Research Background

The overarching bottleneck to Africa’s transformation and growth is rooted in the lack of authenticity/originality due to the continued use of foreign languages as official channels of development.

The use of a colonial language as an official tongue of government business is a factor with enduring negative consequences for locals but which do not appear obvious at face value. However, over time, such a language policy undermines local social and cultural cohesion because language and culture are intertwined -  they are two sides of the same coin. Thus, Language is not merely about communication, but is more about authentic expression, identity, power, prestige, and a sense of self. The study about languages is, therefore, also about how and which voices are being given attention/heard, and which ones are being constrained or silenced. Since the central pivot of any culture is language, by elevating colonial languages over indigenous tongues, local cultural and traditional values are subtly but systematically supplanted with foreign cultural values. In this way, the marginalization of locals is methodically entrenched. More crucially, the continued imposition of colonial languages is inconsistent with relevant United Nations (UN) human rights conventions on the fundamental rights of indigenous or local people on their rights to use and promote their languages as mediums of official communication in schools and government business.

Indigenous or local language use is key to the preservation of customary messages between generations. Linguistic relativity, or the idea that language influences our thoughts about social issues is a critical factor in this equation because language not only construes our perception but also constructs our social reality by manifesting actual social consequences.

Therefore, the decolonization agenda, especially through education, is an important pathway for Africa to reclaim its educational sovereignty because decolonization emphasizes the liberation of Africans from the lingering mental chains of neocolonialism. A fundamental question to ask is: in Sweden, they teach in Swedish; in Finland, they teach in Finnish; in the Czech Republic, they teach in Czech; in Korea, they teach in Korean, so why do Africans not teach in their languages?

For sustainable development to be authentic/real, the educational system of teaching and learning (pedagogy) must reflect the interests, talents, and cultural aspects of learners. Education that ignores learners’ backgrounds, cultural and traditional orientations, natural aptitude, beliefs, and local value systems is not only deficient but also destructive to those learners. The precolonial African educational and governance system was sustainable because of its originality and authenticity, whereby the development agenda was always focused on local needs. In schools, colonial languages makes  pupil progression much slower, and also makes them look as if they are dull students when the actual problem is the foreign language comprehension. Pupils endure intense pressure due to the widespread perception and stigmatization that those who cannot articulate themselves eloquently in English or French are not intelligent students.

The main goal of education should be to provide learners with tools and critical minds that can enable them to construct the world in varied ways, rather than only in one way. If dynamism, pluralism, innovation and challenging the status quo is the goal of education, then subjecting students to education that only emphasizes teaching through dominant colonial languages becomes a self-limiting space that only and fallaciously sees the world from a Western prism. This effectively undermines the very essence of educational and scientific novelty. Education is the practice of freedom that raises critical consciousness, and this should not just be contemplative but should occur in collaboration with social and political resistance. Hence, the role of pedagogy is to prepare students who can critique and work against interlocking systems of domination, imperialism, and supremacist capitalist patriarchy. The idea of exposing hegemonic languages is not necessarily to discourage the learning of dominant languages, as those languages in themselves are not the problem. It is not the dominant language per se that is problematic, but what the oppressors, colonizers and racists do with it; how they shape it to become a territory that limits and defines; how they make it a weapon that can shame, humiliate, colonize and wantonly stripe away the fundamental human rights of locals.

Conceptualizing the Language Problem

This study identifies two fundamental problems associated with the use of colonial languages in African educational systems and curricula. The first problem is whether the continued use of a colonial language is not, by default, itself a continuation of colonialism through the back door. The underlying factor here is that you cannot meaningfully solve a local problem by applying a foreign solution to it. Second, the continued use of colonial languages, notably English and French as compulsory official languages of government business is a peculiar situation, given that less than 50% of the affected African populations are fluent in them, both in spoken and written forms. This means that more than half of the population is already – by default – disenfranchised directly or indirectly.

The United Nations (2015) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Goal number 4 calls for inclusive and equitable quality education for all. But under the prevailing language policy in most African systems, inclusive education cannot be attained when more than 50% of the population is already disenfranchised. Under these circumstances, the democracy and human rights proclamations are effectively reduced to mere political sloganeering. Here, the actualization of fundamental human rights on education remains only in the imagination. Suppose Africa is serious about promoting its cultural heritage and sovereignty: in that case, it must first focus on decolonizing its educational system, which is currently clustered with nuances of foreign colonial cultures that do not speak to local aspirations. As a result, far from being a vehicle for transformation, education in Africa has produced dismal results. School curricula framed in colonial languages keep reproducing an inferior African mindset that privileges monolingual teaching and learning using foreign languages. These colonial educational systems have fostered the emergence of a postcolonial class divide in which only a privileged few can access quality education. Thus, Africa's growth will continue to be unsustainable without properly addressing this foreign language trap and appreciating how it has disempowered locals.

Some may argue that Africa is, after all, already developing despite those language deficiencies, especially given that modernization has brought to the fore a variety of technological advancements in commerce and trade, mobility, finance, medicine, and agriculture. It may also be argued that a dominant language provides locals with broader access to global discourses. However, the counterargument is that such acclaimed development has not trickled down to the ordinary subaltern citizen whose welfare the globalization agenda purports to be uplifting. Empowerment is not just about access to global capitalism, but more about recognition, dignity, ownership, and the ability to shape your world using your own voice. For locals, technological advancements have entrenched their marginalization and hence have come at their expense.

As Julius Nyerere argued, development that is not tailored towards the needs of local people is irrelevant to them, and may only be of interest to historians in the year 3,000. Furthermore, the continued use of foreign languages as official tongues is counterproductive as it defeats the aims embedded in the African Renaissance project, which envisions promoting African cultural heritages and economic growth using home-grown solutions. The African Renaissance project promotes a more holistic understanding of sustainable growth that goes beyond mere Growth Domestic Product (GDP) growth indexes, and instead calls for a reconfiguration of social imaginaries. Such imaginaries see growth in multilayered social strands that encompass greater inclusion of marginalized voices, opportunity and justice for all, and the promotion of cultural heritages and languages as fountains of knowledge systems and creativity.

In integrating the analysis of cultural and economic dimensions of language policy, this study uses a postcolonial frame as an avenue that efficaciously links the anatomy of foreign language use with cultural colonization. The study recommends a policy change with a multilingual approach that elevates indigenous languages to official languages so that the use of colonial tongues in schools and government business becomes optional, or complementary, rather than compulsory.