examine how best these languages ought to be re-empowered through intellectualisation and regular use in education. Drawn from <a href="http://assets.cambridge.org/97811070/88559/frontmatter/9781107088559_frontmatter.pdf">my own extensive, decades-long research</a> – and the work that’s been done by others in the fields of multilingualism and language education – I have drawn up a list of five ways that promise to work when it comes to meeting these goals. And I’ve explained why these approaches matter in the long term. </p>
<p>Doing this is a <a href="http://www0.sun.ac.za/taalsentrum/assets/files/ML%20Afr%20Lang%20&%20Cost.pdf">valuable way</a> to develop, build and champion these languages. Simply continuing the status quo in education with the almost exclusive use of languages like English, French, Portuguese and Arabic will exclusively serve the interests of the former imperialist powers and perpetuates post-colonial political and cultural dominance.</p>
<h2>Golden rules</h2>
<p><strong>Recognise and accept multilingualism as the norm:</strong> Many development models from the “Western” world imposed on African countries tend to be based on the idea that nation-states are ethnically and culturally homogeneous and basically monolingual. They are totally inadequate in the face of the essential linguistic plurality and diversity that is characteristic of the countries in the Global South, including those in Africa.</p>
<p><strong>Don’t teach children in a language they do not understand:</strong> Globally, <a href="https://en.unesco.org/gem-report/sites/gem-report/files/MLD_2016.pdf">40% of children</a> don’t have access to education in a language they understand. There is no solid data for Africa, but the rate is likely to be much higher. </p>
<p>That’s because most African countries prioritise a language for education which is not a language that the children speak at home nor understand at the point when they enter school. They do this for several reasons. One is that the education system was already established at independence and people did not want to change something they perceived as working. Another is that most countries on the continent are home to several indigenous languages and new governments did not want to cause conflicts by prioritising one over another.</p>
<p>This has serious consequences. For one, learning in a foreign language has a <a href="https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000212602">negative impact</a> on test scores in practically all content subjects. <a href="https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000212602">Research</a> has <a href="https://www.globalpartnership.org/blog/children-learn-better-their-mother-tongue">repeatedly shown</a> that children who learn in their own languages, or mother tongues, are more involved in class and are more likely to complete their schooling. </p>
<p>Learning in the mother tongue also facilitates children’s ability to learn another language. This could be English or another “global” language, opening doors to learning or living in other countries.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-it-makes-sense-for-children-to-learn-in-the-language-they-know-best-55346">Why it makes sense for children to learn in the language they know best</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>If necessary, make education trilingual:</strong> Some countries may need to introduce a third language in their education systems. This is because of migration, displacement and the wide variety of languages found across Africa.</p>
<p>In this setup, schools would teach through the local mother tongue as a first language; a regional <em>lingua franca</em> or a national language as a second language, and a foreign or global language (English, Portuguese, French) as the third. This will secure early school success (through use of the first language). It will allow learners to acquire a relevant second language so they can participate and function fully in regional and national business. And it will equip them with a “world language” for official national and international business and politics.</p>
<p>This approach will minimise language barriers, as well as giving learners a competitive advantage when they leave school.</p>
<p>Trilingual education is being discussed widely on a global scale, but is being hesitantly implemented. The late Cameroonian linguist Maurice Tadadjeu <a href="https://kb.osu.edu/handle/1811/81834">proposed this approach</a> for his country as early as 1975; Kazakhstan is working towards a trilingual education system with Kazakh, Russian and English. And <a href="http://www.unavarra.es/tel2l/eng/luxembourg.htm">Luxembourg</a> is a success story: there, the majority of people are trilingual. Any number of African countries, among them Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria and South Africa, could follow suit.</p>
<p><strong>Make language policy inclusive:</strong> Mother-tongue based education <a href="https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000212602">fosters inclusion and equity</a>. It has been shown to have positive effects on girls’ enrolment, attendance, achievements and transition from school to university rates. It also de-marginalises minority sections of the population, and can help to integrate migrants. </p>
<p><strong>It will cost money now, but the long-term gains are enormous:</strong> Some argue that it costs a great deal of money to set up a multilingual education system. It does, but not that much: research has found that taking this approach may amount to <a href="https://theconversation.com/lessons-from-africa-prove-the-incredible-value-of-mother-tongue-learning-73307">only up to 2%</a> of a country’s national education budget. And the rewards, as I’ve highlighted, far outstrip the investment. </p>
<h2>What next</h2>
<p>The International Year of Indigenous Languages serves as a good impetus to start implementing policies that will prioritise Africa’s own languages on the continent. All the evidence suggests this could kick start a genuine “<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-continents-languages-can-unlock-the-potential-of-young-africans-90322">African renaissance</a>”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/114651/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>H. Ekkehard Wolff has received, during the past 9 years since his retirement, funding as a visiting scholar to several international universities in Africa (Ethiopia, South Africa) and Europe (Finland) from DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service: Johann Gottfried Herder Programme), the European ERASMUS-MUNDUS Programme (EUROSA+), and a Hugh le May Fellowship from Rhodes University (Faculty of Humanitites, School of Languages and Literatures).</span></em></p>The International Year of Indigenous Languages serves as a good impetus to start implementing policies that prioritises Africa’s own languages.H. Ekkehard Wolff, Emeritus Professor of African Linguistics, University of LeipzigLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1060062018-11-28T13:09:16Z2018-11-28T13:09:16ZThings Fall Apart: Chinua Achebe and the languages of African literature<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/247718/original/file-20181128-32185-4x4d69.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Christian missionaries in Congo in 1911. From the biography of Gwen Elen Lewis.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Princeton Theological Seminary</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“One of the most infuriating habits of these people was their love of superfluous words,” thinks the colonial district commissioner to himself in the final chapter of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jan/31/things-fall-apart-achebe-review">Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart</a>. It is from the only section of this groundbreaking novel that is not written from the perspective of Africans. Telling of the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/180569">colonisation of the Igbo</a> from their point of view, the line foreshadows much: how colonisation will attempt to write African perspectives, deemed “superfluous”, out of their own histories, but also that, “infuriatingly” enough for an oppressor, the colonised Africans wield words of their own.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/247727/original/file-20181128-32191-xi4esr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/247727/original/file-20181128-32191-xi4esr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247727/original/file-20181128-32191-xi4esr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247727/original/file-20181128-32191-xi4esr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247727/original/file-20181128-32191-xi4esr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247727/original/file-20181128-32191-xi4esr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247727/original/file-20181128-32191-xi4esr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The great African novel?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paull Young via Flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Published 60 years ago this year by Heinemann in London, Things Fall Apart has sold more than 10m copies and been translated into more than 50 languages. It follows Okonkwo, a renowned warrior from a fictional Igbo village in early 20th-century eastern Nigeria. In straightforward and evocative prose, Achebe depicts how a culturally rich and well-governed society is destabilised by the arrival of Christian missionaries and British colonialists. Okonkwo is a flawed hero, but his attempts to confront the forces transforming his village speak to a long history of anti-colonial resistance.</p>
<p>Now considered essential reading in many African Studies and English Literature courses, Things Fall Apart can hardly be dissociated from the emergence of the African novel and modern African writing in general. However, Achebe’s debut also sparked a <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2935429?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">formative debate</a> on language and African literatures. With English so intimately entwined with colonial history, the fact that the novel hailed as inaugurating a modern, independent Africa’s literature was also written in English became a point of contention. Was Things Fall Apart upholding a Western model, or confronting and subverting it?</p>
<h2>Language is power</h2>
<p>Language is never ahistorical or apolitical, but it carries an especial charge in post-colonial contexts. Educational, administrative and religious institutions had conducted life in the colonies in the language of the coloniser. Speaking it would often mean access to privileges, while speaking only African languages could mean economic disadvantage at best, physical punishment at worst. With this history in mind, Achebe and his contemporaries had to ask: did reaching global audiences to challenge their perceptions about Africa matter more than enriching their own languages by helping African readerships flourish?</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/o7FS95IcRNU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The debate extended beyond the question of use and reach: it was also about post-colonial identities. Language provides the names, value systems and and discourses by which we “know” our world and ourselves. A dominant language dominates the terms by which your reality is constituted. To prioritise reading and writing in European languages could perpetuate colonial structures after independence, once again delineating <em>who</em> could speak, on what terms, and by what criteria African writers would be judged. </p>
<h2>Forging identity</h2>
<p>Whether to foster post-independence African literary cultures in European or African languages fuelled the historic <a href="https://90.mak.ac.ug/timeline/first-makerere-african-writers-conference-1962">1962 African Writers Conference</a> at Makerere University in Uganda. Many of its participants went on to become well-known literary voices from the continent. These included the first African Nobel laureate <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1986/soyinka/biographical/">Wole Soyinka</a>, a Nigerian poet and playwright; <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Grace-Ogot">Grace Ogot</a>, one of the first Anglophone female Kenyan writers to be published; and <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/christopher-okigbo">Christopher Okigbo</a>, who together with Achebe established Citadel Press. Also prominent were <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/kofi-awoonor">Kofi Awoonor</a>, a Ghanaian poet and diplomat who was among those killed in the 2013 attack in Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lewis-Nkosi">Lewis Nkosi</a>, whose literary career in exile from South Africa spanned nearly every genre. </p>
<p>There was division on the issue. Kenyan playwright and academic, <a href="https://ngugiwathiongo.com/">Ngugi wa Thiong’o</a> – then a student at Makerere – believed that the restoration of cultural memory rested on rehabilitating mother tongues. Now a major voice in African letters who writes mostly in <a href="https://www.ethnologue.com/language/kik">Gĩkũyũ</a>, Ngugi argued that, without this “decolonisation of the mind”, they would otherwise be forever living by moral, ethical and aesthetic values not their own.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/247726/original/file-20181128-32226-1vicp04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/247726/original/file-20181128-32226-1vicp04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=645&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247726/original/file-20181128-32226-1vicp04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=645&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247726/original/file-20181128-32226-1vicp04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=645&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247726/original/file-20181128-32226-1vicp04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=810&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247726/original/file-20181128-32226-1vicp04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=810&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247726/original/file-20181128-32226-1vicp04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=810&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Portrait of Chinua Achebe by Steve Pyke (2008)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">New Yorker</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Born into a family of Christian converts in eastern Nigeria in 1930, Achebe was educated in local Anglican schools and went onto become one the first graduates of the <a href="https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/university-ibadan">University of Ibadan</a>. So English was indeed a part of his identity in ways not every Nigerian would have shared. But Achebe was therefore all the more aware that education and religion were complex facets of colonialism. Things Fall Apart dramatises this with nuance in the character of Nwoye, who rebels after his brother’s death by converting to Christianity.</p>
<p>Achebe advocated a “both” rather than an “either/or” approach in his 1965 essay <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272336796_African_Languages_and_African_Literature">The African Writer and the English Language</a>. He argued that the African writer, in “fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience”, would bring about a far more subtle rejection of the historical dominance standard English represented. </p>
<h2>Clearing ground</h2>
<p>Ultimately, English was one factor that helped Things Fall Apart, as it did other works of African literature, to transcend national boundaries for six decades. But these probing political and cultural questions were carried right along with it – and they informed a legacy of African thought on the meaning and purpose of literature, which the continent’s contemporary voices can stand on today. </p>
<p>When African writers choose to contribute to literatures in their mother tongues, this can only be positive. But when they chose to reach the world’s Anglophone readers, it is as Achebe <a href="http://wrightinglanguage.weebly.com/uploads/2/4/0/5/24059962/achebe_englishandafricanwriter.pdf">envisioned it</a>: with “a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/106006/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sarah Jilani receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK and the Isaac Newton Trust.</span></em></p>It’s hailed as one of the greatest works of fiction to emerge from Africa. But Things Fall Apart was written in English, sparking debate about the colonisation of language.Sarah Jilani, PhD Candidate, Faculty of English, University of CambridgeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1040072018-10-04T19:31:47Z2018-10-04T19:31:47ZWhy it’s good news that Swahili is coming to South African schools<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/238306/original/file-20180927-72336-1ac8lzd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Swahili is one of East Africa's largest languages.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">vinnstock/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Kiswahili will, <a href="http://www.africanews.com/2018/09/18/south-african-schools-to-teach-kiswahili/">from 2020</a>, become the latest language to be taught in South Africa’s classrooms. This East African <a href="https://www2.ku.edu/%7Ekiswahili/pdfs/intro.pdf">lingua franca</a>, which is also an official language of the African Union, will be an optional subject.</p>
<p>The news has been greeted with interest and has drawn praise from some quarters. But practical questions related to South Africa’s current sociolinguistic and educational contexts must be asked. For instance, why does South Africa need another language on top of the local 11 as well as the various foreign languages some schools offer? Has the country done all it can to champion local languages before adding another to the mix? And is there space on an already crowded timetable to successfully carry on this project?</p>
<p>These questions shouldn’t be ignored, but I would argue that the benefits of introducing Kiswahili far outweigh the risks. There are several reasons for this, among them the chance to prepare South African pupils for rich interactions in trade, academia and ordinary daily life elsewhere on the continent. </p>
<h2>A growing language</h2>
<p>Kiswahili <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/41163481?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">most likely originated</a> on East Africa’s coast. It came about as a result of intermarriage between Bantu-speaking communities along the East African coast and Arabs who arrived at the coast from as early as before 10th C, AD. It then spread into the interior through trade, Christian activities such as missionary work, and exploration activities in the East African mainland.</p>
<p>Today the language is spoken widely in the larger Eastern Africa region as a lingua franca, a language used between people who don’t speak one another’s native language. It’s a national language in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, and an <a href="http://www.theafricareport.com/East-Horn-Africa/swahili-to-become-east-africas-official-language.html">official language</a> of the East African Community which comprises Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan. </p>
<p>Its use is spreading to southern, western and northern Africa. Currently, however, none of these countries are teaching Kiswahili as a subject the way South Africa intends to; instead, it is generally a language of trade and inter-ethnic communication. However, it may not be long until more countries join South Africa in teaching it in classrooms since the language is spreading fast and becoming a household language in many of these countries in addition to its adoption as one of the official languages of the African Union. </p>
<p>Kiswahili is also a popular research subject at many South African universities. And it’s studied outside Africa, most particularly in the US and Europe. This global interest in the adoption of Kiswahili points at its growing international significance. This implies that its introduction into South African schools is a good move with multiple benefits.</p>
<h2>Unpacking the benefits</h2>
<p>South Africa’s language in <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09751122.2014.11890227">education policy</a> provides for the teaching of first and second additional languages alongside a first language (which is usually English or Afrikaans). This is designed to create a truly multilingual and more inclusive society.</p>
<p>Among the many benefits of teaching Kiswahili is the fact that it will be an easy language for South Africans to learn compared to foreign languages from outside Africa. That’s because it shares Bantu origins with languages like isiXhosa, isiZulu and isiNdebele. Bantu languages have long developed by borrowing and nativising the pronunciation and spelling of English words. </p>
<p>For instance the Kiswahili equivalents of “plastic”, “school”, “radio”, and “computer” are plastiki, skuli, redio, and kompiuta. These spelling forms are not far from those in isiXhosa, isiZulu and other South African native languages.</p>
<p>Another benefit is that learning Kiswahili will prepare South Africa’s children to live and work elsewhere on the continent. The country’s many Master’s and PhD graduates can’t all hope to find work in the rest of the world; they could add enormous value on their own continent – especially with a working knowledge of Swahili.</p>
<p>If South Africans are enabled to speak a variety of languages from their own continent, they will then be better able to take part in building not only their own country but also building Africa as a continent.</p>
<h2>Implications on local languages</h2>
<p>So what might the downsides be if Kiswahili is introduced in South Africa’s classrooms? I cannot identify any – if the process is carefully managed. It will take proper investment, political will and a thorough public education campaign to address the misconception that African languages are somehow “inferior”.</p>
<p>This can all be done. South Africa needs to invest in textbooks, curriculum experts and researchers who can help guide the policy around Kiswahili. The only area that might be a struggle is the provision of qualified teachers. The country must look to places like Kenya and Tanzania, which graduates tens of thousands of teachers <a href="https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1092388.pdf">annually</a> who cannot find work in their home countries. They can be the first source of teachers.</p>
<p>Secondly, South African universities can introduce short courses in Kiswahili to prepare a mass of native South Africans to be the next batch of teachers.</p>
<p>In multilingual societies, many languages coexist for the greater national good. South Africa’s decision to embrace Swahili in schools should be celebrated.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/104007/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dr Peter Mose does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Kiswahili will be easy for South Africans to learn compared to foreign languages from outside Africa.Dr Peter Mose, Post-doctoral fellow. Rhodes University, Rhodes UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/964752018-05-16T13:16:56Z2018-05-16T13:16:56ZIt’s time to rethink what’s meant by “mother tongue” education<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/219000/original/file-20180515-195341-jdo2tg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The issue of mother tongue education has been fiercely but sporadically debated in South Africa since 1994. In the past two and a half years, student protests at universities across the country have breathed new life into the discussions.</p>
<p>Proponents of mother tongue education tend to argue that children should be taught in the language they first learned and spoke at home. Those who oppose this approach argue that English is a ‘global language’ and should be the main language of instruction throughout the school system and into higher education spaces.</p>
<p>But in a country steeped in colonialism and apartheid, it’s not far-fetched to suspect that the common understanding of the idea of “mother tongues” is coloured by outside influences. </p>
<p>A mother tongue is taken to be a language that has a name: Xhosa, Tswana or Sotho, for instance. It refers to the standard version of that language, transcribed in most cases by 19th century European missionaries based on how they understood and conceptualised the way people spoke in the immediate vicinity of the rural mission station. </p>
<p>But what they were transcribing were actually regional dialects, not pure versions of pristine languages tied to an authentic and timeless cultural identity. Decades of schooling practices institutionalised and continuously reinforced the missionaries’ notions.</p>
<p>Here’s the problem: those supposedly “pure” languages often bear only a loose family resemblance to the way that modern people in both rural and urban areas actually speak. But, as my own previous and ongoing <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lara_Krause2">research</a> shows, it’s important to challenge the common assumption that “mother-tongue education” is necessarily helpful and empowering for African language speakers if it’s based on an unquestioned, popular idea of what a “mother tongue” is. </p>
<h2>Mismatches</h2>
<p>I’m currently lecturing Xhosa grammar at the University of Cape Town, mostly to second language speakers but also to some who speak it as a home language. Xhosa is the country’s second biggest indigenous African language.</p>
<p>In class I am often confronted with mismatches between what the grammar books say and how people express themselves in speech. So I often ask my Xhosa speaking students about their preferred way of saying something in their “mother tongue”. The students frequently start their response with an apology like: “Well, I can say it – but I know that’s not the proper Xhosa.” </p>
<p>This embarrassment seems to partly come from a perceived mismatch between identifying as a Xhosa person but feeling as if not fully commanding one’s own “mother tongue”. This is reflected in other statements such as: “Even we Xhosas don’t know how to speak Xhosa properly”, variations of which I frequently hear from students and also from my Xhosa speaking friends. </p>
<p>Their statements echo findings I made while <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lara_Krause2">researching</a> first my Master’s and then my PhD. My work focused on language related issues at a primary school in Khayelitsha, which is the biggest of the poverty-stricken, largely informal settlements at the outskirts of Cape Town. Residents there mainly speak Xhosa.</p>
<p>At the school three years of “mother-tongue education” precede the switch to English as medium of instruction in grade 4, when most children are around 9 or 10 years old.</p>
<p>A grade 3 teacher told me that she had to teach her pupils Xhosa numbers before she can teach them maths. These are children whose “mother tongue” is Xhosa. She said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>They know these words in English sometimes. If you say <em>inye</em> (Xhosa for 1), they can say <em>one</em>, because that is the language at home. They don’t say <em>inye</em> at home, they say <em>one</em>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She also often had to teach children to say, for example, imifuno (<em>vegetables - standard Xhosa</em>) instead of ‘iveg’, which is adapted from the English word “vegetable” and is widely used in contemporary Xhosa. </p>
<p>Such examples show that childrens’ actual mother tongues are often translingual. That is, they’re made up of linguistic resources that, according to dominant Western conventions, would be said to belong to different languages. </p>
<p>So does this mean there’s something wrong with these children’s mother tongue? No, I don’t think so. Perhaps, instead, there are some problems with our own notions of “mother tongue”.</p>
<h2>Mother tongue or missionary tongue?</h2>
<p>The frame of reference for European missionaries and colonisers when transcribing African language practices was an idea of <a href="http://www.scielo.org.za/pdf/spilplus/v51/02.pdf">languages existing as autonomous structures</a>, each spoken by a distinct group of people.</p>
<p>Versatile and flexible African listeners and speakers communicating efficiently without necessarily agreeing on one distinct, correct way of speaking did not fit this 19th century European frame of reference. </p>
<p>But to translate Bibles and develop grammars for their “educational” and Christian agenda, missionaries had to make African ways of speaking fit European ideas of language and grammaticality. Their Western concept of language forced them to be selective, to choose some ways of speaking for standardisation and writing purposes and <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250226286">to ignore others</a>. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pT8RqNcQmyk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Anthropologist Joseph Errington discusses colonial language practices.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The result is that most of today’s “African languages” and so-called mother tongues are not defined by the way African mothers speak but by how white Europeans wrote them into being decades ago.</p>
<p>The good news is that some shifts are happening in how African languages are discussed and understood.</p>
<h2>Moving forward</h2>
<p>Ideas like translanguaging are increasingly helping scholars to rethink their assumptions about language. Slowly, <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-continents-languages-can-unlock-the-potential-of-young-africans-90322">the potential</a> of such concepts for South African education is starting to enter debates outside academia. Translingual approaches to teaching and learning are even <a href="http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1947-94172017000200008">being tested</a> in some spaces.</p>
<p>Mother tongues must be re-thought and become rooted in actual language use. This process will make South Africans question established ideas of what “a language” is or what it has to be. That’s a good thing: such progressive thinking is needed to better understand “mother tongues”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/96475/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lara-Stephanie Krause does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It’s not far-fetched to suspect that the common understanding of the idea of “mother tongues” in South Africa is coloured by outside influences.Lara-Stephanie Krause, PhD Student School of Languages and Literatures, University of Cape TownLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/928592018-03-12T14:56:52Z2018-03-12T14:56:52ZHow we’re making the tools to connect isiXhosa and isiZulu to the digital age<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/209564/original/file-20180308-30989-aqgl9m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Software tools can take multiple languages to entirely new spaces.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Zubada/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>We live in a world where around <a href="https://www.ethnologue.com/guides/how-many-languages">7000 languages</a> are spoken, and one where information and communication technologies are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. This puts increasing demands on more, and more advanced, Human Language Technologies (HLTs). </p>
<p>These technologies comprise computational methods, computer programmes and electronic devices that are specialised for analysing, producing or modifying texts and speech. </p>
<p>Engaging with a language like English is made easier thanks to the many tools to support you, such as spellcheckers in browsers and autocomplete for text messages. This is mainly because English has a relatively simple and well investigated grammar, more data that software can learn from, and substantial funding to develop tools. The situation is somewhat to very different for most language in the world.</p>
<p>This is beginning to change. Profit driven multinationals such as <a href="https://research.google.com/pubs/NaturalLanguageProcessing.html">Google</a>, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/2016/07/05/meet-the-ai-team-powering-facebooks-language-tech-efforts/">Facebook</a> and <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/research-area/human-language-technologies/">Microsoft</a>, for instance, have invested in the development of HLTs also for African languages.</p>
<p>Researchers and scientists, <a href="http://www.meteck.org">myself included</a> are also investigating and creating these technologies. It has a direct relevance for society: languages, and the identities and cultures intertwined with them, are a national resource for any country. In a country like South Africa, learning different languages can foster cohesion and inclusion. </p>
<p>Just learning a language, however, is not enough if there’s no infrastructure to support it. For instance, what’s the point of searching the Web in, say, isiXhosa when the search engine algorithms can’t process the words properly anyway and so won’t return the results you’re looking for? Where are the spellcheckers to assist you in writing emails, school essays, or news articles? </p>
<p>That’s why we have been laying both theoretical foundations and creating proof-of-concept tools for several South African languages. This includes spellcheckers for isiZulu and isiXhosa and the generation of text in mainly these languages from structured input. </p>
<h2>Using rules of the language to develop tools</h2>
<p>Tool development for the Nguni group of languages – and isiZulu and isiXhosa in particular – wasn’t simply a case of copy-and-pasting tools from English. I had to develop novel algorithms that can handle the quite different grammar. I have also collaborated with linguists to figure out the details of each language.</p>
<p>For instance, even just automatically generating the plural noun in isiZulu from a noun in the singular required a new approach that combined syntax – how it is written – with semantics (the meaning) of the nouns by using its characteristic noun class system. In English, merely syntax-based rules can do the job.</p>
<p>Rule-based approaches are also preferred for morphological analysers, which split each word into its constituent parts, and for natural language generation. Natural language generation involves taking structured data, information or knowledge, such as the numbers in the columns in a spreadsheet, and creating readable text from them. </p>
<p>A simple way of realising that is to use templates where the software slots in the values given by the data or the logical theory. This is not possible for isiZulu, because the <a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10579-016-9340-0">sentence constituents are context-dependent</a>.</p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.meteck.org/files/geni/">grammar engine</a> is needed to generate even the most basic sentences correctly. We have worked out the core aspects of the <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-70407-4_12">workflow in the engine</a>. This is being extended with <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2989/16073614.2017.1358097">more details of the verbs</a>. </p>
<h2>Using lots of text to develop tools</h2>
<p>The rules-based approach is resource intensive. This, in combination with global hype around “Big Data”, has brought data-driven approaches to the fore.</p>
<p>The hope is that better quality tools may now be developed with less effort and that it will be easier to reuse those tools for related languages. This can work, provided one has a lot of good quality text, referred to as a corpus. </p>
<p>Such corpora are being developed, and the recently established South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (<a href="https://rma.nwu.ac.za/index.php/">SADiLaR</a>) aims to pool computational resources. We investigated <a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7530643/">the effects of a corpus on the quality of an isiZulu spellchecker</a>, which showed that learning the statistics-driven language model on old texts like the bible does not transfer well to modern day texts such as news items from the Isolezwe newspaper, nor vice versa. </p>
<p>The spellchecker has about 90% accuracy in single-word error detection and it seems to contribute to the <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14664200208668036">intellectualisation</a> <a href="https://doi.org/10.29086/2519-5476/2017/v24n2a5">of isiZulu</a>. </p>
<p>Its algorithms use trigrams and probabilities of their occurrence in the corpus to compute the probability that a word is spelled correctly, rather than a dictionary based approach that is impractical for agglutinating languages. The algorithms were reused for isiXhosa simply by feeding it a small isiXhosa corpus: it achieved about <a href="https://keet.wordpress.com/2018/02/18/updated-isizulu-spellchecker-and-new-isixhosa-spellchecker/">80% accuracy</a> already even without optimisations. </p>
<p>Data-driven approaches are also pursued in tools for finding information online, i.e., to develop <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-27974-9_18">search engines</a> alike a ‘Google for isiZulu’. Algorithms for data-driven machine translation, on the other hand, can easily be misled by out-of-domain training data from which it has to learn the patterns.</p>
<h2>Relevance for South Africa</h2>
<p>This sort of natural language generation could be incredibly useful in South Africa. The country has 11 official languages, with English as the language of business. That has resulted in the other 10 being sidelined, and in particular those that were already under resourced.</p>
<p>This trend runs counter to citizens’ rights and the state’s obligations as <a href="https://www.gov.za/DOCUMENTS/CONSTITUTION/constitution-republic-south-africa-1996-1">outlined in the Constitution</a>. These obligations go beyond just promoting language. Take, for instance, the right to have access to the public health system. <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17164939">One study showed</a> that only 6% of patient-doctor consultations was held in the patient’s home language. The other 94% essentially <a href="https://www.sabinet.co.za/abstracts/healthr/healthr_2012_2013_a17.html">didn’t receive the quality care they deserved because of language barriers</a>.</p>
<p>The sort of research I’m working on with <a href="http://www.meteck.org/keen/">my team</a> can help. It could contribute to, among others, realising technologies such as automatically generating patient discharge notes in one’s own language, text-based weather forecasts, and online language learning exercises.</p>
<p><em>A longer version of this article, along with figures, can be found on the <a href="https://keet.wordpress.com/2018/03/08/icts-for-the-south-african-indigenous-languages-should-be-a-national-imperative-too/">author’s blog</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/92859/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Maria Keet received funding for this research from the National Research Foundation of South Africa. </span></em></p>Software tools for South Africa’s Nguni languages may assist with redress and effective communication.Maria Keet, Associate professor in Computer Science, University of Cape TownLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/916762018-02-21T07:23:34Z2018-02-21T07:23:34ZLessons from the Reformation could help spur Africa’s linguistic revolution<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/205924/original/file-20180212-58352-1jb8jd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">There's no reason Africa shouldn't be at the centre of global knowledge production.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Africa is at a tipping point. Countries across the continent are on the brink of shifting from postcolonial to <a href="https://en.unesco.org/themes/building-knowledge-societies">global knowledge societies</a>. A global knowledge society empowers people by increasing access to and preserving and sharing information and knowledge in all domains. Its features include freedom of expression and respect for cultural and linguistic diversity.</p>
<p>This change, driven by digitalisation and globalisation, will nudge African countries from being consumers of knowledge to its producers. It will bring full mental decolonisation to the continent. But none of this will happen without a shift in how Africa thinks about and champions its own languages.</p>
<p>Knowledge comes to Africa in the languages of the former colonial masters – French, English, Portuguese. Education is based almost exclusively on these languages. This would pose no problem if learners acquired nearly perfect command of the foreign language in question. But they don’t. The continent’s learners struggle with English and French. So do many of their teachers. </p>
<p>Across the continent, European languages are seen as “superior”. Africa’s own languages are “inferior”. This language attitude is fatal to optimal education in Africa, which must rely on both indigenous and foreign languages. Repeated over generations, it is deeply entrenched in people’s minds. And it is unsustainable.</p>
<p>Europe cannot serve as a model for Africa. European statehood is largely based on the ideology of a largely homogeneous nation state. These nation states rest on a one state, one nation, one language philosophy. They can be run through a single national language, which happens to be the vast majority’s mother tongue. This concept makes no sense for Africa, with its <a href="https://www.ethnologue.com/region/Africa">great linguistic plurality</a>.</p>
<p>Africa’s current situation has a parallel in European history. Exactly 500 years ago, Martin Luther brought about <a href="http://www.history.com/topics/reformation">Reformation</a>, which historians consider the breakthrough to <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/modernity">Modernity</a>. This led to the <a href="http://www.history.com/topics/enlightenment">Age of Enlightenment</a> and laid the foundations of European exceptionalism. What started as a theological issue launched three “revolutions” which all hold lessons for Africa today: an ideological and political revolution, a technological revolution, and a linguistic revolution.</p>
<h2>A three-fold revolution</h2>
<p><strong>1. Ideological and political change</strong></p>
<p>Luther (1483-1546) was a German monk who doubted the Roman-Catholic teaching at his time. In his view, it contradicted the spirit of the Holy Bible. In the year 1517, took issue with Roman-Catholic dogma. He questioned how the Pope, operating from Rome, dominated Europe so completely – not only spiritually, but also when it came to politics. Luther’s followers were called “Protestants”.</p>
<p>Luther shattered the unity of Occidental Christianity and induced independence of regional polities from the central authority of the Pope. This eventually fostered separation of the State from the Church, which in turn bolstered individual freedom and democracy. And, crucially, it created mass education by abolishing the dominance of Latin as the sole language of (higher) education, replacing it by regional vernaculars.</p>
<p>The parallels to Africa are obvious. The Pope and Latin in Europe in the Middle Ages correspond to the former colonial masters and their languages in Africa.</p>
<p>African “vernaculars” must challenge the hegemonic dominance of English, French, Portuguese and Spanish. There is nothing that European languages can do that African languages cannot do. The desired outcome would be to liberate Africans from their copycat existence in trying to imitate the model of the former colonial master.</p>
<p><strong>2. Technological shifts</strong></p>
<p>Luther’s propaganda took advantage of the <a href="https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-worldhistory/chapter/the-printing-revolution/">printing revolution</a> using movable letters. This was the beginning of mass media. Fast and cheap printing allowed ubiquitous distribution of pamphlets to be read to the illiterate masses in market places and churches.</p>
<p>Today’s equivalents are digitalisation and desktop publishing. Any language, African or other, can be printed at very low cost. So cost is no barrier to the re-empowerment of African languages. In fact, Africa is already embracing digitalisation and global communication even in her many “home languages” – orally, through SMSes and tweets.</p>
<p><strong>3. A linguistic revolution</strong></p>
<p>One of Luther’s biggest achievements was to push literacy in the vernacular. His translation of the New Testament (1522) into largely unwritten German made him the first “<a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.116.1124&rep=rep1&type=pdf">intellectualiser</a>” of standard German. It would go on to become a global language of philosophy and science a few centuries later. </p>
<p>This allowed mass education to take root. It stimulated Germany’s ascent to a leading economy and home to philosophy, literature, science and first-class technology. Mass education based on learning through the vernacular languages eventually overcame oligarchic regimes. It fostered democracy and civil society. Latin, once so powerful, was relegated to a teaching subject in secondary schools.</p>
<p>There’s no reason the same could not happen in postcolonial Africa. A linguistic revolution would make African languages the default media of instruction, and give global languages like English their place as well-taught language subjects. Those global tongues could be used for <a href="http://education.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264093-e-181">translanguaging</a> purposes when accessing imported knowledge. </p>
<h2>Beyond the tipping point</h2>
<p>The time is ripe for change. Africa is advancing in terms of digitalisation; already the <a href="http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/04/15/cell-phones-in-africa-communication-lifeline/">density of cell phones</a> is amazing. Mental decolonisation is on the intellectual agenda. Experts push it by suggesting multilingual education from kindergarten to university. </p>
<p>Standardisation and intellectualisation of African languages are under way, but need much more support from all quarters. Perhaps those long-ago lessons of the Reformation and the decades that followed it hold some of the answers the continent needs to jump from “tipping point” to full-blooded linguistic revolution.</p>
<p><em>An <a href="https://historyofknowledge.net/2018/02/21/developing-knowledge-societies-africa-needs-a-linguistic-revolution/">expanded version</a> of this article can be found on the German Historical Institute’s History of Knowledge blog.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/91676/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>H. Ekkehard Wolff is currently benefiting from a "Hugh le May Fellowship" for senior scholars in Rhodes University's Faculty of the Humanities.</span></em></p>Africa’s current situation has a parallel in European history - the Reformation and the changes it wrought in terms of language exceptionalism.H. Ekkehard Wolff, Emeritus Professor of African Linguistics, University of LeipzigLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.