African languages, development and
the state
Multilingualism is a fact of African life; multilingualism is Africa’s lingua
franca. Why then is African multilingualism so often seen as a handicap to
development? The contributors to African Languages, Development and
the State argue that multilingualism needs to be developed as a strength,
not castigated as a failure.
The contributors—Africans and Europeans, language planners and
anthropologists—examine the rhetoric of language policy and also present
detailed case studies of local outcomes. They believe that African
language planning must be based on the researched facts of African life
and not on preconceived ideas of the relations that should hold between
entities called language, development and the state. Since most of Africa
has now gained over thirty years of post-colonial experience in language
planning, it is possible to assess the legacy of these years and to compare
the best and worst practices. Particular attention is paid to the Nigerian
experience which, as the most populous of the African states with many
years’ experience in the formulation of language policy, furnishes an
invaluable intra-African example for policy makers in other parts of
Africa, particularly in South Africa, where crucial decisions on language
policy are currently under discussion.
The essays in this volume clearly show that multiculturalism, pluralism
and multilingualism as facts of African life have to be seen positively as
resources upon which development must build and not as impediments to
national unity and development. The contributors’ cross-disciplinary
approach demonstrates the basic fact that all facets of social life, from the
farm and the factory to the home or the debating chamber, are embedded
in language. This volume will therefore appeal to a wide readership of all
those concerned with development policy in Africa—economists, political
scientists, language planners and anthropologists.
Richard Pardon is Reader in West African Anthropology, and Graham
Furniss is Senior Lecturer in Hausa, both at the School of Oriental and
African Studies. London.
EIDOS (European Inter-University Development Opportunities StudyGroup) was founded in 1985 and brought together British, Dutch and
German anthropologists actively engaged in the study of development.
The broad purpose of EIDOS workshops has been to assess critically the
dissemination and specialization of anthropological and sociological
knowledge in different European centres and to further the understanding
of the ways in which that knowledge has directly influenced development.
Editorial Board
David Parkin (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of
London)
Hans-Dieter Evers (University of Bielefeld)
Philip Quarles van Ufford (Free University, Amsterdam)
Editorial Committee
Franz von Benda-Beckmann (Wageningen Agricultural University)
Elisabeth Croll (School of Oriental and African Studies, London)
Mark Hobart (School of Oriental and African Studies, London)
Rüdiger Korff (University of Bielefeld)
Norman Long (Wageningen Agricultural University)
Günther Schlee (University of Bielefeld)
African languages,
development and the state
Edited by
Richard Fardon and Graham Furniss
London and New York
First published 1994
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.
© 1994 Richard Fardon and Graham Furniss, the collection as a
whole; individual chapters with the contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
African languages, development and the state/edited
by Richard Fardon and Graham Furniss.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. African languages—Political aspects. 2. Language and
languages—Political aspects. 3. Language policy—Africa.
4. Language planning—Africa I. Fardon, Richard. II. Furniss,
Graham
P119.32.A3A38 1993
306.4'49'096–dc20
93–17208 CIP
ISBN 0-203-42257-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-73081-X (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-09476-3 (Print Edition)
Contents
vii
ix
Notes on contributors
Preface
1
Introduction: Frontiers and boundaries—African
languages as political environment
Richard Fardon and Graham Furniss
1
Part I West Africa
2
3
4
5
6
Pride and prejudice in multilingualism and development
Ayo Bamgbose
33
Official and unofficial attitudes and policy towards Krio as
the main lingua franca in Sierra Leone
C.Magbaily Fyle
44
The politics of language in Bénin
Mamoud Akanni Igué and Raphael Windali N’Ouéni
55
Minority language development in Nigeria: a situation
report on Rivers and Bendel States
Ben Ohi Elugbe
62
Using existing structures: three phases of mother tongue
literacy among Chumburung speakers in Ghana
Gillian F.Hansford
76
Part II Central and Southern Africa
7
The language situation and language use in Mozambique
J.M.M.Katupha
v
89
vi
Contents
8 Language and the struggle for racial equality in the
development of a non-racial Southern African nation
Jean Benjamin
9 Dismantling the Tower of Babel: in search of a new
language policy for a post-Apartheid South Africa
Nhlanhla P.Maake
97
111
10 Healthy production and reproduction: agricultural,
medical and linguistic pluralism in a Bwisha community,
Eastern Zaïre
James Fairhead
122
11 Minority language, ethnicity and the state in two African
situations: the Nkoya of Zambia and the Kalanga of
Botswana
Wim van Binsbergen
142
Part III East Africa
12 Loanwords in Oromo and Rendille as a mirror of past
inter-ethnic relations
Günther Schlee
191
13 The metaphors of development and modernization in
Tanzanian language policy and research
Jan Blommaert
213
14 Language, government and the play on purity and
impurity: Arabic, Swahili and the vernaculars in Kenya
David Parkin
227
Name index
Subject index
246
249
Contributors
Ayo Bamgbose: Professor of Linguistics, University of Ibadan, Department
of Linguistics and African Languages, Ibadan, Nigeria.
Jean Benjamin: Lecturer, University of the Western Cape, Department of
Psychology, South Africa.
Wim van Binsbergen: Fellow at the African Studies Centre, Leiden, and
Professor of Ethnicity, Ideology and Development at the Free University,
Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Jan Blommaert: Research Director, International Pragmatics Association
(IPrA) Research Centre; and Lecturer in Intercultural and International
Communication, University of Antwerp, Belgium.
Ben Ohi Elugbe: Professor of Linguistics, University of Ibadan, Department
of Linguistics and African Languages, Ibadan, Nigeria.
James Fairhead: Associate Member of the Centre of African Studies,
University of London, United Kingdom; currently Senior Research Officer
at the Natwal Resources Institute, Social Sciences Group.
Richard Fardon: Reader in West African Anthropology in the University
of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, Department of
Anthropology and Sociology, United Kingdom.
Graham Furniss: Senior Lecturer in Hausa at the School of Oriental and
African Studies, Department of African Languages and Cultures; and
Chairman of the Centre of African Studies of the University of London,
United Kingdom.
C.Magbaily Fyle: Professor of History, Fourah Bay College, Institute of
African Studies, Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Gillian F.Hansford: Summer Institute of Linguistics, High Wycombe,
United Kingdom.
vii
viii
Contributors
Mamoud Akanni Igué: Directeur du Centre National de Linguistique
Appliqué, Cotonou, République du Bénin.
J.M.M.Katupha: Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport; Eduardo Mondlane
University, Mozambique.
Nhlanhla P.Maake: Lecturer in Zulu at the School of Oriental and African
Studies, Department of African Languages and Cultures, University of
London, United Kingdom.
Raphael Windali N’Ouéni: Visiting Scholar, Institut für Ethnologie, Free
University, Berlin, Germany; Département de Linguistique et de Traditions
Orales, Université National du Bénin, République du Bénin.
David Parkin: Professor of African Anthropology in the University of
London, School of Oriental and African Studies, Department of
Anthropology and Sociology, United Kingdom.
Günther Schlee: Professor of Social Anthropology, Faculty of Sociology,
University of Bielefeld, Germany.
Preface
The chapters in this collection record a workshop held at the School of
Oriental and African Studies, in April 1991, under the joint auspices of the
Centre of African Studies of the University of London (CAS) and EIDOS
(European Inter-University Development Opportunities Study-Group; a
network of European anthropologists concerned with theoretical issues in
development policy). CAS undertook the invitation of African language
policy planners to the meeting, while Mark Hobart on behalf of EIDOS
kindly assumed responsibility for organizing EIDOS participation. As a
result of drawing on these two networks, the workshop was an occasion
for a dialogue between the theoretical and policy orientations of European
and African commentators. This outcome was by design contrary to a
common pattern for ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ views to be segregated from one
another which is unfortunate on several grounds, not least because it
produces the impression that major divisions of opinion exist between
European or American and African commentators. The London meeting
revealed just how far from the truth this impression is: language policy
within Africa is not monolithic, neither do European anthropologists share
a single perspective on it. The patterns of agreement and disagreement
which emerged from the meeting (more of the former than the latter)
cannot be simplified into a mold of African versus European or policy
versus practice.
Language policy in Africa has been dominated by nineteenth century
European ideals of the coincidence of a singular people, nation and state
united by culture and language. There is a growing feeling in many
African countries that this ideal is not only unattainable as a goal in Africa
but even undesirable. This awareness coincides with developments in
Europe which may serve to undermine the monolingual ideal there also.
The key to the change in language policy has involved a reassessment
of what ‘language’ should be assumed to be for the purposes of planning.
Critical examination of the discourse of earlier language planning is,
ix
x
Preface
therefore, a vital element in the practical task of improving future
language planning. To what extent do the purported divisiveness and
impracticality of multilingualism derive—not from the fact of people who
are competent in diverse language practices—but from the way in which
language has been objectified and portrayed as the historical vehicle of
attitudes and consequences?
This collection begins from the premise that African language planning
must be based on the researched facts of African life and not on
preconceived ideas of the relations that should hold between entities
called language, development and the state. Multiculturalism, pluralism
and multilingualism as facts of African life have to seen positively as
resources upon which development must build and not just as
impediments to national unity and development. Policy needs to be geared
to popular realities and populist demands; the state has neither the
capacity nor the resources to bring to fruition schemes that attempt to
counter trends in language use that stem from the (only apparently)
opposite poles of grassroots practice and global processes.
Within this very general prognosis, finer points of national language
policy are likely to admit varied statal responses. Particular attention is
paid in this volume to the Nigerian experience. As the most populous of
the African states with thirty years’, post-colonial experience in the
formulation of policy, Nigeria should furnish a crucial, intra-African
example for policy makers in Lusophone Africa and South Africa, where
crucial decisions on language policy are presently under discussion. Many
of the assumptions on which Nigerian policy is now based have become
commonplace among specialists on African language development; but
questions about the translation of these objectives into practice remain to
be answered.
In general, the contributors to this collection argue that planners should
be concerned not with language so much as with discursive patterns.
Government policy, wherever feasible, should be directed to enabling
people to acquire, and where necessary become literate in, workable
portfolios of language competence. Distinctions between languages and
dialects in Africa are highly conventionalized and often owe as much to
associations with ethnicity, class and religion as to narrowly linguistic
criteria. All languages remain vital by incorporating ideas, terms and
constructions from other languages in their vicinity. The fetishization of
language diversity, instead of attention to discursive variety, is an
impediment to any realistic appreciation of the limitations to language
planning. To a large extent language practice develops irrespective of
government policy. Historically and unhappily, government capacity to
engineer perverse effects through policy, for instance through fostering
Preface
xi
division, has been more remarkable than its capacity to intervene
constructively. This is partly because the national horizon is not the only
goal to which language policy needs to be directed; there is need for transnational cooperation in the choice and development of African lingua
francas (including pidgins) as well as for recognition that European and
Arabic auxiliary languages of wider use will remain vital in external
relations.
Finally, although policy statements on language, especially the
Nigerian case to which we have drawn attention, have become highly
sophisticated in their recognition of the multilingual character of African
societies and individuals, policy and practice diverge. The state might
recognize and support local initiatives that occur outside state sponsorship
to produce orthographies and literatures in hitherto unwritten languages to
a greater degree than it currently does. On this matter, the international
funding agencies with their tendency to conceive development in narrowly
technical terms need education in the extent to which all development
occurs in and through language.
Among those who contributed as paper givers or discussants, but
whose names do not otherwise appear in this collection, we gratefully
acknowledge: Clinton Robinson, Joseph Sheppherd, Gbenga Fagborun,
Frances Harding, Salem Mezhoud, Akin Oyetade, Michael Mann, Ogi
Igwara, David Crozier, Martin Orwin, Bruce Connell, Linda Hunter,
Bertrand Masquelier, Murray Last, Sister M.A.Uwalaka. A special note of
thanks goes to Jean Benjamin for her contribution of a paper that was not
presented to our original workshop but complements the range of
discussion in Part II.
The editors also wish to thank the British Council, the British
Academy, and the Research and Publications Committee of the School of
Oriental and African Studies for support which made the workshop
possible. Without the help of Jackie Collis and Sally Simmonds of the
Centre of African Studies and Sharon Lewis of the Department of
Anthropology and Sociology neither the meeting nor the proceedings
could have been organized as efficiently as they have been.
Richard Fardon and Graham Furniss
London, January 1993
1
Introduction
Frontiers and boundaries—African
languages as political environment
Richard Fardon and Graham Fumiss
MAKING LANGUAGE PROBLEMS APPEAR
That parts of Africa1 have a food problem seems indisputable when people
are starving. That there is an environmental problem seems equally clear
from the evidence of once fertile land that can no longer support
cultivation. But no such, apparently hard, evidence exists to underline the
immediacy of the language problem’ believed also to be Africa’s lot.2
When people have organized empires and trading diasporas over several
millennia, adapted older languages and adopted new ones, contributed
with distinction to world poetry, novels, drama, films, music and
numerous academic disciplines, and continue to develop popular cultures
with astonishing multilingual competence, it could not be more apparent
that Africans are starved neither of words nor of the capacity to use them
with skill and purpose. A language problem, to labour the obvious, has to
be made to appear historically in relation to some deficit—specifically the
deficit between what language (under some definition) should be ‘doing’
and what it is felt actually to be ‘doing’. A language problem’s solution is
called forth by the desire to make good this deficit. This is not to suggest
that problems of food supply or environmental degradation are simple,
either in terms of their causation or solution, but in their starkest forms
both are imagined as conditions of dearth. By contrast, Africa’s language
problem, like its problem of ‘tribalism’, is imagined at the extreme as a
condition of plenty. When Africa is not thought to suffer from
undersupply, its fate is to suffer from oversupply; in short, Africa seems to
be marked by dearth or glut, but never a just or appropriate measure, and
both dearth and glut produce a ‘problem’. Africa is claimed to have too
many languages (plenty), but none of them ‘do’ what they ought (dearth).
But who has the right to make such judgements, relative to what, and what
is to be done about it? What makes a ‘language problem’ appear? Perhaps
1
2
African languages, development and the state
the most pernicious aspect of the assumption of a, singular, language
problem is the implication that it has a, singular, final solution. Instead, we
are going to suggest that the complexities of language use in Africa should
elicit, at most, shifting, labile and pragmatic accommodations on the part
of state authorities to situations which in themselves are also shifting,
labile and largely pragmatic.
The paper of which this Introduction is a revised version was originally
written as an opening presentation for a two-day workshop held at the
School of Oriental and African Studies in 1991. Our intention in holding
the workshop was to bring together (insofar as resources permitted) a
roughly equivalent number of African academics and language planners,
and European anthropologists or anthropologically inclined language
specialists working on Africa in order to promote dialogue between them
on the relationships between African languages, the state and
development. A notably high degree of agreement on issues emerged from
the meeting; so, if we adopt as a starting point a distinction between the
discursive and strategic problems facing African nationals and European
investigators who address issues surrounding African languages, this is
simply a heuristic device and not evidence for differently entrenched
‘mind sets’ relating to the issues we discussed. As specialists in Northern
Nigeria and Northern Cameroon, who also share an anthropological
approach to problems of language, our joint paper brings further,
ethnographic and theoretical biases to the topic. This Introduction retains,
therefore, the spirit of our original position paper rather than attempting a
synopsis of this volume’s contents, which we supply briefly in prefatory
notes to its three, regionally organized, sections.3
Concern with language is common both to academics and to policy
planners in African states and to social and cultural anthropologists
writing about African societies. These people may, of course, be one and
the same: academics in African universities, drawing upon insights from
anthropological studies and also concerned with the formulation of
language policy. But initially we shall write as if they were not the same
people, and that their efforts were to be located in distinct discursive
fields: which is to say, fields of writing and practice structured by different
assumptions and, correlatively, by differing apprehensions of what
constitute pressing problems of language requiring urgent address. Having
pushed the simplifying assumptions as far as seems useful heuristically,
they will have to be abandoned. But the point of making them is to
contrast perspectives predominantly associated with Africans planning
language policy in the context of their own national politics with those
associated with European and American outsiders approaching the issues
of language from the context of academic agendas established in their
Introduction: frontiers and boundaries
3
professional and university disciplines. This further exaggerates our initial
and tendentious assumption, but does allow us to address issues in ideal
terms that are far more nuanced in reality. Of these issues, the most
fundamental concerns the ways that a ‘language problem’ is made to
appear from anthropological or policy perspectives.
An anthropological perspective could mean as many different things
as there are types of anthropology; here we wish to emphasize two
aspects of recent anthropological scholarship: 1) a critical
deconstruction of the terms of current debate to discover their
presuppositions, and 2) a preference for local level perspectives with an
emphasis on practice. 4 These translate into two immediate aims: to
question the way that the term ‘language’ has featured in considerations
of African languages, development and the state, and to shift attention
from African languages to specific linguistic practices in contemporary
Africa, in particular ‘the politics of discursive practice’ (Grillo 1989:17)
as these emerge in situations of multilingualism. One guiding thread to
our remarks derives from the contrast between boundaries (connoting
exclusive and distinct phenomena) and frontiers (suggesting the
interpenetration of phenomena). The distinction is deployed differently
according to context, but we use it to point out the consequences that
follow from treating language either from a top-down perspective
(starting from the assumption of diverse languages) or from a bottom-up
perspective (starting from the assumption that language is most
importantly instantiated in its practical diversity). The top-down
perspective is dominant in those language planning discourses that
address problems posed in terms of national, international, continental
or intercontinental relations; the bottom-up perspective dominates
anthropological discourses that address problems arising from local
researches. The two are not mutually exclusive, but each is certainly ill
at ease with the other’s agenda. Detailed anthropological descriptions of
language practice risk seeming impractical, or worse irrelevant, to
language planners to the same degree that policy documents may seem
insensitive, or worse coercive, to ethnographers. This happens not
because either party fails to appreciate what the other is trying to do, but
because in starting from differing presuppositions about the object they
call language, language planners and anthropologists create accounts for
different purposes which are not fully commensurable.5 This might
matter less if that conceptual cluster of terms which includes language,
but also culture, tribe, ethnicity, people and so forth, were politically
compounded in less complex ways than it is.6
A variety of circumstances combine to explain the crucial importance
of the politics of language in Africa. Many of these circumstances are not
4
African languages, development and the state
unique to Africa, but their African combination has been particularly
closeknit and visible. Because of this, particular care has to be exercised
when choosing examples from elsewhere (e.g. India or Melanesia) to
compare with African cases. Among these circumstances writers looking
at the problem top-down from the perspective of the state normally
include the extremely large number of African languages, the enormous
range in the numbers of their speakers (from a mere handful to many
millions), the poor correlation between the frontiers of speech
communities and the boundaries of African nation states, and the
important roles of European languages, pidgins and of Arabic in particular
functional or sectoral usages. Much needs to be said about each of these,
but we want immediately to add another, bottom-up factor: the very high
degree of multilingualism common in most of sub-Saharan Africa. To put
the matter at its boldest, multilingualism is the African lingua franca.7 Any
African national or ethnographer of Africa will testify to a
transcontinental genius for facilitating communication by drawing upon
language competences however partially these may be held in common.
The African lingua franca might best be envisaged not as a single language
but as a multilayered and partially connected language chain, that offers a
choice of varieties and registers in the speaker’s immediate environment,
and a steadily diminishing set of options to be employed in more distant
interactions, albeit a set that is always liable to be reconnected more
densely to a new environment by rapid secondary language learning, or by
the development of new languages.
Whereas this capacity might be lauded elsewhere, it has been a
commonplace to stress the negative side of the linguistic complexity of
contemporary Africa.8 Ayo Bamgbose refers to this trait as an obsession
with the idea of ‘one’ in African discourses on the nation state in all its
aspects. Practically, a complex pattern of language use does challenge the
ingenuity of representatives of the state responsible for the organization of
government (both legislative and executive), the imposition of law (both
through the judiciary and police), the provision of education and health
services, and a variety of interventions in the economic life of the citizens
(agriculture, livestock, forestry, etc.). In short, African multilingualism
poses problems of national governmentality in both the enabling and
restrictive senses of this term. In the post-colonial state, these problems
are compounded by questions of national autonomy, identity and
authenticity that spill over into the fields of verbal creativity and
philosophy. If the ideologically unconcerned among the citizenry may
nonetheless be coping, to borrow a convenient term from recent
development literature (e.g. Croll and Parkin 1992:15), those involved in
government, politics or the verbal expression of artistic or philosophical
Introduction: frontiers and boundaries
5
realities may find a ‘language problem’ of pressing concern. Whatever the
grounds for them making it everyone else’s concern, faced with the
burgeoning literature on the topic, no one can doubt that there is
governmental and academic unease with multilingualism in Africa.
As members of a, generally speaking, monoglot (British) culture, we
are equally receptive to another strand of writing about language which
stresses the richness of the individual African’s language competence.
Although African language planning discourse has an undeniable concern
with ‘oneness’, there is a countervailing theme of pride in the sheer
numbers of African languages, and the linguistic skill implied by the fact
that so many Africans operate in so many of them. If this richness is
sometimes undervalued, if it appears in policy statements only to be
countermanded by dictates of national integration and efficiency, this
move stems at least in part from the continuing hegemonic influence in the
world of European, nineteenth century, romantic as well as real-politik,
notions of the nation state as the embodiment of a unitary people, culture
and language (Schlee). Given the inadequacy of this ideal in contemporary
Europe, it is worth at least asking what Europeans might learn from
African experience. Ekeh (1990) has recently suggested, in the context of
tribalism, that concepts discarded in Euro-American metropolitan centres
of opinion are prematurely superseded in African studies because
Africanists too readily follow intellectual fashions. While this is a proper
note of caution, the unwillingness to reject inappropriate European
precedents may be just as unhelpful. On the evidence of a recent book by
distinguished Nigerian authors (Emenanjo ed. 1990), the problematic
relation between the state and language remains a major focus of current
discussion, and this discussion is canalized around the ideal of a single,
national language.9 In Europe and America, on the other hand, recent
writers have emphasized the diminishing pertinence of the national state
as an encompassing framework for sociological research (as it was for
most of the classical sociological writers). Instead, attention has shifted to
the emergence of regional and global frameworks for analysis. The
implications of this change in perspective may be crucial to the ways that
the differing discourses on African languages can be made to speak to one
another. What has been described as creolization in African settings is in
some respects similar to the condition that Europeans and Americans
experience as postmodernism or post-pluralism (Parkin). Language as an
object of concern finds itself subjected to, usually incompatible, desires
for purity, authenticity, modernity, Africanness, national usage, equality
and statal identity. Meanwhile, language as practice develops as if it had a
life of its own under the influences of the pursuit of wealth or political
influence, or more neutrally communication and sociality, to which ends it
6
African languages, development and the state
is only a means (Parkin, Blommaert). Africans have, at least since the
opening of the Saharan and Atlantic trades, been coping with issues of
multilingualism which Europeans in the Age of Nationalism managed, for
a rather brief period it may transpire, largely to circumvent practically
even as they were inflating the importance of the conceptual cluster
around the terms language and political identity which has now been
globalized.
LANGUAGE AS POLITICAL OBJECT10
In the preceding argument, we exaggerated the distinction between
language as it appeared to ethnographers and to language planners in
Africa. From the perspective of anthropological theory, or more precisely
recent reflection on anthropological theory, we might as plausibly have
begun by noting a series of similarities. Because African states are not
monoglot, the politics of language necessarily involves relations between
languages. Of course, relations between languages have also been central
to the anthropological enterprise; although recognition of this fact has
been more or less explicit at different times and to different schools of
anthropology. We might alternatively compare policy and anthropological
approaches to language at the point of relations between languages, rather
than in terms of the contrast between distinct languages and the fact of the
embeddedness of all cultural life in language (contexts too broad and
distinct to be usable here). The analysis of relations between languages
offers a pertinent point of comparison between anthropology and
language policy, because degrees of objectification of language are
required of both sets of discourses (putting neither, as it were, under an
epistemological handicap).
The implications of one of Talal Asad’s critical essays offer a
convenient point of entry to one strand in recent anthropological
discussion. In this essay, Asad (1986) sought to bring the notion of
relations between weak and strong languages to bear upon the idea of
cultural translation in anthropology. In contrast to ethnographically based
analyses, Asad’s macro-level approach objectifies language in ways
similar to the policy discourses. Let us outline a few points of his
argument briefly.
Asad begins by noting how cultural translation became accepted as a
definition of anthropology by a generation of anthropologists many—
although not all—of whom had, at one time or another, been associated
with the Institute of Anthropology at Oxford (Evans-Pritchard, Godfrey
Lienhardt, David Pocock, Max Gluckman and others). He takes issue not
directly with this definition, but rather with one of its commentators,
Introduction: frontiers and boundaries
7
Ernest Gellner, who had published a critical article twenty-five years
earlier (Gellner 1961) pointing to a problem that context posed for all
theories of translation. Gellner had protested that given sufficient latitude
in determining relevant context, anthropologists could never conclude that
an assertion was either absurd or contradictory. Interpretive charity would
always encourage them to discover a context in which the assertion or
belief made sense. Asad must have felt this argument to be momentous to
be persuaded to return to it so long after its original publication. The
conundrum of translation is not unique to anthropologists, albeit they have
a particularly vested professional interest in it. In various ways, translation
is a condition of all comprehension, but it is particularly obvious when
more than a single language is involved. The question ‘what happens in
translation?’ is posed urgently in multilingual states.
The argument of Asad’s paper becomes complex, and only a few of its
points need concern us. One source of complexity is that, on some matters
at least, he and Gellner share more than divides them. Albeit in different
ways, neither of them restricts the question of translation to narrow
linguistic criteria, both stress social contexts within which translation
occurs. But they reach radically differing conclusions. Asad is able to
dispatch Gellner’s own examples of charitable interpretation with aplomb.
Gellner’s textual idea of translation—basically matching written
sentences in the language from which he is translating with sentences in
English—ignores what, for Asad, is the primary consideration that
‘society is the cultural condition in which speakers act and are acted upon’
(Asad 1986:155). Anthropologists can apprehend the relevant contexts
only by learning the coherence of discourses and of the practices in which
they participate (1986:153). The issue of context turns out to be resolvable
only through practical competence. This is where Gellner and Asad
converge, but they interpret the consequences of their convergence
differently. For Gellner, social context masks the logical incoherence of
ideology; for Asad, coherence is a quality to be sought only in social
context. Gellner privileges the logic of abstract argument which he finds
mystified by practice; Asad privileges the situational logic of discourse
and practice which he claims is misrepresented by Gellner’s translation
into prepositional logic.
At this point Asad breaks off his argument with Gellner and introduces
the relational idea of weak and strong languages. In practice, languages
are not equal. Anthropologists typically translate into strong languages
from weaker languages. What makes one language stronger than another?
Asad’s explanation is suggestive but not fully developed. We recognize
strong languages by a number of criteria. Strong languages are spoken by
the strong: English (and other globally distributed European languages)
8
African languages, development and the state
are associated with western countries that enjoy unequal political and
economic relations with the rest of the world. These relations are, in the
final analysis, underpinned by the historical forms of industrial capital.
Strong languages more easily express knowledge desired by the strong
from the privileged vantage assured by their modes of life. Weak
languages cannot easily deploy the same knowledge except by being
modified themselves (as he suggests has occurred in modern Arabic) or by
undergoing modification during translation. In this sense, the evolution of
weak languages and translation are examples of the same process acting at
different rates. Borrowing Gramsci’s terminology to make Asad’s point,
there is a hegemonic relation between strong and weak languages by
virtue of the positions of their speakers. As David Parkin has noted, ‘all
discourse embodies hegemonic aspects, in the combined sense of shaping
and dominating others’ wills’ (1984:360). Asad goes further by arguing
that speakers of stronger languages feel impelled to master the implicit in
the discourse of the weak: this implicit is construed as something to which
the strong have privileged access but which remains in principle occluded
from the weak. In Parkin’s terms, the will of the powerful is shaped by the
power they feel their discourse to bear in relation to that of the weak.
These ideas broach a number of facets of the debate about African
languages and the state: the plurality of languages, language as an index
of Apartheid, contextual determination of the sense of what is said, the
relations of power—including assumptions about privileged
comprehension—between the agents of different languages. Asad’s
position is indebted to Foucault, and particularly to the way that
Foucault’s ideas were used by Edward Said in his works on academic
and popular orientalism (Said 1978, and subsequently). But as stated,
Asad’s account poses as many problems as it illuminates. Asad’s initial
concern with context becomes marginalized in the course of his
argument with Gellner until all that remains is a single enveloping
context: between weak and strong languages. But does translation ever
involve a single significant context on which all parties can agree?
Asad’s argument concludes with a monolithic, ineluctable and titanic
struggle between languages. Strong and weak languages are reinforced
in their initial relation by virtue of translation; translation is
preeminently a vehicle of power (Asad 1986:163). While this position
has much to recommend it as a cautionary critique of the creation of
metropolitan anthropologists’ knowledge of peoples who are thereby
peripheralized, can it be applied to relations between African languages
in contemporary states? The argument bears the imprint of its origin in
the polarized debate between the ‘occident’ and the ‘orient’. The
relation between Africa and Europe, let alone within African states, is
Introduction: frontiers and boundaries
9
less amenable to simple polarization. In the predominantly multilingual
environment of Africa, languages are strong and weak according to
context. Both translation and the refusal to translate can be vehicles of
power. The ‘same’ language may be strong, when its members control
the discourse of others by translation, but weak in contexts where its
speakers are relatively powerless. Translation may facilitate control, but
so may the withholding of translation either as a matter of deliberate
policy or (in the long run, perhaps the same thing) because the powerful
are hardly conscious of particular, minority language practices within
the nation.
Asad’s analysis tends to reduce the complexities of discursive practices
to the effects of objectified language, thus rendering it difficult to
distinguish any differences between instances of discourse in languages
assumed consistently to be weak or strong. He thus falls foul of his own
injunction to ground language practice in the social. But the idea that the
relation between discursive practices is power-laden is too valuable to
abandon because of shortcomings in his own use of it. Is it possible to
retain Asad’s notion of the indissociable relation between discourses in
particular languages and power, but to apply this concept in a more
nuanced way to the politics of discursive practice, rather than to language,
in African cases?
We begin by noting that language does not always appear to be an
object. In fact, the objectification of language is a property of particular
types of discourse about language. Language appears as something
different depending how we look at it. Objectification of language—as a
thing—makes particular problems appear to demand urgent
rectification. But how far is the problem ‘language’ or the way we are
thinking about languages? Even if we accept the necessary
objectification of language in relation to both policy and anthropological
discourses, the terms in which the languages are contrasted to one
another are extremely diverse. To look at African instances: languages
(and variants of the ‘same’ language) may be contrasted as modernized
or traditional (as in debates about the expansion of the lexicons of lingua
francas to include terms appropriate to modern technology and scientific
discourse, Blommaert); or as pure and impure (as in debates over the
Arabization of lingua francas in Muslim communities, Parkin); purity
and modernity may have to be reconciled (as in arguments about the
appropriateness of borrowing terms for new objects, or borrowing only
the concepts which ought to be rendered using new compounds of
existing terms—instead of fridge, ‘thing for keeping cold things’).
Alternatively, discussion of language may hinge on authenticity or
Africanness (as in the case of attitudes to Krio, Magbaily Fyle), or upon
10
African languages, development and the state
scale (Hansford, Elugbe). Clearly, relations between languages, and
ideas about what happens in translation that cohere with these relations,
involve more specific features than a simple contrast between weakness
and strength, which risks becoming tautologous (when strong languages
are considered the prerogative of those strong on quite independent
criteria, and vice versa). This is not to deny that perceptions of relative
strength do not provide one important context in which people situate a
reflexive concern with language, but in common with the other contexts
we have enumerated (religious, scientific, aesthetic, political, economic)
these have to be understood as debates that are outside language in a
narrow sense but inside language in a broader sense (because they
involve discourses instantiated in language).
LANGUAGE AS THE SUBJECT OF DISCOURSE
In official statements, the political nature of language planning is often a
submerged theme precisely because it is a dominant consideration.
Policy discussions of language need to attain an appearance of
objectivity, and the globally available rhetorics to achieve this include
the discourses of human rights, economic utility and governmental
efficiency, as well as aesthetic expression and the authenticity of
personal and collective identities. In the creation of published
programmes, African states find themselves playing not just to an
internal audience but also to an external audience which governs some
of the terms of discussion by virtue of holding the purse strings of aid
and debt scheduling. Given that nation states in Africa have derived from
colonial territorial units, to which other criteria of statehood and nation
have had to be added, the ways in which language has been put, both
literally and figuratively, on the map, have been politically and
epistemologically crucial moves. The major devices through which
policy makers have represented language diversity to themselves in print
have been the map and the list.
Putting language on the map and into the list
Language is commonly viewed as an object—scientific object, political
object, cultural object, etc. This usage is the most appropriate for many
purposes, but it is, nonetheless, a specific type of usage, and its different
instances tend to add credence to one another. Languages as objects
need to be attributed such properties as (greater or lesser in each case):
systematicity, distinctiveness, closure, and independence. The map is
one master trope of this type of discourse: both as a physical object and
Introduction: frontiers and boundaries
11
as an image informing other discursive practices about language.11 This
is particularly clear in the African case. Four varieties of map12 of Africa
show a poor fit when superimposed upon one another, and unease about
this fit problematizes ‘language’. Further unease invests practices that
take place, as it were, off the map.
The first map is the one we come across most often: the map of African
states. Many of the lines on this map were drawn first with the infamous
blue pencils of imperial delegates to late nineteenth century conferences.
About a third of the lines are geometric. If the other two thirds have
rationales owing less to ruler and compass, they often reflect only spheres
of influence and trade carved out by the precursors of European
colonialism. The linguistic correlates of this map of contemporary states
owe much to an older terrain shaded in the colours of the occupying
colonial powers. The slightly redefined nation states inherited the
European language geography of their imperial overlords (Treffgarne
1975). To these have been added, in some cases, African national and/or
official languages. In a few cases, European languages have lost the
privilege of sponsorship by the state. These two maps (the colonial and the
national) are the least contested (in the sense that the boundaries are
generally known) but highly contentious all the same. The former is fixed
thanks to having been historically superseded, the latter owes its
permanence to the general agreement of the Organization of African Unity
to live with its inherited national boundaries.
The third map is the linguists’ creation. Each revision of this map
tends to add to the number of named languages located in the virtual
space of the diagram. Notoriously, this map fits ill with either the
colonial or national maps. Some languages, often associated with past
African imperial formations or with trading diasporas, are quite widely
distributed on the map, others are so restricted that the map hardly
allows space to inscribe their names. A higher level generalization of the
language map groups languages into families. On this map we might
note that in Central and Eastern and Southern Africa, many of the
languages are close cognates sharing a high proportion of lexical items
and grammatical structures. In West Africa the distribution is far more
fractured. Related to the language map, but not entirely coincident with
it, is the ethnographic map of the peoples of Africa. This divides the
terrain by allotting it unambiguously to named peoples. These two maps,
the linguistic and the ethnographic, are taken as signs of the process
interrupted by colonialism as well as the evidence on which accounts of
more distant history have largely to rely. Because they can be seen as
compositions created on the ground prior to the inscription of
colonialism on the map, the linguistic and ethnographic maps can easily
12
African languages, development and the state
be captured by rhetorics of ‘authenticity’. But the linguistic and
ethnographic maps are, even in their own terms, subject to dispute. The
grounds of dispute are familiar: the relatively recent crystallization of
singular, fixed ethnic identities; the inappropriateness of twodimensional maps to represent any area in terms of more than a single
salient language or ethnic identity; the interaction of ethnic and
linguistic considerations that go into determining quite what constitutes
an instance of language rather than dialect, and so forth. All the maps are
possible because they rely on conventions; none is an unmediated
reality, though each is treated as such in some discourses.
Each of the four maps could be thought of as a discursive register.
The colonial map, which explains the distribution of European official
languages in Africa, also refers to other aspects of imperial history; the
map of nation states refers beyond itself to a global condition of nation
states and a discourse of human rights embodied in organizations such as
the United Nations; language and ethnic maps speak beyond themselves
to processes that antedate colonialism but were nonetheless affected by
it. Yet the maps can be envisaged to have succeeded one another over a
period of not much more than a century. A discourse located in one of
the maps, and its correlative register, can either disregard or explain its
relation to the other maps. Single-mindedly sticking to a single map (in
the fashion of a nationalist or ethnic irredentist rhetoric, for instance)
renders the other registers ‘off the map’. Not only do the four maps offer
different registers, all four ignore much that is definitively off the map
because it cannot fit into the two-dimensional imagination of this kind of
map-making: the linguistic complexity of the burgeoning urban centres,
or the multilingualism of most African communities, or the fact that all
but global maps can always be encompassed by bigger maps.
The map of African languages already begs a process of naming and
bounding which represents discursive realities in terms of objectified
entities. This process of objectification is normally furthered through
listing, which comes in two main varieties: lists organized according to the
genetic and familial resemblances among languages, and lists ranked
ordinally in terms of the numbers of mother tongue speakers of a language
or the numbers competent in the language more generally. The latter list
may be subdivided, to rank groups of languages as majority and minority,
or according to more exact criteria of scale if required.
To repeat, we are not claiming that there is anything intrinsically
wrong with map-making or listing, only that making languages appear
according to these conventions also makes language ‘problems’ appear
in a restricted range of forms. It is revealing to look at policy-oriented
writings from this perspective. Typically, the horizon of policy-oriented
Introduction: frontiers and boundaries
13
writings is defined in terms of the governmental responsibilities of one
or several nation states. These responsibilities hinge upon the polarity of
unity versus diversity. Politically, economically, educationally,
culturally…policy makers see themselves confronted by choices which
have to be solved in terms of trade-offs between these two over-arching
terms. The era of bold solutions, by the choice of single African
languages in order to pursue only the goal of national unity, has
generally been abandoned as impractical or self-defeating in its own
terms. Policy-oriented writings conventionally begin from the idea of
language diversity which is represented by references to maps of
distribution, diverging trees of language relationship based on linguistic
researches, and lists of languages showing the numbers of speakers
ranked ordinally. Indeed, given the goals of policy-oriented writings,
there maybe no other place to start. But consequences are set in train:
certain deductions become predictable while others are ruled out from
the beginning. For instance, a writer appealing to the branching
genealogy of language relatedness may feel it appropriate to note that,
say, 70 per cent of languages in a state share membership of a single
broad language family. But if these languages are not intercomprehensible, it is unclear what practical consequence then follows—
albeit the rhetorical gesture towards unity is palpably important. More
generally, appeal to any of the maps, or to their correlative lists,
necessarily triggers the broader, divisive, conceptual clusters we have
noted: setting in train such objectified associations as language, culture,
and tribe, or, European language, colonial geography, post-colonial
identity, and so forth. Although languages are made to seem strong or
weak, the reasoning which leads to this conclusion actually proceeds
from extra-linguistic associations (in the narrow sense of objectified
language) towards conclusions that are then seen to prevail at the level of
discourse. Discursive practices are certainly marked by relations of
unequal power, but not in so simple, or univocal, a fashion as that
implied in analyses which proceed from a top-down approach to the
distribution of languages.
Language and sectoral usage
Language may be objectified spatially, or pseudo-spatially, in terms of
genealogies and lists, but it may also be objectified functionally by
allotting different languages sectoral uses. The allocation may be formally
installed, where particular African and European languages are current in
contemporary states as official or national languages to be used for
definite purposes (economic, legal, political, educational, bureaucratic
14
African languages, development and the state
and so forth), or it may be based informally in common recognition that
particular language practices are required for the ‘language of commerce’,
‘language of the hearth’, ‘language of religion’, etc. The idea of sectoral
use is often combined with the notion that certain languages are either
appropriate or current in particular ‘levels’ of society. In this
objectification of language, the functional ‘location’ of language tends
also to imply correlated social emplacement. In common with the
spatialization of language on the map, the notion of sectoral specialization
presents a divisive objectification of language, and this is so whether the
specialized languages are European or African. European languages
potentially divide people along lines of educational background, rural/
urban separation, class, religion and familial socialization, gender and so
forth. African languages potentially divide people according to these
criteria and according to the ethnic map.
Stronger languages empower speakers and therefore represent
advantages for those who carry them in their language portfolio. This is
not simply a matter of communicational competence. Following Bourdieu
we could see linguistic proficiency (like education and culture more
generally, see Bourdieu 1979) as a form of personal capital with social,
symbolic and economic aspects. The perspective from functional and
sectoral specialization in language involves extra-linguistic questions that
take the form ‘what does speaking such and such language imply in
practical and/or symbolic terms?’.
Objectifying discourse
A third form of objectification, more typical of anthropological writings
oriented from the bottom-up perspective, changes the view considerably.
Instead of objectifying language we focus on individuals who are
engaged in language as they go about their business. They read, listen to
the media, are addressed, respond and discuss. These interactions may
involve numerous languages in which the individuals feel more or less at
home. Following the sectoral model, they may feel more at home in
some languages for certain purposes only. We may find that
conversations drift into and out of particular languages as the subject
and register seem to require. Perhaps, it may be difficult to tell quite
what ‘language’ some parts of some conversations are in. An approach
that looks at the way people behave linguistically may arrive at
conclusions radically at variance with the two types of objectification of
language that we have sketched. We do not mean to suggest that close
analytic attention to discursive patterning can escape being a form of
objectification, but crucially it is not a form of objectification that
Introduction: frontiers and boundaries
15
readily corresponds to the other elements of the conceptual clusters we
have suggested are inevitably evoked by the objectification of
languages. Analyses may typically distinguish circumstances in which a
mother tongue is used from situations in which varying types of
multilingualism or polyglossia prevail. But extended situations
conducted only in the mother tongue may be diminishing as a proportion
of all language events in a country like, say, Nigeria. Moreover, mother
tongues are not unchanging, and close investigation of the linguistic
parameters of socialization may rapidly dispell the notion of
uncontaminated ‘authenticity’ that the phrase ‘mother tongue’ tends to
connote. Patterns of discourse cannot be fitted on to a language map and
may complicate accounts of sectoral usage into no more than statistical
probabilities. Although it is the most challenging of the objectifications
to describe, and the most labile between situations and over time, it is
this objectification which brings us to a concern with local-level
practices and the power relations they entail. However, the particularity
of the discourse model tends to make it seem interesting but impractical
to the policy-oriented writer. The discursive model (involving discourse
about discourse) seems to offer little in the way of (what seem to be)
practical solutions to the pressing problems of economic integration,
ethnic stabilization, or educational policy. While useful as an
explanation of why policies have come to grief after the event, its
potential for generating new policy seems limited. Its message appears
to be that most kinds of intervention are impossible or else perverse in
their outcomes. This is hardly sweet music to the ears of problem
solvers; nor is it an account conducive to the attraction of project-tied
foreign or international aid.
So we seem to be left with a hiatus between views—one, moreover, that
is comprehensible and apparently even necessary given the situations of
those who work from them. Dialogue is clearly feasible—our meeting
demonstrated that policy-oriented and anthropological perspectives are
entirely mutually comprehensible; and after all, neither is a complex
position in principle. But can dialogue have any worthwhile outcome in
practice?
REFASHIONING THE LANGUAGE MAP
In a recent attempt to summarize the fractured state of globalization in our
shrinking world, Arjun Appadurai found it useful to separate heuristically
a number of relatively independent descriptions of the global landscape.
He itemizes ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and
ideoscapes (Appadurai 1990). Technology has become unevenly
16
African languages, development and the state
distributed as high-tech industries are found cheek by jowl with peasant
agriculture. Electronic media (TV, film, radio, audiocassettes and
videocassettes, newspapers, etc.) reach further and faster than before
(Mytton 1983). Ideologies (capitalist, socialist, religious) circulate
globally. People (as migrants, as tourists, as students, as workers, as
refugees) move in large numbers. The movement of financial capital has
assumed a high degree of independence from manufacturing. And all of
these globalizing tendencies have linguistic correlates. The mutual
constitution of notions of global and local can be envisaged to occur
within a variety of global landscapes that are not of necessity mutually
consistent. African writers, academics, musicians, artists, politicians,
financiers and so forth spend parts of their professional lives as inhabitants
of globalized landscapes (whether or not they physically move). As
consumers, the majority of people, especially urban people, are subject to
inducements and imperatives to purchase that emanate from the
advertising media of capitalist industries. Nor are the political goods on
offer exclusively local, albeit they are locally appropriated (viz the advent
of [national] Republicans and [social] Democrats in Nigeria). While the
nation state remains an important political reality, to treat it as the only
relevant unit so far as language policy is concerned is to rule out
consideration of either the regional or global considerations that are
steadily growing in significance.
Our first two objectifications of languages (by reference to various
maps and lists, and by reference to function) suggested central roles for
the state, our subsequent stresses on language use and on the global
circumstances of national states introduce greater complexity into
prognostications of the role that the state might like to, or even be capable
of, playing in relation to language use. The objectification of language is
itself subjected to different discursive strategies, and all of them are
politically charged. While Asad is correct to stress that the relations
between languages are marked by unequal power, such relations of
hegemony are difficult to fix unequivocally outside the context of
particular speech acts (and even in such contexts may be ambiguous). Part
of the problem lies in envisaging the relation of hegemony to exist
between languages rather than between social agents who are empowered
or disempowered under specific conditions of language. ‘Language’ is
objectified in the politics of discourse, but it may be the imposition on
others of discourses and practices to do with language that constitutes the
hegemonic relation—and not the language as an agency in itself. This
perspective is occluded when rights are seen to attach to languages rather
than to speakers. A recent publication of the Minority Rights Group,
entitled Language, Literacy and Minorities (incidentally winner of the
Introduction: frontiers and boundaries
17
UNA Media Peace Prize) is significantly ambiguous in its account of the
‘attachment’ of rights to people or to languages. The author of this report
argues from the linguists’ demonstration that languages are cognitively
equal, to the proposition that they (i.e. the languages) ought to have equal
political rights, and from that proposition to the idea that the domination
of one language by another (note again that language is made agentive)
reflects an ideology of linguicism that is closely akin to racism (SkutnabbKangas 1990:7–8). While the liberal intention of the chain of reasoning is
obvious, the practical outcome of pursuing this logical sequence would be
antithetical even to the most nuanced version of policy-oriented African
language discourse which recognizes the contradictory ways in which
unity and diversity impinge on any language programme.
HEGEMONY AND THE STATE
Reference to hegemony usually implies another classical Gramscian
distinction: that between state and civil society. The difference between
the two is highly contestable, and indeed impossible to maintain in the
same form across contexts. Explicitly drawing attention to the shifting
analytic status of the state is something (contrary to some critics) which is
a potential strength of the Gramscian antinomies. Practically the extent of
the state is unpredictable: our media (African or European) constantly
astonish us with tales of the surveillance the state can exert over our lives
and, contrariwise, with the seemingly simple tasks that state apparatuses
prove incapable of discharging. That the state is both weak and strong is a
familiar paradox. In relation to our preoccupations here, two aspects of the
sponsorship of language need to be separated: let’s call them
programmatic sponsorship and pragmatic sponsorship. The two
frequently conflict. By programmatic language sponsorship we mean to
understand the official policy of the state expressed in its regulations about
recruitment, education, the judicial process, the media and so forth (e.g.
UNESCO 1981). By pragmatic sponsorship, we mean those effects in and
through language that the policy of the state brings about.
Sponsorship of language by the state (both programmatically and
pragmatically) is always crucial, but may be especially so when the state,
like the African state, is often the major player in employment and the
distribution of wealth, and when language has become as politically
charged as we have suggested it is in Africa. Authorities involved in
nation-building are rightly advised to avoid contentious separatism in their
language policy, and many African countries have moved increasingly
towards a pluralist stance in their official programmes. In part, we
suggested earlier, this has required recognition of the inappropriateness of
18
African languages, development and the state
the European, romantic notion of the state as the culmination and
embodiment of a unitary people, culture and language. The short term
attempt to subordinate regional linguistic practices has transpired to be a
sure recipe for longer term discord. The state may sponsor a vision of
language use, within limits it can bring it about (especially through
education and through making a certain portfolio of competence the
condition of empowerment), but it cannot legislate a desired situation into
being nor can it determine how people will interpret the changes it
sponsors. The state may programmatically sponsor a workable language
portfolio, one that promises to be feasible within the various definitions of
language use. But, in addition to this, state authorities need to be sensitive
to the pragmatic outcomes of their activities. All too often a species of
linguistic bad faith finds state authorities programmatically sponsoring
one set of initiatives while pragmatically reinforcing another, whether by
intention or not. Unfortunately, the effects of ill-considered interventions
to impose discursive practices can be much more startling than a
gradualist approach.13 The penalties for getting things wrong (at least in
the short term) are greater than the rewards for getting them right.
David Laitin’s recent summation of the different interests in play in the
processes of language rationalization and state-building in Africa sets out
to show how game theory might aid African politicians avoid some of the
pitfalls that await them (Laitin 1992). Formulaically, he suggests that the
outcome of language rationalization in African states is liable to converge
in most countries on a 3±1 formula, which is to say that individual
language repertoires will be required to include competence in between
two and four languages. The three most commonly occurring languages
will be 1) a language of wider communication for official and
international purposes, which will commonly be a European language, 2)
an African lingua franca (standardized from an indigenous language,
pidgin or creole), 3) a regional vernacular. Where individuals are
socialized in one of the larger languages that is nevertheless not the
regional vernacular, they will need to acquire four languages; however, an
individual who is socialized in an African lingua franca, which is also a
local vernacular, will need to learn only two languages. More generally,
the number of languages in which individuals require proficiency will be
affected by the range of mobility to which they aspire.
Laitin’s 3±1 formula comes close to stating the status quo in much of
post-colonial Africa; the originality of his interpretation lies in
demonstrating that radical departure from this pattern is highly unlikely.
On the one hand, there are macro forces that require international and
national communication, on the other hand, there is a micro dynamics of
language use which is reflected in the individual’s language repertoire
Introduction: frontiers and boundaries
19
(akin to what we are calling language portfolio) and in the fluidity of
contemporary linguistic interactions, which may switch between
languages and registers. Mediating the macro and micro level factors,
there is a pattern of diverse political claims articulated by the
representatives of interests wedded to international, national and regional
language interests. If none of these interests is entirely to be overridden,
then the policy makers would be well advised to offer each of them some
endorsement in both policy and practice.
As the most sustained attempt to reconcile top-down and bottom-up
perspectives on Africa’s language problem, Laitin’s argument deserves
the attention of all policy makers who wish to ease the pain of transition
to an outcome he feels is inevitable. Whether the games theoretic,
equilibrium outcome will eventuate is more difficult to predict. Nigerian
policy (see notes 13 and 15) clearly tends in this direction, at least
programmatically. But it is not obvious that the state will be able to
afford to implement its policy, or indeed have the political means or will
to do so. As van Binsbergen emphasizes, state apparatuses function at
numerous levels (from the national to the local), and the political aspects
of language and ethnicity are not necessarily consistent between these
situations. More generally, Laitin assumes that decisions concerning
language will be made through legitimate state apparatuses and that this
will occur as part of a process of state-building. One can only hope he is
correct in this, but alternative scenarios of the disintegration of the state,
control of its remaining powers by factional interests, and a general
decline in statal ability to sponsor developments of national scope are all
too readily to hand. The formulation of state policy on language may
transpire to be a symbolic political contest with only tangential effects
upon the development of discursive practices adopted by most people,
most of the time.
LANGUAGE AND DEVELOPMENT
To complete the triad of terms of our original workshop title, we turn to
what we might want to understand by development and what role the state
can play both in relation to the necessary embeddedness of all
development in language and with specific regard to language policy.
Tables of Gross Domestic Product may appear to transcend language and
aspire to a realm of pure statistics; but the components of the gross product
were made under particular conditions of language (the language of farm
or factory or financial institution). This point has been emphasized in
studies of rural development and agricultural extension work where the
rhetorics of development, the attempted imposition of expertise, and the
20
African languages, development and the state
corresponding attribution of ignorance to local farmers have been
analysed (e.g. Richards 1985; Pottier 1989; Parkin 1975; Hobart ed.
1993). If development is a process of empowerment then it must be
differentiated according to whom it seeks to empower, and in what terms:
cultural, technical, educational, economic, political. Unfortunately
different criteria of development do not necessarily point towards the
same policy. However, if this maligned term has one virtue, it is that it
points to its own base line: development must be development of some
existing situation.
Arguments specifically concerned with language often share many of
the suppositions of broader discourses about cultural development.
Language features in different developmental discourses depending on
whether it is conceived ‘pragmatically’, as a functional device for
communication and technical education, or ‘expressively’, as a vehicle
and manifestation of culture. Looked at in the latter way, language
debates belong to arguments over the uses of African and European
languages waged among African writers and critics (Ngugi 1986;
Chinweizu et al. 1985; Soyinka 1976; Okpewho 1988), over the
differing natures of African and European philosophy (Hountondji
1977; Mudimbe 1988), about the nature of an African as opposed to
European socialism (in the writings of Nkrumah, Nyerere and others),
and, within the broad context of the négritude movement (July 1987).
The arguments differ, but each is grounded in some appeal to African
authenticity (Blommaert).
To privilege some part of the existing field, other variant practices must
be declared ‘inauthentic’, and thus not worthy of further development.
The tensions involved here are also those implicated in the different
discourses on language, development and the state. In order to take a
stance on the question of ‘language’, critics must objectify language and
ignore discursive practices. Thus for Chinweizu and his associates, only
‘works done by Africans and in African languages, whether these works
are oral or written, constitute the historically indisputable core of the
canon of African literature’ (1985:13). Other, less clearcut, works must be
vetted in terms of ‘some decision procedure’ (1985:12). These decision
procedures cannot help but be contentious since they do not start from
existing discursive practices in African societies but from an
‘indisputable’ history. The character both of language and history is
begged. But can African writing be divorced from the current nature of
African societies, which are marked by complex language practices? Who
decides that some of these practices are more authentically ‘African’ than
others, given that all are done by Africans? This question refers us to
broader issues: how far can premeditated change in linguistic practice be
Introduction: frontiers and boundaries
21
sponsored? And, anyway, does ‘authenticity’ constitute a ground for
sponsoring change when the rhetoric of authenticity is so peculiarly
malleable to factional interests?14
The state, we have argued, is severely constrained in its programmatic
sponsorship of language change. These constraints issue from the postpluralist nature of the civil society to be changed, the degree to which civil
society has captured the state, the linkages between national issues and a
variety of regional and global projects over which slight influence can be
exercised, and the degree that state policies pragmatically encourage
outcomes contrary to their programmes.
A classic example of mismatch between Government edict and
popular practice can be seen in the case of written Hausa. In 1917, Hans
Vischer, then Director of Education for the north of Nigeria, set out rules
for Hausa spelling which he published and communicated to a few of his
colonial colleagues at a time before Hausa had been written in Roman
script to a great extent. This orthography was adopted throughout
northern Nigeria. In 1917, linguists and administrators had the
opportunity to establish norms. Contrast the situation in 1966 when a
group of linguists meeting at a UNESCO conference on the orthography
of African languages in Bamako proposed a new orthography for Hausa
to bring its conventions into line with those used for other African
languages. When the proposals were put into effect in Niger, a situation
resulted in which Hausa was written in one way in Niger and in another
in Nigeria. Fifty years of experience in Nigeria had been ignored. The
situation persisted until the authorities in Niger decided to adopt the
Nigerian orthography. As a result of the intervention of prescriptive
linguists, and the state’s sponsorship of their plans, the difficulties
facing people wishing to teach, learn, read and write in Hausa had been
multiplied. The linguists and administrators simply failed to recognize
the historical inappropriateness of their suggestions and their inability to
impose them on Hausa-speaking peoples.
HAUSA AS MOTHER TONGUE AND AS LINGUA FRANCA
Proponents of the need for language policy argue that the key question is
‘what happens in schools?’. This question is closely related to assessments
of the balance between the number of speakers using a language as mother
tongue and those using it as lingua franca. Mother tongue and lingua
franca are often portrayed as poles around which certain features
necessarily agglomerate. But such agglomerations are not self-evident
from the perspectives of discursive practice and the attitudes taken
towards languages, registers and styles of speech in particular
22
African languages, development and the state
communities. Neither mother tongue nor lingua franca are the objectively
bounded entities these usages suggest. An approach from the ‘bottom up’,
which emphasizes features of discursive context, demonstrates further
difficulties that state authorities face in imposing policy.
In Nigeria, it has generally been argued that it would be impossible
immediately to declare Hausa, Yoruba or Igbo the national language
because to do so would upset the delicate political balance between these
three ethnic blocks. Instead, the preference has been for social
engineering to promote a variety of languages in different degrees in
order to maintain or create political balances of various kinds. 15 By these
strategies of deliberate underdevelopment of certain languages and
development of others, it has been assumed that the state can promote its
integration through ‘nation-building’. The distinction between mother
tongue and lingua franca has been crucial to this proposal. The mother
tongue is assumed to be that used within homogenous language groups,
and the lingua francas are envisaged as means of communication
between members of different ethnic and cultural groupings. While the
emphasis on multilingualism is welcome, the presuppositions justifying
the programme may be oversimplified. How many extended language
situations in Nigeria involve only groups of homogenous, mother tongue
speakers? Not many. Even in the heartland of the Hausa-speaking
communities of Katsina, Daura or Kano conversations may switch into
and out of English, and there are frequent occasions for members of the
Hausa community to converse with Yoruba, or Igbo, or Tuareg, or
Kanuri speaking peoples. Yet these circumstances are straightforward
compared to those in Taraba, Adamawa, or Borno states, where people
sometimes use Kanuri or Fulfulde, sometimes Hausa or English, and
on other occasions one or more of the less widely spoken languages of
the region. 16
The significance attached to language choice is highly variable in these
different circumstances. A mother tongue Hausa speaker using Hausa in
Kano might also subscribe to ideas of Hausa culture, Hausa centrality in
the north, and Hausa nationalism that are widely shared in his or her
community; but for a speaker using Hausa in Adamawa, Taraba or Borno,
the language might be an expedient to allow communication between
Shuwa and Kanuri, or Kanuri and Fulani, or it might signify personal
allegiance to a particular group within Maiduguri or the wider north. The
variety of perceptions of significance in language choice, especially in
multilingual settings, invites misunderstandings: a language use that is
pragmatic from one perspective might be interpreted ideologically from
another. The campaigning carried out by the Sardauna during the 1950s
promoted the use of Hausa as an element of his attempt to create a greater
Introduction: frontiers and boundaries
23
Northern Nigeria. From his perspective, speakers of Tiv, Gwari or other
larger, minority languages, could not make independent contributions to a
‘greater northern good’. But it would be a mistake on this account to
believe that the transformation of Numan, where forty years ago most
people transacted their daily business in Bachama, into a town where a
majority of the population speaks Hausa, is any indication of the
incorporation of Numan, or the Bachama, into a collective northern Hausa
identity. While changing patterns of multilingualism have political
implications, these cannot be read off directly.
The contrast between Northern Nigeria and Northern Cameroon is
illuminating. The spread of Hausa and Hausa-ization in Nigeria is
mirrored in the spread of Fulfulde and Fulbe-ization in Cameroon
(Burnham 1991). Chamba in Cameroon have been among the peoples
who have tended to resist Fulbe-ization; many other non-Fulbe peoples
have shown a tendency to Fulbe-ize in town. The preference, especially of
Christian Cameroonian Chamba, is for French as a lingua franca and,
although no data exist to clinch the point, many express a preference to
migrate entirely outside the area of Fulbe hegemony if they choose to
leave their homelands. For Chamba in Nigeria, the use of Hausa as lingua
franca finesses the implications of speaking Fulfulde. Again relying on
impressionistic evidence, it seems that use of Fulfulde as a second
language has been in decline historically in Adamawa and Taraba States.
The fact of the existence of the Fulfulde-speaking Adamawa Emirate in
the nineteenth century has had different outcomes in Nigeria and
Cameroon, but it has significantly invested attitudes to Fulfulde in both
countries. The encouragement (so far mostly on paper) of Chamba as a
medium of instruction in primary schools in Ganye Local Government
Area (where Chamba are a local majority), apart from raising practical
problems about orthography and written materials, will reproduce a
smaller scale version of the political challenges. Which of many dialects is
to be adopted as the standard written form? What are to be the hegemonic
implications of the fillip given to the growing Ñnakenyaré Chamba lingua
franca spoken around the local Government headquarters at Ganye—both
in relation to Chamba dialects which will become subordinated and to the
languages spoken by local minorities (Koma, Vomni, and—in this context
of reversal—even Fulfulde)?
CONCLUSION
The current Nigerian policy of encouraging knowledge of at least one and
often two of the three major lingua francas at school level aims both to
encourage language versatility and to reduce the links between language,
24
African languages, development and the state
ethnicity and political affiliation. These aims are highly laudable in
principle, and that of changing present patterns of multilingualism may
be feasible not least because it moves in the direction that events
already tend—especially with respect to Hausa for Yoruba and Igbo
speakers. However, the link between a particular pattern of
multilingualism and nation-building is complex. Because ethnic
identities (and thus the significance of language practices) are being
reshaped continuously, because language use never ceases to undergo
change, and because the past is always a present concern—in short
because history will not stop to allow legislators respite—the
objectification of language at the expense of discursive practice is a
dangerous impediment to the success of state-sponsored development.
Experience suggests that the state can sponsor dramatic language
reform only under exceptional circumstances (as in the revival of
Hebrew in Israel), but that its capacity to engineer perverse effects is
always remarkable.
Pragmatic language sponsorship suggests a modest and constantly
revised understanding of the changing patterns of language use
combined with a willingness to seize opportunities that arise at levels
between the state and the immediate locality. Such a pragmatic and
populist policy might support initiatives made by local organizations,
regional government and non-statal associations, but equally
importantly it would involve the removal or lessening of constraints
upon local initiatives, whether in the form of language lobbies or
specific restrictions on future language development. Such pragmatic
policy might run counter to programmatic policies adopted centrally by
the state in the short run. But in the longer run it could act as a balance
both to modify the excesses of programmatic implementation, and to
ensure that the changing nature of current language use and the
limitations of prescription remain clearly in focus.
Monolingualism has never been the norm in Africa that it is in much
of Europe. The state may best serve its own interests by enabling people
to develop the personal language portfolios they will anyway continue to
acquire so long as there are incentives to speak to neighbours, acquire
religious, scientific and technical knowledge, and pursue careers in
local, national, regional and international forums. But this will only
become possible when multilingualism (in African languages of
differing importance, in Arabic and in European languages) is developed
as a strength rather than compensated as a national problem. Our
conclusion, therefore, is that dialogue between the different discourses
on language can be productive to the extent that each can identify with
Introduction: frontiers and boundaries
25
the aims of the others in favour of a broadly conceived programme to
empower language users.
NOTES
1 Throughout this volume, Africa is used with the sense of sub-Saharan Africa
unless otherwise specified. Internal references to papers in this collection are
given by author name without further specification.
2 For further discussion of the so-called ‘problem’ of Africa’s languages, see
Bamgbose (1991:2–9).
3 One of us (Furniss) works on a majority language, Hausa; the other (Pardon)
has researched on a minority language, Chamba Daka. In this respect, at least,
our personal biases may cancel out one another.
4 Our introduction is indebted to two recent reviews of anthropology, politics
and language (Parkin 1984; Grillo 1989). Very full references to recent debates
in anthropology can be found in the bibliographies to these articles. For recent
discussions of African language policy we have profited especially from two
collections: Ngalasso and Ricard 1986; Emenanjo 1990. We regret being
unable to cite many of the contributions to the Nigerian debate itemized in the
bibliography to the latter collection, but the most recent of these are not
available to us in London.
5 David Laitin’s recent, wide-ranging synthesis of writings on language policy in
Africa, has attempted to deal evenhandedly with what he dubs micro dynamics
and macro forces affecting language use. Despite the best endeavours of this
exemplary work, he finds it impossible to retain a nuanced appreciation of the
diversity of language practices when he comes to discuss language policy. The
very act of naming languages (Swahili, Hausa, English, French…) tells against
the plurality of language in use. The problem is akin to the virtual impossibility
of discussing ethnicity other than in terms of labels that are ‘tribal’. The
resources of available terms in language fail to match the conceptual
complexity that would be required.
6 As Fairhead argues, understanding patterns of discursive practice involves
understanding also their insertion into local technological and political
debates.
7 This striking formulation is Paul Richards’, to whom a special note of gratitude
is owed more generally for his invitation to present this paper for discussion at
a seminar of the Department of Anthropology, University College London,
from which we derived much intellectual stimulation and clarification.
8 This tendency has been notably resisted by Elugbe (1990:13–14); but he shares
the aspiration to a national language although he envisages this occurring over
a period measured in centuries (1990:17).
9 The contributors to the Emenanjo volume (1990) differ widely in their
preferences, from Sofunke who proposes Igala (an idea not endorsed by the
editor’s introduction) to Rotimi Badejo who favours the early introduction of
English to schools’ curricula as a counterweight to the advantage that
otherwise accrues to Nigerians who speak English as a first language.
However, none of the contributors explicitly rejects the logic of the case for a
single national language at some time in the future.
26
African languages, development and the state
10 The sub-title is borrowed from Grillo (1989:8).
11 Following Foucault’s example in The Order of Things we might have begun by
examining the idea of the ‘list’ which often accompanies the language map but
may appear separately. The map orders languages in two-dimensional space, so
that extension seems crucial; the list is necessarily ordinal, so that assessment
of the numbers of speakers becomes the crucial organizing principle. The list is
particularly important in discussions of the relative numbers of people
speaking a major language as a ‘mother tongue’ and as a ‘lingua franca’.
However, we are reminded by the Derives that frequency of usage is as
significant as numbers of speakers in assessing the range of lingua francas
(Derive and Derive 1986:45). Lists of languages have been particularly
important in the discussion of the, roughly, 400 languages spoken within
Nigeria (discussed below).
12 As Wim van Binsbergen remarked at our meeting, our discussion of
cartography as a trope refers to the conventional, two-dimensional maps in
common circulation and might be complicated by consideration of threedimensional maps capable of encoding greater complexity and co-territoriality.
We restrict our attention to conventional, two-dimensional maps on the
grounds that more complex maps have not so far featured sufficiently
commonly to be generalized as a rhetorical, and conceptual, trope.
13 The history of Sudan is cautionary in this respect (see Miller 1986); the
imposition of Arabic caused English to become a political cause for
southerners. The example warns us to be cautious of assuming that political
claims will always be articulated around the right to use African languages in
public affairs. The political importance of English in the anglophone
Cameroon is another case in point. The expansion of Sango in Zaïre (at least
according to Diki-Kidiri’s account, 1986) seems to show the value of the state
recognizing and encouraging changes already under way. The national
language of the Central African Republic emerged independently of specific
sponsorship.
For all the practical problems it faces, at least if it is given the necessary
resources and time to settle down, the Nigerian 6–3–3–4 programme (the
numbers refer to years of primary, junior secondary, senior secondary and
tertiary education), with an explicit commitment to pluralism, may represent a
Government sponsored recognition of multilingualism that avoids the worst
aspects of over-hasty engineering (see the National Policy on Education of
1977 and 1981, and such supporting literature as the ‘Guidelines’ and
‘Newsletter’ of the 6–3–3–4 committee). However, the very explicitness of the
way that relations between languages are specified in the Nigerian case
necessarily invites some contention. In addition to Bamgbose and Elugbe, see
Akinnaso (1989; 1991) for the Nigerian language situation and policy.
14 Ngalasso suggests that intellectuals’ and politicians’ accounts of ‘authenticity’
may be unconvincing to rural people who feel that the proponents of such a
view are not only living in comparatively splendid (if ‘unauthentic’) style but
also appropriating the signs of authenticity from the villages they have left
(Ngalasso 1986:25–6).
15 Apart from the three major lingua francas (four when Pidgin is included), and
English, it has been calculated (from estimated 1986 population figures) that
twelve or thirteen other Nigerian languages have over a million speakers, while
a further twenty-four languages have more than a hundred thousand speakers
Introduction: frontiers and boundaries
27
(Jibril 1990). This leaves roughly 360 languages with fewer than a hundred
thousand speakers. The National Policy on Education sees a role for instruction
in some of the minor languages (at least those dominant in local Government
areas) at the levels of primary and junior secondary school. Nigerian children
are to learn at least one national language (one of the Wazobia languages:
Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba) other than their mother tongue. For the sixty-four million
mother tongue speakers of a national language, this means acquiring two
national languages.
16 See Okwudishu (1990) for a survey of the language situation in Gongola State
(now divided into Adamawa and Taraba States).
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Federal Republic of Nigeria (1977) National Policy on Education (revised 1981),
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Part I
West Africa
Bamgbose’s opening paper discusses the broad issues of national
language policy in pluralist states. Moving from this wide-ranging
perspective, the subsequent papers focus on increasingly more local
contexts in West Africa—Fyle on an aspect of language policy in Sierra
Leone, Igué and N’Ouéni on national policy and practice in the Republic
of Bénin, Elugbe on experience of initiatives at the level of constituent
states within the Federal Republic of Nigeria, an d Hansford on NGO and
church activity in a part of Ghana.
Bamgbose’s paper criticizes current thinking about language policy on
two fronts: widespread myths about multilingualism, and present
definitions of development. He notes that the overwhelming majority of
contemporary nation states are multilingual and that the tyranny of
‘one’—one nation, one language, one people—has influenced the policy
aspirations of states whose national reality has been quite different. It is an
inescapable fact that national development must take place in the context
of linguistic and ethnic heterogeneity. Multilingualism is, as Bamgbose
indicates, not necessarily divisive, nor is it necessarily disadvantageous to
the citizen. He makes the point, made also by other contributors, that
participation in development entails language competence. Lingua francas
and local languages are essential components of any sustainable
development effort. Bamgbose goes further to criticize the prevailing
narrow definition of ‘development’. In his view, material and technical
development must be linked to social and cultural development, and in
that context he places particular emphasis on self-reliance, ‘intellectual
aid as a surer basis of development in preference to material aid’, the
domestication of technology, and popular participation.
The paper by Fyle on Sierra Leone discusses the way in which Krio, a
widely used lingua franca, impinges minimally on the formulation of state
language policy which is predicated on national representation for the
31
32
West Africa
major population groups—Mende and Temne. Fyle’s paper points to the
importance of understanding actual patterns of language use rather than
the geo-political balances that go to make up the state. The short paper by
Igué and N’Ouéni provides, for Francophone Africa in the shape of the
Republic of Bénin, an illustration of the way in which, with the coming to
power of Kerekou in 1972, a new rhetoric of self-reliance and revaluation
of indigenous culture promised great things for the languages of Bénin.
New institutions were to be founded and new prescriptions put forward
which would promote Béninois languages until they equalled French.
After twenty years, according to N’Ouéni, little seems to have changed.
French remains paramount, and the majority of the population, lacking
French, remain largely excluded from participation in national life and
economic development.
Elugbe and Hansford (Nigeria and Ghana respectively) present
papers which trace in detail initiatives to develop minority languages
that have foundered on the rocks of educational practice. Local
initiatives work in fits and starts, local enthusiasms have difficulty in
engendering a self-sustaining momentum without long term insertion
into the school systems, and both authors appeal for either positive
support or, at the very least, the removal of hindrances put, by the state,
in the way of local initiatives.
2
Pride and prejudice in
multilingualism and development
Ayo Bamgbose
The title of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice is perhaps not
inappropriate as a caption for a discussion of the myths that surround
multilingualism and its role in national integration and development.
There is a simple equation such that prejudice in multilingualism
corresponds to pride in monolingualism and vice versa.
The role of language as a means of communication and social
interaction, a medium of education, and a vehicle for cultural expression
is fairly well-known. In any nation state, language is also often regarded
as a symbol of nationality. This, in turn, is based on the equally wellknown function of language as a solidarity marker. A speech community
has its ‘in-group’ language that marks it off from other speech
communities. This same speech community may have an ‘out-group’
language that it shares with a wider group. Alternatively, the solidarity
function of a language may be restricted to special purposes, such as
religion. In all these cases, language marks a person as belonging to a
group which may vary from a village community or a religious sect, to
an ethnic group or the entire nation.
MYTHS ABOUT LANGUAGE AND NATIONAL INTEGRATION
The perceived solidarity function of language has led to the development
of two complementary myths: the first is that having several languages in
a country (multilingualism) always divides: the other is that having only
one language (monolingualism) always unites, hence, national integration
is believed to be possible only through one national or official language.
Since most African countries are multilingual, the myth of linguistic
divisiveness is often associated with African languages. Hence, it has been
suggested that ‘differences between indigenous languages keep the people
apart, perpetrate ethnic hostilities, weaken national loyalties and increase
33
34
West Africa
the danger of separatist sentiment’ (Schwarz 1965:39). African languages
are, therefore, mainly seen as sources of potential instability and,
consequently, a threat to the well-being of the nation state.
Contrary to the above assertion, multilingualism is not necessarily a
barrier to national unity and integration. In fact, in the African situation, it
is questionable who is the better integrated citizen, ‘he who speaks only
one language, preferably the official language, or he who is able to
manipulate several languages which are used for communication in the
country’ (Kashoki 1982:24). It is also not the case that ethnic division can
always be equated with linguistic division. In Nigeria, for example, Hausa
is spoken by several ethnic groups, while the Edo ethnic group speaks
several languages belonging to the Edoid language family.
Conflicts between groups of people within a country rarely have
anything to do with linguistic differences. As Le Page (1964:16) has
rightly observed, ‘Language is like skin colour in that it is an easily
identifiable badge for those who wish to form a gang or fight against
another gang; the reasons for the gang warfare lie deeper than either
language or colour’. Fishman (1968a:45) too has made the important
observation that language differences need not be divisive, since both
divisiveness and unification are ideologized positions: minor differences
can be magnified, just as major ones can be minimized.
An example of differences being played down can be seen in the way
some lingua francas are emerging in Africa. Because of the utility of such
languages as Akan in Ghana, Wolof in Senegal, Hausa in Northern
Nigeria, Lingala in Zaire, not to talk of the more widely-spoken Swahili in
Eastern Africa, speakers of different languages are embracing them as
second languages. Another example is the way differences in dialects
which have been magnified in the past almost to the point of language
status are now played down considerably (e.g. Twi and Fante which are
now seen simply as dialects of Akan; these two speech forms were listed
as separate languages in the list of nine languages approved for education
in post-Independence Ghana). The converse of this is that differences
between closely-related languages which have largely been ignored in the
past may suddenly assume a major dimension. For example, the EfikIbibio dialect cluster in Nigeria has for years been accepted as practically
one language with Efik as the literary form of the language. This position
is now being reversed and Ibibio is more and more being emphasized as a
separate language with its own orthography. This trend is likely to be
intensified with the creation of a new state, Akwa-Ibom, in 1987 in which
the Ibibio form the dominant group.
Some of the real causes of divisiveness in African countries have
nothing to do with language. They include exploitation of ethnicity by the
Pride and prejudice in multilingualism
35
élite in order to gain political or economic advantage, the problem of
sharing scarce resources with the inevitable competition (e.g. for jobs,
positions, facilities, etc.), uneven development, and sometimes external
instigation based on nationalistic, ideological or religious motives. In
Nigeria, for instance, the causes of our conflicts have to do with
powersharing, particularly among the élite, and access to and control of
the national wealth and the economy. Dissatisfaction with political,
economic, educational, or social conditions is often expressed in ethnic
terms, particularly by the self-appointed leaders of the group. It is then
that one hears that such and such an ethnic group is being discriminated
against in terms of jobs, amenities, educational facilities, etc. In my view,
a more pernicious kind of discrimination is ‘statism’ which effectively
disenfranchises persons that ‘belong’ to another state. As is well-known,
such Nigerians are often subjected to double taxation, differential tuition
fees, and discrimination in employment and admission to schools.
The second myth espouses and exaggerates the importance of a
common language in that it assumes that national unity is not possible
unless a country has a single common language. This position is often
forcefully stated in such statements as ‘Language is a nation’s most
obvious and most important attribute. There is no such thing as a nation
without a common linguistic basis’ (Isayev 1977:192). ‘A people without
a language of its own is only half a nation. A nation should guard its
language more than its territories—‘tis a surer barrier, a more important
frontier than fortress or river’ (attributed to Thomas Davies and quoted in
Fishman (1973:49)).
The underlying assumption in the above position is that nationhood
also involves linguistic unity. Experience, however, shows that there are
viable nations which are multilingual and yet get on very well while
operating in two or more languages, with none of them common to the
entire populace. Canada operates with English and French, Switzerland
operates with French, German and Italian. Hence, it is true that a common
language ‘is not a necessary condition for a unified state and that one or
more major language groups can coexist in a system with minimal conflict
between them’ (Kelman 1971:34). Even in many countries that have a socalled common language, there are minority groups that speak other
languages and have to become bilingual, or else make use of the services
of those who are bilingual in the official language and their own language.
This situation cannot be better put than Le Page does as follows:
It might be thought self-evident that for effective government and
administration of law the rulers, the judges and the ruled should form
one homogeneous linguistic community. From a vantage point in
36
West Africa
Western Europe or North America it might appear as if democracy
could not possibly work unless these conditions were satisfied; with an
elected government passing laws in a language which the people can
understand, so that they can discuss them; with newspapers reporting
discussion, and politicians addressing the people directly in their own
language either face to face or through the medium of broadcasting and
television; with the judges and lawyers discussing the law in the same
language in which the plaintiff and defendant instruct their counsel.
But if these are the conditions for democracy to flourish, then it must be
admitted that democracy has very rarely had a chance to flourish
because these conditions have rarely existed in history and exist in very
few parts of the world today. Even in a comparatively small country
like Britain, the Welsh-speaking Welsh and the Gaelic-speaking
Scots…need bilingual intermediaries between themselves and the
government and for dealings in the law.
(Le Page 1964:15)
In Africa, it seems that we are obsessed with the number ‘one’. Not
only must we have one national language, we must also have a oneparty system. The mistaken belief is that in such oneness of
language or party we would achieve socio-cultural cohesion and
political unity in our multi-ethnic, multilingual, and multicultural
societies (Kashoki 1982:21). Some will even go further to advocate a
supra-national language instead of the assumed explosive alternative
of evolving a national language; and the favourite candidate for this
role, it has been suggested, should be Swahili (Soyinka 1977). In their
preoccupation with one language, others often advocate the
development of a composite language comprising elements of the
country’s languages. Suffice it to say that only those who are
ignorant of the characteristics of language and the science of
language will support such a proposal. Experts in language know
very well that such a hybrid language is virtually impossible to
evolve, and, if formed, cannot cope with the complex demands made
on natural languages. For an example of such an artificial language
proposed for Nigeria, see Bamgbose (1985:100–1).
While it must be conceded that a common language is a
potentially unifying force, the point must be made that other factors
conducive to unity must be present before a common language can
unify. Political, economic, educational and social arrangements
must be such that the different groups in the polity feel a sense of
belonging and a conviction that their needs and aspirations are being
met; see Duggal (1981:48).
Pride and prejudice in multilingualism
37
MYTHS ABOUT LANGUAGE AND NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
National development is usually described in terms of economic growth,
attainment of economic targets, growth rate, increase in Gross National
Product (GNP) or Gross Domestic Product (GDP), rise in per capita
income, etc. It is, of course, possible to make a detailed breakdown of such
indicators of national development as Allardt (1973:268–71) has done in
terms of societal allocations, embracing allocations to different sectors of
the economy (industry, defence, education, technology, administration,
communication, etc.); societal goals, embracing economic prosperity and
growth as expressed in per capita and employment rates, political
efficiency, political participation and modernization efforts; and individual
goals, embracing level of welfare as expressed in private consumption and
housing, life expectancy, freedom to choose jobs or belong to
organizations. Whichever way this concept of national development is
amplified, it is to be considered a narrow one in the sense that it equates
national development with socio-economic development.
Even assuming the narrow conception of national development, the
question arises about the role of language in socio-economic
development. The assumption is that language does have a role to play,
but the nature of that role is hardly spelt out. One major problem,
however, to which attention has been drawn is the relationship between
linguistic heterogeneity and development. Linguistically heterogeneous
states are said to be characterized by low or very low per capita GNP and
are usually economically underdeveloped, while linguistically
homogeneous states have a high or medium per capita GNP and are
relatively economically well-developed (Banks and Textor 1963).
Fishman (1968b), making use of the Banks and Textor cross-polity files,
has shown that there is no necessary correlation between linguistic
heterogeneity and low economic status and vice versa. Of the 114
countries examined, fifty-two are linguistically homogeneous, while
sixty-two are heterogeneous. Of the fifty-two homogeneous countries,
twenty-five (or about 50 per cent) have low or very low per capita GNP,
while forty-seven of the sixty-two heterogeneous countries (about 75 per
cent) have low or very low per capita GNP. All the countries in Africa,
with the exception of South Africa, belong to the category of low or very
low per capita GNP; and these include not only the linguistically
homogeneous Arab countries of North Africa, but also homogeneous
black countries such as Burundi, Rwanda, Somalia and Madagascar.
Clearly this evidence suggests that there must be other variables at work.
Whatever may be responsible for the economic plight of the poorer
countries, the crucial variable cannot possibly be language.
38
West Africa
In spite of the above, heterogeneity continues to be viewed as a
deficiency or disadvantage. As Pool (1972:214) has put it, ‘it is said that
language diversity slows down economic development, by, for example,
breaking occupational mobility, reducing the number of people available
for mobilization into the modern sector of the economy, decreasing
efficiency and preventing the diffusion of innovative techniques’. While
rejecting a correlation between linguistic heterogeneity and
underdevelopment, even Fishman (1968b:63) concluded that sectionalism
and the presence of politically unassimilated minorities are two
distinguishing characteristics of linguistic heterogeneity, and obviously,
these would be seen as impediments to national integration and national
development.
Homogeneity of modern states, whether linguistic or ethnic, is a myth.
In a survey of 132 states, Connor (1972:320) found only twelve (9.1 per
cent) that can be described as ethnically homogeneous. An additional
twenty-five states (18.9 per cent) contain an ethnic group which accounts
for 90 per cent of the state’s population, and in a further twenty-five states,
the largest element constitutes between 75 per cent and 89 per cent of the
total population, and in thirty-nine states (29.5 per cent), the largest group
does not even account for half the population of the state. Taking a cut-off
point of 90 per cent to determine homogeneity, the situation is that, by
stretching the meaning of homogeneity, not more than 28 per cent of all
the states can be said to be homogeneous. The norm, therefore, for
contemporary states is heterogeneity which becomes more striking still
when ethnic diversity within states is taken into consideration. For
instance, Connor found that the number of distinct ethnic groups in some
states runs into hundreds and that in as many as fifty-three states (40 per
cent of the total number of states), there are at least five different units into
which the population can be divided. National development, even when
narrowly defined as socio-economic development, therefore has to take
place largely in the context of linguistic and ethnic heterogeneity.
THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE IN DEVELOPMENT
There are at least two areas in which language is crucial to national
development, even in its restricted definition as socio-economic
development: literacy and communication. There is an obvious link
between literacy and development. For instance, the world’s poorest
countries are also the countries with the highest rates of illiteracy. Since
literacy liberates untapped human potential and leads to increased
productivity and better living conditions, it is not surprising that countries
with the highest rates of literacy are also the most economically advanced.
Pride and prejudice in multilingualism
39
Similarly, mass communication with its emphasis on flow of information
can provide a suitable climate for national development.
It is mistaken, however, to equate national development with socioeconomic development. A wider and more satisfactory conception of
national development is that which sees it as total human development. In
this model of development, the emphasis is on a full realization of the
human potential and a maximum utilization of the nation’s resources for
the benefit of all.
The primacy of man as the source of all economic development is a point
which Schumacher (1973) has effectively made. It is man, he says, who
provides the primary resources and ‘the key factor of all economic
development comes out of the mind of man’. However, a crucial factor in
this creativity is education whose essence is the transmission of values.
Although poverty may be traced to material factors such as lack of natural
wealth, capital or infrastructure, those factors are entirely secondary. The
primary causes of poverty are really deficiencies in education, organization
and discipline. It is these, rather than material goods that can stimulate
development, as can be shown by the economic miracles achieved by
countries without material resources but with the crucial factors of
education, organization and discipline intact. Hence, development cannot be
created, bought, ordered, or transferred. The crucial factors have to become
a property of not just a few, but of the whole society.
The conclusion by Schumacher which is most relevant for our purpose
is that looking at development in quantitative terms such as GNP,
investment and savings is not really useful for developing countries:
Economic development is something much wider and deeper than
economics, let alone econometrics. Its roots lie outside the economic
sphere, in education, organization, discipline, and beyond that, in
political independence and a national consciousness of self-reliance ….
It can succeed only if it is carried forward as a broad, popular
‘movement of reconstruction’ with primary emphasis on the full
utilization of the drive, enthusiasm, intelligence, and labour power of
everyone.
(Schumacher 1973:190–1)
To do otherwise is to follow a course that must lead to failure.
The man-centredness and human face of development are now
increasingly accepted as the correct path to development. In the words of
former President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania:
In the Third World we talk a great deal about economic development,
40
West Africa
about expanding the number of goods and services, and the capacity to
produce them. But the goods are needed to serve men; services are
required to make the lives of men more easeful as well as more fruitful.
Political, social, and economic organization is needed to enlarge the
freedom and dignity of men. Always we come back to Man—to
Liberated Man—as the purpose of activity, the purpose of
development. So development is for man, by Man and of Man.
(Excerpt from a talk given at the International Conference
on Adult Education, Dar-es-Salaam, 21 June 1976,
and reproduced as a preface in Bataille (1976))
The Declaration of Persepolis which emerged from the International
Symposium for Literacy held at Persepolis, Iran from 3–8 September
1975 also came out strongly in favour of man-based development in
declaring that literacy is not merely acquiring the skills of reading, writing
and arithmetic ‘but a contribution to the liberation of man and his full
development’ (Bataille 1976:273–4). It should stimulate initiative,
encourage participation with a view to achieving ‘authentic human
development’ (ibid.).
Inspired by Schumacher, Ansre (1976) has proposed four elements
relevant to an overall national development: economic development,
politico-judicial development, socio-cultural development and intellectual
and educational development. In all this, he claims that the role of
language is crucial since in wealth-getting and wealth-sharing, a minority
official language cannot produce the best results. At best, it will only
produce a wealthy few. On the other hand, a language shared by many
should ensure greater productivity and fairer distribution. Similarly, law is
only just and meaningful if the language in which it is couched is
accessible to all. Socio-cultural development obviously points to
indigenous languages, while even intellectual and educational
development needs to have its roots in the language of the community.
A summary of the elements that should go into national development as
defined in a broader sense include:
1 Integrated development in which economic development is linked to social
and cultural development, and the combination of all three is designed to
improve the condition of man in society.
2 Self-reliance as the basis of all development instead of mass importation
of expertise.
3 Intellectual aid as a surer basis of development in preference to
material aid.
Pride and prejudice in multilingualism
41
4 Technology whenever transferred to be domesticated and indigenized to
conform with the socio-cultural norms and conditions of the country.
5 Mass participation and grassroots involvement in order to ensure
widespread and genuine development.
In the light of an examination of national development in its narrow and
broad senses, we are now in a position to consider the role of language. As
usual, two models present themselves: the model of use of official
languages, usually Languages of Wider Communication (LWCs) and the
model of use of indigenous languages.
Given that the development effort aims to reach the masses, it is
obvious that the language to be used in literacy and communication,
for example, must be one that is capable of reaching a large proportion
of the population. In literacy education, the pride of place has usually
belonged to indigenous languages. Earlier attempts to use foreign
official languages, such as French in Mali (Dumont 1973) or English
for tobacco growers in Western Nigeria, ended in dismal failure.
Among the African countries that have a vigorous programme of
literacy in African languages are Mali, Togo, Somalia, Tanzania,
Nigeria, Guinea, Niger, Burundi and Zambia. The advantages of such
media are that cultural forms and knowledge of cultural values are
better learnt and transmitted, the positive attitude to language
encourages greater motivation to learn, the course of instruction is
psychologically more adequate as the concepts are already familiar,
and the choice of language is in consonance with cultural and political
attitudes (UNESCO 1976:23–4).
Similarly, in the area of mass communication the undoubted
advantages that can be achieved through a greater flow of information
necessarily call for an intensification of the use of African languages in the
media. Unfortunately, communication specialists tend to play down the
role of such languages. For example Schramm (1964:101–2) sees Africa
as ‘a veritable crazy quilt of languages’ the use of which inevitably makes
for small audiences. In contrast, he suggests that the use of Spanish in
Latin America and Portuguese in Brazil may have facilitated the growth of
the press, while in India the use of regional and tribal languages increases
the problems of national broadcasting and exchange of information.
Similarly, Weiner (1967:192) sees multiplicity of languages as a barrier to
communication, and particularly the development of Indian tribal
languages as divisive, since literacy leads to a deepening of divisions in
terms of reading materials. The familiar bogey of linguistic heterogeneity
and its alleged disadvantages are seen at work here again. The point which
is often ignored is that the logic of mass participation points to not less,
42
West Africa
but increased, use of the many languages available in a country in order to
reach the widest possible segment of the community.
The conclusion which seems inevitable in the situation of most
developing countries is that a multilingual policy is the only viable avenue
for development. African languages will have well-defined roles in
education, culture and mass communication without prejudice to the
complementary role of LWCs. But what this means is that
monolingualism is not sufficient. Even Fishman who had earlier
associated a LWC with efficiency now seems to see the drawback of a
position that equates efficiency with monolingualism; for not only does he
debunk the ludicrous idea that ‘English improves the crops, raises the
gross national product, avoids drought and earthquakes, and improves
television’ (Fishman 1978:45), he now affirms that ‘In a multilingual
world it is obviously more efficient and rational to be multilingual than
not’ (1978:47).
Foreign ideas, concepts and technology will undoubtedly be imported
in a foreign language, but such concepts must be transmitted to the masses
in a language that they can understand. The economic miracle achieved by
countries such as Japan is not based on a widespread dissemination of
English, rather it is a result of the domestication of foreign technology in
Japanese, and the translation of the productive processes into terms that
the ordinary factory hand can understand.
REFERENCES
Allardt, E. (1973) ‘Individual needs, social structures and indicators of national
development’, in S.N.Eisenstadt and S.Rokkan (eds.) Building States and
Nations, vol. 1, Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.
Ansre, G. (1976) ‘National development and language’, paper given at the Twelfth
West African Languages Congress, mimeo.
Bamgbose, A. (1985) ‘Language and nation-building’, Review of English and
Literary Studies 2, 2:95–108.
Banks, A. and Textor, R.B. (1963) A Cross-Polity Survey, Cambridge Mass: M.I.T.
Press.
Bataille, L. (ed.) (1976) A Turning Point for Literacy, Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Connor, W. (1972) ‘Nation building or nation destroying?’ World Politics 24: 319–
50.
Duggal, N.K. (ed.) (1981) Toward a Language Policy for Namibia, Lusaka: United
Nations Institute for Namibia.
Dumont, B. (1973) Functional Literacy in Mali: Training for Development, Paris:
UNESCO Press.
Fishman J. (1968a) ‘Nationality-nationalism and nation-nationalism’, in J.
Fishman, C.Ferguson and J.DasGupta (eds.) Language Problems of Developing
Nations, New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Pride and prejudice in multilingualism
43
——(1968b) ‘Some contrasts between linguistically homogeneous and
linguistically heterogeneous states’, in J.Fishman, C.Ferguson and J. DasGupta
(eds.) Language Problems of Developing Nations, New York: John Wiley and
Sons.
——(1973) Language and Nationalism, Rowley Mass: Newbury House
Publishers.
——(1978) ‘Positive bilingualism: some overlooked rationales and forefathers’, in
J.E.Alatis (ed.) Georgetown University Round Table on Language and
Linguistics 1978, Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
Isayev, M.I. (1977) National Languages in the USSR: Problems and Solutions,
Moscow: Progress Publications.
Kashoki, M. (1982) ‘Language policies and practices in independent black Africa:
trends and prospects’, in A.Olabimtan (ed.) African Universities and the
Development and Wider Use of African Languages, Lagos: UNESCO.
Kelman, H. (1971) ‘Language as an aid and a barrier to involvement in the national
system’, in J.Rubin and B.Jernudd (eds.) Can Language Be Planned?,
Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii.
Le Page, R.B. (1964) The National Language Question, London: Oxford
University Press.
Pool, J. (1972) ‘National development and language diversity’, in J.Fishman (ed.)
Advances in the Sociology of Language, vol. 2, The Hague: Mouton.
Schramm, W. (1964) Mass Media and National Development, Stanford: Stanford
University Press and Paris: UNESCO.
Schumacher, E.F. (1973) Small is Beautiful, London: Blond and Briggs.
Schwarz Jr., F.A.O. (1965) Nigeria: The Tribes, the Nation or the Race—the
Politics of Independence, Cambridge, Mass: M.I.T. Press.
Soyinka, W. (1977) ‘The scholar in African society’, in A.V.Iwara and E.Mveng
(eds.) Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture: Colloquium in
Black Civilisation and Education, vol. 1, Lagos: Federal Military Government of
Nigeria .
UNESCO (1976) ‘Literacy in the world since the 1965 Teheran Conference:
shortcomings, achievement, tendencies’, in L.Bataille (ed.) A Turning Point for
Literacy, Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Weiner, Myron (1967) ‘A note on communication and development in India’, in
D.Lerner and W.Schramm (eds.) Communication and Change in the Developing
Countries, Honolulu: East West Center Press.
3
Official and unofficial attitudes
and policy towards Krio as the
main lingua franca in Sierra
Leone
C.Magbaily Fyle
Sierra Leone, a small country on the west coast of West Africa with a
population of some four million people, has some eighteen indigenous
ethnic groups within its borders. The largest of these groups, the Temne
and Mende, together comprise some 50 per cent of the total population.
One of the smaller groups, the Krio, making up less than 2 per cent of the
population, has historically and linguistically developed an importance
out of all proportion to its numbers. The Krio language grew to become
the main lingua franca in Sierra Leone. This essay proposes to explore the
background to this development as a way of demonstrating the nature of
official and unofficial attitudes and policy, both of the people and the
government, to this language.
THE EMERGENCE OF KRIO SOCIETY AND LANGUAGE
Krio society developed out of a colonial situation where groups of
captured slaves had been landed in the colony of Sierra Leone since the
late eighteenth century. This involved, roughly speaking, two segments.
The first is usually referred to in Sierra Leone historiography as the
Settlers. There were three components of this segment. Firstly, the black
poor, freed domestic slaves from England following the decision of Chief
Justice Mansfield in England in 1772 that slavery was unknown to English
law. The second component, the Nova Scotians, were former black
American slaves who had obtained their freedom by fighting on the side of
the British during the American War of Independence. Finally the
Maroons were former slaves in Jamaica who had fought for their freedom
and had consequently been sent packing through Nova Scotia to Sierra
Leone (Fyfe 1962; Fyle and Fyle 1981). These Settlers had all become
largely unfamiliar with African culture. They, particularly the black poor
and Nova Scotians, had, like their parents and often grandparents before
44
Krio as the main lingua franca in Sierra Leone
45
them, been born and bred in the western world and had imbibed western
culture, albeit diluted with survivals from their African background.
They had also come to absorb the prejudices of western society towards
Africa, thus producing in them dismissive attitudes towards African
culture generally.
The other segment is usually referred to in the literature as the
Liberated Africans or recaptives. These were people who had been
captured at various places in West Africa and sold as slaves, but were
recaptured by the British navy trying to give effect to British anti-slave
trade laws on the West African coast. They were all landed in Sierra
Leone, conveniently chosen for the purpose of liberating these ex-slaves,
as a British ‘colony’ already existed there, taken over by the British
Crown in 1808. The recaptives came from a variety of African subcultures (Koelle, a German missionary working in the colony at the time,
recorded some 200 of them).
There arose a need to communicate among this motley group. The
communication pattern which emerged developed under the
‘supervision’ of the English authorities who insisted on their own values
and language, which also quickly became the criteria for advancement.
For those who could readily communicate with the colonial
establishment, there was an increased chance of obtaining contracts and
jobs as carpenters, masons, washer women, domestic servants and so on.
These were the ‘plum’ jobs of the time in the early colony, carrying with
them a consequent social prestige and status. For this reason therefore,
English, and variants of it, which perforce developed among the Settlers
and recaptives, became an ‘official’ means of contact. But most of the
Settlers and recaptives had at best only a smattering of English, used
when necessary. The Nova Scotians had elements of what became Black
American English as spoken in the southern United States, mostly in the
rural areas where the blacks were largely found. But the Nova Scotians
were few to start with, as many of them died in an unfamiliar climate and
environment. The individual languages of the recaptives, who comprised
the vast majority, persisted but did not provide a means of inter-group
communication. Against this background developed a language system
using mostly English derived words, but having a syntax based almost
entirely on the African languages from which it drew support (Fyle and
Jones 1980).
As the language developed, most of the English derived words, and
phrases coined from them, altered their meaning, some losing their
original meanings and others adding new ones. This resulted often from
the need to express concepts relating to the local environment and
situation through words drawn from a language coming from a radically
46
West Africa
different culture and environment. For example, ‘sweet’ comes to mean
‘tasty’; the word ‘brook’ in Krio means ‘to launder’, taken from the fact
that laundry was done, in earlier times, almost entirely at the brook. The
word ‘line’, apart from its usual meanings in English, developed an
added sense as ‘road’. This constituted a revision of the traditional local
concept of a road. In pre-colonial times there were winding tracks in a
forest environment, meant to protect the location of settlements from
outsiders; with the new colonial system, roads tended to be constructed
along straight lines, and so the new meaning. To use metaphorically the
Krio phrase i de na layn means literally ‘he is on the road’, more
properly ‘in the forefront’ or ‘prominent’.
After English the next largest block of vocabulary in Krio came
from Yoruba, as apparently the largest group of recaptives came from
that ethnic group. Their enslavement was as a result of the Yoruba civil
war following the collapse of the Oyo empire about the end of the
eighteenth century. Many Yoruba who would have been transported
across the Atlantic into slavery in the Americas, were thus recaptured
and landed in Freetown. Names of a number of food items—agidi
‘corn meal’, ?biata ‘a vegetable dish’, eba gari ‘meal made from
grated cassava’; of cultural institutions—awuj? ‘a feast of charity’,
k?m?jade ‘a naming ceremony’, ?jeh ‘a cult association’, are all from
Yoruba. Thus while Krio has been regarded as one of the Creole
languages and has hitherto been so called by the Krio themselves,
recent research has shown that the name Krio used by people when
speaking about the language, is the real name of the people, deriving
from the Yoruba word akiriyo, ‘a people who walk about from place to
place’, as the Krio were wont to do (Fyle 1992).
As this research has become known to leading Krio elements they
have hotly contested this issue, insisting that the people are Creole and
the language is Krio. Objecting to names which are thought to be
demeaning and unattractive is not new among the Krio. Debates of this
nature emerged early in this century when the appellation ‘Creole’ was
becoming more commonly applied to these people. The most vocal of
them resented the term ‘Creole’ stating that they were not Creole but
Ibo, Popo, etc. Summarizing this debate, Wyse writes:
In a 1927 discussion of Colonial Under-Secretary Ormsby-Gore’s
report of his visit to West Africa, in which he used the term Creole,
there ensued what was almost a public debate. A.E.Tuboku-Metzger,
elected Rural Area representative in the Legislative Council, and vice
president of the local branch of the National Congress of British West
Africa angrily retorted ‘I am not a Creole. I dislike the expression
Krio as the main lingua franca in Sierra Leone
47
which is being misused in the colony when the word Sierra Leonean
could be appropriately used…’
(1980:12)
CURRENT SITUATION OF THE KRIO LANGUAGE
The need to communicate between a large number of ethnic groups led
to the emergence of the Krio language and to Krio becoming the main
lingua franca in Sierra Leone. To some extent, Mende in the south and
Temne in the north of Sierra Leone can be said to operate as lingua
francas among a few ethnic groups (Sesay 1984:33). But this is very
limited. Even in the north and south of Sierra Leone, Krio became the
language connecting most people of different ethnic groups. Even in the
remotest villages in rural Sierra Leone, it is not difficult to find people
who speak Krio. Even where a local villager does not feel comfortable in
the language, he will often understand statements in Krio.
Thus the Krio language has come to assume unofficial recognition as
the main vehicle of communication in Sierra Leone, the language of the
market place. It is used very widely by politicians when campaigning for
elections outside their own mother tongue areas or where they do not
speak the local language. Heads of State in Sierra Leone regularly make
policy statements during tours to open public shows, health centres,
bridges or other such facilities. Ninety per cent of such speeches are
made in Krio which is perhaps seen as having less regional bias than any
other language. In many schools in the main towns in the Provinces, and
also in Freetown, Krio is used to introduce pupils to English, the official
language in Sierra Leone. Phrases are rendered in Krio with the English
equivalent simultaneously presented for repetition by children
beginning to learn English. Thus it is often seen as ‘essential’ to know
Krio to get into the modern educational sector for schooling.
Indeed Krio in Sierra Leone has long taken the place of West African
English, as shown in the observation by Grieve, in the early
independence period, that Krio is ‘the language of the market place in
those centres where people from many tribes mix, above all the language
of education almost from its beginning’ (quoted in Sesay 1984:36).
In fact one of the most popular forms of entertainment in Sierra
Leone today is drama in Krio. Although they are presented usually in
Freetown, such performances are often taken to provincial towns with
huge success. In 1989, the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Service launched
a drama series in Krio entitled ‘The Professionals’. It was so successful
that it was illegally recorded and played in public transportation. ‘The
Professionals’ began performing in public entertainments on a regular
48
West Africa
basis, being hired to perform by a variety of organizations. Krio is used
increasingly in advertisements, street signs and notices throughout the
country.
KRIO ATTITUDES TOWARDS THE KRIO LANGUAGE
We have earlier mentioned the issue of Krio people themselves decrying
the use of the term Krio to apply to their ethnic group. There has
developed an ambivalent attitude among the Krio towards their
language, at once recognizing the prevalence and importance of their
language in Sierra Leone, while at the same time regarding the language
as somewhat inferior, this time to English. Thus Krio people still tend to
speak English in more ‘é1ite’ situations where the occasion was felt to
be too classy for Krio to be spoken. Even the poorly educated Krio
would in such circumstances endeavour to speak English, no matter how
badly, rather than talk Krio. In other circumstances, Krio people would
place markedly English words and phrases very deliberately into the
Krio they speak—saying ‘bucket’ for ‘bokit’, ‘window’ for ‘winda’,
‘water’ for ‘wata’. In fact in some leading secondary schools,
particularly in Freetown up to the present day, it is forbidden for the
pupils to speak Krio during school hours, with specified punishment
being meted out for such an ‘offence’, and this in schools headed by
Krio principals. They are, however, equally discouraged from speaking
Mende or Temne. But the opposition to speaking Krio is based partly on
the conviction that Krio is a bastardized form of the English language, a
‘patois’ or, as some older Krio called it, ‘broken English’, which will
present a worrying distortion of the English being learnt in school. It is
never realized that learning English as a second language in the milieu of
other indigenous languages will inevitably mean that influence from the
indigenous languages will affect the English. The same is clearly true for
learning any second language within an environment where the original
indigenous language predominates (Robin 1970:513–30; Mackey
1970:554–84).
But equally contributory to this attitude to the Krio language among
the Krio themselves was the inheritance from earlier colonial attitudes.
Within the colonial situation, Africans were taught to believe that their
culture, including language, was demeaning and backward; conversely,
everything western, in this case English, was progressive and
worthwhile. Thus to speak Krio, to pronounce English derived words
with an African slant and intonation, was believed to be retrograde.
Where the pronunciation of a few English words was known, near
illiterate Krio speakers would jump at the chance to show that they too
Krio as the main lingua franca in Sierra Leone
49
were ‘with it’. This attitude has therefore increased the rate at which new
English words have entered the language.
NON-KRIO SIERRA LEONEANS AND THE KRIO LANGUAGE
People of other ethnic groups have acquired and related to the Krio
language, and understanding their position will help us to appreciate
the way in which the language has spread over the whole country. It
will also help to clarify the issue of variants of the Krio language
spoken in Sierra Leone.
Other ethnic groups began to acquire the Krio language through
migrants moving into Freetown to seek job opportunities more readily
available, within the colonial system, in the capital. This pattern of
concentration of facilities in the capital, inherited from colonial rule,
has continued into the post-colonial era. The best jobs, bright lights,
and other social amenities, were mostly found in Freetown. In
consequence the population of Freetown, at about half a million, is far
above that of the second largest town, Bo, which has only about half
that number. Since Krio was the language of Freetown, staying in
Freetown became synonymous with speaking Krio. Thus, as people
returned home to the Provinces, temporarily or permanently, they took
this acquired language with them.
Associated with this migratory trend was the wardship system
which served as a means whereby people from the Provinces were able
to get their children to acquire western education in the Colony, where
the best schools were situated. Such children were placed in Krio
homes where they acquired Krio culture, the language being an
integral part of this acquisition process. In fact some of them had their
names changed to English/Krio names since the Krio believed, like
their colonial overlords, that only such names were truly ‘Christian’
names. Thus the wardship system served as a means for people from
the Provinces to come to Freetown and acquire from Krio homes that
advancement—western values—which colonial rule had taught was
necessary.
Over time there emerged two versions of the Krio language. Native
speakers of Krio generally distinguish between ‘Freetown Krio’ and
‘Up-line’ Krio (the term ‘up-line’ being derived from the colonial
expression ‘up-country’, the Provinces, along the railway line which
was at that time the chief means of transportation for getting to parts of
Sierra Leone outside Freetown). Native speakers use Freetown Krio,
the variant of the heartland area, while ‘up-line’ Krio would be spoken
by second language speakers, usually from the Provinces. But
50
West Africa
Freetown Krio is also spoken by non-native speakers who have lived for a
long time in Free-town and by those who grew up in Krio homes.
On account of their colonial position, Krio people began to believe
that they had acquired western values as a group and were superior to
other, non-Krio, ethnic groups, who had not done so. This view mirrored
and extended the way the English had thought about them.
By the 1950s, the political situation in Sierra Leone was changing.
The departing colonial authorities decided to devolve political power in
Sierra Leone on the majority, meaning the people from the Provinces.
This went against what they had led the Krio to believe would be the
post-colonial dispensation since the Krio, having acquired the desired
western values, were better placed to take the best jobs, the prime social
positions and consequently to inherit political power in Sierra Leone.
Acting on that belief, the Krio leadership hotly contested the handing
over of political power to non-Krio, meaning, in their view, people who
had not yet acquired western values and therefore were unfit to inherit
western style political roles.
Nobody at the time seemed quite to understand the background to this
complex struggle, or to explain it fully. All that was clear was that the
majority, meaning non-Krio people, would inherit political office and
the colonial rulers were leaving. But the Krio opposition to political rule
by people from the Provinces came to be seen by others as a general
uppishness on the part of the Krio, arising from their view that the
western aspects of their culture made them superior. Non-Krio peoples
consequently reacted to this, and this reaction rubbed off on their
attitude to the Krio language as well. There developed a marked desire
on the part of non-Krio to speak their own local languages as opposed to
Krio, even in situations of mixed ethnic company. The anti-Krio ‘people
and language’ feeling was linked to a resurgence of ethnic identity
associated with newly assumed political power.
But within a decade, as political competition came less and less to be
seen along ethnic lines, this anti-Krio sentiment largely subsided.
Slowly, the Krio language began to regain the position it had begun to
hold before independence.
Prejudices among the Krio people also relate to Freetown Krio versus
up-line Krio. Some of the phrases and expressions from up-line Krio
which are entering the Freetown variant have become a source of worry
to first language speakers. For example, where in Freetown Krio one
would say wetin yu bring f?mi, in up-line Krio the same expression is
rendered wetin yu sen f?mi ‘what have you brought for me’. For the
expression in Freetown Krio, den de mek am, someone speaking up-line
Krio would say den de pan mek am ‘it is being done/made’. Children of
Krio as the main lingua franca in Sierra Leone
51
native Krio speakers have begun to acquire these expressions from upline Krio through association with second language Krio speakers from
the Provinces, largely in the Freetown schools where the latter are
numerically predominant. The concern expressed by native Krio
speakers on this issue relates to their idea that theirs is the ‘pure’
language while the other is a bastardized form. There is also a lingering
fear among them that their language might ultimately disappear.
Language is, of course, a living phenomenon and therefore subject to
considerable change over time, nevertheless it is not uncommon to hear
Krio speakers express concerns similar to those expressed by
Englishmen as Americanisms enter their ‘own’ version of the English
language.
OFFICIAL ATTITUDE AND POLICY
The prevalence of Krio however cannot negate the significance of other
Sierra Leonean languages, particularly the two largest, Mende and Temne,
as well as Limba, the third largest. There was for some time no clearcut
policy or official position as regards indigenous languages in Sierra
Leone. Since the late 1960s, it had been policy to utilize Krio, along with
Mende, Temne and Limba for the daily evening news. The news in English
was usually read at a separate time from the news in local languages.
Other local languages were served by a ‘weekly newsletter’, summarizing
the major events in that week’s news.
There has been an obvious hesitation about acknowledging the use of
Krio for official purposes. This is partly due to prejudice against the
‘status’ of the language, explained earlier, in relation to the small size but
former predominance of the Krio ethnic group. But hesitation also comes
from what any such acknowledgement would be saying about Mende,
Temne and Limba. Limba, the third largest ethnic group, has acquired a
more prominent position than it would otherwise have had because two
successive presidents of the Republic have been Limba. President
Momoh, it is often said, paid much greater attention than his predecessor
to the Limba as a group in terms of filling offices and leading positions.
Thus it has gradually become fashionable for Limba to identify
themselves as such and to develop a pride in speaking their language
publicly.
By 1977, the Sierra Leone Government began to consider more
seriously the issue of using indigenous languages in the formal education
system. An Indigenous Languages Education Program (ILEP) was
launched, and early in 1978, a training course in language teaching was
organized by the Ministry of Education to familiarize potential teachers
52
West Africa
with the general approaches to language learning and teaching (Horton
1985:93–6).
A decision was made to start teaching in indigenous languages in
early primary education. No transition class appears to have been
specified but an understanding grew that the first three years of primary
schooling would be taught in indigenous languages. It was decided to
start a pilot project using three languages—Mende, Temne and Limba—
in thirty-six selected schools in areas where these languages are spoken
as mother tongues. The criterion in choosing which languages was the
number of mother tongue speakers, thus Krio was unable to feature in
such a decision. After further workshops to standardize and harmonize
orthographies, teaching in these languages started in the first year of
primary education in September 1979. With a lot of enthusiastic support
from local communities where the programmes were started, it was
reported that at the end-of-year exams, pupils from the pilot schools did
better than those in other schools in the area.
The Ministry of Education then appeared to become more
enthusiastic. In October 1979, it set up a National Planning Committee
to advise on advancing the programme, and producing a standard
orthography. For two years, a number of big workshops resulted, largely
under the influence of voluntary organizations like Canadian University
Service Overseas (CUSO), the German Adult Education Organization
(DVV), the United Methodist Church (UMC), the Provincial Literature
Bureau, the Institute for Sierra Leonean Languages. Topically, areas of
Sierra Leone Government activity not considered priority areas
produced a lot of talk but no money, so that voluntary agencies tended to
become more prominent in the committee. However, it did receive some
government support and maintained a sense of direction at this point.
Even though the terms of reference of the Planning Committee did
not include Krio, a decision was taken at these workshops to standardize
orthography, and other matters, in Krio. This was a recognition of the
prominent role Krio could play in literacy. But since that time, no one in
officialdom has taken seriously the issue of introducing Krio in schools.
No pilot schools were ever selected for teaching Krio, the argument
appearing to be that it had few native speakers.
This programme has not received any official support in recent years.
It has not gone beyond the pilot school stage for lack of finance to
provide adequate supplies of the texts which had been produced for the
first four classes of primary school. In terms of Krio, the importance of
the language was recognized, but the question was should it be taught in
schools with a population of only a few native speakers? No texts were
produced for Krio in these workshops.
Krio as the main lingua franca in Sierra Leone
53
Clearly political considerations go a long way towards determining
what official recognition will be given to any particular language within a
multi-ethnic situation like Sierra Leone. The official line sometimes does
not relate to the reality of the usage pattern of particular languages and one
becoming more significant as a lingua franca than the others. In the Sierra
Leone context a minority language like Krio (in terms of numbers of
mother tongue speakers) has become important, but that importance is at
one level almost ignored by native speakers themselves, and this fact does
not argue for the increased recognition of the language officially (Wyse
and Fyle 1979).
The Krio language will however persist, partly because of an overestimation of its link with English by the population in general, thus
giving it an enhanced status as a prestige language in Sierra Leone. The
persistence of its major function as a lingua franca throughout the country
means it cannot be replaced by English, the official language, because
learning English to that extent would involve massive infusions of capital.
The country cannot afford and, for other additional reasons, will not
consider this option.
The fact that Krio is seen as representing a tiny minority ethnic group,
often seen by other Sierra Leoneans as uppish, will perhaps continue to
militate against any move to use Krio officially at more than its current
unofficially recognized levels. However, progress in the promotion of
the Krio language can be seen more in the relative proliferation of
writing in Krio and the development of a literary tradition. Plays in Krio
performed in Freetown have earlier been referred to. These were not
only written by native Krio speakers. One of the prominent playwrights
in Krio in Sierra Leone by the 1980s was John Kargbo, a non-Krio.
Regardless of official policy there appear to be grassroots developments
in Krio which may well make a major contribution to literacy in Sierra
Leone in the next few years.
REFERENCES
Fyfe, C. (1962) History of Sierra Leone, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fyle, C. N. (1992) ‘Krio’ BBC Focus on Africa 3, 3.
——and Jones, E.D. (1980) A Krio-English Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University
Press and Sierra Leone University Press.
——and Fyle, C.Magbaily (1981) The History of Sierra Leone: a Concise
Introduction, London: Evans.
Horton, R.M.F. (1985) ‘A study and analysis of mother tongue teaching during the
primary years with implications for Sierra Leone’, unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale .
54
West Africa
Mackey, W.F. (1970) ‘The description of bilingualism’, in J.A.Fishman (ed.)
Readings in the Sociology of Language, The Hague: Mouton.
Robin, J. (1970) ‘Bilingual usage in Paraguay’, in J.A.Fishman (ed.) Readings in
the Sociology of Language, The Hague: Mouton.
Sesay, K. (1984) ‘The position of English in Sierra Leone in relation to the local
languages’, Africana Research Bulletin 13, 3:32–61, Institute of African
Studies, Fourah Bay College, Freetown.
Wyse, A.J.G. (1980) Searchlight on the Krio of Sierra Leone (Occasional Paper
No. 3), Institute of African Studies, Fourah Bay College, Freetown.
——and Fyle, C.Magbaily (1979) ‘Kriodom: a maligned culture’, Journal of the
Historical Society of Sierra Leone 3, 1/2:37–48.
4
The politics of language in Bénin
Mamoud Akanni Igué and Raphael Windali
N’Ouéni
MAMOUD AKANNI IGUÉ WRITES
In the early years after the independence of Dahomey in 1960, the
government set the economic development of the country as its priority
and was then subject to a number of coups stemming from the fact that
Dahomey had little by way of resources with which to effect such
development. These difficulties were aggravated in the immediate
post-Independence period as a result of the repatriation of many
hundreds of Dahomeans from other francophone African countries
when those countries became independent themselves. These returning
expatriates joined forces with a locally-produced, newly-graduating
élite in search of salaried employment. As a result of trade union and
student strikes, the regime of the first president of the Dahomean
Republic, Hubert Maga, fell in 1963. The army, having deposed Maga,
ceded power first to Ahomadegbe and then Apithy. Two years later the
army intervened again, and Colonel Soglo ruled with the assistance of
civilians until 1967, when Lieutenant-Colonel Alphonse Alley became
Head of State following another coup. In August 1968 the army named
Dr Zinsou as Head of State following the annulment of presidential
elections because of election irregularities. Then in 1969 LieutenantColonel De Souza overthrew Dr Zinsou. On the 26th October 1972 a
further military coup saw the rise to power of Lieutenant-Colonel
Mathieu Kerekou.
In November 1972, the new régime under Kerekou set out a
programme of reconstruction and national independence whose general
thrust was a rejection of foreign models. For the first time the
programme of the new ‘revolutionary military’ government addressed
the issue of language policy for the new République Populate du Bénin
proclaimed in November 1975:
until now teaching, education and culture have been at the service of
foreign domination and exploitation. Equally this new policy of
55
56
West Africa
national independence breaks with the stifling collar around our
national values placed there by traditional schooling. From this
perspective it is imperative to establish a democratic and patriotic
system of education which will allow the teaching of modern science
and technology in the interests of the people. For this it will be
necessary to:
–Establish an authentic reform of the education system in line with the
requirements of the new policy. This reform will need to put in place
structures and teaching objectives appropriate to the needs of independent
national economic development.
–Recognise the importance of our national languages.
–Rehabilitate our cultures.
–Open our university to all forms of knowledge and all the contemporary
currents of scientific thought. It must have a specifically African character
while remaining universal and yet must retain a privileged place for the
varied kinds of accumulated experience from sister universities….
It will be necessary to ensure the development of popular culture by the
organisation of mass literacy in the national languages, a crucial factor
in our development. It is necessary to create a linguistics institute
which will be charged with removing all obstacles in the way of
utilising national languages as vehicles of knowledge.
(Education et Formation in Discours Programme du
30 Novembre, 1972 [sic]: 10–11)
Prior to this resounding declaration there had been no government policy
in relation to ‘national languages’. During the colonial period, the
leitmotiv of colonial policy was the assimilation of the colonized. The
imposition of French language within the education and administrative
system was a key means in the assimilationist process. Pierre Alexandre
typified the spirit of the age in these terms:
Only one language is taught in the schools, recognized in law courts,
and used in administration: French, as defined by the opinions of the
Academy and the decrees of the minister of public education. All other
languages belong to the realm of folklore, dancing around the maypole,
and riding hobbyhorses and are signs of disintegration of the French
Republic.
(1972:77)
A policy of not only spreading the French language but also suppressing
local languages naturally follows from such a position. It was a matter of
The politics of language in Bénin
57
making the young Béninois, facing the process of schooling, into a black
Frenchman in heart and mind, devoted to the cause of his master and
useful to his endeavours. In convincing him it was necessary to make him
believe that he had no language, merely an ‘idiom’ with a restricted
vocabulary, lacking abstract terms. His speech had rudimentary
grammatical structures, little syntax, and made sense through the
juxtaposition of monosyllables. His ‘idiom’ was inappropriate for rational
argument, for intellectual rigour, and for science. The intention here is not
to trace the details of how these views were promulgated and maintained
but to indicate the degree of disdain for national languages that informed
the context into which the ‘modern state’ was implanted. Those who took
up the reins from the colonizers were precisely those in whom this disdain
had been inculcated most strongly. Thus, in the years following
Independence there were rhetorical ruptures with the colonial period
involving debates around the issue of ‘national pride’, but the notion of
national pride included contradictory references to notre appartenance à
une culture multi-séculaire, on the one hand, and the promotion of French
as a tool of ‘national unity’ in diversity, on the other. Before looking at the
implications of multilingualism and the position of French in
contemporary Bénin, the next section will follow the implementation of
the post-1972 policy on national languages indicating what steps were
taken at the level of state intervention and what the effects have been.
In the three years after the original articulation of a new language
policy in 1972 a number of initiatives were taken. A National Linguistic
Commission (later the National Centre of Applied Linguistics) was
established to produce a sociolinguistic atlas (which listed fifty languages
for Bénin), provide systematic descriptions of languages, and to collect
oral and other texts. A mass literacy programme was instituted through a
Direction de l’Alphabétisation et de la Presse Rurale along with a
Ministry of Alphabetization and Popular Culture. A Department of
Linguistics and Oral Traditions was established at the University which,
since 1974, has produced over a hundred graduates in language studies.
The targets set for the literacy campaigns in seventeen languages were
originally planned to affect 1,113,500 people over the period from 1974 to
1990. That same period saw, in fact, 88,898 people involved in literacy
programmes of which there were three kinds:
A—minimal initiation aimed at assisting incorporation into collective
agricultural enterprises;
B—numeracy aimed at providing skills for the management of agricultural
produce at the village level;
58
West Africa
C—literacy programmes aimed at reading and writing skills appropriate to
local public needs.
The lack of success of these programmes was due in part to the decline in
the number of teachers from 5,000 in 1979 to a few hundred now. A
further important factor was the lack of primers, readers and general
reading materials for the use of those who had gained the rudimentary
skills. A certain amount of reading material in the form of news-sheets and
regional newspapers was part-financed by Swiss Government aid. These
journals were printed in the languages of the literacy campaigns. Because
of the lack of resources to match the ambitions of the new language policy
of Bénin, national languages were formally introduced nowhere other than
the National Assembly and the Centres for the Encouragement of Youth
(CESE). The 1972 declaration of intentions, alluded to above, constituted
a rupture with perceived prior practice and yet the results obtained some
twenty years later clearly indicate that the advance of French—as both the
official language and the only language accepted in public life—has been
little affected.
RAPHAEL N’OUÉNI WRITES
In spite of the élite position of French, multilingualism remains alive and
is developing apace. At the current stage of our research it appears that
there are a number of degrees of multilingualism in Bénin. A survey
carried out in 1988 in the six départements of the country by one of the
authors (N’Ouéni) indicated the following:
Bilingualism—nearly every Béninois speaks at least two languages, a
mother tongue and another national language as a second language.
Ninety-eight per cent of Béninois were shown by the survey to be at
least bilingual.
Trilingualism—the proportion of Béninois who speak three national
languages is about 70 per cent. This is particularly true of northerners
living in the south of the country and vice versa.
A substantial proportion of the people of Bénin speak more than three
languages:
•
•
•
•
50 per cent speak four languages
30 per cent speak five languages
20 per cent speak six languages
10 per cent speak seven or eight languages.
The people who speak the most number of languages tend to be the traders
and civil servants (teachers, health workers, police) who for professional
The politics of language in Bénin
59
reasons spend periods of time in various parts of the country. The
multiplicity of languages, which is often considered to be a handicap to
development, does not in fact constitute an insurmountable problem
since nearly all Béninois have command of a number of languages. In
the south of the country, in the regions of Atlantique, Mono, Ouémé and
Zou, nine out of ten people speak Fon-mina, Fon-goun, Fon-aizo, Adjamina, Yoruba-goun, Sahwè-mina, Sahwè-fon, Yorubafon, and six people
out often speak Adja-fon. In the north of the country a similar situation
is to be found where each person operates in two languages other than
their mother tongue, in addition to Dendi, the lingua franca of the
region. It would therefore be possible to choose two or three languages
for the purposes of ‘national’ communication, and the state could
concentrate its efforts on the promotion of perhaps three languages
through their progressive introduction into the education and
administrative system alongside French. However, far from having such
a vision, the various regimes that have ruled over the country have
simply followed the path of colonial policy, imposing the use of French
on all citizens in all areas of development and administration. This
option has had grave consequences for the ability and willingness of the
various populations to participate in the processes of national, social,
cultural and economic development.
In justifying the imposition of French in teaching and administration as
the official language for all Béninois, the various Governments have
deployed the same arguments summarized as follows:
•
•
•
the French language is the language of nobody in particular, it is therefore
able to act as the means to achieving national unity within such a young
country,
schooling will be easier to institute and to develop rapidly,
communication with the outside world can be effected in French, an
international language, and mastery of scientific and technological
knowledge can be achieved more easily allowing the importation of the
means necessary for the rapid development of the country.
However, contrary to the expectations of the intellectual élite the
consequences of this option have been catastrophic for the prospects of
economic growth. In effect, as in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, it is
possible to identify the following trends:
•
•
a segregation between the minority who have mastery of the French
language and the majority of the population who know and speak the
languages of Bénin,
access to knowledge, to money and to power is reserved exclusively for
60
West Africa
those who are able to speak, read and write the language of ‘superior
social status’.
Even information to be transmitted to people in the spheres of
agriculture, hygiene, and the health of mothers and children does
not get through, precisely because it is transmitted in French
through programmes financed by international organisations,
NGOs, and countries whose stated intention is to assist the country
in its economic development. In this way the majority of the people
do not participate in the push towards development since they are not
able to be integrated into the communication process that is
fundamental to the economic, social, political and cultural structures
of the modern state.
Schooling in French has undergone a great decline. A continuing
increase in the cost of teaching French has been accompanied by a
noticeable drop in the competence levels attained by school graduates.
This non-mastery has a broad effect upon attainment in other areas
since the language of instruction, the vehicle of knowledge’ is French.
The paths to modern knowledge are open to a small minority. The use
of French to promote national unity has not diminished tribalism, a
factor which remains a reality in the country. One has only to look at
the recent legislative and presidential elections in March 1991, when
inter-tribal clashes produced many injuries in Parakou, capital of the
northern region; and Soglo was elected only with the support of the
people of the South who make up more than 60 per cent of the total
population. In reality the purported neutrality of the borrowed
language, French, with its minority base reinforces each group in its
own singularity. It acts as a screen which blocks the development of
certain national languages such as Fongbé, Dendi and Mina which were
already lingua francas before the colonial period.
CONCLUSION
It is clear that multilingualism has been a watchword often
brandished by the state in Bénin which has served as an obfuscating
mechanism to avoid the task of thinking through and putting into
effect a language policy. The same argument has allowed the
intellectuals to exclude the population from the management of
public affairs. It is also evident that development can never occur
when the great majority are marginalized by the use of a language
which simply allows an élite to conduct a monologue with itself.
The politics of language in Bénin
61
REFERENCE
Alexandre, P. (1972) An Introduction to Languages and Language in Africa, trans.
F.A.Leary, London, Ibadan and Nairobi: Heinemann.
5
Minority language development in
Nigeria
A situation report on Rivers and
Bendel States
Ben Ohi Elugbe
Perhaps the best known fact about Nigeria is that it is a country of extreme
linguistic diversity. Although its land mass is less than 7 per cent of the total
area of the African continent, it is agreed by scholars that fully 20 per cent of
Africa’s 2,000 odd languages are spoken in Nigeria (Dalby 1980:100).
Hansford et al. (1976) listed 394 languages but the revised version of the
publication (Crozier and Blench: in press) will show a figure above 400.
Nigeria falls squarely within the Fragmentation Belt, ‘a zone of extreme
linguistic complexity stretching from Senegal to Ethiopia’ (Dalby 1977:6).
Of the four language phyla recognized by orthodox or mainstream scholarship
in African language classification, three are widely represented in Nigeria:
Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Afroasiatic. Only the rather small Khoisan
(or click) languages, almost all in south-western Africa, are not represented
in Nigeria.
Although three of the languages of Nigeria—Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba—
are clearly dominant by virtue of the numerical strength of their speakers
(both as first and second language) the vast majority are spoken by
comparatively small groups. It is the practice in Nigeria to refer to Hausa,
Igbo and Yoruba as the major languages. The three are also called Nigeria’s
national languages in a multilingual practice in which English remains the
official language.
As might be expected, some of the states of Nigeria (there are now thirty
of them) are more linguistically complex than others. In Nigeria, certainly in
the south, the two linguistically most complex states are Rivers and Bendel.
(Although Bendel was, in August 1990, split into Delta and Edo states in an
exercise that raised the number of states in Nigeria from twenty-one to thirty,
we shall work with ‘Bendel’ in this report because it concerns the old Bendel
State. In addition, we shall feel free to use ‘Bendel’ without the tag ‘state’—
Bendel, it is now obvious, remains an enduring concept.)
62
Minority language development in Nigeria
63
In this report, we shall see how these two states have reacted to
linguistic diversity. In each case, we should start by showing just how
complex the state is in linguistic terms, followed by the response of the
state to that complexity. Before doing so, I present a very brief summary
of language policy in Nigeria.
LANGUAGE POLICY AND NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN
NIGERIA
There are two main sources of modern pronouncements on language in
Nigeria: the National Policy on Education (NPE) (1977, revised in 1981),
and the 1979 Constitution. Two other sources are the report of the Political
Bureau (MAMSER 1987:184–6) and the 1989 Constitution of the Federal
Republic of Nigeria, but they contain nothing new and are not yet
recognized as policy statements. In the NPE, some of the pronouncements
are actually made in a section broadly headed ‘The Importance of
Language’.
An examination of language policy in Nigeria, as seen in the two
sources mentioned above, reveals that the language policy has addressed
three issues which Government considers important to national
development. These are education, unity and independence.
Education
The policy is aimed mainly at education. It makes pronouncements on the
role of language in education. At the pre-primary level the policy states
that ‘the medium of instruction will be principally the mother tongue or
the language of the immediate community’ (1981:10). It states that at the
primary level ‘the medium of instruction [will be] initially the mother
tongue or language of the immediate community and, at a later stage,
English’ (1981:13).
At the Junior Secondary School (JSS) level, the NPE proposed that the
pupil should study two Nigerian languages, ‘the language of their own
area in addition to any of the three main Nigerian languages, Hausa, Ibo
[=Igbo], and Yoruba, subject to availability of teachers’ (1981:17).
At the Senior Secondary School (SSS) level, any Nigerian language,
whether major or not, is recommended as one of the core subjects to be
offered. This policy extends to the tertiary level where different languages
are studied—for example, ?do at the University of Benin, Yoruba and Igbo
at Ibadan, ?do, Igbo, Yoruba at Lagos, etc.
The policy also takes into account those who are already too old to
benefit from the formal school system. Government therefore plans to
64
West Africa
embark on a mass literacy campaign. It is not said in what language
literacy is being sought but we may assume that it is literacy in the mother
tongue or in the dominant language of the immediate community.
The policy thus goes beyond education in the narrow sense. It will
enable everybody to participate fully in the national process, thus ensuring
national integration which is vital to the development of the state.
Unity
The Federal Government recognizes the need for national unity. It also
recognizes the role of language in fostering national unity. Hence, in
addition to education and culture:
Government considers it to be in the interest of national unity that each
child should be encouraged to learn one of the three major languages
other than his mother tongue. In this connection, the Government
considers the three major languages in Nigeria to be Hausa, Ibo and
Yoruba.
(1981, Section 1:8)
There is no contradiction in Government’s position: the best policy for
education is a multilingual one based on the mother tongue principle to
which the Government commits itself. Yet, it obviously still believes that a
common language is useful, if not necessary, for the promotion of national
unity. National unity will itself create the kind of peaceful atmosphere
required for meaningful development of the state. Language in education
is an urgent concern but the emergence of a unifying national language
lies in the future.
Independence
Young nations with a colonial history often see a national language not
only as a symbol of oneness, but also as evidence of the completeness of
their independence and the achievement of nationhood. In the case of
Nigeria, the Military Government of General Obasanjo actually inserted
Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba into the 1979 Constitution as national languages.
Amayo cites Ikara (1981) as pointing out that the Obasanjo
administration’s reason for this insertion was that ‘it would have been
embarrassing at this stage of our political development to continue to use
English alone’ (1983:11). It is interesting to note that there is no attempt
here to do away with English which remains the official language, allows
Nigeria to communicate with the outside world and, above all, remains
Minority language development in Nigeria
65
(along with Nigerian Pidgin) the only ethnically neutral language to which
all Nigerians can relate. English is therefore also vital to national
development in Nigeria. But English also suffers from a certain disability
as the language of colonialism. (As for Nigerian Pidgin, it has no official
status whatsoever and is seen as a debased version of English so that its
possible role in national development is for now not appreciated.)
Thus the 1979 Constitution contains attempts to promote some
Nigerian languages as co-official languages with English. At the
national level, the 1979 Constitution recommends that ‘the business of
the National Assembly shall be conducted in English and in Hausa, Ibo
and Yoruba, when adequate arrangements have been made therefor’
(Section 51). And, at the state level, it recommends that ‘the business of
the House of Assembly shall be conducted in English but the House may
in addition to English conduct the business in one or more languages
spoken in the State as the House may by resolution approve’ (Section
91). This, in addition to the assertion in the same Constitution that
Nigeria’s national languages are Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba, underlines
Nigeria’s determination that our independence should be reflected in our
national languages. We return now to the matter of minority language
development in Rivers and Bendel States.
LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY IN RIVERS STATE
The languages of Rivers State are all Niger-Congo (ignoring Nigerian
Pidgin (English) (NP) whose classification is probably Indo-European in
view of its lexicon). In the latest classification (Williamson 1989), the
languages of Rivers State fall into two major families: Ijoid and BenueCongo. Within Benue-Congo, three branches are represented: Cross
River, Igboid and Edoid.
Ijoid
Following the most recent classification of Ijoid (Jenewari 1989) this
family is divided into Ijo and Defaka. According to Jenewari (1989:107),
‘Defaka [is] better known as Afakani by the Ijo’. He describes it as ‘a tiny,
fast receding language spoken in the Niger Delta’.
By contrast, the rest of Ijoid (i.e. Ijo or the Ijo dialects) is a fairly
large group of over a million speakers. Ijo is spoken mainly in the
Niger Delta and adjacent creeks in Rivers, Bendel and Ondo States
(Jenewari 1989:107). Drawing from Williamson (1980), Jenewari
(1989) and Lee and Williamson (1990), the Ijo dialects of Rivers State
may be listed as follows:
66
West Africa
A Eastern
1 Kalabari
2 Okrika
3 Ibani
4 Nkoro
B Brass
1 Nembe
2 Akassa
With many dialects
1 Biseni
2 kdia
C Izon
D Inland
Ijoid languages are spoken mainly in the creek belt of the Rivers State.
Benue-Congo
Cross River
This branch of Benue-Congo has three of the groups within it represented
in Rivers State. These groups all belong to the Delta Cross arm of Cross
River. The Cross River languages are spoken in the central and eastern
parts of the state. Within Delta Cross therefore the following are
represented:
A
1
2
3
4
Central Delta
Abua
5 Ogbronuagum
Odual
6 Obulom (Abuloma)
Kugbo
7 Ogbogolo
Ogbia
8 Mini
B Ogoni
1 Eleme
2 Ogoi
3 Kana (Khana)
4 Gokana
C Lower Cross
Obolo (Andoni) (Obolo extends into Akwa Ibom State)
Igboid
This is the group formerly called Lower Niger. In Rivers State, the Igboid
languages are:
1
2
3
4
5
Ekpeye
Ikwere
Ogbah
Egbema
Echie
6
7
8
9
Ndoni
Ndoki/Asa
Opobo
Igbo-Igbani
Minority language development in Nigeria
67
The Igboid languages are spoken in the northern, most inland parts of the
state. Igbo is normally a second language acquired by the Igboid
communities for wider communication.
Edoid
The Delta Edoid subgroup of Edoid exists wholly in Rivers State. The
Delta Edoid languages exist alongside the I?jo? dialects in the western and
central areas.
Delta Edoid
1 Degema
2 Engenni (Egene)
3 Epie-Atisa
Rivers State is relatively small with a large part of its area covered by
rivers and creeks. There is no one language which effectively covers
the state, whether in terms of geographic spread or in terms of use. Two
languages which have a useful number of second language speakers are
Igbo and Nigerian Pidgin (NP) which is English-based. Unfortunately,
memories of the civil war of 1967–70 and the creation of states, which
severed Rivers State from the Igbo area, have created an observable
degree of resentment against Igbo. As for NP, it is still stigmatized as a
bad form of English and thus denied a role in education. In news
broadcasting, Igbo continues to be excluded totally while NP is used in
radio news under the title ‘News in Special English’. On television,
Ikwere, I?zo?n, Kalab?ari?, and Kana were, for quite some time, the
only ones used. Other languages have been added to the list since the
early 1980s because its speakers were not covered by any other
language. Williamson (1980:87) points out that this situation gave rise
to the Rivers Readers Project.
The Rivers Readers Project
Williamson (1977, 1980 and elsewhere) has written extensively on the
Rivers Readers Project. As might be assumed, the project ‘aims to
produce readers and supporting materials for primary school use in as
many as possible of the local languages of the Rivers State’
(Williamson 1980:87). This was to enable children to ‘learn to read in
their own speech-form before going on [to] English’. Although the
Rivers Readers Project (RRP) ‘is sponsored by the Rivers State
Government through its Ministry of Education’, it benefited initially
from small grants from UNESCO and the Ford Foundation. The
68
West Africa
University of Ibadan also helped by housing the project initially, but it
was later moved to the University of Port Harcourt.
The project operates through Language Committees; in fact, the first
step towards the development of a target language is to set up a Language
Committee made up of people from the whole dialect spectrum of the
language. The members are people who are interested in the language and
are acknowledged to be good speakers or users of it. Members may be
invited individually or as representatives of organizations such as church
denominations, progress organizations, etc. Experienced teachers are
usually prime targets for inclusion in the Language Committee. According
to Williamson:
The function of the Language Committee is to represent the general
feelings of the people about their language, to agree to an orthography,
to go over in detail the drafts of the reader, to launch the final product in
the community…[and to guide] the often considerable enthusiasm of
the speakers of the language into productive channels.
(Williamson 1980:87)
The production of a reader is followed by a launching (which is usually a
festive occasion) and a workshop for teachers who will use the book. The
two events are organized into one with the launching taking place on the
first day and the teachers’ workshops following on the second day.
The Rivers Readers Project produces more than readers. It also
produces what Williamson refers to as support materials in the form of
teachers’ notes, orthography booklets, and occasional publications
(Williamson 1980:88). Professor Williamson, who is the main language
expert on the Project, wrote in 1980 ‘We have not yet…achieved the aim
of the Project’, and she gave a number of reasons to support her statement.
These included the fact that in Rivers schools only English is taught even
where a local language is mentioned on the time-table; the fact that
teachers are not taught how to handle the different languages; and the fact
that teachers need time to become familiar with the modern, often revised,
orthographies in the readers.
In 1991, Professor Williamson (personal communication) remains
largely unhappy about the effectiveness of the Project. The problem of
teachers remains and distribution of readers and other materials is sadly
discouraging. Beyond the ecstasy of the noisy launching, enthusiasm dies
down quickly and those who have responsibility for distributing the
readers and other materials are often found wanting. Even where materials
have been distributed to pupils, there has been no matching enthusiasm to
use them in the classroom. The Ministry of Education has not intervened
Minority language development in Nigeria
69
in a way forceful enough to ensure use of the materials. All this is
traceable to the problem of teacher-training and negative attitudes which
have persisted in spite of the new policies which are more favourable to
Nigerian languages. There is also, at the national level, a policy of oral
teaching and examining of the mother tongue which encourages teachers
to ignore available materials. The ‘oral’ policy was in fact designed to
encourage states without the necessary materials.
An important point to note about the Rivers Readers Project is that it was
established long before the Federal Government had woken up to the need
for a meaningful statement on the important issue of language in Nigeria.
LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY IN BENDEL STATE
My experience of the Bendel situation is a very practical one. Since 1974,
I have been heavily involved in various attempts by the State Government
as well as by Local Government and individuals to come to terms with
linguistic diversity in the State.
It is often said that Bendel State is Nigeria in miniature. The reason for
this is the observation that Bendel State is linguistically (and ethnically) as
fractured (and fractious) as Nigeria itself. In some parts of Bendel, two
communities, each with its own distinct language, may be found in the
same town as, for example, at Otuo in Owan Local Government Area. The
formerly separate Edoid and Ebiroid settlements of Enwa and Igarra in
Akoko Edo LGA have now become geographically one, though
inhabitants of the area know where Igarra ends and Enwa begins. Etuno,
the language of Igarra, is a dialect of Ebira (Igbirra) (see below).
Most of the languages of Bendel State belong to the (New) BenueCongo family of the Niger-Congo phylum. The only non-Benue-Congo
languages of Bendel State belong to the Ijoid family which is much less
related to the others. In the Delta areas, Ijoid and Benue-Congo languages
exist side by side (as in Rivers State). The best known of the Ijoid
languages is Izon, the variety of Ijo used on Radio Nigeria.
As pointed out above, the Edoid group is the dominant one in Bendel
State. Edoid languages occupy virtually all of northern Bendel, most of
the central areas, and almost all of the areas in the south (including the
Delta). The most visibly non-Edoid part of Bendel is the eastern part of the
central area of the State where Igboid languages such as Ukwuani
(Kwale), Ika, and Igbo (Aniocha) are spoken.
The languages of Bendel State can be classified genetically under six
groups: Edoid, Igboid, Yoruboid, Ebiroid (all New Benue-Congo), Ukaan
(Kakumo), and Ijoid. The groups can be represented as follows:
70
West Africa
Benue-Congo
Edoid
The group falls into four coordinate subgroups (Elugbe 1989). The
southernmost subgroup, called Delta Edoid, is not represented in Bendel
State. The others are South-western Edoid (SWE) (all in the western
Delta), North-central Edoid (NCE) covering the central parts of the State
and North-western Edoid (NWE) in the northern fringes of the State and
into the Akoko area of Ondo State.
1 South-western Edoid
Eruwa (Erohwa, Arohwa)
Isoko
Okpe
Urhobo (Sobo)
Uvwie (Effurun, Evhron)
2 North-central Edoid
Edo (Bini)
Esan (Ishan)
Ora-Emai-Iuleha (including Ivbimion)
Yekhee (Etsako, Afenmai, Kukuruku; including Ivbiadaobi)
Ghotuo (Otuo, Otwa)
Uneme
Ate (Atte) -Okpela-North Ibie
Ikpeshi
Sasaru-Enwa-Igwe
Ososo
3 North-western Edoid
Okpamheri (including Oloma)
Okpe-Idesa
Uhami-Iyayu
Ukue (Ukpe) -Ehueun (Ekpenmi, Epenmi) in Ondo State
Igboid
I list below only the better known Igboid languages of Bendel State:
Igbo/Ibo (Aniocha)
Ika
Ukwuani (Kwate, including Aboh)
Minority language development in Nigeria
71
Yoruboid
The main Yoruboid group in Bendel is:
Isekiri (Itsekiri, Shekiri, Jekri, etc.)
Other Yoruboid languages are the Igala dialects along the west bank of the
River Niger from opposite Idah down to opposite Onitsha. The only
Yoruba settlements in Bendel State are Olukumi in Aniocha area and Imeri
on the northern fringes of Bendel State, just north of Otuo and west of
Somorika. By the latest state creation exercise, Imeri is now ceded to
Ondo State. It was otherwise in the Akoko Edo Local Government Area of
Bendel State.
Ebiroid
Etuno (spoken exclusively at Igarra, the Akoko Edo Local Government
Headquarters) and Ebira are mutually intelligible dialects of Ebira. Etuno
is the main Ebiroid language in Bendel State. However, there are many
Ebira (Igbirra) farm settlements which have become permanent so that
Ebira itself is now one of the languages of Bendel. Blench (1989)
classifies Ebira as part of Nupoid but that classification is questionable
and still subject to supporting evidence—hence Ebiroid is used here.
Ukaan
This is a small language spoken in Kakumo, possibly the northernmost
settlement in Bendel State. It is, in spite of its small size, a group in its own
right, coordinate with Edoid, Igboid, etc.
Ijoid
The main (possibly only) Ijoid language of Bendel State is I?zo?n
(including Kolokuma, Mein, etc.). It is also spoken in Rivers State and is
the variety of I?jo? used by Radio Nigeria.
LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT IN BENDEL
As with Rivers State, attempts to grapple with the language problem in
Bendel State antedate those of the Federal Government. Following the
publication of Ogieriaixi’s Edo Orthography in 1972 and the circulation
of Elugbe’s 1972 criticism of the revised orthography proposed there, the
72
West Africa
then Mid-West State Government set up a Mid-West Language Committee
to propose an acceptable writing system for Edo and, very importantly in
my view, to determine the dominant languages of the State and propose
alphabets for them.
The Mid-West Language Committee submitted two documents to the
Government: the report of a seminar it had organized at the University of
Lagos on ‘Edo orthography’ (Ministry of Education 1974), and the overall
report of the committee dealing with the language situation in Bendel
(Ministry of Education 1975). The seminar proposed for Edo an
orthography which has proved enduring. The Committee found that
fourteen languages were dominant in the State and proposed an alphabet
for each of them:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Esan
Edo
Ghotuo
Igbo (Aniocha)
Isoko
Iekiri
Ika
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
Izon (Ijaw)
Ora-Emai-Iuleha
Okpamheri
Uneme
Urhobo
Ukwuani (Kwale)
Yhee (Etsako)
The Committee recommended that ‘all of these…languages should be
developed for use in education at [the] primary level. Some [other]
languages can also be considered for development if there is sufficient
local interest and activity’ (p. 9). The implication of this is that other
languages not regarded as dominant can also be developed. The report,
regrettably, says nothing about Nigerian Pidgin which is easily the most
widely-spoken language in Bendel. In fairness to the Committee, it should
be noted that NP was nowhere mentioned in the responses to the
questionnaires sent out all over the State.
We see here that while the Rivers Readers Project was aimed at
developing every language, the Bendel effort was directed at ‘the dominant
languages’. It is not clear why Government decided to limit itself to the
dominant languages: one possibility is that Government wanted to limit the
cost of developing the languages of the State. The point should be made,
however, that Federal Government policy allows for the two approaches
since the languages recommended for use in the primary school are the
mother tongue or the language of the immediate community. Another
difference between the RRP and the Bendel situation is that the RRP was
established with long term goals whereas the Mid-West Language
Committee was dissolved as soon as it satisfied its terms of reference.
Three factors of overriding importance in language development are
interest, finance, and expertise. An abundance of interest and/or finance
Minority language development in Nigeria
73
can be used to locate and employ expertise but the fact remains that
these three factors are a basic requirement for language development.
These factors become even more important in the case of minority
languages. In Nigeria, for example, Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba have been
labelled ‘national languages’; they are also the three major languages
of Nigeria with a numerical strength which in itself guarantees all the
ingredients required for development. By contrast, a minority
language (in this case any language other than Hausa, Igbo, or Yoruba)
cannot always be guaranteed development. Of course, some of these
small languages are major in a state or in a Local Government Area.
Otherwise, the communities that speak them have to raise their own
funds and sponsor the development of their own languages.
The relevance of interest to language development is amply
demonstrated by the following. In May, 1975, as the Mid-West
Language Committee prepared to wind up and submit its report, I
asked the Chairman, Mr E.C.Halim, if we were going to see urgent
action on our recommendations. He replied that he could not be sure as
it took only a change of government and an attendant change of
personnel for a recommendation to be swept under the carpet. Two
months later, in July 1975, there was a military coup and thus a change
of government. That report has never been referred to again.
In 1988, my colleague, Dr A.P.Omamor, and I, reacting to a circular
from the Ministry of Education, Benin City, went to see the DirectorGeneral of the Ministry. The circular to which we were reacting had
been to Local Government Councils telling them to start teaching the
languages of their areas. We wanted to know what plans the
Government had for developing these local (minority) languages. The
Director-General informed us that they planned to teach the local
languages orally and examine them orally (in each case without
written materials). He and his assistants maintained this position even
when we pointed out that the true test of literacy in the mother tongue
is the ability to read and write it. I have since found that this is a
Nigeria-wide policy. It is clearly dictated by a lack of materials caused
by a lack of finance.
I have been personally involved in some cases in which nongovernmental interest has led, or is leading, to the development of a
minority language, for example:
1 Isekiri
In 1975 development of this language was actively sponsored by the
Isekiri Land Trust. The expert who did the initial work was Dr A.P.
Omamor. I and other members of the Department of African Languages
74
West Africa
and Linguistics at Ibadan were involved in the workshops to train teachers
to teach Isekiri.
2 Okpe
In 1988 development was sponsored by Chief B.T.Owumi of Sapele. The
expert is Dr A.P.Omamor.
3 Ghotuo
Since 1990 Otuo Union has been the driving force behind development,
and I am the expert in this case.
CONCLUSION
We have seen above how two relatively small but linguistically complex
states have reacted to that complexity in different ways. Rivers State set up
a project with no specified lifespan. Bendel State, by contrast, set up a
Language Committee with orders to submit a final report within a year. In
each case, the states acted in advance of Federal Government
pronouncements.
We have seen already a lot of materials development in the case of the
Rivers Readers Project. According to Emenanjo ‘some sixty-two
publications are available in twenty-one local—all minority—languages
under the Rivers Readers Project’ (1990:94). By contrast, Bendel State
cannot boast of producing any material in any of the dominant languages.
The materials available have been sponsored by individuals and local
communities. In Rivers State, some of the materials are currently
undergoing revision (Williamson, personal communication).
There is, in Rivers State, an abundance of materials whereas there is
very little in Bendel State, leading the Bendel Government to talk of oral
teaching and examining of the mother tongue. In these two states we see
contrasting directions: in Rivers State resources and investment were
provided predominantly by the state, NGOs and the university, in Bendel
private initiative has driven what development there has been. The trick
may well be to bring all these forces together.
REFERENCES
Amayo, A. (1983) ‘The search for national integration and national identity in
Nigeria since Independence—the linguistic aspect’, paper presented at the
National Conference on ‘Nigeria since Independence’, Ahmadu Bello
University, Zaria, 28–31 March.
Blench, R. (1989) ‘Nupoid’, in J.Bendor-Samuel (ed.) The Niger-Congo
Languages, New York: University Press of America.
Minority language development in Nigeria
75
Crozier, D. and Blench, R. (in press) An Index of Nigerian Languages (a revised
and updated version of Hansford et al. (1976)), Dallas: Summer Institute of
Linguistics.
Dalby, D. (1977) Language Map of Africa and the Adjacent Islands (provisional
edition), London: International African Institute.
——(1980) ‘National language policy in the context of Africa’, in A.Bamgbose
(ed.) Language in Education in Nigeria: Proceedings of the Language
Symposium, Kaduna, October 31–November 4 1977 (2 vols), Lagos: National
Language Centre.
Elugbe, B.O. (1972) ‘Some comments on Edo orthography (comments on
Ogieriaixi 1972)’, mimeograph.
——(1989) Comparative Edoid: Phonology and Lexicon (Delta Series 6), Port
Harcourt: University of Port Harcourt Press.
Emenanjo, E.N. (1990) ‘In the tradition of majors: lessons in language engineering
for the minority languages’, in E.N.Emenanjo (ed.) Multilingualism, Minority
Languages, and Language Policy in Nigeria, Agbor: Central Books Limited in
association with the Linguistic Association of Nigeria.
Federal Republic Nigeria (1977) National Policy on Education (revised 1981),
Lagos: Federal Ministry of Education.
——(1979) The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Lagos: Federal
Ministry of Information.
——(1989) The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Lagos: Federal
Ministry of Information.
Hansford, K.J., Bendor Samuel, J. and Stanford, R. (1976) ‘An index of Nigerian
languages’, Studies in Nigerian Languages 5:1–204.
Ikara, B. (1981) ‘Towards participatory democracy in Nigeria’, in B.Ikara (ed.)
Nigerian Languages and Cultural Development, Lagos: National Language
Centre.
Jenewari, E.C. (1989) ‘Ijoid’, in J.Bendor-Samuel (ed.) The Niger-Congo
Languages, New York: University Press of America.
Lee, J.D. and Williamson, K. (1990) ‘A lexicostatistic classification of Ijo
dialects’, Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 1,1:1–10.
MAMSER (1987) Report of the Political Bureau, March, 1987 (reproduced for
mass distribution), Abuja: Directorate for Social Mobilization (MAMSER).
Ministry of Education (1974) Edo Language and its Orthography: Report of the
Seminar on Edo Orthography, 15–18 May, 1974, Benin City: Ministry of
Education.
——(1975) Report of the Mid-West Language Committee, Benin City: Ministry of
Education.
Ogieriaixi, E. (1972) Edo Orthography, mimeograph.
Williamson, K. (1977) ‘The Rivers Readers Project’, The Nigerian Language
Teacher 6,2:16–24.
——(1980) ‘Small languages in education: the Rivers Readers Project as case
history’, in A.Bamgbose (ed.) Language in Education in Nigeria: Proceedings
of the Language Symposium, Kaduna, October 31–November 4, 1977, Lagos:
National Language Centre.
——(1989) ‘Niger-Congo Overview’, in J.Bendor-Samuel (ed.) The Niger-Congo
Languages, New York: University Press of America.
6
Using existing structures
Three phases of mother tongue literacy
among Chumburung speakers in Ghana
Gillian F.Hansford
DEVELOPMENT
Whilst development usually entails improving things like agricultural
skills, or health care, it is noteworthy that at the conference that gave rise
to the papers in this volume, participants focussed rather on the
development of languages, as part of national development. Bamgbose, in
this volume, states that emphasis should be on ‘a full realization of the
human potential and a maximum utilization of the nation’s resources for
the benefit of all’. He backs up his argument by quoting from Schumacher,
Nyerere of Tanzania and a UNESCO report. Of his five excellent summary
points, the last is ‘mass participation and grassroots involvement in order
to ensure widespread and genuine development’. Participation is actually
increased by ‘the use of the many languages available in the country’.
Elugbe adds, ‘The development of a society is the development of
individuals within it.’ However, he says not only is there, in the case of
Nigeria, ‘no single document directed solely at the language problem’ but
Nigerian governments ‘see the cost but do not see the benefits. They look
for immediate results.’ It has been estimated that only 5 per cent of the
population of Nigeria are able to use English. Igué and N’Ouéni describe
a similar situation for French in Bénin: ‘schooling in French has
undergone a great decline’.
The widespread use of a language is seen by people for whom it is not
their mother tongue as an imposition. This is true whether it be English, or
an African language such as Hausa, Igbo or Yoruba, which are mother
tongues of many people, or Krio which is the mother tongue of a minority.
Whilst Asad’s distinction (1986) between strong and weak languages,
referred to by Pardon and Furniss, is useful, we should not necessarily
deduce that the speakers of the strong language view the encouragement
of the use of their own language as a strategy to acquire supremacy. For it
might be merely expedient in order to communicate with the largest
76
Using existing structures
77
number of people. However, if a language is used over a wide area and for
diverse purposes, but fluency is achieved only by a few, has its
‘imposition’ achieved the desired ends? Further, as Pardon and Furniss
point out, almost certainly some languages will remain underdeveloped.
A CASE STUDY OF THE CHUMBURUNG LANGUAGE
Chumburung of Ghana, being a minority language, is one likely to be
underdeveloped in any programme that encourages the use of Asante or
English. Of sixty languages in Ghana more than fifty could be called
‘minority languages’ in terms of the number of speakers. Akwapim,
Asante, Fante, Ga and Ewe were developed as vernaculars over the last
hundred years by mission and government policy. Some of the rest have
been partly developed within the last fifty years by non-governmental
organizations (NGOs), mainly in the area of adult literacy.
In this study of a grassroots non-governmental organization’s
contribution to literacy for minority groups I discuss the literacy project
sponsored by the Ghana Institute of Linguistics, Literacy and Bible
Translation (or GILLBT) amongst the Chumburung. It underwent three
phases: adult literacy within the village authority system, children
learning to read and write Chumburung in the schools, and lately classes
held by the churches. Each stage took off when the previous one went into
decline. The phase within the village authority structure ‘failed’ because it
did not generate sufficient interest to attract those previously uninterested.
However, it did supply teachers with practical experience for the phase in
the schools. This phase failed because some of the teachers were
temporarily removed from the classrooms, and because there was no clear
policy concerning the languages of the classroom. The third phase has
been able to make progress both because Christians have a desire to read
the Scriptures, and because the ability to read Chumburung had by that
time become more of a community value.
This paper goes on to consider some of the outline plans for more than
one language to be used in schools, as proposed by fellow contributors to
this volume for Nigeria, and by Gbedemah back in 1975 for Ghana. A
concluding suggestion is made that, as a separate issue from learning the
language orally, consideration must be given to the child’s learning to read
and write each language that will be used during the widening of the
child’s horizons.
The Chumburung, numbering around 27,000, live around the lower
Daka river area in the Northern and Volta Regions of Ghana, and are
primarily yam farmers. There is a cultural mix of ethnic groups living
within the traditional Chumburung area. A dominant group to one side of
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them claim suzerainty over them, but this is denied by the Chumburung.
On another side is a group with whom they share the worship of a certain
god, but to whom they say they owe no political allegiance. However, the
seats of local government, and hence the education offices, are situated not
within Chumburung territory, but in two towns, one in each of those other
areas. The trade language, also used frequently in the churches, is Asante.
While one cannot but be aware of the many languages spoken by many
Africans (as instanced by Igué and N’Ouéni), once again we need to be
aware that fluency may not be great in the second and subsequent
languages.
The language of education throughout Ghana is however not Asante
but English. About a quarter of adult Chumburung have attended school in
the past, but only 4 per cent actually finished primary and middle school.
Children at the moment show a much higher attendance rate, around 90
per cent being on the register. However, they mostly leave school with an
English reading age of eleven years or less. Secondary schools and job
opportunities are outside the area, and few who go off in search of them
return to the area.
FIRST PHASE OF CHUMBURUNG LITERACY—USING THE
VILLAGE AUTHORITY STRUCTURE
Primers were prepared in the late 1970s using a well-tested phonic
method, building up syllables. In contrast to the functional literacy
programme that Igué and N’Ouéni cite, the beginning of the course is
learning to read and write, leaving for the post-primer stage the actual
acquisition of fresh knowledge. All the stories for practice reading are
grounded in normal village life, and were written by a local man. Even
teachers’ instructions were in Chumburung. The chief and elders of each
town or village were asked to choose people who had completed primary
and middle school, and hence were literate in English, and were patient
and trusted in their community. These men and women were then trained
in what must have been the shortest teacher training course on record. On
the first day, they learnt how to read Chumburung, and on the second day
how to teach their own people, including illiterates. Two days is all that a
farmer can spare from his work. Adult literacy classes in Chumburung
were then set up in various villages, throughout the dry season for about
five months. To counteract the shortness of the training of the teachers, a
supervisor visited each class in action once a month. Normally adult
literacy is in Asante or English, and comes within the province of the
Department of Social Welfare and Community Development. Because
they also encourage vernacular literacy, certificates were awarded jointly
Using existing structures
79
with GILLBT, and the number of those who became literate in
Chumburung was included in their statistics.
However, the poor economic situation at that time did not encourage
students to buy books, and the supervisors found it difficult to visit
classes, most of which are rural, with only a bicycle. Not only were there
the usual drop-outs from those first classes, but the impetus was not
carried over to others, that is others were not motivated to feel a need to
learn to read Chumburung themselves. Thus, over a three-year period in
eleven towns, less than a hundred people became literate in
Chumburung.
SECOND PHASE OF CHUMBURUNG LITERACY—USING
THE EDUCATION SYSTEM
It was established that there were twenty-one primary schools and ten
middle schools in the Daka river area, and that roughly half the children in
these schools were mother tongue Chumburung speakers. Also there was
at least one teacher in each school who was a mother tongue Chumburung
speaker. These school-teachers, together with the teachers of adults,
pressed the education authorities to allow Chumburung reading to be
taught in the curriculum slot marked as being for vernacular languages. Of
the sixty languages in Ghana, eleven are approved by the Bureau of Ghana
Languages as ‘official languages’, although this does not include
Chumburung. The ‘official language’ designated for the Chumburung
area was, in fact, not being taught for various reasons. In part of the area,
this is mainly because the language designated as official is that of the
ethnic group whose dominance is contested. However, there is also a
desperate lack of textbooks in all parts of the area. Since the slot was being
underused, the local education authorities proved willing to employ those
who had had experience teaching Chumburung adult literacy classes to
teach the subject using the same primers as in the adult classes, and paid
them a salary. GILLBT was able to obtain external funding for printing
primers and anthologies of stories in larger quantities than previously. A
committee to oversee both adult and school literacy included education
officers and the head of a teacher training college, as well as the
supervisors of the adult classes.
Sadly, two factors have stopped the schools programme. Firstly, owing
to an upgrading of the middle schools to become junior secondary
schools, teachers who had not previously been to teacher training college
were required to complete a four-year course. This effectively removed
teachers of reading in Chumburung for that period. Secondly, among
education authorities, there was disagreement as to which Ghanaian
80
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language could be taught legitimately, and a ban was placed on the
teaching of Chumburung literacy in schools until such time as the current
educational policy is clarified or reviewed. Nevertheless, fifteen of the
thirty-one schools had participated, and 900 children over three years had
had some exposure to reading Chumburung, although some of these may
not themselves have been Chumburung speakers.
THIRD PHASE OF CHUMBURUNG LITERACY—USING THE
CHURCH STRUCTURE
About 10 per cent of the adult Chumburung population attends one of the
seventy-four congregations representing thirteen denominations. One
hundred duplicated copies of the first draft of the Chumburung New
Testament by two local men were circulated, and a Bible correspondence
course started. Nearly 300 people completed questions on at least one
book of the New Testament, and two completed the entire New Testament.
During this third phase of Chumburung literacy, ecumenical gatherings
were held in each town. One or two people in each congregation learnt
how to teach adult Sunday school lessons in Chumburung. Since Asante is
widely used in churches, each language group meets before the main
service for religious instruction in their own language, a pattern already
employed by some of the very large multilingual churches in the capital.
Following the dedication of the printed New Testament in 1989, some
churches have taken the opportunity to start literacy classes, either for
church attenders or within the wider community.
Thus we see that, when adult literacy declined for lack of motivation,
the programme progressed temporarily within the education system, and
then more recently the church has advanced the process of reading in the
mother tongue. While official figures for those who have become literate
in Chumburung are still low, there is now an undercurrent of positive
feeling among people towards reading in their own language. Wherever
one travels, someone will say, ‘I can read Chumburung too. So-and-so
taught me’. Furthermore, some newly literate people have taught
themselves to read Asante as well, and many non-schooled adults are now
pressing for books to help them learn English.
FUTURE POSSIBILITIES FOR MOTHER TONGUE
EDUCATION
Looking at the educational systems across a number of countries, we find
two significant phrases used repeatedly. In English, we speak of the
language used in the classroom as the ‘medium of instruction’. In French
Using existing structures
81
the phrase is the Vehicle of knowledge’. Both highlight the fact that if the
language employed by the teacher is not well understood by the pupils,
they will not learn. Since they also learn from written textbooks, they need
also to be fluent in reading that language. What language might be best as
a medium of both instruction and learning?
Elugbe has given a synopsis of Nigeria’s plan for a progression of three
languages to be consecutively used in the schools: mother tongue, national
language, and English. Whereas Nigeria is raising three regional
languages to the status of national languages, there is not a corresponding
policy establishing a raised status for Asante in Ghana. In fact, as
Gbedemah (1975) says, there would be reactions against it. Therefore I
will retain the phrase ‘regional languages’ for languages that are more
widely spoken in an area, which may or may not be the mother tongues for
the pupils in the schools.
Language development plans refer both to language learning and the
use of language as a medium of instruction. In Gbedemah’s ideal plan, in
the first four years, the Ghanaian child would be exposed 75 per cent of
the time to the first language or mother tongue (which according to
present administrative arrangements in Ghana would be the major
regional language) in elementary school. What is not realised, or maybe it
is realised but is too difficult to handle, is that for many children their
mother tongue is not the regional language. Furthermore, the plans of
Nigeria, Ghana and Bénin do not clearly state when reading and writing in
each language are to be taught. Is it to be at the same time as acquisition of
the language?
GILLBT is not the only organization to believe that literacy in the
mother tongue is much easier than in any other language, since the words
being read, often with a good phonic orthography, are immediately
comprehended. Transition to reading another language with which people
are orally familiar is expedited. The world of the primary school in any
country deals as subject matter with the immediate environment. What
language better to employ than the mother tongue? At this stage basic
arithmetic is more likely to be understood in the mother tongue. As
children’s interests develop, they may begin to acquire verbal facility in a
regional language. Chumburung children acquire Asante orally and
painlessly, even if not to a great depth at this stage. This regional language
could be taught as a subject orally at first, and when the children are able
to read their own mother tongue they could start reading in the regional
language. However, the two processes, oral acquisition and reading, need
to be consecutive not contemporaneous. By junior secondary school, that
regional language could become the medium of instruction. At this stage
the subject matter is likely to be national in scope, e.g. national geography
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and history. Initially English would be taught orally as a subject. English
notoriously has a complicated spelling system, but the children would
have already mastered the letters and other reading skills, and would
cope better when they first started to learn to read English. Then English
could be used as a medium of instruction in senior secondary schools,
containing much of the language of science and technology. The
regional language could, of course, continue to be studied as a subject in
its own right.
Such a progression from the small world of the local environment to the
global world with its emphasis on technology, would obviate the need to
construct specialized vocabulary artificially in the mother tongue for
concepts not used in everyday life. After all, as Gbedemah (1975) points
out, languages ‘exist in different cultural matrices’.
As an example, let us take the case of Krio of Sierra Leone, the plight of
whose mother tongue speakers is so graphically portrayed by Fyle in this
volume. The status of Krio is of mother tongue for a minority, and trade
language for many. For mother tongue speakers, they would be taught to
read it at primary school, but other groups would learn to read their own
mother tongue before progressing to Krio and finally English.
Such programmes, whilst apparently very costly, would ‘enable
everybody to participate fully in the national process’ (Elugbe in this
volume), assuming education was compulsory. It would also ensure that
provision is made for speakers of minority languages, since no minority
group would wish to abandon a mother tongue.
Whilst applauding Elugbe’s plans for Nigerian universities, it is
important to stress that most teachers are trained not in universities, but
in teacher training colleges. The Chumburung programme has shown
that if teaching in primary schools involves the mother tongue, more
people are drawn into the teaching profession, thus utilizing more of the
nation’s resources. In the Chumburung case, it is to the credit of the
village elders, who chose the teachers in the first phase, that most of
them are still actively involved in the programme either in schools or in
adult classes, or have themselves gone on to teacher training. This
contrasts with the high teacher drop-out rate that Igué and N’Ouéni
speak of in Bénin. Chumburung speakers themselves are looking
forward to a time when training in teaching Chumburung reading and
writing is taught at the Ajumako School of Languages, for this is the
major establishment that trains students to teach one of the approved
vernaculars as a subject in schools.
However, even if education in schools were to be compulsory, and the
‘three language’ plan fulfil its potential, there still remain those who are
currently at school or who never had the opportunity. I believe the role of
Using existing structures
83
NGOs and churches is sadly neglected by governments. Elugbe cites the
‘shamefully low’ figure of twenty Nigerian languages which ‘already
have standard (official) orthographies developed for them’. What of the
118 languages that he says have also been reduced to writing? Rather
than expending effort in standardizing the orthographies of these
languages, would it not be better to encourage the use of existing books
and training teachers in those languages? Pardon and Furniss show in
this volume how difficult it is in practice to impose a new and
theoretically ‘better’ orthography on an existing one. There also remain
in Nigeria more than 200 languages for which orthographies have yet to
be established.
The Rivers Readers Project in Nigeria has shown (I. and A.Gardner:
private communication) that if a book is on the school syllabus, adults are
more motivated to read it also. The language in fact acquires a certain
prestige which of itself motivates more people. Certainly amongst
Chumburung speakers, some women are beginning to learn to read
Chumburung because their children have learnt in school. Literate
mothers are also not to be undervalued as helpers of their small children in
their first attempts at reading, and as a growing pool of potential teachers
in nursery and primary schools.
CONCLUSION
At first sight the ‘three language’ plan is so daunting in concept as to be
overwhelming for any government. However, if the state is committed to
a ‘full realization of the human potential and a maximum utilization of
the nation’s resources for the benefit of all’, as I earlier quoted from
Bamgbose in this volume, then I believe that it needs to recognise and
encourage NGOs and churches in all the contributions they can make.
From the Chumburung experience, we can see that more than one
approach is necessary. If the NGOs are allowed to contribute to the
school situation, not only do those pupils involved learn something they
would not otherwise learn, but their parents and the wider community
become involved also. This in turn results in having more and better
teachers, and more parental cooperation in the education of the next
generation of children.
REFERENCES
Asad, T. (1986) ‘The concept of cultural translation in British social
anthropology’, in J.Clifford and G.E.Marcus (eds.) Writing Culture: the
Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press.
84
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Gbedemah, F.F.K. (1975) Alternative Language Policies for Education in Ghana
New York: Vantage Press.
Part II
Central and Southern Africa
The political imperatives that lie behind three of the papers in this section
relate to the recognition of diversity within state boundaries where the
state has hitherto recognised and promoted only one or some of the
languages, predominantly those of the élites or of the former colonial
power. In this respect, these papers, by Katupha, Benjamin and Maake,
echo the programmatic statements that have been the subject of debate
since the 1960s in other parts of Africa. They address policy issues about
recognition and the allocation of state resources, based upon a restatement
of the multi-ethnic and multilingual social reality of the state and a belief
that a ‘new’ state can emerge, more cohesive and less conflict-ridden,
through the recognition of legitimate aspirations to deploy and value
‘own’ language and culture within a state which recognizes a variety of
such languages and cultures.
For Mozambique, Katupha characterizes Portuguese, which was
promoted as a tool of national unification in the face of troubling diversity,
as contributing to defining élite membership. Certainly, not knowing
Portuguese excluded individuals from the élite. At the same time,
economic and technological development, if it is to involve the majority of
the people, can be promoted only through the use of African languages.
Katupha’s solution is the long term promotion, through the education
system, of ‘functional bilingualism’ such that, with resources allocated to
the development of African languages, it will be possible for Mozambican
citizens to function in a variety of sectors in their own languages, while
having access to other spheres of communication through Portuguese. For
South Africa, the subject of the papers by Benjamin and Maake, the
situation is further complicated by the fact that the development of the use
of African languages was part of the agenda of the Apartheid state.
Opposition to Apartheid involved, to some extent, the insistence on
English as the medium for resistance; to promote the use of African
85
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Central and Southern Africa
languages was tantamount to endorsing the so-called ‘independent
homelands’. In this context, therefore, in recognition of the fact that
National Party Governments since 1948 had vigorously, and successfully,
promoted Afrikaans against English, resistance involved deliberately
using English (as was demonstrated by the 1976 school strikes against the
imposition of Afrikaans as medium of instruction in black schools).
Both Benjamin and Maake make programmatic statements which
appeal for the recognition of diversity through the official promotion of
varieties of ‘functional multilingualism’ on a regional basis within South
Africa such that, for example, Southern Sotho, Afrikaans and English
would become the ‘official’ languages of the Orange Free State, whereas
Xhosa, Afrikaans and English would be the ‘official’ languages of the
Cape. The protection of a right to be educated, and generally express
oneself, in the mother tongue is carefully balanced with equal access to the
lingua franca(s) which allow access to other spheres of social life. Insofar
as those other spheres are the world of the existing and emerging élites,
those whose mother tongue is the lingua franca will remain at an
advantage; Maake looks to redress the balance by prescribing the learning
of two languages for all children starting school. It is perhaps not
surprising that it is South Africa that engenders the strongest prescriptive
response among the papers presented here.
In contrast the final two papers in this part represent pragmatic
perspectives on language issues. Fairhead examines the relation between
Kinyabwisha, Swahili and French in Eastern Zaïre. His discussion
concentrates upon the way in which patterns of language use mesh with
local political and technological debates in which concepts are being
translated into and out of alternating cultures. Viewed from the perspective
of Kinyabwisha-speakers, Swahili is as ‘foreign’ as French. Kinyabwisha,
the language, is a medium of communication anyone can learn, but a
linked concept, ikinyabwisha, ‘the economy of heat’, constitutes an
explanatory system representing the Bwisha ‘form of life’. Fairhead’s
paper draws attention to the significance of contextual debates for an
understanding of patterns of language use. Van Binsbergen’s meticulous
comparison between ethnic minorities and their languages in Zambia and
Botswana broaches the complexities of state policies as they impinge
upon the formation of ethnicities and the politicizing of language issues.
His analysis challenges any facile equation between ethnicity and
divisiveness within the nation state by revealing the multiplicity of
historical circumstances which influence how ethnicity will become
politically salient, as well as the multiplicity of levels of government upon
which ethnic agendas may impinge to divergent effect. The relations
between ethnicity and its anchorage in language change rapidly, and he
Central and Southern Africa
87
identifies post-colonial hegemonizing of the state by particular language
interests, as well as the moment of standardization of minority languages
in writing, as key episodes in continuing processes of the objectification of
ethnicity and language. Similar language policies in Botswana and
Zambia furnished part of the context for understanding the trajectories of
Kalanga and Nkoya ethnicities and their associated languages, but
language policy cannot itself explain what happened in these two cases. In
his espousal of a ‘graded model’ of recognition of languages for different
uses at levels of statal organization, van Binsbergen carefully distances
himself from the view that a single blueprint can be applied to the
historical particularities of African states that have developed distinct
characters and political problems during the post-colonial period.
7
The language situation and
language use in Mozambique
J.M.M.Katupha
The choice of language and the use to which it is put is central to a people’s
definition of themselves in relation to the entire universe. Hence language
has always been at the heart of the two contending social forces in the
Africa of the twentieth century.
(wa Thiong’o 1986:4)
Thinking about policy behind the current language situation in
Mozambique is no different from other countries in independent black
Africa today. It vacillates between dismantling colonial relationships on
the one hand, and on the other striving for nation-building, technical
development as well as openness to the outside world. This has led such
countries generally to adopt language policies in which the language of
the former colonizing power is used for official communication, while
social communication relies largely on African languages. Indeed, in the
process of purging society of colonial values, the languages of the
colonizing powers are considered untouchable. This may be compared
with the resolution passed by the Organisation of African Unity, which,
while vehemently condemning the evils of colonialism, urges every
member state to accept as sacred the current territorial boundaries, a
product of colonialism. The aim of this paper (which was first presented at
the nineteenth Annual African Linguistics Conference, Boston University,
April 1988) is to discuss language use and its specificities as well as
inherent contradictions in Mozambique arising from the current language
policy.
The paper characterizes the multilingual situation of the country. Then
it discusses the social use of each group of languages. Functional
bilingualism emerges as a possible language policy to be adopted by
Government. The last part of the paper suggests that functional
bilingualism is a provisional solution securing cultural preservation and
modernization until African languages are able to fulfil the functions of
European languages.
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Central and Southern Africa
THE LANGUAGE SITUATION IN MOZAMBIQUE
Mozambique is a multilingual country. Apart from European languages
(Portuguese, English and others) all African languages spoken by
Mozambicans belong to the Bantu group. The extent of dialectal variation
amongst the Bantu languages of Mozambique requires further
investigation. A preliminary survey indicates, however, the existence of
languages from four of Guthrie’s zones representing eight distinct
language groups:
1 Zone G
Language Group G40: Swahili
Languages: ki-Swahili, ki-Mwaani
2 Zone P
Language Group P20: Yao
Languages: chi-Yao, chi-Makonde (chi-Maviha)
Language Group P30: Makua
Languages: e-Makhuwa, e-Lomwe, e-Chuwabo, e-Ngulu, etc.
3 Zone N
Language Group N30: Nyanja
Languages: chi-Nyanja, chi-Chewa (chi-Manganja), etc.
Language Group N40: Nsenga-Sena
Languages: chi-Nsenga, chi-Nyungwe, etc., chi-Sena (chi-Ruwe, chiPodzo)
4 Zone S
Language Group S10: Shona
Languages: chi-Manyika, chi-Tewe, chi-Ndau
Languages Group S50: Tsonga
Languages: shi-Tswa, shi-Changana, shi-Ronga
Language Group S60: Chopi
Languages: chi-Chopi, gi-Tonga
There is a certain degree of inter-intelligibility amongst members of the
same language group, to such an extent that they may be considered
dialectal variants. This is the case within all language groups, with the
exception of the Yao group of languages (P20: chi-Yao, chi-Makonde), the
inter-intelligibility of which needs to be investigated. The Chopi group of
languages (S60) occupies a restricted area within the zone of influence of
the Tsonga group. It is often the case, therefore, that the native speakers of
the former group can speak one of the language variants of the latter. Four
most widely-spoken languages can be distinguished from within this
language network:
1
e-Makhuwa
41 per cent
The language situation and use in Mozambique
2
3
4
shi-Tsonga
chi-Nyanja
chi-Shona
91
19 per cent
10 per cent
8 per cent.
Other languages or groups of languages are spoken within the sphere of
influence of the above four.
LANGUAGE POLICY AND LANGUAGE USE
Mozambique is no exception in the decisions made concerning the
language of the former colonizing power within independent Africa.
Portuguese was adopted during the armed struggle for independence
waged by FRELIMO (Mozambican Liberation Front). In those days
Portuguese was retained as a bridge in the face of inter-regional barriers to
communication. Its adoption may be considered part of FRELIMO’s
ideological transformation from nationalistic to revolutionary ideas in
which the identification of Mozambique as a nation to be (re)built was
FRELIMO’s main aim. Whereas under conditions of colonialism the
possession of Portuguese was associated with an élite, during the armed
struggle a functional Portuguese emerged within the army as well as in the
liberated areas, having many of the characteristics of what Heine (1977)
calls ‘a horizontal medium of communication’. It was at that time
proclaimed that exploitation could not be defined in terms of colour or
language. One could be of any colour or race, speak a native language that
people could understand, and yet be an exploiter. The use of Portuguese
was therefore justified not only as overcoming regional problems of
communication but also was considered the ‘enemy’s weapon’ in the
hands of FRELIMO. Portuguese was also used in the ideological
development of the new administration in the liberated zones. In the
meantime African languages remained a major emotional expression of
nationalism, expressed in nationalist dances and songs. Since
independence, Portuguese, accordingly, has been seen as playing the
following roles:
1 a unifying language
2 a language of official communication
3 a language of formal learning including literacy campaigns.
These roles assigned to Portuguese are in contrast with its historical role
under Portuguese colonialism which, pursuing an assimilationist
philosophy, paid no attention to African languages. They were
pejoratively treated as ‘dialects’. Portuguese was the language everyone
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Central and Southern Africa
ought to know and speak. The colonial Portuguese administration,
however, developed no school network across the country. Missionary
schools were the places where, in the countryside, people could learn
some Portuguese either through religious teaching or in the process of
learning how to serve the colonial administration.
In the urban areas the so-called official schools were designed only for
children of the colonizers. Some children of the few assimilados could go
and study in such schools. Only in exceptional cases could such children
go beyond secondary education. Both in the missionary and the official
schools, speaking one’s native language was strictly forbidden and when
one was caught speaking it, the punishment could be either ridicule or
severe physical beating. Being able to speak Portuguese meant, therefore,
having in one way or another, experienced the humiliation of one’s own
native language. The resistance to this, especially amongst the peasants in
the countryside, meant that the majority of Mozambicans could neither
read nor speak in Portuguese. This has continued to be the case, despite all
the efforts of the Government in expanding the school network across the
country and in promoting literacy campaigns. Portuguese remains the
language of the minority, mostly concentrated in the urban areas. On the
other hand, culturally, the Bantu languages constitute the basis of
Mozambican cultural identity. Mutual inter-comprehensibility derived
from genetic relatedness and geographical closeness makes it easier to
overcome the blocking of communication between or within ethnic
groups. This reality, however, has been pragmatically ignored or
strategically overshadowed in the language policy inherited from colonial
history. In the adoption of Portuguese as the language of official
communication, it appears that cultural development has been dissociated
from technical development and the role of the Bantu languages passed
over in silence.
Language in Mozambique shows two patterns of bilingual behaviour,
that I have characterized as horizontal and vertical bilingualism. This
opposition was used by Heine (1977) to distinguish informally acquired
and socially neutral languages from languages usually formally acquired
that create social distance. I had used this terminological distinction
before I came across Heine’s article (Katupha 1984a), with different
implications. By horizontal bilingualism I mean the use of two genetically
cognate languages as opposed to vertical bilingualism—the use of two
genetically unrelated languages. The former is practised amongst speakers
of Bantu languages and the latter amongst those speakers of both
Portuguese and one (or usually more) Bantu languages. The 1980 census
(Moçambique 1980) characterizes Mozambican vertical bilingualism in
the following figures: Portuguese is spoken by 24.4 per cent of the
The language situation and use in Mozambique
93
population comprising 1.2 per cent who speak it as their mother tongue
and a further 23.2 per cent who are bilingual, the remaining 75.6 per cent
of the population speaking no Portuguese at all.
Although horizontal bilingualism has not been directly measured, it is
likely to be far greater than the vertical bilingualism revealed by these
figures. In communicative as well as developmental terms, the Bantu
languages still play a great role internally, especially in the countryside.
Indeed, this is recognized by the Government and in spite of the lack of
a clear definition of their role, there has been concern that something
should be done. The Minister of Information said recently, ‘a challenge
which must be rapidly confronted in broadcasting is to produce
programmes in Mozambican languages and not limit ourselves to
translating such programmes into them. The language issue is a
fundamental question of culture and policy that should not be ignored
through passivity, inertia and laissez-faire’ (Noticias, 8 January 1988).
This conspicuous manifestation of anxiety by a member of the
Government, thirteen years after independence, is indicative of how
difficult it has been to spell out an appropriate language policy in tune
with the recognized political and cultural status that the African
languages enjoy. Adopting measures for the economic and technological
development of the country without at the same time developing the
African languages would appear to ignore the fundamental question of
the relationship between policy and culture. In other words, economic
and technological development would be impaired if there were no clear
definition of the role of Bantu languages in the country.
In general terms, although there are four languages relatively widely
spoken in the country, no language is more important than any other. They
enjoy equal status and social prestige within the current political
framework of a developing language policy. Apart from in private social
life they are officially used in the radio broadcasting network, but only at
a regional level. Portuguese and English are used in nationwide and
external broadcasting programmes. An attempt to use African languages
in local ‘walljournals’ has proved ineffective, partly for lack of
systematized and standardized alphabetic scripts on the one hand, and the
high level of illiteracy on the other. Indeed, the lack of standard alphabetic
scripts increases the number of illiterate people in as much as few of those
who can write and read in Portuguese can do so in their own mother
tongues. The different Christian sects constitute a sizeable sector making
extensive use of African languages in worship, Bible and liturgical
translation and religious instruction. Although no sociolinguistic survey
has been carried out it is possible to signal three major categories of
people according to the language they use in their social interaction:
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Central and Southern Africa
1 hose who can speak Portuguese
2 those who only speak local languages
3 those who can speak both local and foreign languages.
In the capital city of Maputo the following language valuations may be
observed: Portuguese is generally regarded as a language of success,
power and social prestige amongst those who speak only the local
languages. Amongst those who can speak Portuguese, the great majority
defend the view that the African languages ought to be used in all aspects
of life as much as Portuguese. However, when it comes to comparing
Portuguese and other European languages, most of those who can speak it
regard English as the language for further opportunity, especially among
the younger generation.
Despite kiSwahili being spoken within Mozambique (on the northern
border with Tanzania) it is regarded as a foreign language and usually
identified as the language of FRELIMO soldiers trained in Tanzania.
Indeed, whenever there is a gathering of such people it is normal to hear
them speaking some kiSwahili of a kind.
The influx and movement of people of differing language groups in the
capital of the country, Maputo, divides the speakers of African languages
into two major groups: those who can speak one of the variants of the
Tsonga group and those who can not. Usually the latter are known as swingondo (sing, xi-ngondo, from Ku-gondagonda, ‘to utter meaningless or
unfamiliar sounds’, A.Sitoe, 1988, personal communication), a term
apparently coined during the colonial era to mean ‘barbarian’, or ‘those
who cannot speak my language’, and used to discriminate against any
person coming from any part of the country beyond the Save river. The
term appears to have been fostered and spread, during the struggle for
independence, by the colonial forces in order psychologically to subdue
those captured by the Portuguese soldiers in the northern part of the
country and brought to the then Lourenço Marques, the ‘land of civilized
people’. Nowadays, though still with discriminatory and pejorative
overtones, it has become accepted amongst residents of the capital.
FUNCTIONAL BILINGUALISM AND EDUCATION
The linguistic picture presented above indicates that Mozambique is,
indeed, no exception in the move towards the use of African languages.
The uncertain and rather sluggish move towards their use in public
employment, administration, as well as the private sector, shows how the
European model of modernization is entrenched in independent Africa.
In an attempt to address the question of African languages, in 1978, the
The language situation and use in Mozambique
95
then Minister of Education declared that they should be developed in
such a way as to bring them in line with the development of Portuguese
(1978, Workshop on Methods of Portuguese Teaching, Maputo). This
was to be done, apparently, not so much for reasons of cultural
preservation but as part of a psychological strategy directed at the
education of children in primary schools as well as people in the adult
education sector. This education strategy, centring on the child’s preschool experience, as well as the world around it, is meant sharply to
contrast with and replace the colonial educational strategy which gave
no importance to the social environment of those who had access to
education. The fact that in the new system of education, the pre-school
experience as well as the world surrounding the students is constantly
taken as an input for learning strategies brings the notion of functional
bilingualism into play. Functional bilingualism is regarded as an
underlying educational strategy which will allow the student’s
perception of the surrounding world, including his or her mother tongue,
to contribute to the process of learning Portuguese. Learning the latter in
this way means the oblivion of the former is avoided. However,
economic and technical problems have so far prevented the
implementation of such a strategy as far as language teaching is
concerned. Whether functional bilingualism is to remain merely a
curricular concept or whether it will become part of an overt official
language policy in which the use of Portuguese and of African languages
would become equal in all spheres of communication, is not yet clear.
My own view is that for economically ailing independent Africa,
functional bilingualism is a realistic compromise between the preservation
of cultural traditions and modernization. It is a step forward which
deserves to be given a chance to prove itself right or wrong. Its full
implementation should start in education for it reduces the imbalance in
the take-up of learning opportunities between those who enter school
already having some knowledge of the language of learning and those
who do not. Indeed, whatever language policy is adopted African
languages must have a well-defined place if the widening gap between
cities and countryside is to be closed or, at least, minimized.
REFERENCES
Heine, B. (1977) ‘Vertical and horizontal communication in Africa’, Afrika Spectrum
12:231–8.
Katupha, J.M.M. (1984a) ‘Bilinguismo na Educaçao Formal e Nao Formal,
comunicaçao apresentada no seminario sobre Comunicaçao Social em Apoio aos
Programas de Desenvolvimento’. Paper given at a UNESCO/FUNUAP conference,
Maputo, 12 November–7 December.
96
Central and Southern Africa
——(1984b) ‘Alguna Dados sobre a Situaçao Linguistica na R.P.M. e as suas
Implicaçes para o Desenvolvimento Rural’, unpublished manuscript, Maputo:
Universidade Eduardo Mondlane.
Mozambique. (1980) Recenseamento Geral da Populaçao, IV: Populaçao e
Escolarizaçao. Maputo: Direçqao Geral de Estatisticas.
wa Thiong’o, N. (1986) Decolonizing the Mind: the Politics of Language in African
Literature, London: James Currey.
8
Language and the struggle for
racial equality in the development
of a non-racial Southern African
nation
Jean Benjamin
Language is a tool for communication. It is the medium through which
thoughts, values, attitudes, are transmitted within and between cultural
groups. It is also an index of group and class categorization and
identification, a tool for group mobilization, a medium for expressing and
assessing knowledge and a tool for gaining access to class mobility. In
South Africa the communicative function of language has been obscured
by the tendency of those in power to use language as means to maintain
relations of dominance of Whites over Blacks. In what follows, ‘Black’ is
used as a collective term for all those who are not White South Africans.
Where necessary, for instance when discussing the effects of Apartheid,
reference will be made to ‘Coloureds’, ‘Indians’ and ‘Africans’.
Apartheid language policy and planning functioned to exclude African
languages from official status within South Africa. Language played a
major role in the division of the society into racial and tribal groupings.
Further, the low status afforded African languages and the unavailability
of these as school subjects in White, Coloured and Indian schools severely
affected the motivation of these groups to learn African languages. Mother
tongue education ensured that English- and Afrikaans-speaking Whites
would be equipped to participate in the national system; it served the
opposite purpose for Africans. Whites benefited directly from this AngloEuropean national culture, while it supplemented Apartheid legislation to
prevent the integration of the Black population into the South African
nation. The Afrikaner nationalists further appropriated Afrikaans and used
it to promote their own nationalist identity; thus Afrikaans became
stigmatized as the language of the oppressor amongst Africans. Resources
were allocated for the development of Afrikaans to enable it to compete
effectively with English on a technical level. The development of African
languages was limited to the promotion of traditional ethnic identities
subject to the control of Afrikaner officials who sat on language boards.
97
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Central and Southern Africa
Initially, the Apartheid government denied Africans access to English for
fear of creating ‘White Collar aspirations’ amongst them. After the
Soweto rebellion however, an English medium of instruction followed
initial mother tongue instruction. However, lack of adequate allocation of
educational resources and the subsequent crises in Bantu Education
ensured that inadequate proficiency in English would remain a stumbling
block to Black advancement.
This essay focusses on the role language has played in entrenching
Apartheid inter-group relations. I argue that language should be
recognized as a terrain of struggle for the attainment of racial equality in a
South Africa within which all cultural groups are recognised. I attempt to
spell out an alternative language dispensation for the development of a
non-racial South African nation.
IMPORTANCE OF OFFICIAL STATUS
Apartheid language policies entrenched inequalities and divisions
between groups by granting official status to English and Afrikaans to the
exclusion of indigenous Black South African languages. The
disadvantages of not having official recognition for one’s language are
most often quoted by Afrikaans linguists concerned that Afrikaans may
lose its official status in a new dispensation in which only English has
official recognition. These disadvantages include the considerations that:
1 knowledge of the official language becomes a prerequisite for
appointment and promotion in state institutions (thus non-speakers are
excluded from state jobs);
2 in the case of a powerful official language, such as English, the language
can become irresistible even in non-state institutions such as the church;
3 psychological pressure leads to parents preferring the official language
as sole medium of education, sometimes leading to it becoming the home
language of non-speakers (for the sake of the children’s advancement);
4 in such a case the right to demand a non-official language as a school
medium becomes meaningless or even counter-productive;
5 a further ‘psychological’ factor is added when the state and its instruments
propagate negative attitudes toward the non-official language and its
speakers (Webb 1990:2).
Although these implications are quoted most often only in the context
of Afrikaans losing its official status to English, they are equally valid
in considering the need for granting official status to African
languages in a dispensation which is inclusive of all cultural groups. In
Language and the struggle for racial equality
99
the present dispensation, Afrikaans- and English-speaking South
Africans are privileged by the official recognition of their languages
while it is speakers of African languages who suffer the disadvantages
mentioned above.
LANGUAGE AS INDEX TO DIVIDE AND RULE
The official recognition of Afrikaans and English only was central in the
Apartheid government’s intention to create a South African nation
characterized by Western European culture while dividing the African
majority into ethnic minorities in the land of their birth.
Language was often the only basis on which Africans were classified
into ethnic groups, stripped of their South African citizenship and forcibly
removed to Bantustans (McLean 1990:2). Ironically, such action, ranging
from forced removals through to Bantu Education, has often been
interpreted as support for the language rights of Black people (McLean
1990:2). Few other countries in the world have attempted through
legislation to separate demographically different groups on the basis of
their vernaculars. In South Africa the vernacular became the basic feature
of state nationalism (Brown 1988/9:34).
Apartheid language policy further entrenched ethnic division by not
making African languages accessible to non-speakers, thereby blocking
communication between different ethnic groups. Language has, thus, been
used as an effective barrier between those classified as Whites, Coloureds
and Indians on the one hand, and those classified as Africans on the other.
Separate group areas and education systems ensured that a number of
generations of South Africans classified as White, Coloured and Indian
would grow up unable to communicate in an African language, or to
identify with African culture. African culture was thus mystified while the
members of the dominant group promoted stereotypes of Africans as
‘savages’ not deserving to be included as an aspect of the ‘civilized’
world.
LANGUAGE AND POWER RELATIONS
The Anglo-European culture imposed by the Apartheid government not
only symbolized centuries of oppression through slavery, colonial
conquest and, later, Apartheid, but also contained ideological baggage
antagonistic to being African and working class.
Frank Meintjies (1989:15) first showed through several examples how
language reflects, entrenches and reproduces power relations between
White employers and Black workers; for example, the use of words such
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Central and Southern Africa
as ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ to refer to Black men and women, employment
contracts for Black workers which contain terms such as ‘obedience’
and ‘discipline’ and criminalize ‘latecoming’ and ‘talking back’, as well
as the differential use of the label ‘thief’: theft is used with reference to
workers’ misconduct, while ‘fraud’, ‘corruption’, ‘embezzlement’ and
‘improper conduct’ refer to management misconduct. Meintjies
(1989:16) pointed out, however, that ‘Language is not inherently
oppressive; its role is defined by the people who wield it and the social
forces which act upon it’. Language is, therefore, an active terrain of
struggle upon which the forces of Apartheid act to subjugate the Black
majority, and which the forces of liberation should strive to transform. A
democratic government should, through corpus planning, eliminate
overtly racist discourse. Editors, journalists, writers and educators
should be vigilant in eradicating language uses which perpetuate the
ideologies of racism and patriarchy.
AFRIKAANS AND POWER RELATIONS
According to Trudgill (1974) oppression through language can take a
number of forms. Most obviously, governments can discourage or prevent
groups of people from using their native language for political reasons;
Afrikaners suffered this form of oppression under British rule. Concern
with their language rights in opposing British linguistic imperialism
provided a focus and support for emergent Afrikaner nationalism in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century (Reagan 1985). When the Nationalist
Party came to power in 1948, however, it appropriated Afrikaans and used
it to impose its value system on the broader South African community
(Davids 1987; Du Plessis 1988). Thus, Afrikaans became linked with
White power politics (Louw-Potgieter 1991:329) and became known as
‘the language of the oppressor’. Resistance to Afrikaner nationalist
dominance and to the imposition of Afrikaans in African schools
culminated in the Soweto riots, one of the outcomes of which was the
withdrawal of Afrikaans as medium of instruction from Black schools
(Steyn 1987).
The appropriation and politicization of Afrikaans by right wing
Afrikaner ideologues resulted in the stigmatization of Afrikaans and
decreased the likelihood of its spread as a lingua franca (Cluver 1991:10).
Present fears by some Afrikaners that Afrikaans would die out if it lost its
official status are misguided and make sense only when Afrikaans is
viewed as the language of the Afrikaner. The survival and growth of
Afrikaans resides not in its official imposition, but rather in the
recognition of all its varieties and cultures, in the opening of the language
Language and the struggle for racial equality
101
group boundaries to all its speakers, and in its capacity to rid itself
ideologically of its racist connotations.
EFFECT OF OFFICIAL STATUS ON AFRIKAANS
DEVELOPMENT
The use of Afrikaans as a language of government from 1925 onwards
created a need for it to be standardized and lexically developed to enable
its speakers to compete effectively with English speakers. Milestones in
the development of Afrikaans include:
1 the founding of the ‘Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Taal, Lettere en
Kuns’ (1908),
2 the publication (1917 onwards) of the Afrikaanse Woordelys en Spëlreëls,
3 the creation of the Vaktaalburo (technical language bureau) in 1950, and
4 the implementation of ‘Christian National Education’ (CNE) and the
‘mother tongue principle’ in 1948 (Reagan 1985).
All of these institutions excluded Blacks and enabled Afrikaners to
conduct their affairs in their mother tongue up to the highest levels of
state, social, and technological functions.
AFRICAN LANGUAGES NOT DEVELOPED
The mother tongue principle never produced the advantages for speakers
of African languages that it did for English and Afrikaans speakers
within South Africa. The government never intended to develop African
languages into fully standardized languages but to limit them to use
within the African family, cultural group, the Bantustan and the school
(Cluver 1991:16).
In line with its policies of mother tongue instruction within
Bantu Education, the government took up the task of developing
African languages. Language boards were created to expand the
vocabularies of the larger African languages for use in secondary
and tertiary education and in the mass media (Cluver 1991:16).
This happened without the democratic participation of Africans
and was therefore rejected by the ANC (Brown 1988/9:42). Thus,
the government’s efforts to develop African languages were
perceived by African leaders as an attempt to keep Africans in
primitive tribal bondage (Lithuli 1962). At the time, the ANC had
not entirely dismissed the notion of the development of African
languages. Instead it was more concerned with the participation of
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Central and Southern Africa
African people themselves in the development of their languages
(Brown 1988/9:42).
Inherent in the promotion of different African languages for cultural
affirmation was also a potential for inter-tribal division and conflict. The
proposal to develop a unified orthography for closely related African
languages for the purpose of promoting unity amongst Africans, as well as
to facilitate the development of one or more standard African languages,
emerged in the 1930s (Tucker 1929:200) and again in the 1940s (Nhlapo
1945). More recently Alexander (1989) has revived the proposal for the
unification of related African languages as part of a strategy for nationbuilding. A criticism of this position is that unification of languages
through language planning will not in itself create unity amongst speakers
of the different languages. Social psychological evidence in this regard
indicates that speakers of different languages will converge only if
perceived benefits outweigh costs (Giles, Bourhis and Taylor 1977).
Acceptance of this strategy by the different speech communities is
therefore crucial to its effectiveness.
Another perspective, emerging from within the Communist Party in the
1940s and endorsed by the influential Soviet Africanist Prof. I. Potckhin,
argued for the development of all African languages. The Pan Africanists
within the liberation movement argued instead for Swahili as lingua
franca. Neither of these positions was taken up by the ANC during the
1950s, who were satisfied with choosing English as a unifying language in
opposition to government attempts to promote tribalism through language
differences (Brown 1988/9:42).
More recently it is becoming evident that the choice of an ex-colonial
language for the purpose of national integration makes possible only
horizontal integration. This involves the combination of the educated
élites from the various linguistic groups which may comprise only 10–15
per cent of the population. The alternative, vertical, integration would
enable the integration of the élites with the masses and allow the vast
majority of the people who have no access to the official language to
participate in the social, economic and political system. This sort of
integration is only possible through an African language (Bamgbose
1991).
In the ANCs present constitutional proposals, the right of all South
African languages to enjoy equal status is affirmed. Similarly, Willemse
has argued for the development of all South African languages:
In a liberated South Africa the state and government, fully
representative of the African majority, must be charged with the
responsibility to protect and develop African languages…. The state
Language and the struggle for racial equality
103
must also be charged with putting in action processes that would
facilitate the development of multi-lingualism in South Africa, be that
in terms of education, official media or commerce.
(Willemse 1991:7).
The development of multilingualism is not limited to the achievement of
equal status for different language groups. Through the development of
individual bilingualism and multilingualism, it aims to overcome the
barriers of inter-ethnic communication. The advantages of bilingualism
for English and Afrikaans speakers in South Africa are undeniable and
correlate with a reasonable standard of living achieved by the majority of
these speakers. Where African languages are concerned, however, the
diversity of languages has often been seen as a problem. It has been
pointed out, however, that in the African situation a person who speaks
several languages should be regarded as a better integrated citizen than
one who is proficient in only one language, even if it happens to be the
official language (Bamgbose 1991). In the meetings and conferences of
the liberation movement in South Africa during the 1980s and 1990s, such
multilingual individuals have performed an invaluable service in
translating between the various languages prevalent to enable the masses
to participate in the deliberations.
BANTU EDUCATION AND MOTHER TONGUE INSTRUCTION
In accordance with the stated aims of Bantu Education, not to educate the
‘Bantu’ ‘above the level of certain forms of labour’ (Verwoerd 1954,
quoted by Meintjies 1989:17), oppression through language initially took
the form of encouraging diversity for the purposes of divide and rule by
retribalizing all Africans into separate ethnic groups. Black people,
therefore, regarded mother tongue instruction, not as a valuable
democratic right, but as an attempt to isolate them from the ruling élite,
from possibilities of advancement, from access to international literature
and to other contacts (Trudgill 1974). Whereas Afrikaans- and Englishspeaking White South Africans could achieve social and economic
mobility through mother tongue proficiency, the dissatisfaction of
Africans with mother tongue instruction within Bantu Education, is well
documented (Bunting 1964; Hirson 1981; Troup 1976).
Reagan (1985) challenged these objections to the ‘mother tongue
principle’ drawing parallels with progressive and anti-imperialist
education systems in other African countries. It has been cautioned,
however, that international theories regarding the efficacy of mother
tongue programmes should not be generalized uncritically to South
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Central and Southern Africa
African society (McLean 1990:4; Cluver 1991:17). In spite of the fact that
Reagan pointed out in the same paper that language planning is political,
his criticisms of Apartheid language policy within Bantu Education were
treated in an apolitical manner. In justifying Apartheid language policies
Reagan (1985) overlooked the fact that they were imposed upon a
disempowered population. As McLean (1990:5) correctly pointed out ‘a
language policy is not intrinsically good or intrinsically bad. It is good or
bad…in terms of its human consequences within the specific
sociopolitical milieu which it occupies.’
In the case of Africans, the consequence of Apartheid language policy
was the denial of human rights. Language rights must proceed beyond
initial mother tongue instruction. Individuals should have the right to use,
speak, publish, be educated, and be employed, in the languages of their
choice. All South African languages should be promoted and developed
ultimately to deal with all the functions of language within speech
communities as well as within the broader South African society.
Multilingualism should be a conscious and state-aided endeavour
(Willemse 1991). Only then will mother tongue instruction reap the
pedagogic benefits advocated by linguists such as Reagan (1985).
ARGUMENTS ABOUT ENGLISH AS LINGUA FRANCA
It is not unusual for newly independent post-colonial countries to choose a
lingua franca which is highly developed and ex-colonial (Brown 1988/
9:41). In the 1930s and 1940s the prevailing view within the liberation
movement was that English should be the lingua franca as it would cut
across ethnic divisions. This stand was taken by the ANC in opposition to
the state, which supported the development of African languages for the
purpose of divide and rule (Brown 1988/9:41). More recently the potential
of English for the fostering of national unity has been advocated by
Alexander (1989) and Meerkotter (1985:89). Alexander (1989), however,
argues for English as lingua franca in the short term, with the longer term
elaboration and unification of the Sotho and Nguni languages for this
purpose. Meerkotter, on the other hand, argues for English as sole national
lingua franca.
The use of English and the development and recognition of African
languages as official at national and/or regional levels are inseparable.
Recent perspectives on second language acquisition show that the learning
of a second high status language is optimal when the first language is not
threatened (Padilla et al. 1991:125). At a more pragmatic level, it has been
argued that the adoption of English as sole national lingua franca would
militate against the development of African languages (Dirven 1990;
Language and the struggle for racial equality
105
Willemse 1991). For these reasons, both for political and educational
purposes the use of English as a national lingua franca should not occur at
the expense of other languages in South Africa.
ENGLISH AND THE DANGER OF ‘THOUGHT CONTROL’
English, because of its liberal ideology and status as a world language, is
more acceptable as a second language—hence the widespread preference
amongst Africans for English as a language of wider communication and
educational medium. It also gains support from being a popular
educational medium. Due to international economics, many textbooks are
published in English. Willemse argues, however, that while English
proficiency provides access to the international world, there is also the
danger of a concomitant internationalization of thought control through
the ‘world’ language (Willemse 1991).
Njabulo Ndebele (1986) in a keynote address to the Jubilee Conference
of the English Academy of Southern Africa, warned against uncritical
complacency regarding the role and future of English in South Africa.
Within the context of the development of English as a world-language,
Ndebele is critical of the desire of native speakers of English to maintain
control over English in order to spread their influence. He draws a further
link between the colonial relationship between European and African
cultures in South Africa and the relationship between English and African
languages. He states that the future cannot be defined solely by those who
have previously wielded power to their exclusive advantage. Ndebele
argues for the development of a new South African English which should
be freed from ‘the functional instruction of corporate English of American
and British imperialism’ (Ndebele 1986).
ENGLISH AS ÉLITIST
Further problems connected to the adoption of English as a national
lingua franca concern its potential for entrenching unequal class
relations. English is acquired through formal education and tends to
be used by relatively educated speakers. Increasingly in South
Africa, the distribution of English is less a feature of race than of
class (McLean 1990:9; Dirven 1990:22). Access to English is
regulated by class features, since its primary agent of dissemination
is education, and its secondary agent is contact, which is more likely
to occur between first language English speakers and the African
urban middle class than the African rural working class (McLean
1990:9).
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Redressing the problem depends on a broader restructuring of South
African society. Solutions include making English more accessible (e.g.
through adult education and increasing opportunities for access to
education, contact with first language English speakers), changing the
status of English and the African languages by encouraging a ‘difference’
rather than a ‘deficit’ view of devalued varieties, elaborating the African
languages, as well as raising the socio-economic status of African
language speakers (McLean 1990:9).
UNITY IN DIVERSITY IN A DEMOCRATIC NON-RACIAL
SOUTH AFRICA
A clear distinction must be drawn between the narrow nationalism which
Apartheid represented and progressive conceptions of national diversity.
Oliver Tambo articulated this distinction in his address to FRELIMO in
Mozambique during its Fourth Congress. He conceived of a future South
African nation ‘in which sovereignty will come from the people as a
whole and not a collection of Bantustans and racial and tribal groupings
organized to perpetuate minority power’ (quoted by Jordan 1988:117).
Jordan further argued that, ‘The nation…is not defined by skin colour or
racial designation; its parameters are set by individual acts of voluntary
adherence, which require submergence of other loyalties in favour of this
larger unit’ (1988:118).
Although diversity should be recognized, people should not be
assigned to eternally frozen categories. A democratic state should not
legislate involuntary adherence to externally defined ethnic groups. It
cannot legislate on diversity, neither can it abolish affinities based on such
groups (Jordan 1988:119). Whilst much has been written about the
national question (Van Diepen 1988) such an alternative vision of a nation
has not been popularized. People have lived through the Apartheid
construction of group identity, of which language was often the only
index. Many South Africans have internalized these racial labels and
representations. While the Population Registration Act has been repealed,
the racial labels and discourse continue to entrench racial differentiation.
In this regard, politicians, educators and other opinion makers, at least
those who are serious in their endeavour to develop non-racialism in South
Africa, should not entrench race differentiation through unnecessary
references to such labels in their speeches.
IMPLICATIONS FOR A NEW LANGUAGE DISPENSATION
In a new language dispensation, different language and cultural groups
Language and the struggle for racial equality
107
should not be set up in competition with one another. All major languages
in a region should enjoy the advantages of official recognition.
A South African national should be able to speak all the major
languages in a particular region. In the Western Cape, for example,
Afrikaans, English and Xhosa could become prerequisite for state jobs
which involve communication with the public. Such a policy would not
only produce more employment for Xhosa language teachers but would
also provide incentives for non-speakers to learn Xhosa and seek
opportunities for contact across ethnic barriers. Language would thus
cease to be a barrier in inter-ethnic contact.
Educational and other state institutions should emphasize the
multicultural and multilingual nature of the South African nation. Regional
official languages should be taught in all schools by mother tongue
speakers. Languages spoken by smaller speech and cultural communities
should, wherever possible, be taught as subjects in schools.
The elaboration of languages should be performed by speakers of those
languages, and resources should be pumped into the development of
African languages in order to redress historical inequalities.
Even if English were to be decided upon as the national language of
wider communication for pragmatic and economic reasons, this should
not happen at the cost of developing African languages. Special emphasis
should be placed on educating children within a multicultural context, in
which tolerance for different cultures within the South African nation
should be promoted. A South African English, which reflects all its users,
should be developed and ways should be found to make English accessible
beyond formal education.
CONCLUSION
I have attempted to show how language has been used through policy and
planning by the Apartheid regime to complement Apartheid legislation
and create a society consisting of a dominating Anglo-European White
minority and a host of tribal and ethnic groupings (so-called national
groups) held firmly in place socially, geographically, and linguistically.
This structure has been entrenched within the various education
departments to such an extent that the government hopes it can safely
repeal Apartheid legislation because the social construction of ethnic
groups, and the concomitant status relations between them, will continue
to be reproduced.
With the present dispensation, the rights of communities to be educated
in their mother tongues and within their own cultural environments will
continue to maintain separate ethnic groups, while differential status and
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Central and Southern Africa
resource allocation between Afrikaans and English speakers on the one
hand, and speakers of African languages on the other hand, will ensure
that Africans either remain within their respective cultural communities or
assimilate within the ‘national’ culture on terms or standards dictated by
the White minority.
Mother tongue instruction would continue to ensure direct access to
national resources for Whites while social mobility for Africans would be
dependent on mastering a second higher status language and cultural
environment. Thus, inequality between Whites and the majority of Blacks
will continue to be entrenched. The aforementioned scenario obtains in
the present stage of reform where, for example, traditionally White and
Coloured educational institutions are being opened to African children in
the absence of a multicultural educational environment.
At its national conference in 1992, the ANC adopted a human rights
and language policy which emphasizes the right of the individual to
communicate in the language of her/his choice, as well as the recognition,
development and promotion of all the languages and cultures which make
up South African society. Realization of this policy depends on the extent
to which ordinary people, community organizations, churches,
educational organizations, and trade unions recognize the role that
language has played in dividing South Africans into ethnic groups and in
entrenching inequality between White and Black groups. They need to
recognize that language is one terrain in the struggle for building nonracialism and place the language and national question on their agendas.
This struggle needs to be conducted within the classroom and the family,
where attitudes towards languages are formulated. Unless people at the
grassroots level develop alternative conceptions of the South African
nation and consciously strive towards the removal of barriers to interethnic communication and the achievement of equality, race
discrimination will continue to reproduce itself through language.
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Bamgbose, A. (1991) Language and the Nation: the Language Question in SubSaharan Africa, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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Bunting, B. (1964) The Rise of the South African Reich, Harmondsworth:
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Cluver, A.B. de V. (1991) ‘Language planning models for a post-Apartheid South
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Language and the struggle for racial equality
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Davids, A. (1987) ‘The role of Afrikaans in the history of the Cape Muslim
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Pretoria: HAUM.
Dirven, R. (1990) ‘Contact and conflict linguistics in Southern Africa’, in K.
Chick (ed.) Searching for Relevance: Contextual Issues in Applied Linguistics
in Southern Africa, Durban: South African Applied Linguistics Association.
Du Plessis, L.T. (1988) ‘Politiek en die ontwikkeling van Afrikaans’, Tydskrif vir
Letterkunde, 26:75–80.
Giles, H., Bourhis, R.Y., and Taylor, D.M. (1977) ‘Dimensions of Welsh
identity’, European Journal of Social Psychology, 7:29–39.
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Jordan, P. (1988) ‘The South African liberation movement and the making of a
new nation’, in M.van Diepen (ed.) The National Question in South Africa,
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Lithuli, A (1962) Let My People Go, London: Collins.
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McLean, D. (1990) ‘Guarding against the bourgeois revolution: some aspects of
language planning in the context of national democratic struggle’, paper
presented to public symposium on ‘Language Planning’ held at the University
of the Witwatersrand on 2 February 1990.
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South African Association for Language Teaching 19, 3:88–95.
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Ndebele, N. (1986) ‘The English language and social change in South Africa’,
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Southern Africa, 4–6 September 1986.
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Padilla, A.M., Lindholm, K J., Chen, A, Duran R., Hakuta, K., Lambert, W. and
Tucker, G.R. (1991) ‘The English Only Movement: myths, reality and
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du Plessis (eds.) Afrikaans en Taalpolitiek, Pretoria: HAUM.
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Bantu Languages, London: Green and Col (reproduced by Greg International
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New Jersey: Zed Books.
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Willemse, H. (1991) ‘A position paper on language policy in a new South
Africa’. New Observations 83:6–8. New York.
9
Dismantling the Tower of Babel
In search of a new language policy for a
post-Apartheid South Africa
Nhlanhla P.Maake
This paper addresses the problems of language in relation to development
and government policy in South Africa, where there is now an urgent
need, coupled with other social, political and economic needs, for a new
language policy, especially given the history of that country, where the
domination of one group over others has had far-reaching implications for
African languages and cultures.
My purpose is not to set out the history of language politics in South
Africa, fascinating as that history is, especially the rise of the Afrikaans
culture, language and state, Afrikanerdom, from a defensive position at the
turn of the nineteenth century to an imperial posture from the middle of
the twentieth century. My bias here is to look towards the future rather
than the past, though in South Africa more than in many places the present
can only be fully understood in the context of current historical legacies.
LANGUAGE DISTRIBUTION
In South Africa the question of the role and place of African languages is
an urgent one. Some of the views which have been expressed with regard
to other parts of Africa by neo-conservatives who want to return to African
languages on the one hand, and ‘progressives’ who want to intensify the
use of the languages of Europe on the other, are not appropriate to South
Africa/Azania’s unique position.
I wish to link my discussion to two representations of ‘language’. The
first is taken from the Old Testament, to illustrate how differences of
language can be used to divide people, and the second is drawn from the
New Testament, illustrating how language can be used in a constructive
way for the general good.
It has been suggested by observers that Africans in South Africa/
Azania have a negative attitude towards their languages because these
languages enforce division between different ethnic or tribal groups, and
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Central and Southern Africa
that certain languages belong to certain political enclaves, for instance,
that isiZulu is the language of the Inkatha Freedom Party and isiXhosa the
language of the African National Congress. This view is commonly
reinforced by simplistic reports on the current faction fights in South
Africa. This view grossly neglects the complexity of patterns of language
use and my intention is to consider the place of African languages in South
Africa currently, and how these are destined to play a no less significant
role in future development—technological, industrial, social, economic
and political, in post-Apartheid South Africa. The term ‘African
languages’ here will be used with specific reference to the nine indigenous
languages: Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi, Northern Sotho, Southern Sotho, Tswana,
Ndebele, Tsonga and Venda, and exclude the two ‘official’ languages,
Afrikaans and English, which are basically languages of European origin
but which by now have become indigenous, in the case of Afrikaans
divorced to some extent from its origins in Dutch.
However, though the speakers of these latter languages have become
natives through permanent settlement for now more than three centuries,
they have, to their own detriment, deprived themselves of the opportunity
to become an integral part of Africa by waging wars against and
segregating themselves from the native inhabitants, forming a privileged
and oppressive ruling class ever since their forebears moved to the Cape in
the seventeenth century.
At present the speakers of African languages constitute 68.2 per cent
of the population of South Africa, The distribution of the speakers of
African languages within South Africa is as follows: Zulu is spoken in
Natal and Kwa-Zulu; Xhosa in the Cape Province and the ‘homelands’
of the Transkei, Ciskei and part of the Eastern Cape; Swazi in the
‘homeland’ of Ka-Ngwane; Northern Sotho in the northern Transvaal, in
and around the area designated the ‘homeland’ of Lebowa, stretching as
far south as Warmbad and the Pretoria region; Southern Sotho in the
‘homeland’ of QwaQwa and the major part of the Orange Free State up
into the area north of the Vaal river and the southern part of the PretoriaWitwatersrand-Vaal triangle; Tswana is spoken in the fragmented
‘homeland’ of Bophuthatswana and the intervening areas, the southwestern part of Transvaal and north-west Orange Free State; Ndebele in
the ‘homeland’ of Kwa-Ndebele, stretching to the eastern Transvaal;
Tsonga and Venda are spoken in the far north of the Transvaal, parts of
which form the ‘homeland’ of Gazankulu and the so-called ‘independent
homeland’ of Venda. The boundaries are not so clearcut, and in our
general outline of this mapping we take into consideration the discussion
of frontiers and boundaries presented by Fardon and Furniss in the
introduction to this book.
Dismantling the Tower of Babel
113
It would be reasonable to expect that South African black society
would by now be thoroughly mixed in terms of languages, given the
history of South Africa and the movement of population occasioned by,
among other things, the destruction of the Xhosa chiefdoms (1850s) and
the mighty Zulu kingdom (1879), the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley
in 1867 and gold in Johannesburg in 1886, the Land Act of 1913 which
deprived the African population of their land and land-ownership, leaving
them with little more than 10 per cent of the land, and the taxes which
were imposed forcing Africans into urban areas to earn cash through the
sale of their labour. Such mixing was, however, obstructed by the
Nationalist Government’s ‘homeland’ policy, which reversed the flow,
moving people from the urban back to the rural areas, and restricted the
tide of potential urban dwellers with laws like the Urban Areas
Consolidation Act of 1945, which was enforced with the use of the
notorious Pass Laws. Many people were removed en bloc from urban
areas and ‘repatriated’ to the homelands; in this way the language map
was kept almost intact and stable.
The government made great efforts to keep each language group to
itself after the destruction of mixed areas like Sophiatown, Lady Selborne,
Marabastad, Eastwood, District Six, and others. In the new townships
sections were demarcated for and allocated to individual language groups.
But, as irony would have it, although this situation led to a strong assertion
of the African languages, as each group was developing in artificial
isolation from other groups in its own area, at the same time the
concentration of these languages in the industrialized areas led to the
inevitable mixing of people who spoke different Bantu languages in
churches, work places, social gatherings and other situations, which even
the most stringent prohibitions could not contain. A new generation of
children was born which could identify with more than one language
group. The folly of trying to keep people within the same cultural family
was exposed as a shameful fiasco in industrialised areas, for there was
nothing to be gained for the Africans in creating tribal laagers. Apartheid
succeeded only in separating Blacks from Whites, because an
overwhelming majority of Whites wanted that separation—the honesty of
the Afrikaner provided a convenient scapegoat for what the Englishspeaking community tacitly approved of and supported.
English and Afrikaans have been recognised since the Union of South
Africa in 1910 as the two official state languages. Africans had to acquire
knowledge of these languages as a means of finding employment, and at
no time has it ever been the policy of government, including the White
South African Party and others before 1948, to foster the knowledge of
English among Africans to a high level. Communication between the two
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groups, Africans and Europeans, as the Whites called themselves, was
always a one-way monologue, where the African had to understand only
enough to carry out instructions as a servant and unskilled labourer. In
other words, the idea of functional multilingualism as suggested by
Mateus Katupha in this book, was the lot of the African language speakers.
Since the Act of Union, Africans were educated in missionary schools,
but when the National Party came to power the task of educating Africans
was grudgingly removed from the mission schools, who had all along
been performing their Christian duty to the displeasure of the Union
Government by producing English-speaking intellectuals. Among such
intellectuals were the founders of the first African-organized political
movement, the African Native National Congress, such figures as Sol
T.Plaatje, Walter Rubusana, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, John L.Dube, Sam
Makgothi, and Saul Msane, and the later founders of the Pan-Africanist
Congress, such as Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, Anton Mziwakhe
Lembede, Zaphania Mothopeng and others. It was the rise of such
intellectuals which provoked the National Party of the Afrikaners into
limiting the education of the Africans, so that their intellectual
advancement should not be a threat to the state, and lest they write Mene,
mene, tekel ufarsin ‘your government is divided and its days are
numbered’ on the walls of the buildings which house the Pretoria
Government, as invisible fingers wrote on the walls of the palace of King
Darius in the Old Testament.
LANGUAGE POLICIES OF THE PAST
When the National Party came to power in 1948 one of its major aims was
to gain for Afrikaans ascendancy over English. The first target of this
policy, and the pawns in it, were the Africans, whom Dr Verwoerd, the
architect of classic Apartheid, described as ‘Black Englishmen’. His aim
was to make Africans occupy a lowly place in the economic and social life
of South Africa. As one of the means to this end he introduced the Bantu
Education Act Number 47 of 1953. The official reasoning behind it was
that it would replace the missionary system of education which alienated
Black students from their fellows who had not had the opportunity of
Western education.
Instead of enabling the majority, Bantu Education was meant to disable
the minority who were championing the rights of Africans and all
underprivileged classes. The main grievance against Bantu Education
among Africans was that the system as a whole was meant to isolate
Africans from economic development in the country. Their position was to
Dismantling the Tower of Babel
115
be that of perpetual hewers of wood and drawers of water for Whites. As
Dr Verwoerd, then Minister of Bantu Affairs, put it:
The number of detribalized Natives must be frozen…. Natives from the
country districts and reserves will in future be allowed to enter the
white towns and villages only as temporary workers, and on the
termination of their service contracts they will regularly have to go
back to their homes.
(quoted in Pelzer 1966:10)
This education system was only a part of larger machinery, and it is on this
matter that many observers misunderstand the attitude of Azanian
Africans towards African languages.
When the Act came into force there was strong objection to it—its
control mechanisms, school organization, the syllabus, and all. The
question of language was naturally on the agenda, since one of the ways in
which this system sought to implement its objectives was through the
medium of African languages in schools. Objections were made therefore
not against the use of African languages per se but against their use as part
of the system which was meant to hold back Africans from advancement.
Africans were thus caught in a dilemma, since rejection of Bantu
Education ipso facto meant disowning or neglecting their own languages.
It was a painful position to be in, and its consequences remain painful.
The dilemma of the Afrikaner is also of note. On the one hand he was
concerned with the advancement of the Afrikaans language and culture, to
carry on the struggle of the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners, ‘the
Fellowship of True Afrikaners’, which was started in 1875; and at the
same time he wanted to use the advancement of African languages and
cultures to keep Africans under control and in isolation, distanced from
their common identity as Abantu/Batho ‘a people’ or ‘people’. Hence, he
had to re-define the word Bantu and give it negative and derogatory
connotations militating against any sense of unity:
And the Lord came down to see the city and the Tower, which the
children of men builded. And the Lord said, behold, the people are one,
and they have all one language…. Come, let us go down, and there
confound their languages, that they may not understand one another’s
speech.
(Genesis 11:5–7)
At the same time it must also be stated that this policy inadvertently and
paradoxically helped Africans to achieve what was done so expressly for
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Central and Southern Africa
Afrikaans. Notwithstanding its many drawbacks, the language policy
strengthened African languages to some extent, without creating much of
the division which was originally intended.
REGULATION AND CONTROL OF AFRICAN LANGUAGES
In order to enforce control over African languages the Central Bantu
Language Board and its subsidiary committees were established, headed
by Afrikaners. In 1977 this Board was replaced by ‘autonomous’
Language Boards for each of the languages and handed over to native
speakers. However, these language boards still worked indirectly under
the auspices of the Publications Control Board with its many machineries
of censorship of writing in general. The aims of these Language Boards
were, inter alia, to standardize the languages, prescribe books for schools,
work with publishers to accept or reject manuscripts for publication, make
orthographic rules, etc. They acted as an arm of censorship and thus
stultified the development of African language literatures.
English-speaking universities were no less culpable. In their
Departments of African Studies they excluded native speakers of African
languages, except in some cases where the most highly qualified were
employed in the lowest positions. They were true to Afrikaner aspirations
of control, and African academics were denied positions in the liberal
English universities, where less qualified Whites held senior positions.
Even up to 1975 when some liberal White schools introduced African
languages in their curricula, native speakers were deliberately excluded as
a matter of policy. These schools were content with employing White
teachers, whose knowledge of the African languages was sometimes
appallingly weak.
It is not surprising that the English-speaking community was never
concerned about African languages. Even when it came to defending their
own language against the Afrikaner onslaught they raised the feeblest of
protests; as Mphahlele put it, they behaved like a eunuch goaded into a
fight over a woman (Mphahlele 1984). They left the pain of having to
learn Afrikaans and English to the millions of Africans whom they only
met as a source of labour and who were forced to learn Afrikaans or
English so that they could meet their employers’, demands. No one could
have put the case more eloquently than Dr Verwoerd:
The economic structure of our country, of course, results in the Natives
in large numbers having to earn their living in the service of Europeans.
For that reason it is essential that Bantu students should receive [some]
instruction in both official languages from the beginning so that they
Dismantling the Tower of Babel
117
can even in the lower primary school develop an ability to speak and
understand them…. Instructions have already been issued to
commence immediately the teaching of Afrikaans.
(Pelzer 1966:77)
For both the English and Afrikaans speakers it was a matter of Mohammed
having to go the mountain because the mountain would definitely not go
to Mohammed.
Let us sum up the position with regard to the politics of language in
South Africa: Whites of all political and ideological persuasions have been
so comfortable with the privileges which Apartheid offered them in the
form of cheap Black labour that they found no need to learn African
languages—they were in a situation which never demanded that they
associate with the African working class as equals at any time. One
renowned South African journalist summarized the position succinctly:
‘Once, while addressing a group of three hundred pupils at an Englishspeaking high school in Johannesburg…when I asked how many knew a
black child outside the master-servant relationship, there were three
hands’(Sparks 1991:217).
One of the major organs controlling the way in which African
languages are used is the South African Broadcasting Corporation
(SABC), which is state-controlled and run by non-native speakers
appointed by the Government. As the sole major broadcasting medium it
has had a monopoly of control over broadcasting in African languages.
The SABC took upon itself the task of imposing standards and directing
the course of the development of the African languages, and the
administrative headships of the African language services were, and still
are, securely in the hands of Afrikaners.
The two main institutions of control, the Language Boards and the
SABC, in their attempt to keep the languages ‘pure’, have set conservative
standards which are not in keeping with the evolution of language in the
new urban cultures. They served as instruments of control retarding the
free development of expression, and constraining the content of the
literature published and prescribed in schools. Both the SABC and the
Language Boards are responsible only to the Government, the Department
of Information and Department of Education and Training (Bantu
Education) respectively.
While these two institutions work in one direction, in most urban areas
new dialects, codes and registers have developed to such an extent that one
has to be wary of any notion of a ‘standard’ version of any of the African
languages. There have arisen a number of patois, called Flytaal or
Tsotsitaal, which have evolved since the 1940s and 1950s in formerly
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Central and Southern Africa
mixed areas which now exist only in name. Variations of these dialects are
as numerous as there are townships in the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vaal
(PWV) triangle, and other areas.
FUTURE POLICY CONSIDERATIONS
If history has any lessons for the future, it should be clear to policy makers
that language in South Africa should not be used to enforce segregation of
one group from another, nor as a tool of domination or reinforcement of
class, racial or ethnic distinction. Language must be allowed to be a tool
by which people communicate in given situations without feeling superior
or inferior in relation to the other language, and without being put at a
disadvantage by it. South Africa’s history testifies to the tragic
consequences of such unequal relationships.
Language must be used freely, and without stigma, to express ideas.
The Tower of Babel must be dismantled, a tower which has been in the
process of construction since the enforcement of the use of English by the
English Governors such as Lord Charles Somerset in the 1840s, and that
of Afrikaans by the Afrikaner Government in the 1970s, which led to the
catastrophic climax of 1976 when school students took to the streets in
protest against the imposition of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction
for at least half of the subjects taught in African schools.
Contrary to the views of some outsiders, who can neither understand
nor speak any South African Bantu language, it is evident that the Nguni
languages, either in the form of Zulu or Xhosa, are becoming more
widespread and generally acceptable as the main vehicles of
communication among Africans, without any implication of political
domination by those who speak those languages as their first language.
This is evident to anyone who can speak South African Bantu languages,
and who travels in South Africa. It is particularly true in the Southern
Transvaal, where, as a result of more than one generation of inter-marriage
among African ‘mother tongue language’ groups, it is rare to find a
monolingual umZulu, umXhosa, moSotho, etc.
The so-called Separatist Churches provide examples of
multilingualism without friction. These African churches, like the Zion
Christian Church (ZCC) of Bishop Lekganyane, St John’s Apostolic
Church of Bishop Masango and Bishopress Manku, the Nazareth Baptist
Church of Isaiah Shembe, and many others, now boast a larger
membership than the established churches, constituting 20.8 per cent of
the population, which is over 5 per cent more than the largest established
church, the Afrikaans Reformed Church. At no time has it been suggested
that the use of African languages has caused division or friction among
Dismantling the Tower of Babel
119
members of these churches. The ZCCs headquarters are in Lebowa, and
although it uses mainly Northern Sotho as the ‘official’ language, it has
members across the Republic of South Africa in the north, and in the
Southern African states of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland where
languages other than Northern Sotho are used. The Apostolic Church, with
headquarters in Katlehong in the East Rand (Bishop Masango) and Evaton
in the Vaal (Bishopress Manku), uses both Southern Sotho and Zulu, and
the Nazareth Church uses mainly Zulu, its headquarters being in Natal/
Kwa-Zulu. Multilingualism within these organizations has never been
seen as a source of difficulty.
African intellectuals and political organisations have always been
preoccupied with rallying support across ‘tribal boundaries’ and they
have neglected the use of African languages as a means to achieve
liberation. With a few early exceptions, like the ANC newspaper AbantuBatho, African languages have always been perceived as a tool of
division and therefore their potential ability to mobilize ordinary people
was not exploited. The liberation movements were concerned with
making themselves understood to Whites, who were a small minority in
the liberation struggle. Most significantly, the South African economy
would have gained immeasurably if the African language speakers’
potential as artisans, engineers, and skilled labourers had been met halfway and their mother tongues utilized in a variety of vocational fields. It
was the trade union movement in the 1970s, and more so in the 1980s,
which brought African languages to the forefront of the struggle,
because it was the workers themselves who pursued the struggle, not the
intellectuals who spoke English, at home or in exile.
LANGUAGE AND DEVELOPMENT
For South Africa/Azania to develop its economic potential to the
maximum no major language can be excluded from the schools, factories,
industries, judicial and legislative institutions, and other aspects of the
new socio-political infrastructure. The trade union movements have
proved that in order to communicate with the majority of workers it is
necessary to speak the African languages. This writer has been a translator
of documents from Afrikaans and English for trade unions (especially
during the Rowntree strike in the Eastern Cape in the early 1980s and
subsequently), documents for self-help organizations in the lower income
groups, and pension and provident fund documents. All this translation
work was urgently required to meet the need to communicate with various
African language-speaking communities, a further indication of the need
to give African languages their rightful place.
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Central and Southern Africa
The majority of the people in the factories, mines and industries, are
African language speakers, and the numbers are swelling even in
institutions of higher learning, which have hitherto been dominated by
Whites (for example, the University of South Africa has 47,096 African
language speakers against 37,213 English and 26,023 Afrikaans-speaking
students registered for the 1991 academic year). It is, therefore, only the
most myopic policy which will deny the special role of African languages
in the future development of South Africa.
Participative democracy will never become a reality until people who
have had no opportunity to master even the basics of Afrikaans and
English have been educated to understand and participate in their own
languages.
Language policy makers will need to take into account the
geographical distribution of these languages as indicated above. A natural
starting point will be to consider a ‘semi-federal’ arrangement of support
for ‘official’ languages. In the Cape Xhosa and English could be
designated official languages, and perhaps also Afrikaans since it is
spoken by a majority of the Coloureds; in Natal and Kwa-Zulu (as one part
of a unitary South African/Azanian state), Zulu and English would be
official languages; in the Orange Free State Southern Sotho and Afrikaans
would be the first two official languages, with perhaps English as the
third; in the Transvaal, with its diversity of groups, divisions could be
drawn such that English would be the overall official language but coupled
with Zulu in the south (PWV), with Ndebele and Afrikaans in the east,
with Northern Sotho from Pretoria to the North of Pietersburg or
Bandolierkop, and further north with Tsonga. Beyond Gazankulu Venda
would be the official language. (There are other minority languages which
are spoken by sections of the South African population which must also be
given due consideration in any new language policy, such as Gujerati,
Hindustani, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.)
Official languages will need to be given equal status in the educational,
industrial, technological, economic, social, judicial, legislative, executive
and political infrastructure. Each child should start school with at least two
languages, and then, as and when circumstances demand, learn other
languages. And, in my view, no person, South African or foreigner,
permanent immigrant or migrant worker, should be allowed to teach in a
South African school without evidence of the mastery of at least one South
African Bantu language. Last, but not least, non-native speakers, together
with the present government-controlled Language Boards, must
relinquish their custody of African languages and hand back control to
native speakers, of whom there are many qualified to work on the
standardization and development of these languages.
Dismantling the Tower of Babel
121
The main argument against this ‘semi-federal’ structure would be
that a lot of economic resources would have to be invested in
developing so many languages. In my view no future government of
South Africa, be it of the ANC, the PAC, Inkatha, National Party, South
African Communist Party, or any coalition of these, can afford to leave
unaltered the damage that earlier language policies have inflicted on
millions of South African citizens.
Some political organisations have realized the need for a language
policy, and have started to work on it. However, so far, no definite outline,
except in the most general and tentative terms, has emerged. Often the task
of working on language policies is in the hands of individuals whose
knowledge of the language situation is minimal and who do not know the
languages themselves. As we approach post-Apartheid South Africa/
Azania the need for an enlightened language policy is becoming ever
more pressing. Having started with the Tower of Babel let me conclude
with words from the Acts of the Apostles:
And suddenly there came a sound from heaven like a rushing mighty
wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there
appeared unto them cloven tongues as of fire, and it sat on them. And
they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other
tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
(Acts 2:2–4)
REFERENCES
Mphahlele, E. (1984) ‘Prometheus in chains: the fate of English in South Africa’,
address to the English Academy of Southern Africa, Johannesburg, 27 April.
Pelzer, A.N. (ed.) (1966) Verwoerd Speaks: Speeches 1948–1966, Johannesburg:
APB Publishers.
Sparks, A. (1991) The Mind of South Africa, London: Mandarin Paperbacks.
10 Healthy production and reproduction
Agricultural, medical and linguistic
pluralism in a Bwisha community,
Eastern Zaïre
James Fairhead
INTRODUCTION
Conversations in one Bwisha village often mix Kinyabwisha
(Kinyarwanda), Kiswahili and French, within as well as between words,
phrases and sentences. This paper examines this linguistic pluralism in the
context of medical/agricultural pluralism and political pluralism. Rather
than focus on languages per se, the paper examines discontinuities in the
ways Banyabwisha1 understand and respond to human and crop health
problems, and on related discontinuities in the ways they claim legitimacy
in political action. The analytical strategy, therefore, is to focus on the
frames of reference which orientate language use (cf. Pardon and Furniss)
and to show what this reveals about the articulation between the different
‘languages’ which Banyabwisha draw on and mix.
The paper looks at some specific developments in linguistic practice
associated with the articulation of different ‘languages’ such as the use of
loan words and new constructions. It shows why these need to be
understood in relation both to changing technical knowledge (e.g. in crop
health therapy), and to the political and economic changes in which
technical understanding is embedded.
Such an ‘ethnography of linguistic interaction’ should contrast with
and complement discussions of the pros, cons and possibilities of policies
to promote particular languages as part of ‘development’. This example of
how linguistic interaction is locally politicized and the roles which
technological issues play in conditioning this, will help us consider both
how language ‘development’ issues interact with technological ones, and
how local people might interpret language policy.
The paper examines the idioms and frames of reference which
cultivators use to describe soil fertility and crop health, drawing a strong
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Healthy production and reproduction
123
contrast between those considered ‘Bwisha’, making sense within
particular political relationships, and those distinguished as ‘non-Bwisha’,
making sense in other political contexts. It is therefore necessary to begin
by outlining the current political complexity of village life.
PROLIFERATION OF POLITIES
In 1910, inhabitants of north-west Rwanda, Bufumbira (in south-west
Kigezi, Uganda) and Bwisha (in eastern Zaïre) were divided into their
respective nation states. At that time, their quasi-autonomous territorial
patrilineages were linked through marriage alliance and exchange
networks, and shared a similar history and common language
(Kinyarwanda). Senior family ancestors, the spirit of a cult heroine, and
the Rwandan monarch (Mwami) were respected as the major actors who
ensured prosperity, as were local officiants who mediated relations with
them. Respect was payable in labour, tributary payments, and military
allegiance. Between family, cult and royal authorities there was an uneasy
coexistence. For example, Nyabingi, the cult heroine, was at times the
organizational focus of dissent from Rwandan monarchy.
Structures of authority have since multiplied. For Banyabwisha they
have come to include the Belgian, and now Zaïrian state, the ‘customary
chief installed for indirect rule, the Catholic and assorted Protestant
churches, Islam, coffee estates, and NGO development projects. All these
polities are currently represented in the study village, where villagers deal
with their lineages, five important local churches, the village development
committee, the village committee of the Zaïrian state party (MPR), the
village chief of the traditional administration, and the neighbouring coffee
estate. The strength and legitimacy of these different polities draw on the
very different ways in which they protect people and land, and influence
personal and soil health and fertility.
DISCONTINUITY IN BWISHA MEDICAL PLURALISM
When ill, a Munyabwisha patient and caring friends and relatives must
make some tough decisions. Whatever the proximate cause, many
conditions can ultimately be the work of a poisoner/sorcerer (umurozi), a
disgruntled ancestor (umuzimu), or a chance incident which provoked the
ill-fortune which it evoked symbolically (umuziro). It may be sufficient
just to treat the symptoms, and most people would start there, either
asking around for news of a good local specialist for the problem, or
attending a clinic. But this is not necessarily the most prudent approach.
Whether for serious, strange, or persistent illnesses, it may be necessary to
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treat the underlying cause, either by soliciting the help of a diviner and
other specialists to whom one may be referred, or the help of a Christian/
Islamic god. Therapeutic decisions are, however, further complicated by a
strong distinction drawn locally between specifically Bwisha conditions
(ikinyabwisha) and conditions for which western medicine maybe
appropriate (ikizungu). Distinguishing between these causal domains can
be crucial. One fearful patient considered that mistakenly using ikizungu
medicine to treat a Bwisha condition would be fatal.
In diagnosis, certain symptoms are clearcut, but often the character
of their cause is less obvious, so the symptoms cannot be properly
recognised, let alone interpreted and treated. There are, however,
‘divinatory’ tests which help to identify the necessary interpretive
framework. Whilst specialist diviners can be consulted for this, people
usually test themselves first. A standard and common test is to drink
an emetic which will induce vomiting only if Bwisha sorcery/
poisoning is responsible. Many will attend a clinic only if this has a
negative result.
Distinguishing between these frames of interpretation is just as relevant
to understanding crop health. Putrefaction of a bean crop may be
attributed to proximate causes, such as excessive rainfall which has not
been compensated for in management techniques, or the presence of a
menstruating woman whose periods are known to be damaging. In the
same way, poor (or fantastic) crops can be attributed to sorcery, ancestral
malice, or the legitimacy and practice of territorial chiefs.
Explanations and treatments within these different frameworks of
analysis draw on very different concepts of cause, origin and contagion,
and of responsibility, culpability, chance and intention. They have
different specialists (e.g. paramedics, umupfumu ‘diviner-healers’) to
whom villagers can go if their condition defies self-diagnosis and
treatment. And these specialists use characteristically different methods
and instruments of investigation, and have very different styles of
treatment. Historical changes in these different discourses have influenced
attitudes towards different languages, and their use.
UNDERSTANDING CROP HEALTH: HOT AND COLD, MOIST
AND DRY, HARD AND SOFT
Villagers sometimes consider the influences on plant growth in terms of
temperature (heating and cooling), and humidity (moist and dry) and
consistency (hard and soft). But explanations in these idioms contrast
strongly with those in another explanatory idiom in which crop success
(and personal health) is related to ivitamin, or nutrients. I will argue that a
Healthy production and reproduction
125
stark contrast between these different idioms is associated with the very
different forms of legitimacy which structure village society and politics.
Villagers often describe the determinants of plant growth in terms of
the interaction between soil temperature, moisture and consistency, and
try to balance these attributes in crop management. Decaying vegetation
or cow dung noticeably give off heat, just as they would if burnt, but more
slowly, and over a longer period. Steady decay of such organic matter, like
the sun’s heat, is thought to warm the soil, and such warmth in the soil is
considered to encourage crop growth. If they can, farmers prefer to
cultivate decaying vegetation into the soil rather than burn it, and burning
vegetation is considered a waste. 2 Nevertheless, too much decaying
vegetation in the soil can ‘burn’ germinating seedlings, turning the crop
yellow and harming it. In such circumstances it is better to burn off the
excess, or at least to wait for a week or two after cultivating the vegetation
into the soil, to allow the initial ‘heat’ to dissipate before sowing. A
balance must be struck, and this underlies the skilful manipulation of field
weeds, crop residues and vegetation accumulation during more or less
prolonged fallows in local soil fertility management practices (cf.
Fairhead 1990).
At the higher, cooler and wetter altitudes further up the Rift Valley
slopes and towards the Virunga volcanoes, sorghum and bean crops take
several months longer to grow and beer ferments in three days, not one (cf.
Pottier and Fairhead 1991). When cool things happen more slowly. Rain
water is considered cooling and so, for example, as the rains set in after the
long dry season, they cool the land. Consequently, it is good to sow early
in the season especially in land which does not keep its heat (where there
is less decaying vegetation). Sometimes farmers say that a crop is growing
poorly because a ‘stream’ in the soil is cooling the roots. Crop
putrefaction, like poor growth, is often attributed to this cooling effect of
water. The verb ‘to rot’ (kubora) also means ‘to be soaked to the bone’.
When a bean crop putrifies in the field after prolonged and untimely rain,
it can be described as going completely cold (kuhororoha). Equally, if rain
or dew drops remain on a bean leaf or a bean flower for long, they ‘cool’
it, causing it to putrify. Such putrefaction can also be likened to the effects
of pouring boiling water over a leaf, exemplifying the notion of moisture
and temperature balance in explanation.
Moisture and decayed organic matter are important factors which
influence the third key component in local site productivity evaluation:
soil consistency. Both moisture and decaying organic matter soften soils.
A hard soil is considered to be both less productive and more difficult to
cultivate and control weeds in. Soils can be considered hard for several
reasons. Firstly, the reddish clay subsoil (kahuhuma) may be nearer the
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surface and reduce the softer texture of the the black topsoil (urukara).
Secondly, as the soil dries out it hardens. Thirdly, the tough and extensive
roots of certain difficult weeds (e.g. Imperata spp., Pennisetum spp.,
Agrostis spp.) can make the soil difficult to hoe. Controlling these weeds,
and thereby softening the soil, is necessary in order to grow a successful
crop. Fourthly, soils low in decaying organic matter tend to be hard. The
more decaying vegetation in the soil, the softer and more fertile they
become. These four factors are usually conflated in the general ascription
of consistency. Although farmers do distinguish between the different
reasons for softness (and distinguish exceptions to these norms, e.g. ‘soft
because of over-cultivation’), this property can rarely be reduced to a
single cause, and the general ascription of softness is more useful.3 This
interpretative framework drawing on temperature, moisture and soil
consistency can (or at least could) link causes of crop health with social
and political affairs, with kin and ancestral relationships and with political
legitimacy.
PROCREATION, PRODUCTION, POLITICS AND
PUTREFACTION
As is also the case in neighbouring regions, it is considered the duty of a
political chief or monarch not only to ‘warm the land’ but also to prevent
it from overheating.4 Kuteka, meaning to rule, also means to ‘warm up’ or
‘to cook’. Peace, which a successful ruler should ensure, is itself a state of
warmth, and the term umutekano unites these two meanings. Looked on
another way, peace is also a state of coolness: amahoro, ‘peace’, derives
from the verb kuhora, ‘to cool’. Political leadership and the distribution of
‘warmth as fertility’ are linked through the two words which mean
fertilizer. The first, ifumbira, derives from the term ifumba, which is the
bundle of dry herbs in which one wraps smouldering embers to distribute
fire. The second, ingabulire, is the noun form of the verb kugabulira,
which means ‘to distribute pasture or food as a chief; a necessary attribute
of good rule. It shares a common root with the term umugabo, meaning
‘man’; that is to say a man who has a child. Ingabulire simultaneously
connotes the distribution of manure in the field, the distribution of fertility
emanating from the most senior chief, which in Rwanda is the Monarch,
the Mwami, and the role of men in generating such fertility. As will
become clear, the chief lies at the focal point of a veritable ‘economy of
heat, moisture and softness’ which transcends and links things
agricultural, things reproductive and things political.
At the core of this ‘economy of heat’ is the association between sexual
intercourse, heat and fire. To make fire, one rubs a firestick (urugabo,
Healthy production and reproduction
127
meaning male) into the receptacle hole of another stick (urugore, meaning
female). The sexual act, fire-making and fire itself are central to both
family and royal procedures used to ensure the reproductive success of
crops or people. First we shall examine sowing procedures, then
reproductive understanding, then the role of the political leaders.
The family procedures 5 to ensure successful sorghum or millet
cropping were observed by Lestrade in the 1930s (1972:253–7). The
evening before sowing, a senior man mixes the seed with other protective
objects in a barrel (ikicuba). Protective items include (a) plants such as
‘spontaneous reproduction’ (umutobotobo), ‘success’ (umuganashya),
‘desire’ (umwifuzo), ‘family’ (insina, ‘banana shoots’); (b) manure from
both a cow untainted by the death of a parent or offspring (evoking life),
and a hippopotamus (evoking high yields), and (c) ‘slag from a forge’
evoking virility. The officiant’s wife places some sorghum porridge and
her spatula in a serving basket, and puts this in the storage bin; an action
evoking productivity. Then, dressed in sheepskin (inyabuhoro, also
meaning ‘origin of peace/coolness’), the officiant solicits success from the
family ancestors. Husband and wife then have sexual intercourse, whilst
married adult children refrain. The next day, the officiant ties some roof
thatch around a burning ember taken from his family fire. Carrying this
wrapped fire (ifumba, cf. ifumbira, ‘fertilizer’) and the protected seed, he
leads the sowing group to the field, followed by his wife who carries the
hoes, and helpers who carry extra seed and beer. The fire is put in a hole
dug in the field to shelter it. It must not go out. The field is sown, and on
completion further ancestral solicitation is made. On the way home, the
wife walks in front, with her husband behind carrying the hoes. No one
may cross a stream or wash in cold water. The fire is returned to its origin
and the hearth fire must not go out until the crop germinates. All married
family members have sexual intercourse. These procedures generate and
maintain the heat needed for the growing crop. As we shall see now, this
management strategy is not only a preoccupation throughout the
reproductive cycle of both crops and people; it also links these cycles.
We have seen how heat and moisture (rain) soften the soil (kuregea).
This softening procedure is central to local understanding of fertility. For
example, farmers attest that only after such softening does the fertility of a
fallow become apparent. Farmers can accelerate the softening of fallowed
land by laborious cultivation, clod breaking, crumbling and root
extraction. When they lack the time for this, they often plant peanuts
which do better in harder soils, and wait a season until the land has
gradually softened before sowing millet. 6 Such softening is equally
important in human fertility. Just as hard dry land is infertile, so a hard,
dry woman is infertile. A ‘dry woman’ is one who can produce no vaginal
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Central and Southern Africa
secretions (umunyaza) during sex, and who can produce no breast-milk
(Taylor 1988). 7 One term (igihama) is used to describe both the
agricultural and human condition.
Central to human reproduction is the need for both male and female
secretions (itanga, ‘gifts of the self’) to mingle, preferably during
orgasm. The two fuse to produce a common product, a child. 8
Considerable effort is made during a woman’s upbringing and in the
sexual act itself to ensure that women enjoy sex and produce vaginal
secretions (Taylor 1988). In short, reproduction necessitates the coming
together of fluids under warm conditions; of softened earth and rain in
crop production, and of vaginal secretions and sperm in human
reproduction. Fundamentally, these conditions are not just important
during the sexual act or during sowing, but must be maintained
throughout the reproductive cycle. During pregnancy, more frequent
sexual intercourse (gukurakuza) is necessary as this actually constitutes
or builds the child (Taylor 1988, 1990). Equally, growing crops are
improved by maintaining fire in the house, having frequent sex, and
working in the field. At weeding, for example, fire is again taken to the
field, this time wrapped in straw from the conjugal bed.
The need for partners to make love persists after giving birth because a
woman must be warmed for her to convert hard body fat to liquid milk
(Taylor 1990). There is, however, an eight-day interval between the birth
and the first and (obligatory) post-partum love-making. During these eight
days, a good husband will make a point of bringing his secluded wife
wood for the night fire (Lestrade 1972). A couple must also make love
after preparing the first post-harvest sorghum porridge. If a woman has not
eaten this with her husband, any adulterous acts she engages in while he is
away will kill him.9 Whereas a husband’s heat and semen constitutes the
child, adulterous love-making can burn (overheat) the uterus, and
dehydrate the child (Taylor 1988). Unsurprisingly, adultery is considered
to be poisoning. Equally unsurprisingly, its effects are not restricted to
people. If a woman sows sorghum in her husband’s absence, her
subsequent adultery would either kill the crop or, if the crop grew, kill her
husband. Other forms of malicious poisoning (uburozi) cool a woman’s
blood and thus make her dry and unfit either for sex or for nourishing a
child. Cures ‘warm’ the blood to improve vaginal secretions or lactation.10
For example, a cold woman afraid of sex (intinyi) can be taken discreetly
to a blazing forge to heat her. This is a dangerous thing for a normal
woman to do; a ‘taboo’ (umuziro) (Lestrade 1972:40).
In principle, reproductive cycles must not be mixed. The produce of
one season cannot be mixed with the produce of another (Lestrade 1972:
262), just as the sexual liaisons of one season or of one child cannot be
Healthy production and reproduction
129
mixed with another. Furthermore, as a woman’s menstruation represents
an infertile part of the human reproductive cycle, it is not surprising to find
that growing crops can be devastated by a menstruating woman
(Bigirumwami 1984).11
Whilst this ‘economy of heat’ links crop production and human
reproduction, the chief also plays a central role. We do not know the
procedures of Bwisha’s chiefs, but we do know those of the Rwandan
Mwami who were Bwisha’s overlords from the seventeenth century
(d’Hertefelt and Coupez 1964). The Mwami tactically manipulated water
and heat to distribute ‘peaceful warmth’ and rain to soften the lands of his
followers. In procedures to overcome problems in the kingdom, the fire
lighter is a key implement, and fire-making linked with love-making are
crucial and complementary elements. In these procedures, the Mwami
would normally light a fire with grasses drawn from everywhere in the
country to associate all Rwanda with the heat (ibid: 330). Epidemic
illnesses and other disasters were sometimes attributed to the pollution of
the royal fire: a fire kept perpetually alight by its guardians at the royal
court. To put the polluted royal fire ‘back on its path’, the Mwami would
extinguish it using water from the rivers Abundant and Incalculable,
mixed with some milk. He would then light a new fire and have sexual
intercourse with a new wife (ibid: 65). The importance of fire and water is
made clear in the procedures the Mwami used to remove the skins of the
dynastic drums; drums which controlled the fate of the kingdom. To do
this he had to soften the skin binding with hot water. Seemingly to avert
the dangers of over-heating the kingdom, the king would first mix the
boiling water (drawn from the river Abundance) with some cold water
(drawn from the river Incalculable) to create peaceful tepid water. He
would then sprinkle some cold water on the drums, saying ‘here is cold
water/peace (ubu n’ubuhoro); let the drums, men, cows and land have
peace’. Only then did he use the hot water on the drum to loosen the
binding.12
The Mwami used similar methods to afflict his enemies and those
who would not pay tribute with harmfully extreme conditions. In one
case, for example, as the king was about to set off on a journey, two
burning embers of the royal fire were wrapped for transport (ikifumba,
cf. ifumbira, ‘fertilizer’). One of these fires was maintained in his
honour, but the other was extinguished with water from the river Groan
(Bugongi), as the king, to paraphrase him, said ‘would that we make
Bushumbi, Burundi and Bunuabungo and all places not paying tribute
groan on the drum’ (ibid: 133).13
Links between crop production and human reproduction are equally
apparent both when a person dies, and when a year dies; that is, when the
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Central and Southern Africa
dark phase of the annual Gicurasi moon begins. Both human and seasonal
funerals divide into two stages: mourning (kwirabura, when things are
black) and the end of mourning (kwera, when things become white again).
During the black phase (three days for a woman, four days for a man, five
days for a season and much longer for a Mwami) no one associated with
the deceased may marry, cultivate, let cattle copulate and many other
things. Any progeny would be diabolical and would need to be destroyed.
Only when mourning, for whatever reason, is properly finished (kwera),
could one take up cultivation again and go on to expect good harvests and
personal fertility. The term kwera also describes these good harvests, just
as the term kwirabura describes poor ones. Poor harvests could result
from problems relating to a deceased person associated with that land, or
more generally, from problems associated with the season.
To sum up at this point, it is clear that Bwisha agricultural explanations
have extremely strong pragmatic elements, but this does not mean that we
can consider Bwisha farming description to draw on ‘natural explanation’,
unless we are extremely careful in our definition of natural. Technological
explanations are integrated with political and social thought, and the
linkages are inscribed in vocabulary, language and practices. It is through
this ‘economy of heat and consistency’ that we can understand why rituopolitical leaders could be accredited with responsibility for the
agricultural prosperity of those living within their jurisdiction, and why
royalty considered the claims of others to control fertility to be a political
threat (Schoffeleers, 1978).
IVITAMIN: ANOTHER EXPLANATORY FRAMEWORK
But in Bwisha, people do not necessarily consider it to be people who
present alternative claims to fertility and thus usurp power. A new
comprehension of fertility complicates things. When I lived in Bwisha
from 1986–8, farmers did talk about their farming in terms of heat,
moisture and consistency, but the links with family and political affairs
seemed not to be in evidence. When talking in a substantive way about
fertility, people usually described it in terms of ivitamin (from French ‘la
vitamine’), and ivitamin’s local synonym (in farming) imboreo (from the
Kiswahili, mboleo).14 But why do people prefer to use these borrowed
terms even though they are speaking in Kinyabwisha? Why do the
Kinyabwisha terms ifumbire or ingabulire not seem right?
In some ways, the use of the term ivitamin does parallel fertility
descriptions in terms of ifumbire. Nowadays, indeed, the old term ifumbire
has often come to be used synonymously with ivitamin. But the political
and ecological associations of the new term are very different; ivitamin
Healthy production and reproduction
131
does not belong to an economy of heat and consistency, but to the
economy of money with which we are perhaps more familiar. Ivitamin
acquires its existence or status as an object within a very different
structure of presuppositions, and, when invoked, evokes the relevance of
these. For those seeking a clear theoretical statement in terms of social
theory, Foucault (1972) might have argued that ivitamin is an object
emergent within a very different discursive formation. Before drawing on
some of Bwisha’s political and economic history to explain discontinuities
between these two lived-in economies or ‘discourses’, it is important to
recognise how ivitamin is used. To do this I want to dwell on aspects of
crop and human nutrition.
Bwisha’s inhabitants tend to consider themselves to have ‘states of
health’ which, if bad, can lead to illness. They have several ways to
evaluate their state of health, and one potent indicator is the amount of
blood (amaraso) they have. Too little blood, and one is weak, dizzy
and susceptible to illness. But a balance must be struck; too much
blood, and one can be tense, get headaches and also fall ill. The same
idiom and the same need for balance is used for plants. For example, if
bean plants have too little sap then they are weak, uncompetitive with
weeds, and yield poorly. Too much sap, and they become ‘overvigorous’ (gufura), and are liable to putrefy and yield badly. In this
state, a plant almost forgets what it is for, which is to produce flowers
and seeds, not leaves. 15
These descriptions are compatible with the ideas about reproduction
described earlier. Within this understanding, the quantity of blood was
just as important an indicator of states of health. Both the white semen
and women’s white secretions which fuse to create and build the child
are derived from red blood which has been purified (Taylor 1990).
Foods which increase blood consequently increase virility. Today,
villagers usually say that levels of sap or blood are influenced by the
amounts of ivitamin available. Ivitamin is the term used for
‘goodness’, whether in soil or foods. The more ivitamin in food or soil,
the more sap or blood it will engender. Too little ivitamin leaves a plant
low on sap and weak; too much will encourage too much sap, and
engender over-vigorousness. Where there is too much ivitamin,
farmers may switch to crops which grow better in these conditions, or
to crop varieties which are less vigorous (more controlled) in their
growth patterns. Choosing crop varieties to suit soil conditions, or
altering soil conditions to suit crop varieties are matters of great skill.
Farmers consciously improve the efficiency of ivitamin use by placing
decaying organic matter in the right place at the right time (cf.
Fairhead 1990).
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Central and Southern Africa
To overcome insufficient ivitamin in the soil where they were
cultivating perennial coffee, certain villagers approached me privately to
try out western fertilizers: ivitamin. They had gained some familiarity
with fertilizers during the period when they were used by large-scale
colonial and post-colonial coffee plantations and, these days, local
representatives of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation
(FAO) promote fertilizer use, although they seem only to assist large
plantations. Following a similar logic, people who consider themselves
to be low on blood now visit the local paramedic for an ivitamin
injection, if they can afford it (injections go straight into the blood).
Otherwise they buy the ivitamin tablets available at the market, or try to
eat certain foods said to have more ivitamin. Such foods include local
foods known to give strength (i.e. millet, sorghum, beans and, most of
all, meat) as well as foods which health extension workers have
suggested contain ivitamin, such as fruit, vegetables and several western
foods such as sweet tea, coffee and bread.
This concept of ivitamin has now become central to local notions of
crop health and the recycling of organic matter. Decaying vegetation
releases ivitamin to the soil (kutanga ivitamin), and growing plants
acquire it. Significantly, in this construction it is decaying plants which
‘give of the self’ (kutanga). The involvement of any other agency in the
process is marginalized. In this way, the nutrient cycle which influences
crop production is now conceived of in isolation from, and independently
of, the social and political elements of the economy of heat and
consistency.
Intriguingly, the linguistic construction of the soil having (gufite)
something in and of itself that makes it fertile is generally used only in
relation to ivitamin or imboreo. Past constructions relating to fertility
identify that the soil is something (e.g. hot, soft, warm, productive) or
that it has had something done to it (e.g. has had vegetation spread over
it, has been worked a lot, has had cattle grazing on it), but not that it
possesses something which is the agent of fertility. Thus when using
the old terms, rather than say ‘the soil has a lot of ifumbire (bufite
ifumbire nyinshi)’, one would use the passive of the verb kufumbira
(not the noun ifumbira) to say that ‘the soil has been spread with
ifumbire’.
The distinction between understanding fertility in terms of heat and in
terms of ivitamin is shown in the different metaphors which two farmers
used to describe poor fertility in one field. One farmer said there was a
stream flowing under the soil surface, cooling the roots. Another
inferred that the nutrients had been lost from the soil, using the verb ‘to
pour off the water that beans have been cooked in’ which connotes a
Healthy production and reproduction
133
separation of goodness and its washing away (this water is often fed
to goats).
I could not have contrasted more strongly the understanding of
fertility in terms of ivitamin with understandings within the economy of
heat and consistency. But it is not immediately obvious why the concept
of ivitamin should not just have become incorporated into the existing
agricultural and medical conceptual framework in the way that, for
example, highland Maya have incorporated modern scientific disease
notions and cures into their ‘traditional’ classifications of hot and cold.16
Bledsoe and Goubaud (1985) criticize the way researchers have
represented the intersection between indigenous healing systems and
western medicine, showing that there is a tendency for researchers to
assume: (a) that the two medical systems are discrete; (b) that their
integration is awkward; (c) that they can conflict or compete with each
other and (d) that they can coexist and play complementary roles in a
pluralistic system of choices. Bledsoe and Goubaud question the
assumption that western and indigenous medical systems are discrete or
discontinuous, arguing that this is an ethnocentric vision and that, for the
user, western medicine and indigenous medical systems may be
analytically integrated. They examine how Mende have reinterpreted
certain kinds of western pharmaceuticals as appropriate for indigenously
defined sicknesses and cures.
I would disagree only insofar as to say that local interpretations can
include an understanding of discontinuity between analytical and
therapeutic systems, However, to understand the existence of such
discontinuity we should not look just to the radically different
intellectual logics of the the different explanatory and therapeutic
frameworks. These are more epiphenomena than causes. Is any
‘intellectual system’ (therapeutic or otherwise) so systematic that it
cannot incorporate new ideas and objects, albeit reinterpreting them in
the process? No, the emergence and existence of such intellectual
discontinuity for the user requires a more positive explanation; one that
is rooted in particular historical, political and economic circumstances,
and in the perpetual reinstantiation of that history in the current political
and economic structures which are its living legacy.
THE ORIGIN AND ENDURING NATURE OF EXPLANATORY
AND THERAPEUTIC DISCONTINUITY
The explanations of agricultural, political and familial phenomena in the
first part of this paper could be seen to ‘speak to each other’, to use the
computer idiom. When reflecting on explanations and therapeutics within
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Central and Southern Africa
this field of compatibility Bwisha people refer to it as ikinyabwisha
(meaning ‘things of Bwisha’). They contrast this with a field of
experience, explanation and therapeutics which they refer to as ikizungu
(meaning ‘things of Bazungu’; of White outsiders). Whilst ikinyabwisha is
also the term for the local language dialect of kinyarwanda, and whilst
French is an ikizungu language, my argument is that these fields of
experience do not map onto linguistic boundaries. Nevertheless, the
distinction and discontinuity between ikinyabwisha and ikizungu seems to
be fundamental to modern Bwisha thought and life, to explanation and
therapy.
In origin, this discontinuity or frontier initially had a strong
geographical form. During Belgian rule (effectively 1927–60), Bwisha
was divided into land that remained under customary authority (known as
isheferi), and land that was alienated from customary authority and
jurisdiction, and came under state control. European coffee farmers
purchased this land (iplantasion). Plantations had (and still have) very
different political, juridical and fiscal structures from non-alienated land.
They introduced new farming techniques, and alien crops and varieties.
They used western fertilizer (ivitamin), and used chemical sprays (also an
ikizungu medicine, umuti). What Banyabwisha made of such fertilizer one
can only speculate. How those whose land had been alienated felt when
such fertilizer was applied to it is not known. Nevertheless, Banyabwisha
who were forced to work in these plantations (and 70 per cent of them did
by 1959) would walk to and from this ikizungu world daily.
Discontinuity between the ikizungu and ikinyabwisha world also
originated and persists as a result of the particular way that western health
care has been established. Predictably, and in keeping with the times, this
was instituted in total independence of, and confrontation with, local
medical practices. It was made available through the plantations (which
needed labour) and church institutions (which needed converts). Health
care was not always voluntary. Vaccinations and sleeping sickness
monitoring were, for example, imposed in much the same way as
employment or religion. But the distinction between ikizungu and
ikinyabwisha in health practices no longer allowed the two discontinuous
domains to be distinguished in a purely geographical way. People’s bodies
became subjected to the two worlds. And to the best of my knowledge, the
ikizungu/ikinyabwisha distinction did not become imaged in a divided
bodily geography. Rather, the distinction emerged in a strong contrast
between ikizungu and ikinyabwisha illness; hence the divination
techniques with which this paper began.
The origins of this discontinuity are enduring, as, for example, in the
discontinuity that is maintained within the structures of land ownership,
Healthy production and reproduction
135
and instantiated in village and regional land disputes. Those living on their
ancestral lands can claim ‘inalienable’ rights to it for ikinyabwisha
reasons outlined above. But where I lived, there were only a few people
with such claims to village land. Land is now bought and sold and, in
many ways, people consider the land they cultivate to be privately owned
either by themselves or their husbands or their landlords. True, fathers,
uncles and brothers can still have claims to one’s private land, and true,
wives have durable rights to their husband’s land. But village men no
longer consider that they need to respect or pay tribute to those from
whom they acquired their land. Indeed, most judge that it is those who
purchase land now who deserve respect. Power rests in money, not land.
Those who cede (sell) land and who use it to acquire political authority as
a result are nowadays imaged as weak. Other villagers live on squatted
land which they have come to consider as theirs by right. After three years
of unchallenged squatting, they can gain durable land rights, even if this is
never the case in ikinyabwisha thought. Indeed within ikinyabwisha
reasoning, it is foolhardy to squat and cultivate a place deserted by old
occupants, because assistance of living descendants of the land ancestors
was a prerequisite both for successful cultivation and family life (cf.
Lestrade 1972:229). But those who claim land through purchase or
‘ownership’ seem not to think their own or their crops’ health to be much
threatened by ancestral spirits of dead previous occupants or by their
political chiefs. When it is, such intervention is defined as poisoning
(uburozi), and the Bible and Christianity afford some protection against
the newly defined ancestor ‘devils’ and those who would use diabolic
powers.
Understanding fertility in terms of the restricted cycling of nutrients
(ivitamin) makes sense and is appealing for many land users. Ivitamin is a
substance which soil or people can have more or less of, which in and of
itself renders them strong and their soil fertile. Like land, fertility in the
form of ivitamin is the sort of thing that can be purchased. Reliance and
dependence on rituo-political superiors is avoided. Bluntly, ivitamin is an
understanding of fertility which is compatible with the open market for
land. The monetary economy which now constructs land ownership and
health care has also come to define the origin of productivity. Like modern
money in Bwisha society ivitamin is also gender neutral. It not only
disengages understandings of soil fertility from wider political control, it
also disengages it from household relations, which, as described earlier,
were once so integral to crop and human fertility understanding.
Whitehead (1981) has argued that when money becomes an index of value
of men’s and women’s produce and labour, men’s and women’s tasks in
agricultural production become more comparable. This is true in Bwisha,
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Central and Southern Africa
but understanding soil fertility in these new ways has been a necessary
intellectual corollary.17
It is important to stress that ikinyabwisha and ikizungu ‘discourses’ are
not associated with different categories of persons, nor are the discourses
in some way mutually exclusive in the sense of a Kuhnian paradigm shift.
The discourses may clash in land or allocatory disputes, but they do not
directly ‘compete’ for ‘the right logically to exist’.
Every villager, of no matter what tenurial status, has an ambiguous
relationship with ‘the state’, the church and all things ikizungu.18 This
ambiguity can be identified in land tenure worries which are ever present
for villagers. For example, state administrative apparatus and the
‘traditional’ chiefs have an uneasy coexistence. Whilst the state claims
rights to all land, and the authority to dispossess all people of land or
political authority, many chiefs and those with traditional land claims are
unwilling to accept the state’s authority over ‘their’ land and people. And
given the weak local implementation of state law, so-called ‘traditional’
chiefs (especially the Chefs de Collectivité) tend to get the upper hand. A
recent government report, for example, accuses the chiefs of wrongfully
using their customary jurisdiction to dispossess their subjects of their land,
forbidding them to build permanent homes, and denying them all right of
land ownership (Katuala and Mwramba Tshibasu 1986:89). Both the state
and other institutions, such as the Catholic church, the village MPR, and
non-Governmental development organisations (NGOs), which (can)
support the rights of small-holders against their chiefs, fall clearly within
the ikizungu field of experience.
These conflicting signals from the divided higher authority are
reflected in local land classification. Sometimes villagers categorize their
land as isheferi (i.e. under customary authority) relative to the plantation,
so stressing their autonomy from the exactive neighbouring plantation
which they associate with state-endorsed land alienation. However, at
other times they may classify their land as state land (ileta) as opposed to
the chiefs land, so stressing their autonomy from traditional chiefs.
This is perhaps a superficial expression of a much deeper rooted
ambiguity. We have seen that many villagers have social and economic
reasons to evade and denigrate ‘customary’ authority, whether as a result
of their personal tenurial status (as land purchasers or squatters) or more
generally as gender independent rather than gender interdependent
farmers (Fairhead 1990). But for everyone there are also many social and
practical reasons for asserting authority. Both husbands and wives, for
example, need to assert different sorts of customary authority in married
and family life to prevent ridicule and to gain the respect of each other and
their peers. A Protestant minister’s wife who diagnoses herself as ill from
Healthy production and reproduction
137
Ikinyabwisha causes cannot ignore this even if for moral or religious
reasons she does not seek the therapy of ikinyabwisha specialists. Whilst
she may suggest that many specialists are charlatans, she does not suggest
that what they deal with is in the realm of fiction. For her it is very real,
and very evil. She may rely on self-treatment with local (not ikizungu)
medicines and prayers. Equally healer-diviners themselves who find that
they have ikizungu ailments may well seek the medicine of paramedics.
In short, these discourses coexist and endlessly structure relations of
authority and dissent. Attempts to live on one side of this intellectual
frontier and to present the other side as non-existent are inconceivable.
SOME CONCLUDING THOUGHTS: LINGUISTIC
PLURALISM AND DISCOURSE
Bwisha’s customary chiefs and authorities sometimes associate the
erosion of their power with things ‘French’, explicitly forging an
association between the French language and ikizungu phenomena. One
chief put it this way’ “People of French”19 are destroying this country.
They prevent my people from doing compulsory labour’ (Seruraho
1979:50). But it is really only within the ‘two dimensional’ and
‘conflatory’ rhetoric of political speeches that an identity between
language and discourse can be forged, and even then, such a conflation is
most unstable.
Banyabwisha do distinguish their language, Kinyabwisha, as
discontinuous from other languages spoken in the region such as French,
Kinande, Kikiga, Kiswahili. Within Bwisha itself, certain dialects are
described. Equally, things ikinyabwisha are also contrasted with things
ikizungu. But crucially, these two notions Kinyabwisha (language) and
ikinyabwisha (economy of heat)—of language and of explanatory
coherence—do not map on to each other. The latter bounds a particular
‘form of life’ in which words and gestures can acquire particular sorts of
agency. The former bounds a language which anyone can learn. For
Banyabwisha, the objects and phenomena constituted within the ikizungu
discourse were no less ‘natural’ phenomena, for being different to
ikinyabwisha phenomena. Misinterpretation could kill. And, as we have
seen, today’s Kinyabwisha language can, of course, describe these things,
albeit with borrowed words and constructions.
For the purposes of this book, I would like to make three other
concluding remarks. Firstly, putting analytical stress on discourse rather
than languages per se (cf. Pardon and Furniss) has implications for the
ways ‘borrowed’ words are conceptualized. Rather than ask how
borrowed words are loaned from one language to another and how they
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Central and Southern Africa
are considered part (or not) of that language, a better question might ask
how different frames of reference integrate and render compatible (or not)
concepts from different languages.
Secondly, the focus on discourse might alter how we consider the
relationship between African and European languages. Although
linguistically Kiswahili clearly resembles Kinyabwisha more than
French, when considered in terms of the historical circumstances of their
use, as we have seen, Kiswahili can have more in common with French
than Kinyabwisha. This exemplifies a problem in drawing too strong an
analytical distinction between horizontally and vertically related
languages based, perhaps, on the phylogenetic ‘horizontal’ relationship
between Bantu languages and the unequal vertical relationship between
these and the languages of colonialism.
Thirdly, as academics, we should not conflate discourse with
language in the two dimensional way of Bwisha politicians. We should
not (necessarily) look for political relations in languages and their
interactions, and expend too much energy in promoting or politicizing
this or that language. By focussing on ‘which language’, we might have
been overlooking the existence of what are much more fundamental
local political and technical debates.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This paper is based on fieldwork in Bwisha, Kivu, Zaïre (1986–8). I am
grateful to inhabitants of the village where I lived, to the Economic and
Social Research Council of Great Britain who funded the research, and to
the International Centre of Tropical Agriculture’s (CIAT’s) Great Lakes
Bean Improvement Programme with which I collaborated.
NOTES
1 Banyabwisha literally means ‘people of Bwisha’, a small chiefdom in eastern
Zaïre which borders on north-west Rwanda and south-east Uganda.
2 Ash is somewhat anomalous. Burnt, and no longer able to generate heat, it
nonetheless enhances plant growth. Local associations with ash show its
ambiguous position. A ‘cold ash’ translates as ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’. Ash
(ivu) is associated with a chameleon (uruvu) and with the notion of ‘origin’
(amavu).
3 Certain linguistic usages and translations are derived from Jacob (1984–7).
4 Richards (1939) described this for the Babembe.
5 I use the term ‘procedures’ with care. These have been termed rituals, but this
places the actions within a ‘religious’ sphere, whereas it appears to me that we
are dealing with the manipulation of natural processes.
Healthy production and reproduction
139
6 The longer fallows of the past left the land relatively soft, and less work was
needed.
7 For analysis of Rwandan understanding of sexuality and reproduction, I draw
heavily on Taylor (1988 and 1990).
8 As well as meaning to give, kutanga means ‘to go in front’. Recall that at the
sowing procedure a man goes in front of his wife to the field, and a woman
goes in front on the way back (Lestrade 1972:253–7). A similar act is replayed
by the Mwami in royal sowing procedures (d’Hertefelt and Coupez 1964:139).
9 The intercausality between human reproductive and crop productive cycles
helps us understand why dry women and barren (e.g. non-menstruating)
women were once put to death (d’Hertefelt and Coupez 1964:260). Their
existence undermined the fertility of the land (Taylor 1990:1025).
10 The use of cooling, heating, dampening and drying materials is current in
indigenous medicine and magic (Lestrade 1972:26).
11 Gottlieb (1982) provides an example of why it is wrong to see menstrual blood
per se as necessarily polluting. Rather, it is the confusion of reproductive
cycles which is dangerous for both crop reproduction and human reproduction.
12 In one procedure to put out the royal funeral fire, water from the river Bubeho
is used. Bubeho derives from the word imbeho, meaning ‘cold’. This evokes
peace (d’Hertefelt and Coupez 1964:372).
13 These links make it clear why people fear boiling over (or spilling) cooking
water on to the cooking fire, as it presages ill fortune (Lestrade 1972:249).
Similarly, if milk falls in the fire, the cow which produced it risks becoming ill.
To reduce this risk, one must sprinkle the flame with cold water (Lestrade
1972:28). It is clear why to take a pot off the fire means to remove problems,
and why if a house burns down people consider fire to have become dangerous.
It is clear also why both sex and cultivation are suspended until a specialist
redresses the situation and gives back to fire its utilitarian and socially
constructive role. These observations also help us to understand why, at critical
‘hot’ times for the country (e.g. during illness or epidemic), general sexual
abstinence was necessary.
14 Banyabwisha have other contextual ways to describe places of differential
fertility on which I do not dwell here. People describe places (a) where plants
grow vigorously (harashishe) or not (hatashyishe); (b) where harvests are
good (kurumbuka) or poor (kurumba); (c) where productivity is low
(uburumbe) or otherwise; (d) where there has recently been a fallow or a buildup of vegetation (umurare, ingando); (e) where there has not been much recent
cultivation (nk’ingando, like ingando), and (f) where cattle have grazed. Whilst
these descriptions refer to the fertility status of a place, they gloss over the
nature of fertility.
15 According to the dictionary (Jacob 1984–7), the term fura connotes getting
lost, acting before thinking, and getting carried away with oneself.
16 Logan (1973), cited in Bledsoe and Goubaud (1985).
17 The use of the term ‘necessary’ here needs qualifying. There are many African
examples where land has become commoditized but where the nature of
fertility seems to remain understood within ancestral terms. Sometimes in
these cases, land sale can either be delimited to descendants of common
ancestors (e.g. mentioned in Riddell and Campbell 1986), or can be associated
with blood pacts which unite buyer and seller (e.g. mentioned in White 1990).
‘Commoditization’ is not a universal phenomenon, but can take many forms.
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Central and Southern Africa
This essay is examining the particular form which land commoditization has
taken in Bwisha and hopes to understand how this is the result of a particular
history.
18 Smith (1979) suggests that a similar dilemma exists in Rwandan thought. The
saying ‘to be in Rwanda is to keep taboos’ (kub’i’Rwandan’ukwizirira) can be
matched with another saying: kiriziya yakuye kirazira, ‘the church has
uprooted [displaced] taboos’. Smith describes how people, when forced to
transgress customary taboos, invoke the latter saying, less as a statement of
reality, than as an excuse to break a particular cultural rule in the hope that it
will not bring calamity. Banyabwisha have another way of doing this. When
breaking customary norms, people may say that they are following ‘Article
15’. Article 15 is the celebrated Zaïrian principle of ‘getting-by’ (débrouillezvous), a principle advocated by (or associated with) the state. Se débrouiller
has entered Kinyabwisha as kwidebrie via Kiswahili (kujidebrie). People
invoke the principle, and implicitly, the support of the state, in their actions
when they do something that they feel they really ought not to do.
19 These ‘People of French’ such as the church and NGO authorities consider
themselves intellectuals, supporting the rights of poor small-holders.
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d’Hertefelt, M. and Coupez, A. (1964) La royauté sacrée de l’ancien Rwanda,
Tervuren: Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale.
Fairhead, J. (1990) ‘Fields of struggle: towards a social history of farming
knowledge and practice in a Bwisha community, Kivu, Zaire’, unpublished
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Coast: a symbolic analysis’, Africa 52, 4:32–47.
Jacob, I. (1984/85/87) Dictionnaire Rwandais-Français de l’lnstitut National de
Recherche Scientifique, 3 vols, Butare: INRS.
Katuala, K.K. and Mwamba Tshibasu (1986) Lesgrands conflits foncières du Nord
Kivu: philosophic, action preventive et rectificative et rapport de la
Commission Foncière Sous-Regionale, Goma (Zaïre): MPR.
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Zaire: 1984 in its context’, Africa 61, 4:537–70.
Richards, A.I. (1939) Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia: an Economic
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11 Minority language, ethnicity and
the state in two African situations
The Nkoya of Zambia and the Kalanga
of Botswana
Wim van Binsbergen
INTRODUCTION1
Language differences often provide an anchorage for ethnic identity.
Ethnic self-articulation tends to have a linguistic component: propagation
of the language spoken by a national minority in the face of lack of
recognition of that language in a nation state’s language policy covering
such domains as formal education, the judiciary, contacts between the
state and its citizens in general, political discourse, freedom of expression
and the media. Language policy—even if appealing to ‘objective’
considerations of linguistic analysis, constitutional equity and socioeconomic development—is often formulated and implemented in a
political and ideological context partly defined by ethnic parameters. In
the present paper I shall briefly trace, and contrast, the ethnic aspects of
the language situation in two contemporary African communities: the
Nkoya of central western Zambia, and the Kalanga of north-eastern
Botswana. The choice of these two cases is inspired by more systematic
considerations than personal preference alone: while my own current
anthropological and historical research happens to concentrate on these
two communities, their choice here is strategic. In terms of their linguistic,
ethnic and political situations within their respective nation states, Nkoya
and Kalanga are in some respects comparable, yet they display striking
differences with regard to the role language has played in their respective
processes of ethnicization in the twentieth century. Thus, the comparison
may have heuristic value in highlighting some of the crucial variables that
inform the interplay between language, ethnicity, the state and
development, even though I take it for granted that a two case comparison
can never in itself yield viable generalizations.
Comparative empirical data concerning the two languages, and the
ethnic groups of the same names which focus on these languages, are
compiled in an elaborate matrix (Appendix) which has the disadvantages
of being condensed and schematic but the advantage of accommodating
142
Minority language, ethnicity and the state
143
Figure 11.1 The Nkoya and the Kalanga in Southern Africa
more information than could otherwise be presented in an article. Granted
this descriptive background, my discursive argument will be selective.
My argument is set, implicitly, against the background of studies of
ethnicization and inter-ethnic relations in Zambia and Botswana. While
the relevant literature on Zambia is considerable (including classic
studies in this field by Mitchell and Epstein), 2 the multi-ethnic
dimension of contemporary Botswana society has been largely ignored
by scholarship. Researchers have themselves internalized the image of a
peaceful, ethnically and linguistically homogeneous, thoroughly
Tswana country—an image propagated by the national élite under
conditions of Tswana linguistic and cultural hegemony. The notable
exception is the considerable attention paid to the plight of the Khoi-San
(locally called Sarwa), under conditions of social humiliation and
economic exploitation at the hands of the Tswana. 3 The claim to
homogeneity of Botswana has also been accepted by linguists (e.g.
Alexandre 1972:89).
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THE NKOYA OF WESTERN ZAMBIA4
The scattered minority language we call Nkoya today (with its
constituent dialectal variants such as Nkoya-proper, Mashasha,
Lushange, Lukolwe, Mbwela), with about 30,000 speakers in central
western Zambia, is generally accepted to be the language of people who
formed part of an early movement—like so many others in the past half
millennium—from southern Zaïre into the savanna of South Central
Africa from c. AD 1500.5 On the strength of political and cosmological
notions deriving from their Zaïrean homeland (Kola), some of these
immigrants began to involve the local population (in part consisting of
earlier immigrants) in a process of state formation, from the late
eighteenth century, if not earlier, which led to the creation of a number
of small polities (along lines clearly discernible from recent research) in
which Nkoya was the court language. Most probably, the language, and
the people identifying themselves by reference to it, were known early
on not as Nkoya but as Mbwela. The origin of the name Nkoya itself
remains somewhat obscure: it is associated with a forested area near the
Kabompo/Zambezi confluence, and it later became the toponym for the
entire region (roughly coinciding with today’s Kaoma district) where
Nkoya is spoken by the majority of the population; it may well be a
dialectal variant of the magical name of Kola itself. Whatever the case,
our first record of its use for the political élite of one of these polities
dates back to c. 1840: in the praise-name under which a female ruler,
Mwene6 Komoka, acceded to the major Mutondo royal title. Only a few
years later these polities, on the eastern fringes of what later (e.g. in Max
Gluckman’s famous anthropological studies) became known as
Barotseland, were made tributary to the Kololo state, through which
immigrants from what is today South Africa had supplanted the earlier
Luyana administration. The original Luyana ousted the Kololo
immigrants again in 1864 but largely retained the latter’s southern Sotho
language, amalgamating it with their original Luyana to form today’s
‘Lozi’ language. It was in the context of political incorporation into the
Lozi state that ‘Nkoya’ (in its Lozi form Mankoya, which was also
extended to become the name of a district capital, to be renamed Kaoma
in 1969) became the name of one particular Lozi ‘subject tribe’ and of
the latter’s language—myopically uniting, under this Lozi-imposed
label, not only a certain dialectal variation but also several encapsulated
polities which had never before identified themselves as ‘Nkoya’.
Favoured by the colonial state which was imposed in 1900, Lozi
administrative and judicial subjugation, social humiliation and
economic exploitation of the people in the eastern Barotseland fringe
Minority language, ethnicity and the state
145
actually increased during the colonial period. While the Luvale (another
‘subject tribe’, to the north of the Lozi core area) were allowed to secede
from Barotseland and form a district of their own, Lozi colonization of
Nkoyaland went on through the creation of a Lozi court at Naliele near
Kaoma in the 1930s, where the son of the Lozi Litunga, ‘king’, was put
in charge of the newly created Mankoya Native Authority; Mwene
Mutondo Muchayila, who opposed these developments, was ousted
from office and for ten years (1948–58) exiled to a remote part of
Barotseland—only to return to office in the years 1981–90. Under the
unifying impact of this shared negative experience within an overall
administrative and political framework, it was in the period around
World War II that the name ‘Nkoya’, now reflexively used by the people
themselves, became a rallying cry for an increasingly comprehensive
ethnic identity facing a common perceived ethnic enemy, the Lozi,
whose language, used in the Lozi indigenous administration including
the courts, had become a main instrument of control and humiliation.
Nkoya was a minority language in the Barotseland Protectorate, the
indigenous administration of which retained considerable autonomy
under colonial rule. Meanwhile, throughout Northern Rhodesia (now
Zambia)—of which Barotseland formed part—seven languages had come
to be recognized by the state as vehicles of formal education,
broadcasting, the judiciary, and state/subject interaction: Bemba, Tonga,
Nyanja, Lozi (throughout Barotseland and in the region of Livingstone,
the early colonial capital in the south), Lunda, Luvale and Kaonde. At
Independence, the colonizer’s language became the country’s official
language. For fear of ‘tribalism’ and in the service of ‘nation-building’, in
the first decades after Independence no language other than English was
used in state-citizen communication—a practice observed so strictly that
President Kaunda addressed crowds in his native Chinsali district not in
the local Bemba language but in English. Nkoya found itself among the
sixty-odd languages or dialects in Zambia to which no official status was
accorded. Thus, the Nkoya language had become doubly peripheral: a
minority language vis-à-vis Lozi, that remained dominant in most formal
situations including education, local government and the courts in Barotse
(later Western) Province, and vis-à-vis English. Also peripheral in terms of
participation in the modern economy, minimum access to national markets
of labour, produce and power (while the regional spheres were totally
dominated by Lozi speakers), in the 1960s the Nkoya ethnic identity
(defined by speaking the Nkoya language, and by allegiance to local
chiefs—the encapsulated heirs to the independent polities of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) was characterized by great
resentment of continued Lozi domination and by rejection of the
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independent nation state of Zambia which (from the parochial perspective
of Kaoma district) had allowed itself to be captured by the Lozi
aristocracy.
Circulation of people over great distances has been a normal feature of
the social organization of Nkoya rural society, in which young men and
women move between villages in search of kinship-based patrons and
spouses, until they become less mobile by middle age. The geographical
scope of this intra-rural migration has extended beyond the areas where
Nkoya is spoken by the majority of the population, and as a result many
Nkoya were and are bilingual or trilingual in the languages of western
Zambia. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the local language
and ethnic situation has considerably diversified; Lozi domination
facilitated the immigration of Lozi speakers into the fertile and wellwatered, sparsely populated lands of Nkoya; Angolan immigrants
(speaking such languages as Luvale, Luchazi, Chokwe and Mbundu and
ethnically identifying by these same names) also flooded into the region
from the late 1910s. As a result, Nkoya soon became a minority means of
expression even at the newly-created district capital. The influx of
immigrants (whose agricultural and hunting methods tended to be more
modern and aggressive) created pressure on local land for the first time in
history. Encapsulated within the Lozi indigenous administration (which
moreover controlled part of Nkoyaland directly, through Lozi indunas),7
Nkoya chiefs were unable to curb this invasion. After Independence (when
their power was further eroded by the institution of Local Courts over
which the chiefs no longer had formal control)8 the selective granting of
land to ethnic strangers was adopted by the chiefs as a means of gaining
prestige and additional income. Appointed as members of the new Rural
Council, which after Independence supplanted the Lozi-controlled
Mankoya Native Authority, the chiefs facilitated a major development
project, which led to a massive agricultural scheme in the eastern fringe of
Kaoma district attracting thousands of ethnic strangers from all over
western and southern Zambia in what was to become the new rural town of
Nkeyema. Not only did this further diversify the local language situation,
it also confirmed the Nkoya as linguistic and economic underdogs,
serving—usually in a language other than their own—immigrant farmers
on their own lands as casual labour, or pursuing, in their nearby villages
(and then in their own language), the meagre yields of an eroded historical
agricultural production system which, because of the depletion of the
forests, could be supplemented by the time-honoured techniques of
hunting and gathering to a diminishing extent.
In this linguistic, ethnic, political and economic desolation, from the
1920s, the local Nkoya-speaking groups found an ally in Christian
Minority language, ethnicity and the state
147
missions and (since the local Catholic Mission was rather Lozi-orientated)
especially in the fundamentalist evangelical South African General
Mission, which shifted to Nkoyaland from an increasingly hostile Angola.
In its wake, the mission brought Mbundu immigrants to the district, thus
contributing further to its ethnic and linguistic differentiation; however, in
the context of this mission, ethnic strangers would adopt Nkoya as a
second language. Establishing excellent relations with the Nkoya chiefs,
the mission pioneered literacy in Nkoya, published school primers, had
hymns and part of the Bible translated into Nkoya,9 and was largely
responsible for the creation of a climate in which peasants would go about
their Christian activities and their social contacts (especially in the form of
letters to the many relatives who were temporarily absent as labour
migrants) in their native language. A remarkable form of ethnicoreligious
discourse emerged, in which local Christian leaders would also be the
articulators of the budding Nkoya ethnic identity, and improvised prayers
in Nkoya would mix pious and political elements in fervent evocations
(full of predictable biblical parallels) of their ethnic plight at the hands of
the Lozi. In this context the first Nkoya pastor, Rev. Johasaphat Shimunika
(1899–1981), nephew and son-in-law of the first Mwene Mutondo to be
baptized, was not only largely responsible for Bible translation but also
collected Nkoya oral traditions, collating them into passionate statements
of Nkoya ethnic identity and anti-Lozi manifestos, which circulated
among the Nkoya from the late 1950s. I have recently edited a published
version of his main work, Likota lya Bankoya, ‘The history of the Nkoya
people’ (van Binsbergen 1988, 1992a: parts II and III).
Away from their rural homeland, Nkoya labour migrants had no
choice but to reproduce the peripherality which was their fate at home.
A few years of mission education in Nkoya hardly compared with the
splendid educational facilities, in the empowering languages of Lozi
and English, which the Lozi aristocracy had managed to attract and
develop in the centre of Barotseland. The Nkoya’s small numbers and
lack of specialized skills made it impossible for most of them to
capture substantial portions of the urban labour markets, which were
controlled by the Lozi and other dominant ethnic groups. Occasional
urban success often involved ethnic and linguistic ‘passing’, dropping
the (still only emergent) Nkoya ethnic identity for that of Lozi or
Bemba, and loosening the home ties. The majority of the many Nkoya
labour migrants however remained insecure strangers in town, and
continued to rely heavily (in times of unemployment, illness,
bereavement and personal conflict) on such security as the intensive
(and costly) cultivation of rural ties would accord them. Regrettable as
this state of affairs may be judged from the perspective of personal
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achievement in modern, capitalist relations of production, it was
largely responsible for the continued vitality of Nkoya rural society.
Persistent investment of migrants’ cash in rural-based institutions
(kinship, marriage, chieftainship, old and new cults of affliction)
allowed Nkoya rural society to remain the relational, symbolic and
therapeutic power-house of dispersed Nkoya-speaking individuals, and
thus a viable basis for an increasingly vital Nkoya ethnic, linguistic
and cultural identity.
Twenty years ago, when I started research among the Nkoya, they still
felt the lack of recognition of their language to be the major sign of their
powerlessness at the national and regional level, which they interpreted
exclusively in terms of Lozi oppression. Primary school teaching was no
longer in the hands of the mission but had become the responsibility of
Government, and as a result it took place in the recognized language of
Western Province and Livingstone, Lozi. Very few Nkoya primary
school graduates found their way to secondary school and fewer still
matriculated: this happened largely because educational success
depended on the mastery of two languages (Lozi and English) hardly
used in the Nkoya rural milieu, but also because the number of children
attending school was low, and the regularity of those who did attend
poor—due to the Nkoya’s emphasis on boys’ hunting and musical skills,
and girls’ domestic chores and puberty ceremonies. In the collective
Nkoya consciousness a large and sinister place is occupied by a district
educational officer, inevitably (like the majority of local teachers) of
Lozi identity, who allegedly rounded up and burned virtually all Nkoya
school primers. Neither was the Nkoya language used in any of the
provincial or national media. Since the early nineteenth century the
Nkoya royal orchestra had been a standard element in court culture all
over western Zambia, and as a result the folklore programmes of Zambia
Broadcasting Corporation often featured Nkoya songs. Requests for
Nkoya-language programmes, however, were systematically turned
down by reference to the country’s formal language policy. Nkoya
speakers occupied only the most lowly jobs at the district headquarters
and UNIP party office, and any dealings between Nkoya villagers and
the outside world, for administrative, medical or judicial purposes,
would have to take place through the medium of Lozi, of which only half
the adult men and very few women had more than a smattering. Political
meetings, too, had to be conducted in Lozi or English. At one such
meeting, held in preparation for the 1973 national elections which for
the first time brought a Nkoya (Mr J. Kalaluka)10 into Parliament, the
District Governor (of eastern Zambian extraction), when challenged
why the meeting could not have been held in Nkoya, spoke out in anger:
Minority language, ethnicity and the state
149
‘This nonsense has to stop. Chief, you must control your people. There
is no Nkoya. Nkoya does not exist!’
Various processes combined to change this situation substantially in the
course of two decades, even if Zambia’s language policy formally
remained the same. The integration of the Barotseland Protectorate, its
traditional ruler the Litunga and the Lozi aristocracy, into the independent
state of Zambia had been difficult, and had had to be bought on the
onerous conditions of the Barotse Agreement. One section of the Lozi
aristocracy had promoted UNIP in Barotseland, which had been a reason
for many Nkoya to side with UNIP’s rival, the African National Congress
(ANC),11 in addition to short-lived political organizations of a specifically
Nkoya nature. The commitment to the struggle for Independence had been
massive among the Nkoya, not so much out of disgust with the colonial
state (whose blessings were to form a standard topic of conversation
among the Nkoya in the post-Independence period—despite the fact that
Lozi domination had been greatly reinforced by the colonial state) but in
the hope that Independence would bring the end of Lozi domination. Until
the late 1960s the Lozi played a major role in the successive factional
coalitions around which Zambian national politics revolved. The
prohibition against habitual labour migration from Barotseland to
Rhodesia and South Africa increased ANC sympathies among the Lozi, at
a moment when UNIP was already contemplating one-party rule. The
Lozi were outwitted and divested of their political power at the national
level, and UNIP found in the Nkoya welcome allies in an otherwise hostile
province.
The Nkoya’s ethnic claims for access to regional and national
representative bodies, restoration of the prestige of their traditional
leaders, and increased development efforts in their area, were met to a
considerable extent, and such few Nkoya as could be considered to
constitute a traditional and modern élite (e.g. the royal chiefs, and Mr
Kalaluka) soon found themselves in a position where, as brokers between
the modern world and local villagers, they could combine ethnic
mobilization with personal economic and political advancement. UNIP
branches, and ward and village development committees mushroomed,
and for the first time the repertoire of UNIP political songs was translated
and sung in the Nkoya language. Political meetings in favour of the ruling
party were held locally in the same language. The enhanced economic
opportunities in Nkoyaland increasingly contrasted with the bleak
situation of many Nkoya migrants in the declining economy of Zambia’s
towns, and people began to remigrate home.
Moreover, at the national political and ideological level, the earlier
universalist insistence on English and fear of ‘tribalism’ gradually gave
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way to considerations of authenticity and pluralism, and the more the
impoverished and disintegrating Zambian state proved unable to mobilize
popular support on the basis of services and benefits extended to citizens,
the more passionate and desperate became the appeal to a composite
cultural heritage to which each ethnic and language group was now seen to
contribute, even outside the established happy few of the seven staterecognized languages.
While the political acceptability of the Nkoya language increased, at
the major Christian mission establishment in Kaoma district the work on
the translation of the Bible continued steadily. Largely under the
supervision of Rev. Shimunika until his death, and subsequently under
that of his former associates, draft translations were made of the entire
Old Testament, and these were discussed at general conferences which
the church organized in Kaoma and Lusaka in the late 1980s. Although
the text has been ready for publication for some years now, and a
subscription campaign has been launched, funds are still lacking to place
a print order.
While this translation work, and the enthusiasm it generated over the
years, clearly testifies to the vitality of the Nkoya language, the
organizational framework for the text consultations was no longer
exclusively that of the mission and of the Evangelical Church of Zambia
which it has engendered. Instead, the editorial processing of the Bible
translation in recent years, as well as similar consultations in the context
of my edition of Rev. Shimunika’s Likota lya Bankoya, has taken place
within the context of a new Nkoya ethnic association.
Ethnic associations, which had thrived in Northern Rhodesia but then
been discouraged after Zambian Independence, became viable again
after 1980. With restored ethnic pride, the return of educated manpower
to the rural homeland, and the fruition of the ethno-historical seeds
which Rev. Shimunika had sought to plant for so many years, the time
was ripe for the Kazanga cultural society to be launched in the early
1980s. The society derived its name from an ancient Nkoya institution,
the king’s first-fruits festival, which (partly because of the connotations
of ritual murder which it shares with all royal ceremonies in the Nkoya
context—among others) had rarely been held in the twentieth century.
While continuing (in vain, so far) the campaign for the Nkoya language
in the media and schools, joining hands with Nkoya politicians in their
attempts to further the cause of Nkoya chieftaincy, and formalizing an
economic and social support structure for rural-urban migrants on a
modest scale, the society’s main project was to develop a newly
‘bricolaged’ form of kazanga as an annual festival, bringing together all
Nkoya chiefs (especially the four royal ones, who historically would
Minority language, ethnicity and the state
151
meet rarely, each, instead, observing a strict avoidance in his own area),
and presenting to the crowds of urban and rural Nkoya, other locals,
government officials and hopefully tourists, a densely packed
programme encompassing the entire (if slightly orchestrated,
folklorized, and electrified) repertoire of Nkoya music and dance (van
Binsbergen 1992b).
Thus the festival was to form the Nkoya answer to the famous Lozi
Kuomboka ceremony, which has attracted large crowds since the
beginning of the twentieth century. At the second Kazanga festival, in
1989, the triumph of the Nkoya language could hardly have been more
complete: not only did the junior Minister of Culture, Lazarus Tembo (of
eastern Zambian background, once Zambia’s most popular folk singer,
and a blind man), attend in his official capacity, but he seized the
opportunity to be the first high-ranking state official ever to address a local
crowd in Nkoya—mispronounced and apparently off the cuff, but in
reality touch-read from the braille notes hidden in the Minister’s pocket.
The previous night the state had declared a 100 per cent devaluation of the
Zambian Kwacha, and villagers who later that week went shopping at the
district capital returned to their homesteads emptyhanded since their
money could no longer buy even what little was available in the shops. But
the state could not have chosen a more effective way to impress the Nkoya
with, in Mr Tembo’s words, ‘how much we have to be thankful for’.
In October 1991 the Kaunda era came to an end when UNIP lost the
national election to the new MMD coalition party, and Mr F.Chiluba
became state president (Baylies and Szeftel 1992). The Nkoya of Kaoma
district were divided. During his last year of office, President Kaunda had
successfully intervened to protect Nkoya chieftaincies against the
Litunga’s mounting aspirations, and this is a major reason why UNIP
remains a remarkable presence in the area. However, especially among the
peasants, there was and still is considerable support for MMD. The new
administration offered new national level opportunities to politicians from
the area, some of whom are full Nkoya, and others who are not but make
a point of expressing themselves in Nkoya to further cultural and
traditional-political aspirations as articulated by the Kazanga society.
Gradually shedding their underdog image, the Nkoya are becoming
increasingly deft at the situational manipulation of their ethnic identity at
the regional and national level, and begin to command considerable
political resources. At the regional level, ethnic antagonism now
occasionally gives way to a more comprehensive ideology of ethnic
solidarity between the groups of western and northwestern Zambia—as
against the ethnically dominant centre and especially north (Bemba,
Aushi), on which the Chiluba administration leans heavily. Although it is
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too early to make predictions, it does look as if the upward movement of
Nkoya identity in the 1980s will continue under the new regime.
THE KALANGA OF NORTH-EASTERN BOTSWANA
Like the Nkoya language, the western Shona dialect cluster known as
Kalanga, today extending from north-western Zimbabwe all the way into
the North Central and North East districts of Botswana (where it mainly
exists in the form of the Lilima dialect), boasts a considerable local
presence. While much of the history of this language and of the ethnic
group who are identified by it remains to be written, 12 it is a wellestablished fact that Kalanga, already called by that name, was the state
language of the Changamire state which in the late seventeenth century
succeeded the Torwa state; the latter produced the archaeological complex
known as the Khami culture, and was closely associated historically with
the earlier extensive state system centring on the famous site of Great
Zimbabwe.
When, as an aspect of the Zulu expansion, the Changamire state was
supplanted by the Ndebele state in the early nineteenth century, Kalanga
speakers lost their association with dominant political power. The
southern part of the Kalanga area then found itself in the overlapping and
competing spheres of influence of the Ndebele state, in the north-east, and
an expanding Tswana polity, to be known as Ngwato, to the south. While
these powers were more or less in balance, the relative no-man’s-land on
the Tati river became a major area for White prospecting and mining,
agricultural enterprise and urban settlement: the Tati district, later known
as the North East district, was focussed on the new town of Francistown.
Land alienation and the general implantation of the capitalist mode of
production went on there on a scale unequalled elsewhere in the
Bechuanaland Protectorate during the colonial period. Attempts to annex
the Protectorate as a whole for South Africa failed as did attempts to
incorporate the Tati district into the Southern Rhodesia of which it was so
reminiscent. After Botswana’s Independence (1966), administrative
formalities made the Botswana/Rhodesia boundary more difficult to cross.
Under UDI, and during the Zimbabwe war of liberation and its violent
aftermath in south-western Zimbabwe (when local Kalanga suffered along
with the Ndebele under the ZANU state’s aggression), the experiences,
and political and cultural concerns, of Kalanga on either side of the border
increasingly diverged. Yet massive emigration of war and post-war
refugees, dispersed by violence in Zimbabwe as much as attracted by the
post-Independence economic boom of hitherto tranquil and rustic
Botswana, kept the lines of contact open.
Minority language, ethnicity and the state
153
In at least one respect the Zimbabwean Kalanga immigrants found an
unpleasantly familiar situation in Botswana: their ethnic and linguistic
identity made them, along with the original Botswana Kalanga, stand out
as politically and socially suspect in a country which for fear of appearing
disunited, emphatically proclaimed itself a monolithic Tswana state:
through the adoption of Tswana as its national language, by its ruling
party’s (BDP—Botswana Democratic Party) populist imagery centring on
the Ngwato royal family (whose one-time heir apparent, Sir Seretse
Khama, was to be BDP’s leader and the country’s first president), and by
the very name of Botswana, i.e. ‘Tswanaland’. In Botswana, Kalanga is
very much a minority language, in which no formal education is offered,
which is not used in the media, is practically inadmissible for use in courts
of law except in outlying villages, and in which hardly any published
material circulates.
The Kalanga (comprising c. 120,000 speakers or 13 per cent of the
population (Picard 1987:5)) constitute the largest non-Tswanaspeaking group in the country, but by no means the only one: for
example, in the north, north-west and west, Mbukushu, Yei, Koba,
Ndebele, Subiya, Herero, etc., defied ethnic and linguistic
classification as Tswana, as did the Khoi-San (called by their Tswana
name ‘Sarwa’) scattered all over the country. The Kgalagadi are a
borderline case in that their language is similar to standard Tswana but,
as a separate branch of the Sotho-Tswana peoples, they are not counted
among the eight constitutionally recognized Tswana groups, 13 and they
share with the Sarwa a history of serfdom and humiliation at Tswana
hands (Gadibolae 1985; Mautle 1986).
Under the Protectorate, the Tswana had formalized a model according
to which the country’s entire territory was neatly parcelled up among
themselves, each ‘tribal’ area administered by a hereditary chief.
Consolidating the realities of Ngwato expansion in the second half of the
nineteenth century, the area where the Kalanga lived (with the exception
of most of the North East district, which had become freehold land of the
Tati Company) fell under the kgotla (‘tribal’ headquarters, court) of the
Ngwato chief (kgosi). Kalanga traditional authorities were incorporated
into the Ngwato indigenous administration as mere village headmen
(sing, kgosana, ‘little chief’). At Independence, the Tswana chiefs’
constitutional and juridical status was redefined as complementary to the
modern central state and its democratic institutions. A House of Chiefs
was instituted as the apical structure of tribal administrative and judicial
organization and, in terms of the Constitution (Republic of Botswana
1983), only senior members of the Tswana tribal administrations qualify
for membership. Kalanga activists read into this section of the
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Constitution a denial of the existence, within the national territory, of
languages other than Tswana, and of ethnic groups other than the eight
Tswana-speaking ones.
In that part of southern Kalangaland which lies in present-day
Botswana, the influx of relatively small offshoots of non-Ngwato Tswana
groups (primarily the Khurutshe, since the late eighteenth century, and the
Rolong in the early twentieth century) 14 and of non-Tswana recent
immigrants from the north and east had turned the ethnic and linguistic
situation of north-eastern Botswana into a complicated mosaic. Kalanga
ethnic identity and language, which had such a long local history, had
considerable but not unanimous attraction for these immigrant groups:
Khurutshe in the village of Ramokgwebane, and Rolong in the nearby
Moroka, soon adopted Kalanga, whereas the offshoots of the same groups
in Makaleng, Tonota, Matseloje and Borolong retained their original
ethnic identity and their Tswana tongue (Schapera 1952; van Waarden
1988; Malikongwa & Ford 1979). The Khurutshe kgosana of Makaleng
came to represent the local population, including the Kalanga, in the
Ngwato indigenous administration and in the House of Chiefs. This meant
that the Kalanga were and are not represented, in their own right, in the far
from nominal traditional political structures of the country (cf. Gillett
1973; Silitshena 1979).
Especially in the second quarter of the twentieth century under the rule
of the regent Tshekedi Khama (Seretse Khama’s paternal uncle), Ngwato
overlordship in north-eastern Botswana was resented and often
challenged, especially over church matters (Benson 1960; Chirenje 1977;
Wylie 1991). Not unusually in Protectorate Botswana, the Ngwato
administration did not permit any Christian diversification and upheld the
monopoly of, in this case, the London Missionary Society. In this part of
Protectorate Botswana African independent churches, which were already
flourishing in South Africa where thousands of Botswana labour migrants
became acquainted with them, inevitably acquired overtones of ethnic and
tribal defiance of Ngwato dominance. The Tati concession, however
miserable in other respects, offered a White-controlled sanctuary from
Ngwato rule, and it is here that ‘Christian Independency’ first flourished
in the country. In the historical consciousness of contemporary Kalanga in
Botswana much is made of the high-handed way in which a particular
immigrant Kalanga group around John Nswazwi, defying Ngwato
overlordship both in religious and in tributary matters, was beaten into
submission by Tshekedi’s regiment in 1947.15
The Kalanga’s reliance on agriculture rather than animal husbandry
made their children more easily available for schooling than, for
instance, the Tswana, whose school attendance had to be balanced
Minority language, ethnicity and the state
155
against the need to herd cattle. In the Protectorate period, ideas and
people moved freely between Bechuanaland and Rhodesia, and while
educational services (or any other services to be provided by the colonial
state and the indigenous administrations it upheld) were kept at a
minimum in the Protectorate, Christian missions in nearby Rhodesia
were flourishing: they translated the Bible into Kalanga, and offered a
great many Kalanga both the formal education and the ideological
outlook that provided the basis on which to advance in colonial society,
while increasingly challenging the premises of inequality on which that
society was based (Bhebe 1973). The great Zimbabwean politician
Joshua Nkomo is very much a product of this situation (Nkomo 1985).
But so are others (e.g. Mssrs K.Maripe, T.Mongwa, P.Matante, D.Kwele)
who later, as commercial entrepreneurs, Kalanga ethnic activists and
national level politicians, were to play a prominent role in the
modernizing and highly proletarianized situation of Botswana’s northeast, with its rapidly growing town of Francistown. After ‘Christian
Independency’, Francistown became the cradle of the first major
independence party, the Botswana People’s Party, which from its outset
was highly critical of Tswana ethnic, administrative and linguistic
hegemony (cf. Nengwekhulu 1979; Murray et al. 1987).
It testifies to the complexity and situationality of ethnic identity that
most of these leaders could, and did, adopt other, non-Kalanga, idioms
of mobilization. Nkomo could identity as Ndebele as much as Kalanga,
and it is in the former identity that he gained world-wide renown. Maripe
completed a doctorate in industrial relations in Belgium and, long before
gaining local prominence as a Kalanga novelist and as BPP president,
stood out as a trade unionist active not in Botswana but in the Federation
of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (Meebelo 1986: passim); in other words he
could have identified, and probably did at one time, as Zimbabwean and
even Zambian. Mongwa, Francistown’s BPP mayor in the mid-1980s, is
Pedi as much as he is Kalanga. Matante was prompted to form the BPP
through his membership of the South African, African National
Congress (ANC), and he was moreover active as the leader of an
independent African church in Botswana; so we might have heard from
him as a South African black politician or as a minister of religion. All
this reminds us of the fact that appeal to an ethnic idiom in the context of
formal, national-level politics is not the expression of primordial
attachments ingrained through socialization in early childhood—as firstgeneration studies of ethnicity in Africa and the Third World in general
tended to stress (cf. Geertz 1963)—but is often the deliberate and
strategic choice of a particular political instrument, identity and career
from among alternatives.
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After Independence, Botswana rather unexpectedly saw an economic
boom—largely based on the diamond industry (in which South African
capital and expertise was wisely matched with Botswana state control) and
the beef export industry—against the background of open economic
relations with South Africa guaranteed by a Customs Union putting
Botswana (along with Swaziland and Lesotho) in an awkward but
economically favourable position among the Southern African front-line
states. The BDP Government, which gained power democratically in the
drive for Independence and has retained it ever since, therefore had plenty
to offer to the Botswana state élite and to the population at large, and
prudently but consistently delivered enough to ensure stability, economic
progress and popular support. In the process, the multi-party system was
nominally encouraged and gained the country international esteem and
donor support. In reality, however, with every national election which was
held at the constitutionally stipulated times, the impotent opposition
parties—including the BPP and the BNF (Botswana National Front)—
increasingly became an ornamental fringe to a de facto one-party, populist
and rather authoritarian political regime (cf. Picard 1987; Holm & Molutsi
1989). Repeatedly, when the outcome of democratic elections led to
opposition majority at the district and town-council level, the dilution of
representative bodies by state-appointed BDP representatives, and the
persuasion of elected opposition representatives to cross over to the BDP
while retaining their seats, proved to be standard tactics to retain or regain
BDP control.
This situation was not entirely unlike Ngwato/Kalanga relations in the
nineteenth century and under the Protectorate: occasional and dramatic
Kalanga challenges to Ngwato hegemony did not preclude the fact that the
ordinary, and widely accepted, situation was one of peaceful
accommodation, where the Kalanga, as ‘Northerners’, had their assigned
place in the Ngwato polity, not only in distant homogeneous Kalanga
villages at a distance from the Ngwato capital, but also in the Ngwato
heartland, even in specifically Kalanga wards at the capital (Schapera
1952, 1984, 1988).
A remarkable contradiction between implicit ethnic accommodation
and occasional overt ethnic confrontation can be observed at this point.
Challenge to Tswana hegemony and explicit proclamation of Kalanga
identity became more and more bitter as standard expressions of political
opposition to the BDP. That political opposition in the struggle over state
control had to be phrased in an ethnic and linguistic idiom was also due to
the fact that such religious and class oppositions as had unmistakably
arisen at the level of people’s consciousness, were still not sufficiently
well articulated to serve as a basis for mass mobilization. In independent
Minority language, ethnicity and the state
157
Botswana, a class idiom is mainly propagated by the BNF, in
intellectualist Marxist terms which fail to attract mass support. Of course,
the unsettled nature of class contradiction as a basis for mass mobilization
has, until quite recently, been a general theme in post-Independence
politics throughout Africa. In fact, however, the Kalanga’s relative
educational and entrepreneurial success had led to a situation where a
disproportionately large percentage of BDP politicians at all levels
(including Cabinet Ministers and MPs) happened to be Kalanga, who as a
condition of political eligibility and respectability played down their
Kalanga identity and allowed Tswana ethnic and linguistic hegemony in
the country to go unchallenged.
Thus the very people who, being affluent and relatively well-educated,
might have been involved in the production and consumption of Kalanga
symbolic culture (in the form of literature, drama and ethno-history)
inside Botswana, tended to have vested interests in not doing so. Maripe’s
Kalanga novels are nowhere to be bought in Botswana. Copies of the 1929
Bible translation in Kalanga could be seen for years rotting on the shelves
of the Francistown Bookshop along one of the town’s main shopping
streets. Kalanga oral-historical traditions, folklore and proverbs were
largely left to foreign researchers and had no market inside Botswana. It is
commonly believed that it is an offence to publish books in Botswana in
any language other than English and Tswana; not being a jurist, I have no
information on whether there is any law under the Constitution which
limits freedom of expression in such a way. The insights which modern
scholarship, mainly on the basis of Zimbabwean material, have gained
into the splendour and historical depth of Kalanga history, highlighting its
intimate link with the glorious Zimbabwe state and the widespread Mwali
cult which is among Southern Africa’s major religious expressions,16 have
so far never managed to percolate back into the publicly-articulated ethnic
consciousness of the Botswana Kalanga. There is an amazing contrast
between the riches of Kalanga history, and the poverty of the Botswana
Kalanga collective historical consciousness which seldom reaches beyond
the Nswazwi episode, never taps the sources of ethnic pride history has so
abundantly to offer, and even reproduces the erroneous Tswana view17 that
the Kalanga in Botswana are merely recent immigrants enjoying, but
dishonouring, Ngwato hospitality! Such inspiration as could have been
derived from ethnic identification with the Zimbabwean Kalanga across
the border18 seems scarcely to have been tapped after Independence.
While assistance through personal kin networks was offered to Kalanga
victims of the Zimbabwean war of liberation and its atrocious aftermath
(mainly in the form of accommodating illegal immigrants in Botswana), at
the public and national level the border communities went out of their way
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to dissociate themselves from such violence as spilled across the frontier,
stressing—not always spontaneously—that their first allegiance was to the
Botswana state and not to an international Kalanga ethnic identity.
The increasing entrenchment of Botswana Kalanga within the national
territory of Botswana was one of the reasons for the Kalanga Bible
Translation Project in the mid-1980s, headed by White Lutheran
missionaries recruited from Germany and the USA, and with strong
organizational backing from the Lutheran mission in South Africa.
Justifications for the project included the incomplete nature and linguistic
defectiveness of the existing translation of 1929, whose orthography,
moreover, was judged inadequate. Draft translations were undertaken in
the Project Office variously based in the town of Francistown (1987–8),
the village of Zwenshambe (1988–9), and Francistown again (1989present). The actual translation work is mainly in the hands of Kalanga
native speakers with post-secondary education, assisted by advisory
committees throughout the Botswana Kalanga area. Attempts to expand
the project into a revitalization of Kalanga language and culture in general
have so far not taken off, and the project has been severely hampered by
conflicts over external, White control, conditions of service, and the
conflicting national cultures and management styles of the various
missionaries involved. So far the project’s main achievement has been the
development of a new standardized Lilima orthography in consultation
with Botswana native speakers.
In the course of the 1980s, Kalanga ethnic and linguistic identity
developed into a major issue, but within the Kalanga community more so
than between Kalanga and Tswana. Students at the University of
Botswana founded the Society for the Propagation of the Ikalanga
Language (SPIL) with amazingly little government opposition: the
required registration with the Registrar of Societies was virtually routine,
even though this was to be the only overtly ethnic association in the
country and one obviously not propounding Tswana hegemony.19 On
various occasions, SPIL branches and individual members (never the
entire association as such) challenged the Kalanga members of the
Government to speak out in favour of the teaching of African languages
other than Tswana, and to identify publicly as Kalanga instead of
submitting to Tswana hegemony. This led to major outcries, in which the
official position with regard to the exclusive use of Tswana for the sake of
national unity and efficiency was repeatedly expounded and defended,
and local BDP politicians clamoured—in vain, so far—for the prohibition
of the SPIL.
However, to date, the SPIL initiative has failed to engender massive
ethnic support. It has remained a pastime of middle-class people whose
Minority language, ethnicity and the state
159
command of Tswana usually equals that of Kalanga, and whose children
have often been raised to have Tswana or English as their first language.
With the exception of the few and irregularly produced issues of the
mimeographed journal Tjedza,‘Light’, the society can boast little
literary or cultural production. Its annual meetings are enlivened by
performances of dance troupes but, expert and exciting as their
repertoire is, their very presence brings out the dilemmas of ethnic
mobilization along Kalanga lines in Botswana: traditional dancing is
part of the general primary and secondary school curriculum throughout
the country, the movements and songs hardly stand out as specifically
Kalanga, and to the extent to which elements are borrowed from
territorial and possession cults these, too, combine Kalanga references
with Ndebele, Venda and even Tswana ones.
My reading of SPIL is that it primarily reflects a struggle, within the
Kalanga middle-class community, between those whose acceptance of
Tswana hegemony has paid off in terms of political and economic
power—in other words has allowed them a share in state power—and
those (typically younger, perhaps slightly better educated and perhaps
with slightly stronger roots in their rural home communities and the
latter’s traditional leadership) whose access to political and economic
power so far has been frustrated and who, through insistence on a
Kalanga ethnic idiom, seek either to capture their own share of state
power, or at least to discredit the state, proving it to be less universalist,
and more ethnically particularistic, than its constitutional
pronouncements would suggest. But these ideological expressions
mobilize less support in a context where, de facto, numerous individual
Kalanga have had more than their fair share in the capturing of the
Botswana state—even if they could not publicly claim to have done so
under the ethnic label of Kalanga.
SPIL emphatically declares itself to be a non-political society.
Churches find themselves in a similar position, and it is noteworthy
that—even though my Botswana research has come to concentrate on
the religious domain—I have no evidence of linguistic and ethnic
antagonism playing a dominant role in churches and non-Christian cults
in north-eastern Botswana today. Multiple and situational ethnic and
linguistic identity, code switching, the mixture of songs and texts from
Kalanga, Ndebele, Tswana (and even Shona and English) in the course
of one religious event, and the accommodation of potential ethnic
opposition within an encompassing idiom of religious transcendence of
disunity are the catchwords to describe the local religious situation.
Having concentrated on urban research, I do not really know to what
extent this pattern in the religious domain corresponds with a relative
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absence of group conflict along ethnic lines in other spheres of life in the
rural communities of north-eastern Botswana today. My impression—
not supported by extensive fieldwork—is that their ethnic and linguistic
diversity, particularly the Kalanga/Khurutshe distinction of long local
standing, has no negative impact on social relations; bilingualism,
intermarriage, patterns of residence, and the frequent passing of
Khurutshe (of the Mpofu totem) as Kalanga, support this view. However,
my extensive participant observation in the urban setting of Francistown
shows the nature of relations in religious contexts, as described above, to
be in contrast with other contexts in which there are ubiquitous, petty
confrontations on language and ethnic issues, in relationships between
neighbours and between friends, on the work floor, in access to the
informal sector of the economy, in amorous matters, in drinking and
nightlife, and in the conceptualization of social relationships in terms of
sorcery. These frictions are clearly reflected in the cases tried at the
urban customary courts. As an urban society, Francistown is saturated
not only with African/White but also with Tswana/Kalanga conflict, in
which ethnic stereotypes and the failure or refusal to learn and
understand each other’s language often adds an awkward dimension to
casual interaction between strangers.
In the face of this conspicuous inter-ethnic conflict in everyday
urban life, it is remarkable that the political efficacy of Kalanga
ethnic mobilization has remained so slight. While closely linked to
the Kalanga cause and always vocal on minority language rights
(National Executive Council 1984, 1988; Maripe 1987), the BPP’s
nationwide aspirations have prevented this party from identifying too
narrowly as a one-‘tribe’ affair. Daniel Kwele’s Botswana
Progressive Union (BPU) was founded specifically because his being
Kalanga prevented him from assuming the national leadership of the
BNF (which has a strong regional backing in the south of Botswana);
and until his death in 1990 his pronouncements were the most
militant and unashamedly pro-Kalanga among contemporary
Botswana politicians. Never really successful, the performance of
BPP and BPU in the 1989 national elections was extremely
disappointing. There is little to suggest the imminent failure of the
BDP strategy of Tswana hegemony, populism, and co-option of
potential opposition, as long as the state élite remains in a position to
‘deliver’. The country’s language policy is likely to remain as it is. In
the long term, however, the diminishing diamond resources, the
impact of continued drought on Botswana’s problematic agriculture,
the paradoxically negative effects for the Botswana economy of the
dismantling of Apartheid in South Africa, increasing rates of
Minority language, ethnicity and the state
161
inflation and unemployment, the increasing public arrogance of the
Botswana military, and the wave of democratic change and popular
participation in many other (far less liberal) African countries since
1990, may yet bring Botswana to a critical point where language and
ethnicity are turned into effective political capital (Bernard 1989).
DISCUSSION
Despite many superficial correspondences, comparison of the trajectories
of Nkoya and Kalanga reveals considerable underlying differences. First
the correspondences: as a result of the mfecane upheaval which affected
the entire Southern African subcontinent in the nineteenth century, in two
regions a Bantu language of considerable local antiquity, and sharing both
structural and lexical continuity with adjacent languages,20 is confronted
by a Sotho language (of a very different group of Bantu languages, and
unintelligible to speakers of Kalanga and Nkoya) originating from the
south and carried by a group of such power that it relegates the other local
language to minority status;21 in the colonial and post-colonial period this
minority status is formalized in a national language policy and implies
exclusion of the language involved from the state’s political and
administrative practice; the dynamics of state formation and hegemony,
and the introduction of Christianity as a literate world religion, then
engender an ethnic consciousness largely focussing on language; the
recent political and economic history of the people who carry the minority
language casts light on the extent, direction, degrees of organization,
cultural and ethno-historical elaboration, and success, of the languagecentred ethnic strategies of each group. At this level of generality a similar
story could be told for scores, if not hundreds, of languages and ethnicities
in the modern world. Only on closer scrutiny, are systematic differences
between the Nkoya and the Kalanga trajectories highlighted, which
suggest crucial underlying variables.
Difference in scale
Difference in scale is very manifest: the 30,000 Nkoya speakers
constitute less than 1 per cent of the Zambian national population,
while the 120,000 Kalanga speakers constitute 13 per cent of the
Botswana population. That the Kalanga are almost twenty times
larger, as a national percentage, than the Nkoya cannot be ignored if
we want to understand the differences between Kalanga and Nkoya
in terms of access to the modern state and economy, education, and
privileged class positions. The absolute numbers also suggest
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disparities as potential markets for missionary efforts, book
production and marketing, and for creative talents to be mobilized
in literary production, even though it cannot be said that the
Botswana Kalanga have done better than the Nkoya in these
respects.
The definition and historical restructuring of national political space
The number of hierarchical politico-administrative levels between
minority speakers on the ground and the nation state, and the changes
this set-up has undergone in recent constitutional history—in other
words the definition and historical restructuring of national political
space—is a significant variable.22 In the course of the last two centuries,
Nkoya speakers have had to accommodate themselves within two states
which relegated their language to minority status: first the Kololo/
Luyana state, which constituted the highest level of political
organization until 1900 (much was retained by the Barotse indigenous
administration under colonial rule), and whose majority language (in
terms not of numbers but of power relations) was that of the Lozi élite;
and subsequently the colonial and post-colonial state, whose majority
language was, and has remained, English. The Lozi did not manage to
perpetuate their Protectorate in the form of a seceded post-colonial state
of Barotseland—an option seriously contemplated by many at the time
(cf. Mulford 1967; Caplan 1970), and still lurking around the corner
today—but had to accept integration within the Zambian state on terms
which were increasingly similar to those applying to other regions in the
Zambian territory. This meant that the Lozi, having increased their
ethnic and political domination over the Nkoya during most of the
colonial period, failed to capture the wider post-colonial state; their own
Lozi language was relegated, in political and administrative status, from
the supreme level of state language to an intermediate level as one of the
seven state-recognized regional languages under the hegemony of the
official national language, English. After 1964 it was the decline of Lozi
power at the national level that offered the Nkoya room to enhance their
linguistic status and their chieftaincies, to engage in ethnic organization
and cultural and ethno-historical revitalization, and to start, as an ethnic
group, on a centripetal movement vis-à-vis the nation state and its
development initiatives.
From the point of view of the redefinition of national political space,
the Botswana Kalanga trajectory has been fundamentally different: if
Tswana domination in south-west Kalangaland (i.e. north-east
Botswana) in the nineteenth century and under colonial Protectorate
Minority language, ethnicity and the state
163
conditions was rather similar to Lozi domination in Nkoyaland during
the same period, subsequent differences between the Nkoya and Kalanga
linguistic and ethnic trajectories owed much to the fact that (as a result
of international political and economic relations prevailing in the
subcontinent since the late nineteenth century, but also because of the
undeniable presence of a Tswana language majority over a huge part of
what today is Botswana and the Republic of South Africa) no
intermediate level emerged: the Tswana did capture the post-colonial
state of Botswana, managed to impose their language as the national
language for use in its state institutions along with English, retained
their hold on the state throughout the post-colonial period by a dexterous
utilization of democratic institutions and international esteem, and thus
ended up in a position incomparably more powerful than that of the Lozi
in Zambia today.
Tswana as a national and as a regional language
There is a clear contradiction between (1) Tswana as a national,
statebacked language on the one hand, and (2) Tswana as just
another regional language at the sub-national level of north-eastern
Botswana, spoken by Khurutshe locals and southern urban immigrants,
on the other.
This contradiction explains some of the inconsistencies in the
patterns of ethnic animosity (in everyday urban life), ethnic
accommodation (in everyday rural life, if my reading of the scanty
evidence at my disposal can be supported), transcendence of ethnic
opposition (in the religious domain), antagonism over language in the
formal political domain of party politics, and the failure of mass
mobilization over minority language issues and Kalanga ethnicity in
general. Tswana national political hegemony empowers speakers in
certain state-defined situations in north-eastern Botswana: BDP
politicians addressing a political rally, judges in the urban customary
court, civil servants in offices, schoolteachers, broadcasters; but
(because of the effective constitutional functioning of the Botswana
state, which makes it difficult to mobilize state power openly for
particularistic personal interests) such empowering is far less relevant in
the day-to-day contacts between urban neighbours who are ethnic
strangers, and between rural fellow-villagers who know that despite
their different tongues they have shared a local history for a century or
more. We must resist the temptation to consider ethnic phenomena in the
national political domain and those in the local domain as necessarily
converging on the same categories of ethnicity.
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Traditional rulers
Traditional rulers have played a very different role in the ethnic and
linguistic trajectories of the Nkoya and the Kalanga. Although Nkoya
perceptions cast the Lozi as their main ethnic enemies, the fact remains
that some Nkoya royal chieftainships survived the incorporation process,
and not as mere village headmen (as among the Kalanga), but as senior
members of the Lozi indigenous administration, sharing (albeit to a lesser
extent than their Lozi counterparts, and at the cost of considerable
contestation) in the financial proceeds of the 1900 Barotse Treaty and the
1964 Barotse Agreement. Nkoya chiefships have largely retained their
regalia, royal enclosure, palace, subsidized orchestra, and paid
councillors, throughout the colonial and post-colonial periods until
today.23 The creation of the Naliele Lozi court in the 1930s as a tangible
expression of Lozi internal colonization was greatly resented, but it
provided an administrative continuity when its Mankoya Native Authority
became Kaoma Rural Council, with the chiefs (or their Prime Ministers)
as appointed members—a situation again persisting today. Thus the chiefs
could continue to function as foci of cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and
historical identity, and at the same time act (in collusion with their junior
relatives: Nkoya modern politicians such as Kalaluka) as political brokers
bringing together their people and the state. Among the Botswana
Kalanga, Tswana domination effectively and from early on rooted up
everything of this nature, so local ethnic consciousness remained without
a traditional political focus, which might have served as a tangible
connexion with the splendid political history of the Kalanga over the past
500 years or more.
An important lesson is to be learned here in terms of the appreciation,
from the point of view of national integration and development, of the
potential role of ethnicity and of traditional leaders as foci of ethnic
consciousness. One cannot blindly generalize that all sub-national
identity is divisive and leads to centrifugal tendencies away from the
state—as has often been maintained both by African politicians and by
political scientists. Under specific circumstances, which empirical
sociological and historical research has to identify, the road to increased
participation in the state and its development efforts leads via ethnicity
and traditional leaders—as in the case of the Nkoya. One can only
speculate how different Botswana Kalanga ethnicity would have been
today if Ngwato hegemony had not eclipsed Kalanga traditional
leadership, or if the latter had been restored when the opportunity to do so
arose at Independence. My guess would be that Kalanga ethnicity in
Botswana might be more vocal and vital today and less of a backroom
Minority language, ethnicity and the state
165
middle-class pastime, that the status of the Kalanga language would have
been higher—so that a Kalanga élite could be more loyal to it, and that
Kalanga identity and Kalanga language would have developed into
respectable sub-national expressions with their own recognizably loyal
place in the Botswana nation state, as vehicles for qualified integration
rather than centrifugal disruption (as they are seen by the Tswana today).
It is for profound reasons that the position of Kalanga traditional rulers in
Botswana today is analogous to the position of the Kalanga language
today: powerless, peripheral, without organic place on the national scene.
And just as the 1980s have rediscovered the importance of traditional
rulers for an understanding of the contemporary African state and its
defects, it is likely that the near future will see the same for minority
languages.24
The state has a discourse not only on language, but also in
language
Given the three-tiered complexity of the Nkoya ethnic situation (local
level/Barotseland/national level) Nkoya ethnicity could grow to become
centripetal vis-à-vis the state; given the two-tiered make-up of the Kalanga
situation (local level/national level), Tswana capture of the state meant
that any Kalanga ethnicity opposing the Tswana would have to be
centrifugal vis-à-vis the state. This is an important reason why language
policy in Botswana is inflexible in a way it did not prove to be in Zambia.
Speaking Nkoya does not directly threaten the constitutional premises of
the Zambian state, but refusing to speak Tswana can very well be
interpreted as a subversive act. Of course, there is plenty of room for
semantic mystification here: it is only by sleight of hand that BDP
politicians manage to convince their audiences that (a) whoever is
constitutionally a Motswana25 (which includes all Botswana Kalanga
except the most recent immigrants), is (b) linguistically and ethnically a
Motswana (which leaves out 30 per cent of the citizens of Botswana), and
therefore (c) would not wish to speak any other language than Tswana!
Here we are confronted with the highly significant fact, often
overlooked in discussions of language policy and ethnicity, that the state
has a discourse not only on language, but also in language—so that the
premises of élite power are subjectively implied in the very social
constructs that, in terms of language policy, are being negotiated under the
pretence of disinterested objectivity. Language policy in Botswana may
formally be enacted in English documents, but it is largely prepared,
thought out, and discussed in Tswana.
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Central and Southern Africa
It is probably due more to naivety than to cunning that semantically
twisted syllogisms of the above kind are propounded time and again in the
national political discourse in Botswana: the identification of the
Botswana state with Tswana ethnicity and the Tswana language is
generally perceived by the actors as a social reality, and whoever
challenges that reality threatens to destroy all the undeniable blessings
which make Botswana stand out as a stable and affluent country in a lost
continent (cf. Good 1992). Whoever is loyal to these underlying premises,
and shows such loyalty by submitting to Tswana hegemony in public
behaviour, is apparently welcome to use whatever language he likes in the
privacy of his home. Of course, sophisticated Kalanga activists (like Dr
Maripe, or the lawyer Mosojane—member of a Kalanga royal family, BPP
presidential candidate in the 1984 national elections, BPP national
secretary, SPIL member, and in daily confrontation with the Botswana
state on behalf of his clients, in court and in correspondence with the
Registrar of Societies, etc.) have on numerous occasions pointed out the
constitutional flaws in this attitude (cf. Maripe 1987; National Executive
Council 1984, 1988), but to no avail. The fact that most of their fellowKalanga in the same educational and income bracket have chosen to
submit to Tswana hegemony is a major reason why the non-Kalanga state
élite can afford to ignore the principled constitutional argument and
perpetuate the existing language policy.
One country or two
Speaking of national political space, we also realize that the difference in
the Nkoya and Kalanga trajectories has to do with the concrete
geographical location of their speakers’ homelands on the map. For the
purpose of the present argument I have slightly simplified the Nkoya
situation so as to assume that all Nkoya speakers fall within Lozi
territory—ignoring the less prominent royal chieftaincies of Mwene
Momba and Mwene Kabulwebulwe outside Zambia’s Western Province; it
is no simplification however to maintain that the entire Nkoya-speaking
rural population is found in the heart-land of western Zambia. People
speaking languages close to Nkoya are found in southern Zaïre and in
eastern Angola (Mbwela, Ganguela), but present-day Nkoya speakers,
even their ethno-historical specialists, are virtually unaware of these
connexions which—as I have argued in detail elsewhere (van Binsbergen
1992a)—certainly do not inform their ethnic consciousness. Kalanga, by
contrast, is spoken in western and southern Zimbabwe as well as in
adjacent north-eastern Botswana. Without going into a discussion of
Zimbabwe Kalanga ethnic and linguistic accommodation to the other
Minority language, ethnicity and the state
167
Shona languages of that country, to Ndebele expansion since the
nineteenth century, to Tonga and other trans-Zambezian languages, it is
clear that the trajectory of Kalanga ethnicization, since the creation of the
Bechuanaland Protectorate and especially after Independence in 1966,
must be seen in the light of their incorporation into an entirely different
national political space. Botswana Kalanga define themselves not so
much—through inclusion—by reference to Zimbabwean Kalanga (with
whom they continue to entertain kinship, marital and ritual ties), but—
through opposition—to Botswana Tswana, particularly the Ngwato. This
must be part of the explanation why cultural and linguistic production
among the Zimbabwe Kalanga seems hardly to filter across the border and
why the exciting insights of Zimbabwean history (but relating to a time
when the Botswana/Zimbabwe border did not exist, and much of the
Kalangacentred state system lay in north-eastern Botswana) fail to be
incorporated in Botswana Kalanga consciousness. There is an additional
reason on the Zimbabwe side: although Kalanga is a western variant of
Shona, and the latter is the majority language (numerically and politically)
of Zimbabwe, the Kalanga language’s status in Zimbabwe (and hence its
organization and resources) is weak and problematic since it is identified,
by the political centre, with anti-ZANU tendencies in the (largely
Ndebele) south-west of the country. The Botswana/Zimbabwe border has
increasingly hardened into a real boundary, even to the extent of the
expansion and growth, to a level of considerable local autonomy, of
Botswana branches of the Mwali cult, which continues to have its centre in
the Matopos hills south-east of Bulawayo; the influence of this cult on
trans-border linguistic continuity may be limited since its personnel is
multi-ethnic and its archaic ritual language is not today’s Kalanga.
The Botswana Kalanga mainly speak the Lilima dialect, which is the
standard for SPIL and for the Kalanga Bible Translation Project of the
Lutheran church in Botswana. The insistence on a new Lilima
orthography, which (as arbitrary as all orthography) is emphatically
different from the Zimbabwean conventions, and the enormous investment
in the translation of the Bible into this dialect following this new
orthography (even when the New Testament is largely available in a 1929
translation; Ndebo 1985), must be understood as an attempt at manifest
localization or Botswana-ization: to claim and define a place for Botswana
Kalanga within the national political space of Botswana, with as little
reference as possible to a Zimbabwe which, in Botswana eyes, is poor,
conflictridden, criminal, violent, non-Tswana, in short subject to negative
stereotypes. There is a strong element of artificiality and uprootedness in
this accommodation to Botswana political space, and one cannot really be
surprised if the exercise has not, so far, led to the general cultural
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revitalization the White expatriate Lutheran missionaries had expected.
Instead the Kalanga Bible Translation Project (with close links with SPIL
in terms of personnel) is ridden with conflict over White control and
African initiative; as if the opportunity to put one’s ‘own’ language on the
Christian and publishing map, condescendingly offered by the
missionaries at great expense and effort, is not sufficiently redeeming in
its own right.
The objectification of language
Bible translation, among the Nkoya and the Botswana Kalanga, is an
example of the convergence between ideological expansion of a world
religion, and the linguistic and ethnic processes at the local level. The
Nkoya case shows the potential, the Kalanga case the limitations of this
convergence. What happens to a language when it is committed to writing,
pummelled into the desired orthographic shape, scrutinized for its
potential lexically and syntactically to convey the alien images of an
imported world religion with its alien theological classifications and
nuances? We have seen how this Christian/ethnic convergence in the
language process can be illuminated by the idea of a national political
space, in which the language is to claim and fill a specific niche given
prevailing political and language-policy conditions. However, the same
phenomenon could also (cf. Pardon & Furniss 1991) be described as
reification or objectification—at the hands of academic linguists,
missionary linguists, administrators and educationalists but also and
primarily at the hands of native speakers themselves (cf. Fabian 1986).
In the process, a language is named, standardized, variants become
perceived as dialects and subsumed under the general chosen name (a
form of hegemony in itself, but one we cannot go into here), and the
lexicon has to be deprived of some of its capacity endlessly to incorporate
new matter from adjacent language communities: for language defines
itself by opposition to other languages at the local scene, so some
linguistic forms will have to become marked as one’s own and others as
alien. More than any other part of institutionalized culture, language is
encoded in formal rules whose infringement can immediately cause
puzzlement, ridicule, rejection or a breakdown of communication among
listeners and readers. This capability of encoding and displaying identity
or alienness in social interaction, incidentally, must be one of the reasons
why, among all possible culturally produced materials, it is primarily
language on which ethnicity feeds and thrives. Lexical and syntactic
purism is one of the hallmarks of ethnicity. For example, when I edited the
Likota lya Bankoya manuscript in consultation with a few readers’
Minority language, ethnicity and the state
169
committees of native speakers of the Nkoya language, the latter insisted
that Rev. Shimunika’s Nkoya text be cleansed of all anglicisms and Loziisms, even when these were totally accepted in contemporary spoken
Nkoya and the ‘purer’ alternatives were felt to be awkward, obsolete or
not generally understood.
It is impossible to assign a definite starting date to the process of
linguistic objectification, even with reference to a specific language and
access to historical linguistic data. It is difficult to see how any language
could maintain a minimum stability and persistence over time, without
which it would not deserve the term language, if objectification did not
already exist in some inchoate form. One thing can be said in this
connexion, however: the model of the nation state, in which a unique
language coincides with state power, is alien to most pre-colonial African
contexts. Eighteenth and nineteenth century states in central western
Zambia outside the Zambezi flood plain were multilingual and
multiethnic; political power was not linguistically or ethnically marked to
the extent it was to be in the Lozi state; and there are indications that, as a
result, language boundaries were more fluid—as if the objectification
process was still in an early stage. Certainly the objectification process is
very much intensified in a context of political and economic
incorporation—the very cradle also of ethnicity.
When selected elements of collective symbolic production (e.g. a
language, a cult, a vision of the past) are drawn into the orbit of a group’s
identity formation in inter-ethnic relations, these elements tend to be
objectified to the extent of fossilization. For the social analyst like myself,
who is not a linguist, there is even the risk of overlooking the dynamics of
language and treating it as if it were an independent variable in the
ethnicization process, rather than being shaped itself in that very process.
Both Nkoya and Kalanga are relatively ancient linguistic presences in the
region where they are found today. A discussion of the historical linguistics
of these languages is beyond my competence, but it is important to realize
that we have identified at least two contexts in which objectification is
particularly manifest: when the language becomes a focus of an emerging
ethnic identity, and when language is committed to writing for the first time,
often in a context of the dissemination of a world religion.
Identity, commodity and proletarianization in the context of language
In the objectification process the named, standardized and purified
language becomes imbued with an ‘emotive relevance’, a socially
constructed sense of identity and of opposition vis-à-vis other, rival
expressions at the local and regional scene. It is for this reason that I
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Central and Southern Africa
cannot entirely go along with David Parkin’s otherwise illuminating idea
of approaching language objectification in Africa (specifically on the
Swahili coast) as a form of ‘commodification’: as if the language becomes
a commodity which is cut and dried, strictly demarcated and regulated like
an industrial product, freely exchangeable—and disposable—in a market
of money, power and prestige.
The ethnicization process, viewed here as the ideological and
organizational response to incorporation in a national political space,
inevitably implies alienation: identity has to be constructed only when it
has become problematic, in the face of the intrusion of an otherness so
massive and powerful that it can no longer be encapsulated by means of
the usual mechanisms through which the local society accommodates
newly-born members, in-marrying spouses, strayed travellers and other
isolated individuals. In the modern world, such alienation often springs
from material disempowerment, in the process of the imposition of alien
political power (e.g. the colonial state) and the world-wide penetration of
the capitalist mode of production. In the process people lose (give up,
often) much of what they then subsequently realize was once their own: a
supportive kinship system, expressive art forms, a symbolically powerful
and meaningful cosmological order. This is the familiar context for a
discussion of commodification (cf. van Binsbergen 1992b).
Perhaps in the final analysis, the Botswana Kalanga’s underplaying of
language, the submission to Tswana linguistic hegemony and the lack of
success of Kalanga ethnic mobilization along language lines, could be
explained in terms of the Kalanga language (in the highly proletarianized
situation of north-eastern Botswana) having become a commodity, easily
exchanged for another (Tswana) whose higher market value is undeniable.
In such a context one makes a fool of oneself if one publicly cherishes a
despised minority language as a vehicle for literary expression, or evokes
the splendour of a medieval state which has long since disappeared and
which cannot be linked in other than negative terms to the present
dominant group (the Tswana) in the local nation state.
Perhaps it is also as a result of proletarianization that Kalanga ethnicity
primarily expresses itself in the political domain rather than in the cultural,
literary, religious or ethno-historical domain. One of the most
disconcerting aspects of symbolic life in Botswana today is that local
historic (i.e. African) culture is largely absent from public life; it is
allowed to enter public discourse only in the very form (fossilized,
commodified) which Parkin stresses for language in the contemporary
context. In order to be acceptable for public consumption (I use this word
purposely) historical elements of African rural culture (e.g. the traditional
judicial process in the kgotla or village court, which features in official
Minority language, ethnicity and the state
171
discussions of the very different modern customary courts)26 have to be
selected, taken out of context, deprived of their meaning, reduced to
textbook truisms, and then added as harmless ornaments (as duly
processed packages of ‘identity’) to a consumerist life-style whose
principal reference group is the urban middle class of nearby South Africa,
known in detail through the media and personal exposure. The
prominence of this pattern among the Botswana population especially in
the urban areas is striking, even if we realize that the difference with other
African societies is only a matter of degree. The pattern’s contradictions
are particularly manifest in the racially-conscious environment of
Francistown (cf. van Binsbergen 1993). The problem is not that historical
African cultural forms—referring to a past rural order and its
contemporary partial survival, real or imaginary—are not there and do not
decisively inform people’s ideas and actions, but that they are largely
censored out of public discussion: they have gone underground, where
they are safe from harassment by dominant White culture and its local,
predominantly African representatives. The cult of the High God Mwali,
the place of ancestors in everyday and ritual life, healing cults, sorcery,
ritual violence, divination, the symbolic basis of family life and of
production and consumption—only at the cost of personal commitment
and patience greater than ordinarily required in other parts of the continent
is the expatriate researcher allowed a glimpse of the extent to which the
‘Kuwait of Africa’ shares in a general African cultural orientation. Under
such circumstances there is no premium on traditionalizing and
historicizing symbolic production as a channel for ethnic expression27 (the
path the Nkoya have taken): instead, one confronts the formally organized
texture of social power, in the thoroughly respectable, political domain,
which is seen to be organized along modern principles of rationality.
All this sounds like praise rather than criticism of Parkin’s idea. Yet,
especially in a context of alienation and proletarianization, powerlessness
in the face of an authoritarian state, and the shattering—in modern
migrants’ consciousness—of a village-orientated symbolic microcosm,
language for the native speaker tends to be the last refuge of owning and
belonging, of competence and identity. Cultural reconstruction and
revitalization, such as is at the root of many ethnic movements in the form
of literary and ethno-historical production, seeks to rebuild an imaginary
world of belonging in order to combat the disowning that characterizes the
ethnic group’s collective experience in the outside world. But while this is
eminently true for the Nkoya (whose language has been objectified, but
certainly not commodified), it is far less true for the Botswana Kalanga.
Straddling both urban and rural commitments, survival strategies and
cultural expressions, the Nkoya were never effectively proletarianized,
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Central and Southern Africa
and the viability of their rural culture and their language testifies to this.
But why have the Kalanga responded so very differently? Was it because
they have been much more effectively proletarianized, deprived of the
possibility of returning to any viable rural society, since land alienation,
over-grazing and drought have led to the collapse of the local ecosystem?
Or was it because, in their proletarianized condition, Kalanga success in
the modern world, away from the lost village, has been incomparably
greater than that of the Nkoya?
CONCLUSION: LANGUAGE POLICY AND DEVELOPMENT
Our argument has perhaps illuminated the role of language in the
trajectories of two African ethnic identities, but does it also contain a
lesson for language policy? One striking point which emerges is that
under similar conditions of withheld state recognition, the two languages,
Nkoya and Kalanga, and the ethnicities associated with them, have been
able to traverse such different paths while the formal language policy in
the respective countries remained unchanged. The existence of a
restrictive Zambian language policy did not prevent the Nkoya from
engaging in cultural and ethno-historical self-reconstruction, and on the
Kalanga side we have seen plenty of reasons why, even if Botswana’s
language policy had been less restrictive, it would have been unlikely that
the Kalanga would have produced a more enthusiastic ethnic and
linguistic response. The specific nature of the existing language policy
hardly explains what happened—instead, political and economic factors
cast much more light on the correspondences and differences between the
two cases.
In principle this means that the data presented in this paper do not in
themselves suggest a particular ideal form for a national language policy
in African states. The following remarks therefore, although inspired by
my research, are basically personal. Much as I love the two languages
discussed here, and would regret to see them disappear from the treasure
of universal human culture, I do not think that the only, or even best, way
to safeguard their future existence and to utilize their present potential for
self-expression, communication and citizen participation, is to include
them in a national level formal language policy. They must be
acknowledged and accommodated in policy, but only at the regional and
local level.
The following two situations bring out the dilemma:
1 a peasant farmer being forced to use any language other than his own in
first-line administrative, medical, judicial and developmental contact with
Minority language, ethnicity and the state
173
the state (a situation which, however common in both Zambia and
Botswana today, constitutes an infringement of his human dignity and
human rights, and effectively prevents him from citizen participation),
and
2 national level institutions (such as parliament, the university, the High
Court) being burdened with a multiplicity of languages, which may
boost ethnic pride but at enormous financial sacrifice and at the risk
of international isolation.
The latter even suggests that the national political space within which
ethnic and linguistic processes evolve (since this is the constitutionally
defined space for the legitimate exercise of state power), might very well
be too narrow for a meaningful language policy to be defined. Botswana,
with only one million inhabitants, has risked isolating itself from
international production and circulation in the intellectual, artistic, and
technological fields, by allowing Tswana to be used at the national level
beside English; Zambia’s policy, of not allowing the use of any African
language at the national level, seemed the better choice, but we have seen
how the decline of the state is forcing it to compromise in this respect.
When the costs of thwarted citizen participation and frustrated ethnic
pride at the local and regional level are weighed against the costs of
consistent plurality of official languages in politics and public
administration, formal education, industry, etc., we have to look for a
formula which balances efficiency with equity: a graded model which
insists on the use of one official language at the national level, while for
the regional and local level makes generous provision for the use,
preservation and propagation of such plurality of languages as actually
exists within the national boundaries. In this way basic human rights are
safeguarded; the obvious role of the mother tongue in alphabetization is
recognized (even for reasons of efficiency no modern state can afford to
waste the intellectual and technological potential of the youths who
happen to have a minority language as their mother tongue); the
requirements for effective local and regional communication in social,
cultural, religious and political matters—surely essential in a democratic
state—are met; and language-centred ethnic frustration is far less likely to
threaten the stability and integrity of the state.
In post-colonial Africa, and in the world at large today, there are
numerous examples to show that such a threat can be very real. A Kalanga
activist like Kwele liked to see the Kalanga case in the same light, and his
standard ethnic rhetoric included the phrase ‘or else the guns will speak’.
In the light of my analysis this prediction is, for the moment, somewhat
unrealistic, but the experience of humiliation, on which such utterances
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Central and Southern Africa
are based, is both undeniable and unnecessary, and deserves our concern
and our intellectual efforts.
The argument also has some bearing on the issue of development. In
the first place symbolic reconstruction and social revival at the local and
regional level—such as language-based ethnicization often entails—could
be recognized, more than is the case at present, as an essential element of
development. The practical design and implementation of a graded
unitary/pluralist language policy as advocated above would qualify for an
exciting form of development cooperation.
More often, however, development is conceived in terms of a
population’s increased economic opportunities. In this respect the lessons
of my analysis are far from straightforward. Among the Nkoya, the postcolonial state’s positive if partial and opportunist response to ethnic
aspirations (a package including language, traditional leaders, modern
representational bodies at the regional and national level) brought the
Nkoya much closer, not only to the state, but also to a modernizing
economy which is clearly developmental—even if most Nkoya villagers,
as yet, have not exactly benefited from this type of development. Among
the Botswana Kalanga, their relative access to a modernizing economy
and to the state (albeit not specifically as Kalanga) prevented their ethnic
and language aspirations from taking wing. In both cases one has the
feeling that the state’s formal language policy has remained rather
irrelevant since it failed to make provision for the local level of peasants
and poor urbanites; it is primarily at this local level (where plurality of
languages is a reality, especially in Africa) that development is realized, or
fails to be realized.
APPENDIX
Table 11.1 Nkoya and Kalanga compared
Table 11.1 (continued)
Table 11.1 (continued)
Table 11.1 (continued)
Table 11.1 (continued)
Table 11.1 (continued)
Minority language, ethnicity and the state
181
NOTES
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Fieldwork among the Zambian Nkoya was undertaken in 1972–4, and during
shorter visits in 1977, 1978, 1981, 1988, 1989 and 1992 (twice). Fieldwork
among the Kalanga of Botswana was undertaken in 1988–9 and during shorter
visits in 1990, 1991 and 1992 (twice). I am indebted to the African Studies
Centre, Leiden, for the most generous encouragement and financial support;
and to research participants, to assistants and Government officials in both
Zambia and Botswana and to members of my family, for invaluable
contributions to the research. An earlier version of this argument was presented
at the conference on ‘African languages, development and the state’, Centre of
African Studies (University of London) and EIDOS, London, April 1991; in
this context, I wish to thank the conference organizers, Richard Pardon and
Graham Furniss, and the participants, for stimulating discussions; and the
African Studies Centre, Leiden, for financing my participation. Rob
Buijtenhuijs made useful comments on an earlier draft.
Cf. Mitchell 1974, Epstein 1978, and references cited there; major recent
additions to this literature are in Vail 1989, including Robert Papstein’s (1989)
analysis of Luvale ethnicity which has considerable parallels with the Nkoya
case. I have given an overview of rural ethnicity studies on Zambia in van
Binsbergen 1985; 1992a deals with the interplay between twentieth-century
ethnicity and the production of images of the pre-colonial past.
Cf. Wilmsen 1988, 1989 and references cited there.
On the Nkoya, cf. Brown 1984; McCulloch 1951; van Binsbergen 1977, 1985,
1986, 1987, 1992a, 1992b; Clay 1945. On the Lozi and Barotseland (Western
Province, Western Zambia) in general, cf. Gluckman 1943, 1951, 1968; Prins
1980; Mutumba Mainga 1973; Stokes 1966; Caplan 1970. The only linguistic
publication specifically on the Nkoya language is Yasutoshi Yukawa 1987.
This is not only the Nkoya’s self-image (cf. van Binsbergen 1992a), but also
the opinion of, among others, the ethnologist McCulloch (1951:93) and the
linguist Fortune (1959:26).
Mwene: ‘ruler’; here: ‘queen’.
Induna: ‘office-bearer in the Lozi indigenous administration’.
Throughout the colonial period, those Nkoya royal chiefs whose chieftaincies
had survived functioned as members of the Lozi aristocracy and in this capacity
boasted their own courts; legal proceedings were by preference conducted in
Lozi, but the use of Nkoya was not ruled out. Shortly after Independence
(1964), the central state instituted Local Courts, with state-trained judges and
assessors who de jure were independent from the chief (not de facto, since they
were members of the local aristocracy and appointed in consultation with the
chief). At an unofficial level, below the Local Court each valley would continue
to have its court presided over by a senior member of the chiefs council;
proceedings there would mainly be in Nkoya. An interesting development in
Nkoyaland in the late 1980s was the spontaneous, but state-tolerated,
institution of mabombola ‘palaver’ courts at chiefs’ palaces, administering a
local customary law in the Nkoya language, but without any formal powers
beyond reconciliation; cf. van Binsbergen 1977.
Testamenta 1952. A list of published texts in the Nkoya language is given in
van Binsbergen 1992a:441ff.
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Central and Southern Africa
10 Mr J.Kalaluka is the son of a Lozi father and of a Nkoya mother, sister of
Mwene Timuna Kahare. On his career, cf. van Binsbergen 1992a.
11 Not to be confused with the South African political organization of the same
name, by which it was however inspired.
12 The Kalanga have received considerable ethnographic attention (especially in
the work of R.P.Werbner (e.g. 1970, 1971, 1975, 1989, 1990), but much work
remains to be done on their history (cf. Malikongwa and Ford 1979; Tapela
1976, 1982; von Sicard 1954). In recent years, the Botswana Kalanga have
been the subject of extensive oral-historical and especially archaeological
research by van Waarden (1988), and linguistic and ethnohistorical research by
Wentzel (1983). Fortune was the first to describe the Kalanga language
(Fortune 1949, 1956, 1969). Elements of Kalanga can also be found in the
classic works of Doke (1931a, 1931b, 1954); a very early wordlist is Weale
1893. A first impression of the historical data on Kalanga as a language can be
gleaned from Beach 1980: xi, 189, 243, 258–9, 265, 279 and passim. On ethnic
relations in the area, cf. Masale 1985; on rural land alienation, cf. Schapera
1943, 1971.
13 In the Botswana constitution, the section on the House of Chiefs is the only
part listing ethnic groups, and (as is clear from the context) exclusively with a
view to defining the composition of that House; these groups are: Ngwata,
Ngwaketse, Kwena, Tawana, Kgatla, Lete, Rolong and Tlokwa (Republic of
Botswana 1983).
14 For the place of these groups among the Tswana see Schapera 1952, 1984.
Khurutshe are a sub-group of the Hurutshe Tswana of neighbouring South
Africa; the Rolong Tswana also originate in South Africa but are now found on
both sides of the border in the south of Botswana. One particular, massive
category of immigrants had no impact of its own on the language situation
beyond swelling the numbers of the existing groups: labour migrants from
Zambia and Malawi for whom Francistown was a major stop-over between
South Africa and their homes, and many of whom settled permanently in and
around Francistown. While some have retained or assumed a distinct ethnic
identity (notably as ‘Rotse’, which refers to Barotseland), virtually all have
adopted Kalanga or Tswana as their language.
15 For an official reading of the episode, where its scope and violence are
relegated to minimum proportions, see Tlou & Campbell 1984. A recent
reading is Wylie 1991:162–72; also cf. Ramsay 1987. The topic is also
currently covered in work in progress by such prominent historians as
T.O.Ranger and N.Q.Parsons.
16 On the Mwali cult, cf. Blake-Thompson & Summers 1956; Daneel 1970;
Fortune 1973; Werbner 1989.
17 Which meanwhile has found its way into authoritative textbooks widely
available in Botswana, e.g. Tlou & Campbell 1984.
18 At present I have insufficient data on these developments in Zimbabwe. The
developments hinted at are far from recent. Already in the late 1950s Fortune
(1959:8) wrote with reference to Zimbabwe: ‘There are a number of Kalanga
and Lilima-speakers who are anxious to preserve and develop their language
and to have it as a medium in their junior schools’.
19 Registrar of Societies, Gaborone, file No. H 28/90/258; this society was
registered on 7 August 1984; also cf. van Binsbergen, in press.
Minority language, ethnicity and the state
183
20 Cf. Guthrie 1948; Fortune 1959; the continuity on the ground was repeatedly
brought out in a practical sense in the course of my anthropological and
historiographical field-work, when I found that my language skills, however
limited, in Nkoya or Kalanga enabled me to communicate, albeit defectively,
with local non-speakers of these languages.
21 There is an interesting concrete link between the Kalanga and the Nkoya
situations: in the second half of the nineteenth century the Wankie area, the
north-western extension of the Kalanga language region, was tributary to the
Kololo and subsequently the Luyana, so that Holub (1879) could list Kalanga
as another Barotse subject tribe.
22 For a related discussion of ethnicity in an idiom of space, cf. Amselle 1985.
23 This applies to the most senior Nkoya royal chiefs, Mwene Mutondo and
Mwene Kahare, of Kaoma district. Outside the district, and outside
Barotseland, the history of Mwene Kabulwebulwe and Mwene Momba has
been rather different, but then they never suffered Lozi incorporation to the
same degree as their Kaoma counterparts.
24 A point made by Richard Pardon at the conference where this paper was first
presented; also cf. van Binsbergen 1987.
25 The usual term, in Botswana English, to denote the personal nominative of
Tswanahood.
26 Cf. Roberts 1972.
27 On this point the Botswana situation as described has strong parallels with
present-day South Africa, and reflects such dilemmas of cultural and symbolic
reconstruction as have only very late in the liberation struggle gained explicit
recognition and respectability.
28 Not being a linguist, I include this entry only in order to allow those who are, to
identify the languages professionally. I am aware that the classification of
African languages has evolved greatly since Guthrie’s pioneering work
(Greenberg 1963; Alexandre 1972).
29 Fortune contests Guthrie’s classification even if it is close to Doke’s (1954):
‘There is need for a closer examination of the Nkoya-Mbwela languages,
scattered as they are, and influenced by others, it is at the moment impossible
to indicate the true position’ (Fortune 1959:27). Ohannessian & Kashoki’s
authoritative Language in Zambia regrettably does not reconsider this question
and comfortably classifies Nkoya in a group of its own (H, comprising such
minor dialectal variants as Nkoya, Lukolwe/Mbwela, Lushangi and Mashasha)
(Ohannessian & Kashoki 1978:20 and passim).
30 Also cf. Fortune 1959:8–9.
31 Cf. Kashoki 1978:20; van Binsbergen 1992a: 6; and references cited there.
32 Based on Picard 1987:5.
33 Guthrie (1948) classification S21.
34 Guthrie (1948) classification K21, which however does not seem to do justice
to the fact, well recognized by Fortune, that Lozi is ‘a mixture of Southern
Sotho and Luyana, now the lingua franca of Barotseland Protectorate and used
in all African courts. It is mainly Sotho in morphology but has a great number
of Luyana words which seems to be increasing…. The language Lozi, a
combination of Sotho and Luyana, grew up between 1869, the date of the
expulsion of the Kololo invaders, and 1919, at the Barotse court’ (Fortune
1959:41–2; cf. 1963). On Luyana, the original court language of the Luyana
kingdom with striking parallels with contemporary Nkoya, cf. Givon 1971.
184
Central and Southern Africa
35 This was the year of official registration; considering the amount of time
needed to prepare for official registration, the actual founding initiative dated
from 1981–2.
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Part III
East Africa
In addition to their regional concern with East Africa, the three papers in
this Part share a focus on speakers’ attitudes towards the languages that
they speak, and more specifically on how attitudes towards a speaker’s
own language are inflected by the relationships held to prevail between
that language and other languages of which the speaker is aware. These
relational attitudes are elements of wide-ranging, and changing political
and ideological, discourses about difference. In varied ways, each of the
papers embeds its discussion of the evaluation of language difference in
the broader contexts of ethnic, religious or political circumstance.
Schlee’s paper valuably contrasts with the following pair, more
centrally concerned with Swahili, insofar as one of the two languages he
discusses, Rendille, has generally not been subjected to the politicization
of language purity, although he notes that some missionary activity
encourages such a development. Oromo, by contrast, a language with
many times more speakers than Rendille, has become a political cause
(albeit more so for Ethiopian Oromo than the Kenyan Oromo speakers
among whom Schlee researched). Oromo and Rendille are perceived by
their neighbours as non-Islamic languages (compare Parkin below on
Swahili, Arabic and Kenyan vernaculars), yet both use some Islamic legal
terms in order, Schlee suggests, to suggest an ‘international’
comparability between Muslim custom and their own. In the remainder of
his paper he looks at loanwords exchanged between neighbouring
languages (especially Rendille, Oromo and Samburu) by virtue of mutual
political influence, as parts of youth cultures, or through the copying of
ritual or customary practices. In conclusion he remarks upon the
conventional character of different ways of classifying the languages in
his area and, where sources allow, advocates the study of suppressed
loanwords as a means of relating language change to past inter-ethnic
relations.
Blommaert’s account of discourse about Swahili in Tanzania goes
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some way towards meeting Schlee’s strictures. He examines the
metaphors of ‘development’ and ‘modernization’ applied to Kiswahili in
the pursuit of language development to enable teaching and technical
development in a national African language. These metaphors establish
unattainable goals, so that, for instance, Kiswahili scholars find
themselves continually forced to coin terms to replace English loanwords,
thus ensuring that the language is always in need of further development.
More generally, he argues that language development functions as part of
development discourse, changing as development agendas also change.
Such change occurs within the ‘hybrid coherence’ of policy in the postcolonial state. Discursive traditions about African languages in the postcolony have to deal with the relationship between African and colonial, or
now globalized, languages. Changing attitudes towards the
commensurability of languages, the borrowing or suppression of concepts
and terms, and towards translatability more generally cannot be
appreciated outside this context.
Blommaert’s discussion of the interrelationship between global and
local linguistic considerations in the context of secular development in
Tanzania finds a religious counterpart in Parkin’s extension of the idea of
diglossia in Kenya. Parkin examines how, even within a ‘single’ language
such as Kiswahili, the concept of ramifying diglossia illuminates the play
on ‘purity’ and ‘impurity’ which arises pervasively: within the relations
between a full knowledge of Arabic and the fragmentary knowledge of
many Kenyan Muslims, between Arabic and Swahili as languages,
between more and less Arabized forms of Kiswahili, and between
Kiswahili and Kenyan vernaculars. In common with Blommaert, Parkin
argues that the metaphor of ‘purity’ in Kenya (like that of ‘modernization’
in Tanzania) predicates a principled goal that is unattainable in practice by
virtue of the inflationary potential for further desire generated relationally
between languages and registers. Thus, Swahili can never become so
Arabized or modernized that ‘purity’ and ‘modernity’ cease to remain
desired goals.
These three papers share two focuses of recent anthropological
research to which we drew attention in our Introduction: each of the
authors uses fine-grained local research to discuss attitudes towards
language and language change, but they do this with deconstructive
unease concerning the identities of distinct languages and the metaphors
of authenticity, modernity, or purity employed to evaluate or encourage
their changing usages. Objectifications of language correlatively suppose
relations between languages, and these are never solely linguistic in a
narrow sense but cluster with other, strongly motivated, objectifications
(that are religious, political, economic and ethnic).
12 Loanwords in Oromo and
Rendille as a mirror of past
inter-ethnic relations
Günther Schlee
Wherever people meet in an inter-ethnic or international context either
they have to decide which language to use, or they find that the decision
has been made for them by conventions established earlier. This
conference, for instance, was held in English with some papers in
French—a common pattern for such events. Such choices are evidently
not determined by the sheer number of speakers a language has; were that
so, Chinese would be the dominant world language, and Russian and
German, the languages with the greatest number of speakers in Europe,
would have a more marked presence on the European scene than they do.
For a variety of reasons the history of language use has taken a different
course.
Such questions—who speaks which language, where, and in what
situations—have been emotionalized in Europe since the early nineteenth
century when nationalist values were attached to language. According to
Kummer, the inception of such processes has always involved the
formation of an ethnic intelligentsia, whose members define themselves in
contradistinction to an over-regional, supra-ethnic power, with another
ethnicity at its nucleus. The definition of an oppressed group, the
redescription of that group in cultural terms, and the perception of
language as the most important element and most practical indicator of
that culture then follow (Kummer 1990:267; Schlee forthcoming). This
politicization of language (which was one of the factors—albeit only a
‘superstructural’ one—in the disintegration of the Hapsburg and Ottoman
empires) has started to look somewhat old fashioned to Western
Europeans; but it can be be observed still in the backwaters of Europe, for
instance, in the on-going process of the ‘balkanization of the Balkans’
(Schlee 1985a), or when the representatives of the three Baltic republics
choose to hold their conferences through interpreters rather than speaking
Russian, the language of the only one remaining of the four continental
empires.
Lithuanian, Estonian and Latvian are small languages in the European
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context. From this perspective, the two languages about which I am going
to speak are also small languages: Oromo has about twenty million
speakers (more than all the Baltic and Finnish languages combined, but
fewer than Dutch or Rumanian). However, in the African context, this
many speakers makes Oromo one of the populous languages of the
continent, as well as the largest of Ethiopia, but not the official ‘national’
language. In Kenya, where there are approximately a further 190,000
speakers, Oromo is one of the more important local languages. Rendille,
the second language which concerns me, has no recognized national
status. Even primary literacy, which according to official directives should
be taught in every mother tongue, is hardly available in Rendille, for want
of teaching materials, which are only now being produced. Rendille has
about 20,000 speakers, which would be too few to survive in a network of
communication of the European type. In Africa, however, there are
hundreds of languages of similar size or smaller, and many of these, like
Rendille, are not threatened by imminent disappearance. Nonetheless, a
single change in external factors—a new road, or a mineral resource
discovered in the area—can affect the fate of such a small language
drastically.
From the European perspective which I adopt throughout as a heuristic
and contrastive device, one would expect that by virtue of their small size
and/or weak status (cf. Baxter 1978:288f) both Oromo and Rendille to be
fiercely defended by romantic ethnic élites. In the case of Oromo, the OLF
(Oromo Liberation Front) in Ethiopia does provide the ideological home
for such an ethnic intelligentsia striving for emancipation on the grounds
of cultural identity and linguistic unity. In Kenya, nothing of this sort
exists. Abdullahi Shongolo, a Moyale school-teacher, and myself are
working on a collection of Boran-Oromo tales and proverbs. Although this
is a typical task of ethnic intelligentsias during periods of romantic,
linguistic self-assertion (for instance, the Grimm brothers for German,
F.Mistral for Provençal, J.Dobrovsky, J.Jungmann, F.Palacký and
P.J.Šafarik for Czech and so on), we seem to have the field to ourselves.
Most Kenyan Oromo whom I know have a relaxed attitude towards their
language and are not engaged in any sort of cultural struggle.
The Rendille, similarly, are not defensive about their language. There
exists a high degree of bilingualism (involving Boran-Oromo in the north
and Samburu (Maa) in the south, as well as Swahili and English in the
contexts of formal education and migrant labour). Rendille is itself found
as a second language, learnt by traders who do not wish to impose either
Somali (which is closely related to Rendille) or Swahili (unrelated) on
their customers. The area inhabited primarily by Rendille mother tongue
speakers has been stable during the seventeen-year period of my own
Loanwords in Oromo and Rendille
193
observation. Heine’s prediction (1976:182–6; 1980:73ff) of a northward
shift of the southern border of the Rendille-speaking area has not come to
pass. He extrapolated this retreat of Rendille from the observation that the
older generation in the little southern town of Laisamis was predominantly
Rendille-speaking while the younger generation tended to speak
Samburu. But this situation seems to be in fluid equilibrium. Rendille
become Samburu speakers, but as they do so new Rendille speakers come
in. The area around Laisamis constitutes the southern gate of the Rendillespeaking area. The gate does not move; rather the people move through it,
leaving this southern boundary more or less stable.
The lack of defensiveness about language implies a lack of concern
with linguistic purity, another contrast with Europe and with Swahili
discussed by Parkin. The example of German is again instructive. Since
the Napoleonic wars German has been ‘cleansed’ of many French
loanwords. It is less remarkable that there has been such a policy than that
it has been partly successful, because language drift is typically resistant
to policy initiatives. Language changes usually occur in directions which
are unplanned and not desired by purists. But there are many French
loanwords which I heard used by the elderly when I was a child for which
one nowadays hears only ‘German’ replacements: for instance, trottoir—
‘pedestrian pathway’, now Bürgersteig; or, perron—(in real French quai)
‘railway platform’, now, Bahnsteig. The majority of remaining French
loanwords (some of which are rendered here in their German spellings)
have morally dubious or derogatory overtones: kokett, kokott, Filou,
Intrige, Bastard, Affäre, Kretin, Idiot, Separée, Negligé, Maitresse.
Because German has been cleansed of many traces of former French
domination, at least of those which reflect positive aspects of French
influence, it would be hardly possible to write a cultural history of German
and the Germans on the basis of the language as presently spoken; too
many traces of earlier conditions have been replaced by faked ‘German’
words, which look old in spite of their recent invention. But why should
one attempt to write about the history of German culture on the basis of
contemporary German language alone? For German, unlike Rendille and
Oromo, there is an abundance of documentation on the basis of which
history can be written, including the history of covering the traces of
French. For Oromo and Rendille, however, we are heavily reliant on the
present languages as a basis from which to deduce the history of their
speakers, since texts in earlier stages of these languages have not been
preserved. Rendille and Oromo have adopted loanwords from different
sources and from each other, and, so far, they have not been subjected to
purists cleansing them of these. Our reliance upon present-day language
as a source of historical reconstruction is both higher, because alternative
194
East Africa
sources are scarcer, and also more rewarding, because Oromo and
Rendille languages are richer depositories of past influences than, say,
German in its cleansed state.
Lately, missionaries from the Summer Institute of Linguistics have
started to teach their charges that they should use the ‘original’ Rendille
word whenever there are two words for the same thing. In their
dictionaries these missionaries transcribe Rendille words in the most
archaic, ‘original’ form they can find. Their reasons for doing this are
beyond the scope of the present paper; why people should go half-way
around the world to spread an ideology which is completely foreign to
local people and potentially destructive to their forms of organization,
and why they should do so in a form of the local language which is as
‘pure’ as their foreign mandibles are able to pronounce, are problems of
Anglo-Saxon, rather than, Rendille ethnography. Missionary language
cleansing has so far shown few effects; Rendille and Oromo continue to
incorporate loanwords into their languages, reshape them to fit their
phonemic systems, and so enrich their arsenal of wordshapes and are
able to differentiate more concepts. Discovering which words have been
borrowed from what languages, and to which semantic domains these
belong, can tell much about the past inter-ethnic attitudes, relative levels
of advancement in different fields of culture, fashions and power
relations.
Although one could deduce much of the history of the speakers of these
languages from their loanwords, I am not going to do this. I have already
reconstructed a deal of Oromo, Somali and Rendille history from other
sources (oral traditions, written sources, the comparison of cultural
elements like forms of livestock management, food avoidances,
calendrical systems and so on) and published the results elsewhere (Schlee
1989). Part of what I have to say about loanwords supports my previous
findings about ethnogenetic processes and past forms of interethnic
relations; what does not directly support my earlier analyses at least does
not contradict them. Much of the history I have reconstructed from other
source materials could also have been reconstructed from analysis of the
loanwords. It would have been nice to pretend to know less about the
history of the area in order to reconstruct it anew from another set of data,
but I cannot pretend to this sort of innocence and, therefore, present this
analysis of loanwords in the light of earlier findings.
The actors of this presentation, however, are new. I am going to
discuss the interactions between languages, while the actors of my
book (Schlee 1989) were clans. There, I described how clans split, and
how parts of the products of such splits merged again, and how
gradually during this process contemporary ethnicities emerged so that
Loanwords in Oromo and Rendille
195
the products of a clan fission could belong to different ethnic groups,
as clan brothers in different ‘tribes’. Many clans in this part of the
world are older than some of the ethnic groups. This implies that
earlier forms of a given language were not necessarily spoken
exclusively by the ancestors of their present-day speakers; they might
have been spoken by some groups whose descendants now speak
different languages, and some of those who speak a particular
language now may not have done so for long. Organizational and
linguistic units change their composition; individuals, clans and clan
fragments reaffiliate themselves. Some Oromo groups, like the Gabbra
and Sakuye, once spoke earlier varieties of Rendille or a similar
language, fragments of which are preserved as archaisms in prayers
(Schlee 1989:71, 144). Because I am going to discuss ordinary
language, my unit of study will be ‘a language’ and not ‘a group’. To
discuss who spoke a language and when, would complicate the
analysis beyond the scope of a single essay (for such a discussion cf.
Schlee 1987, 1989); however, because the point is germane to the
broader topic of this book, the distinction between the language and its
speakers at any moment needs to be kept in mind.
As in any play, the dramatis personae are introduced first. I list the
names of the interacting languages with some conventional names of
their respective sub-families and families, but without discussing the
relative linguistic distances between them. It is enough to say that they
are sufficiently different from one other not to be mutually intelligible to
monolingual speakers; we are dealing here with languages, at a rather
high level of difference, and not with dialects.
Oromo
Rendille
Arabic
Swahili
English
Samburu (Maa)
Lowland-East-Cushitic
Lowland-East-Cushitic
Semitic
Bantu
Germanic
Nilotic
Afroasiatic
Afroasiatic
Afroasiatic
Niger-Congo
Indo-European
Nilo-Saharan
ARABIC LOANWORDS IN OROMO AND RENDILLE
Jural terms
It requires some historical notes about the relationship of the two
linguistic communities with the Islamic world to appreciate why the
number of Arabic loanwords in Oromo and Rendille is remarkable.
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East Africa
The Oromo expansion of the sixteenth century took place at the
expense of both Christianity and Islam, which had already been
weakened by wars with each other. The most famous of these wars are
associated with the name of Ahmad Grany. The effects of Oromo
expansion in the north, which caused the decline of Muslim sultanates
at the southern fringe of the Christian Empire, are well known.
However, there are grounds for assuming that Oromo expansion from
their nuclear areas in what now is southern Ethiopia took place in all
directions at roughly the same time. Because of the absence of written
sources, we must rely heavily on oral traditions as far as forms and
consequences of the Oromo expansion into what is now Kenya are
concerned. Some traditions, told by Muslim Somali who are possibly
extrapolating their present-day values into the past, claim that their
ancestors had to flee the Boran, the most important Oromo group in the
south, because living together with them was made impossible by their
conflicting legal systems. The Muslims, of course, claim that their
ancestors abided by the shari’a, while the Boran imposed their own
laws on them in cases of inter-ethnic disagreement. (In internal
matters, of course, each group could follow its own rules and apply its
own conciliatory mechanisms. The idea of imposing a universal law
upon all the inhabitants of a given territory was to develop much later
and in a different part of the world (Schlee 1989:97).)
Some sources, however, claim that the Boran tried to convert the local
Somali, and Somali-like, populations under their domination to
‘paganism’ (hín-kufaar, Oromo, ex Arabic, ‘to become non-believers’)
(Schlee 1989:100). The Boran and Oromo culture and language in
general are, therefore, perceived by their Muslim neighbours as nonIslamic or even anti-Islamic forms of identity and expression. I have
even heard Somali refer to the Oromo language as the ‘language of the
Devil’. Boran (and Rendille) until recently conformed to this stereotype
of them by ridiculing Muslim practices (on ‘Galla’ who rejected the
message of Islam, see Huntingford 1955:11, 20; on the identification of
‘Galla’ with ‘pagans’ by outsiders, see Haberland 1963:258).
Despite the fact that some Somali and Somaloid groups (namely
certain parts of the Garreh and Ajuran) which had earlier undergone a
degree of Islamization have adopted Oromo language, and that some
Boran (the Waso Boran) and other Oromo (e.g. the ones on the Tana)
have converted to Islam in recent decades, being Boran stands for a nonIslamic social identity. The core of this identity is to be found in those
domains of law which regulate marriage, inheritance, and compensation
for torts, and thereby obstruct intermarriage between Muslim and nonMuslim communities and influence other forms of inter-ethnic relations.
Loanwords in Oromo and Rendille
197
The legal system is an element of the ‘surface’ of a culture—part of its
observable interface with other cultures. And, somewhat paradoxically,
in terms of social identity the surface is also the core: the outer, visible,
symbolically and interactionally relevant part is the most important part
of an identity. In order to study these matters adequately, we have to be
as superficial as we can, relegating apparently ‘deeper’, existential or
essential issues to a less important position.
Having located Boran customary law at the surface, which is also the
core, of a non-Islamic culture, we maybe surprised to learn that the name
of that institution derives from Arabic, Islamic legal terminology. It is
called aada Borana, from Ar. adat un, which refers to local customs and
legal practices which are tolerated in Muslim communities as long as
they are not in contradiction with the shari’a. Often adatun is of preIslamic origin. It makes perfect sense that Muslims should use this term
to refer to the Boran customary law, but why should the prototypical,
non-Islamic, traditionalists of the area themselves refer to the core of
their culture by a term of Arabo-Islamic derivation? And they do so
constantly; in apologetic speeches in a legal contest, when somebody
tries to legitimize his actions or claims, constant appeal is made to aada,
a word used in a solemn way, with an undertone of reverence and a
definitely moral ring.
The solution to the conundrum of an Arabic loanword which denotes
a core element of a non-Islamic culture is possibly to be found in our
earlier generalization—because the core is the surface. The aada Borana
was an ethnic institution that applied to nam Orma, Oromo people, but it
competed and coexisted in the wider inter-ethnic context with other legal
systems. The meta-level or, so to speak, international level at which
these systems met and interacted was pervaded by the influence of
Islamic civilization. By using a term of wider acceptance for their
customary law (one which, in fact, is understood from the Atlantic to
Indonesia, although the Oromo might normally have been unaware of
these geographical extremes), rather than a term derived from a Cushitic
root of more restricted currency, the Oromo implicitly acknowledged
that their law, however holy and God-given it might appear to them, was
only one of a plurality of systems of law used to regulate human affairs
in different places. They located their own customary law, aada Borana,
inside the wider framework of the general category of aada, or adatun as
such, the common denominator of systems of aada in different societies
and places.
Haberland points out that the roughly synonymous term sera is also
of Semitic origin: sar’at is the word for ‘law’ in Ge’ez (1963:226). By
talking about aada-sera, a common compound expression, the Boran
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appear to ensure that they will be understood by all their Semitic
neighbours.
As for the Rendille, I have shown (Schlee 1989:40, 91, 112–14, 225–
8) that, in spite of some Somali claims to the contrary, they are not a
recent offshoot from the modern Muslim Somali, but derive from an
early, pre-Islamic, Somali-like culture. As a collectivity, they have not
been Muslims at any time in their history. Their ritual calendar,
customary law, and camel management systems can all be shown to be of
non-Islamic origin, and even today Islam has spread only among an
urbanized minority of Rendille. Islam has not affected Rendille society
so much as it has those Rendille who have left their society (Schlee
1982). The Rendille word for ‘customary law’ is huggum, a derivate of
Arabic ?aqqun, and we may explain this usage in the same way as the case
of aada Borana, that is to say as an international idiom used for an aspect
of the interface between one culture and other cultures.
Another legal term common to Oromo and Rendille is alál, which is
mainly used for ‘full property’ as distinct from shared rights in
livestock, the various forms of which constitute a complex legal and
economic system (Spencer 1973:37–40; Schlee 1989:56–9). It is
further used for a ‘rightful’ wife, one’s legal offspring as opposed to
the hazards of biology, etc.; its Arabic etymon, ?alal, has a similar
range of meanings. Alál stands for everything which is proper and
allowed—from marriageable kin categories to meat from animals
which have been properly slaughtered (the Islamic equivalent of
kosher)—as opposed to haramun, ‘forbidden’ things.
The customary law of the Rendille is incompatible with the shari’a.
Without going into the details of marriage laws and inheritance rules,
what must be stressed here is that what is alál for a Rendille would not be
?alal for a Muslim Arab, nor vice versa. To transform one system of law
into the other, one would have to take away wives from their husbands
and to disown inheritors, because the rules concerning divorce,
remarriage and so forth, which determine who is married to whom and
who inherits from whom, differ in the two systems. However, the general
categories used for discussing right or wrong are part of an international
code. In a way one is reminded of Leach’s argument in Political Systems
of Highland Burma which stresses the existence in those ethnically
fragmented highlands of an inter-ethnic metasystem in which all the
cultural differences become meaningful at a higher level as boundary
markers and guidelines for specialization and interaction.1 In the case of
the Rendille and Oromo, who lived on the fringe of the Islamic world, it
was Arabic that provided some sort of common denominator for shared
categories.
Loanwords in Oromo and Rendille
199
Calendrical units and their names
The cultures derived from the PRS stratum (Proto-Rendille-Somali, cf.
Schlee 1989:31–5, 54–92) which comprise the Rendille and various
groups which have adopted Oromo speech since the sixteenth century,
share a calendar which has a solar year and a cycle of twelve, named,
empirical, lunar months. Unlike most other calendars, there is no attempt
to adjust one of these reckonings to the other. They also share a seven-day
week and a cycle of seven solar years, the units of which are identically
named. The seven-year period is also an important unit of measurement of
time in the various generation-set (gada) systems. Several units of the
calendar, including those resulting from a combination of features (a given
day of the week in a certain phase of the moon, etc.), are ascribed
propitious or unpropitious meanings, especially for activities involving
camels, which are the focal point of the cultures in question.
It is not difficult to recognize the names of the days of the week (and of
the years in the cycle of seven) as Arabic:
Rendille
Alasmin
Talaa’da
Arbah
Khamiis
Guma’d
Sab’di
Ahad
Oromo
Alsinin
Talasa
Arba
Kamis
Gumat
Sabdi
Ahad
Arabic
Yawm-ulIthnayni
Yawm-uth Thalatha’i
Yawm-ul Arba’a’i
Yawm-ul Khamiisi
Yawm-ul Jum’ati2
Yawm-us Sabti
Yawm-ul Ahadi
English
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
To decide whether this is a case of mere loanwords or of ‘loan things’ (the
borrowing of calendrical units along with the names for them), we have to
determine the origin of these cycles of seven.
The origin of the cycles of seven
We know that the seven-day week is of ancient oriental, specifically
Sumerian, origin. It has been diffused from there to Europe, where its
units were renamed according to the pantheons of the different branches
of the Indo-Europeans. In the absence of evidence for an alternative
origin, it is plausible that this same system of time reckoning was also
diffused into north-eastern Africa and became a cultural possession of the
PRS peoples. The question is when. In trying to answer this, we cannot pin
down particular centuries, but we can discuss two alternative gross
hypotheses:
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East Africa
Hypothesis 1 The cycles of seven represent an Arabo-Islamic influence;
therefore, the units of time reckoning derive from the same
source as the names used for them.
Hypothesis 2 The cycles of seven were already part of north-eastern
African cultures before Islam made its influence felt;
therefore, the units of time reckoning have been in the area
longer than the current names for them.
The following arguments support hypothesis 1.
a) The seven-day week is neither common Cushitic nor the only way of
classifying days in the area. The Boran recognise an additional cycle of
twenty-seven named days (ayaana) which is quite different from the sevenday week and not even a multiple of it. If the seven-day week was
established anciently in the area, one would expect it to have been more
generally accepted.
b) The names of the days, which are of Arabo-Islamic derivation, are
associated among one Oromo-speaking group, the Gabbra, with the custom
of giving children gender specific names, also of Arabic origin,
which correspond to their day of birth.
day of the week
Alsinin (Monday)
Talasa (Tuesday)
Arba (Wednesday)
Kamis (Thursday)
Gumat (Friday)
Sabdi (Saturday)
Ahad (Sunday)
boy’s name
Mammo (Mahmud,
Muhammad)
Isaako (Is’haq)
Ali (’Ali)
Umuro (’Umar)
Adan (Adam)
Abudo (’Abd…)
Ibrai (Ibrahim)
girl’s name
Midín
Talaso
Arbe
Kamme
Gumato
Sabdio
Aad
The names for boys obviously correspond to the Arabic names given in
brackets, and the names for girls are derived from the Arabic words, mostly
numerals, which also form the names of the days of the week.3 These
names are by no means the only personal names in use among the Gabbra.
There are others, of Boran origin, which, as is usual in many African
societies, refer to the circumstances of birth: like Diramo for a girl born
in the morning, or Tura (Latecomer) or Dullac (The Old One) for a boy
who kept his mother waiting a long time, perhaps following a series of
miscarriages or other reproductive mishaps. The association of Arabic
names for the days of the week with Muslim boys’ names may strengthen
the hypothesis of an Arabo-Islamic origin for the time-reckoning system
Loanwords in Oromo and Rendille
201
itself, although no similar link between personal names and the names of
weekdays is known to me from elsewhere in the Muslim world outside
north-east Africa.4
Other arguments support hypothesis 2.
a) One might argue that the cycle of seven days is an older feature of PRS
culture than the Arabic names given to the days because of the alternative
names and associated myths mentioned above cursorily. Tablino
(1980:79f) gives an almost full set of these names which now have widely
fallen into disuse. The only gap in his list is Thursday.5
ayaan ree
ayaan
worabesa
ayaan arba7
ayaan dabela
ayaan dikira
ayaan loon
ayaan gaala
‘the day of the smallstock’
‘the day of the hyena’6
Monday
Tuesday
‘the day of the elephant’
‘the day of the dabela elders’, or,
‘the day of the dikir chants’
‘the day of the cattle’
‘the day of the camel’
Wednesday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
While the association of Friday with ritual activities reminds one of Islam,
the remainder of this list is not only un-Islamic, but may even sound
slightly heterodox and blasphemous to Muslim ears,
b) The cycle of seven days is linked, as we have seen, to a cycle of
homonymous years which, being solar, have nothing to do with the Muslim
calendar which ignores the solar year and applies the name ‘year’ (sannatun)
to the cycle of twelve lunar months instead. One author derives the solar
year and the associated custom of dab shid, as the Somali call it, from
Iranian origins and assumes that they were established on African soil
during the Persian occupation of Zeila in the fifth century (Hunt 1951:9;
Lewis 1955:62). Two things we know for certain about this element of
the calendrical system is that it is non-Islamic, and that it is of some
antiquity among the Somali; Cerulli (1926:6) quotes an inscription on a
Mogadishu tombstone which allows the conclusion that the 22 August
1365 fell into a Saturday year. If we extrapolate the present-day Rendille
solar calendar, which is based on seasons, backwards, we come to the
conclusion that the year from the autumn rains 1364 to the autumn rains
1365 should have been a Sunday year. Possibly the old Somali have
counted the year from some other point of the solar cycle, or they just
have counted 365 days without adjustments for astronomical or
metereological events, as the Gabbra do. In this latter case, the difference
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East Africa
between any given day of this cycle and any given date of the Gregorian
calendar, which reckons with intercalary days, would grow at a rate of
twenty-five days per century. This would result in dates which are 150
days later in the Gregorian year six centuries ago. A third possible
explanation of this discrepancy would be that somebody, whether the
stonecutter or the PRS or Cerulli or myself, has made an error of one
year. Whatever the case, the system seems to have been in use in
Mogadishu in 1365, and to have been expressed in an inscription side by
side on the same tombstone with the date of a lunar Hijra year which gave
the chronological clue to Cerulli.
The reader may have noticed that I incline towards hypothesis 2, a preIslamic origin for the cycles of seven, but I admit that the supporting
evidence is not sufficiently conclusive to reject entirely the alternative
hypothesis of an Islamic origin.
Other Arabic loanwords in Rendille
Rendille is a Somaloid language. It would have been classified as a Somali
dialect had it been recorded in Somalia rather than in Kenya (Lamberti
1983:458–63); and the Rendille would have been regarded as a kind of
fringe-Somali if they had been Muslims at the beginning of the colonial
period, when such identities were relatively hardened by becoming
administrative categories. Not being Muslims, Rendille cannot be Somali,
because Islam is an integral part of Somali identity. Historically, however,
Rendille is a Somaloid language of the older and more ‘original’ kind; it
reflects the stage of the language before the massive incorporation of
Arabic loanwords which are characteristic of Somali. There are, however,
a number of Arabic loanwords some of which may have penetrated into
Rendille via Somali in recent times (although the contiguous Rendille/
Somali settlement area has been fissured by a wedge of Oromo speakers
since the sixteenth century). Other Arabic loanwords look older than this.
In Arabic, for example, ‘ajuz means ‘old woman’. The Somali form
?ajuus (more examples for ‘? ? can be found) has the same meaning and is
used with a great deal of reverence. In Rendille, however, hajuus means
‘slut’; it has undergone a change of meaning by acquiring a negative
connotation. Changes of meaning (if the basic meaning remains the same
and there is no doubt about the identity of the word) and changes of shape
(if corresponding to regular sound shifts) are indicators that a word has
had sufficient time to change and develop in a language. In the above
example, the fact that, unlike many recent loans in the speech of Islamized
Rendille, the word does not belong to the religious sphere, reinforces the
Loanwords in Oromo and Rendille
203
impression of antiquity. Today, Somali is no longer important as a source
of Arabic loanwords in Rendille; most recent Arabic loans get into
Rendille via Swahili and have a distinctly Swahili touch: siasa, adabu,
(ku)dharau. I give a few more examples of Arabic loans in Rendille which
look old to me, and leave it to my readers to judge whether they share my
impression.
Rendille
(h)araam
‘mean, greedy’
a-soom-a
‘I fast, spend the day
hungry (especially about
animals which cannot go
to pasture)
fara’d
‘horse’
Arabic
haramun, forbidden,
unclean’
sama yasumu,
‘to fast’
farasun, ‘horse’
THE LINGUISTIC ASSIMILATION OF SOMALOID GROUPS
BY THE OROMO AND OROMO LOANWORDS IN RENDILLE
Before the Oromo expansion of the sixteenth century, the PRS complex of
cultural features was associated with a Somali-like (Somaloid) language
or a cluster of related languages (dialects?) of Somaloid affiliation. The
Gabbra and Sakuye, now Oromo speakers, recall traditions of once having
a language of their own, and some sources specify that this language was
shared with the ancestral Rendille (for a more detailed account of this
history cf. Schlee 1989). Certain Ajuran and Garre also changed from
different varieties of Somali to the Oromo language. People became
Oromo speakers after political affiliation, the establishment of a
relationship (called tiriso) at the clan level with the dominant Oromo
group of the area, the Boran. Certain Boran influences, however, extended
even beyond this network of political and ritual relationships to affect the
Rendille, who successfully remained independent of the Boran, and paid a
high blood-toll for their independence by being constantly exposed to
Boran raids. Until now, the fact that some Somaloid groups have become
linguistically assimilated to the Oromo, leads to confused classifications
by outsiders with some strange administrative consequences. It has been
mainly on the grounds of language that administrators, anthropologists
and historians have always divided the peoples of the lowlands of the Horn
into the two broad categories ‘Galla’ and ‘Somali’. Language has barred
the view from other sub-systems of culture whose comparison would have
led to quite different categorizations.
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East Africa
Nevertheless we should not forget that linguistic links are strong and
that language, apart from being a means of communication, is the major
tool of the human mind. The tool of an artisan, although made by hand,
may make the hand in turn by training the grip and shaping the palm. In a
similar way language, our major tool of thought, may have an intricate
Humboldtian relationship of mutual stimulation with other aspects of the
human mind. Language is something very close to us.
Even more than the political links, which vary in strength and are
sometimes absent, it may be the community of the language that links
Oromo speakers together and makes them nam Orma, ‘Oromo people’.
The rich oral literature, the treasure of proverbs and the sophisticated
poetry are inexhaustible sources of intellectual inspiration and pleasure to
anyone who is lucky enough to be a speaker of this language.
The second sphere in which Oromo—in our case mainly Boran—
culture transcends the framework of the original Oromo is in political
organization. One can acquire features of a political organization in two
ways: by participating in it, or by copying it. The Alganna phratry of the
Gabbra, the Sakuye and the Ajuran (in certain phases) may been seen as an
extension of the Boran polity.8 Their jallabas, or age-set spokesmen, are
installed either directly by the qallu of one or the other Boran moiety, or
derive their authority from him by the fur ring of a sacrificial animal
which he sends to them as a sign of installation, even though the actual
choice of a spokesman may be made by others. The other Gabbra, who
independently install their age-set officials, copy Boran terminology and
many aspects of their political institutions. Their hayyus have the boku, or
sceptre, and the whip (licho) as symbols of power in the same way as the
Boran abba gada and hayyus. Their jallabas are also installed in office in
a similar fashion to those of the Boran.
The division between eebiftu (praying) or qallu lineages and lineages
which are not eebiftu, and therefore eligible as hayyu, is also shared by the
Boran (who oppose worr qallu to worr boku); however, this division is
probably not derived from the Boran culture but represents instead the
common original possession of both the PRS and the Boran cultures. The
Rendille, who show few Boran influences, also have this division; and
even Muslim Somali claim lineage-specific powers to heal, pray for, curse
and miraculously harm or kill others—although such powers are hardly
compatible with orthodox Islam.
Even among the Rendille, who have kept their original Somaloid
language, the Boran influence—although significantly weaker—should
not be underestimated. The Rendille use the Oromo term jaldab9 but,
given that their political system is quite distinct, with a different meaning.
It does not denote a specific office but a senior elder, an ‘old gentleman’ in
Loanwords in Oromo and Rendille
205
general.10 Like the Gabbra, the Rendille use certain Boran-type milk
vessels along with the Boran names for these. Madal (madala in Boran)
and jijo (cico in Boran) are milk containers made of plant fibres which are
plaited, or better sewn with a needle. This is by no means a marginal
feature because of the ritual functions of these vessels in the sorio and
almado ceremonies and their association with elderhood.11
SAMBURU (MAA) WORDS AND ITEMS IN RENDILLE
CULTURE AND LANGUAGE
Muslim traditions12 claim that the early Rendille were Muslims and were
forced by the Samburu to pierce their earlobes and to abandon Islam.
While there is no evidence to confirm that Islam was ever a core element
of Rendille culture, the second part of this tradition may contain some
truth. While other Cushites either pierce their earlobes (or, like the
Gabbra, just the right earlobe) enough to pass an earring through them,
or like the Muslim Somali do not pierce their ears at all, many Nilotes
(e.g. the Samburu, the Maasai, the Nandi and traditionally also their
Bantu neighbours, such as Kikuyu) broaden their earlobes with
successively larger plugs until, in elderhood, when these plugs have
been replaced by small metal earrings, their earlobes dangle down
almost to the shoulders.13 The name for the perforated ivory discs worn
as ear plugs by circumcised warriors, il-kaba, is Maa and probably
borrowed from the Samburu (il-kamba).14
Another feature shared with Nilotes and probably derived from them is
the removal of the two lower middle incisor teeth. These two features—
pierced and enlarged earlobes and the removal of two, and only two, lower
incisors15—are shared with the Rendille not only by the Samburu but by
the whole Maasai/Nandi cluster. 16 Apart from the Rendille, to my
knowledge, no Cushites share these features. This strengthens the
hypothesis of a Nilotic origin. The piercing of the earlobes and the
extraction (more precisely levering out) of the lower incisors are delayed
until puberty in the case of twins and breech-born children. Ear-piercing
in these cases is done with a ‘bleeding arrow’, made and blessed by a
blacksmith, instead of acacia thorns which are normally used for the
purpose. This custom applies to Rendille, Samburu and possibly others.
This is not to say that all manipulations on the body are common to the
Rendille and Samburu and borrowed from the latter. Some very
conspicuous features, like the incisions around the navel which make the
skin contract over it and leave a very small hole17 and the three pairs of
circular ornamental scars on the belly,18 are typical for Rendille men and
exclusive to them. Circumcision, socially the most important form of
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East Africa
ritual surgery, was probably an original Rendille custom, but many of the
details associated with it have been borrowed from the Samburu. The
institution as such seems to be of Cushitic origin and borrowed by some
Nilotes, while later elaborations on this theme may have been borrowed
back from the Nilotic Samburu by the Cushitic Rendille.
Proceeding outwards from the surface of the body to its cover—the
attire and hairdress—we can note that many items of warrior fashion, the
expression of the culminating phase of male vanity among the Rendille,19
are of Samburu origin and have Samburu names. The word for ‘red ochre’
il-karia (from ol-karia, pl. il-karian 20) which, mixed with fat, is so
liberally applied to hair and shoulders, is of Maa origin, and so are the
names for the various types of beads, e.g. in-gorowo which are worn as a
necklace, in-geri21 for the long chain of beads worn across the chest, ilkatar22 for beads worn as a bracelet, in-kantarre which are worn around
the ankles, and im-bageti for small red beads in general. The long plaited
hair, halhal, is referred to by a Rendille word (the Samburu would say ilmaasi), but is, nonetheless, an original feature of Samburu warriors, which
according to Spencer (1973:144) has been copied by the Rendille as
recently as the 1940s.
Just as the Samburu warriors for a while adopted the blue coiffure of
the Turkana and later abandoned it (Spencer 1973:152), so the Rendille
warriors, no less receptive to foreign influences than European youth
cultures, are presently at the height of a Samburu fad. To what extent
elements of this fashion will become stable elements of Rendille culture is
difficult to guess. Samburu youth culture, apart from bodily ornaments,
has affected the institution of premarital concubinage. Targén, the name
for a ram slaughtered by a warrior at the parental home of his girlfriend, is
a Samburu institution which was adopted at the same time as their
hairdress. This custom has replaced labardús, the milk which was
formerly given to the mother of the girl. The word and the object, labardús
(probably Samburu il-bardús) were also of Maa origin. Here we have a
case of Rendille replacing one Samburu custom with another.
Apart from the terminology of the youth culture, a number of other
words are common to Maa and Rendille. It is unclear in every case who
has borrowed these from whom, because early Nilotes borrowed terms
from Cushites, probably Somaloids (Fleming 1964:90f), a process which
gave rise to the similarities which later were used to justify the name
‘Nilo-Hamites’ (Schlee 1989:34f). Later borrowing from the Samburu is
obvious in the case of certain words which retain the Maa prefixes, en-and
ol-, as in- and il- in Rendille. Examples of Swahili words which seem to
have reached the Rendille via Samburu include:
Loanwords in Oromo and Rendille
il-banga
il-dawa
il-kasi
il-tuba
il-tukan
(Sw. panga)
(Sw. dawa)
(Sw. kazi)
(Sw. chupa)
(Sw. duka ex Ar. dakkanun)
207
‘matchet’
‘medicine’
‘work’
‘bottle’
‘shop’
Other examples include the key ideological concept, ‘respect’ (towards
one’s elders, towards those whom one avoids sexually) which is expressed
by a Samburu word, in-kanyit. En-aisugi23 snuff, Rendille neysugi, is an
important item of youth culture, and it is plausible on these grounds that
Rendille have borrowed it from Samburu.
The following similarities, some of which may be coincidental, are not
so easy to explain. The question whether all of them are cognates and, if
so, what was the direction of borrowing could be ascertained only by
closer linguistic comparison, also involving the distribution of these words
in other Nilotic and Cushitic languages. Somebody more familiar with
Maa than I may notice further similarities with Rendille.
Maa
Rendille
English
pa-supen24
ol-turrur
a-ipiri
ol-koroi
a-sik
suuji
o-sina
Subén
urur
bir-nan
karraw
sig-nán
suuj
sina
‘young ewe’
‘gathering, crowd’
‘to whisk, to kindle (fire)’
‘colobus monkey’
‘to rub’
‘ugly’
‘grief, sorrow’
While I find the above similarities difficult to explain, in the case of Maa
and Rendille kinship terminologies it seems obvious that the Rendille
have combined two terminologies—a Cushitic one, largely shared with
the Somali and Boran speakers, and the Nilotic Maa terminology—to
form a complex new terminology with a larger number of terms that allow
more semantic distinctions between relatives to be distinguished than in
either of the two source systems. In this process of combining two
terminologies, they must have changed their type of cousin terminology.
In the Cushitic languages most closely related to Rendille, kinship
terminologies have ‘descriptive’ and ‘Sudanese’ features. Rendille now
closely approximates the ‘Omaha’ type. Although nobody would claim
that there is an exact correspondence between Omaha terminologies and
patrilineal clan systems, this form of terminology and type of social
organization harmonize well, and Rendille kinship terminology is
pervaded by the logic of patrilineal clan organization. Similar ‘Omaha’
208
East Africa
systems can be found among the Nilotes. One can, therefore, assume that
the borrowing of Nilotic kinship terms went along with influence of
Nilotic ideas about social organization, and that the remaining Somaloid
terms changed their range of meaning to adjust to the new categories
(Schlee 1985b). Among the bilingual Ariaal, a transitional group between
Rendille and Samburu, much more Samburu culture is found. Some Ariaal
can be said to be not only bi-lingual but also bi-cultural.
Bearing in mind the numerous resemblances to the Samburu, not only
of the Ariaal but also of the ‘white’ Rendille, the inter-ethnic, Nilotic,
perspective adopted by Spencer in his 1973 book appears fully justified.
Spencer deals with ‘symbiosis’, exchange and integration between
Rendille and Samburu. The perspective I took (Schlee 1989) is neither
better nor worse than Spencer’s but simply different; I looked in the
opposite direction, north and north-east, and, therefore, discovered
similarities with other Cushites (rather than Nilotes), with whom Spencer
hardly deals at all. According to one set of criteria, we would group the
Rendille with other cultures deriving from the ancestral PRS stratum, a
relatively early stratum (pre-1500); an emphasis on more recent mutual
borrowings and on the fluidity of transition between them, would make
the Rendille/Ariaal/Samburu/Maasai as a whole appear to form a loose
unit. Different criteria thus lead to different classifications.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
It goes without saying that the material presented here is by no means
exhaustive. Far from covering all recorded loanwords in even one of the
languages discussed, I have not even discussed all types of loanword
relationships. For instance, Oromo loans in Somaloid languages have been
mentioned but not Somali loans in certain Oromo dialects and so on. A
major source language in recent times has been English. While many
English loanwords in Rendille are still a generational phenomenon and
limited to the slang of schoolchildren (‘Anglo-Rendille’), other
loanwords, particularly those associated with the military, are longer
standing. An example for the first type would be, gruuba kombleyn khabo
feranda sooromate—‘the group which has a complaint has come to sit on
the verandah’, in which all lexemes apart from frequent verbs are
(phonemically reinterpreted) English, while the grammatical morphemes
and the syntactic structures are Rendille. Rendille examples for the second
type would include, koblo ‘corporal’, and ambús ‘ambush’.
I have demonstrated that loanwords tell us much about history and
about past and present inter-ethnic relations, especially where linguistic
purity and language cleansing have not historically been a concern for
Loanwords in Oromo and Rendille
209
those we study. From the historical and anthropological points of view it
would be as interesting to study the process of elimination of loanwords
from a language and other forms of loss of vocabulary as it is to study
lexical growth and the incorporation of new words. We do not have old
linguistic documents for Oromo and Rendille in which we might find
words that are no longer used; the only linguistic witnesses of the past are
the words which exist now. Historians who work in archives have the same
problem, they have to base their reconstructions and interpretations on
sources which exist, knowing well that those which no longer exist
(especially those which have been actively suppressed but also those
which have been destroyed by selective neglect) might have been much
more interesting. So much about obliterated sources, defunct words and
the secrets of silence.
NOTES
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
This may not be quite the way Leach put it. I am using my own terms which,
however, are inspired by Leach (1954), Barth (1969) and many others; cf. also
Schlee (forthcoming).
That the ‘jim’ of this word reached Rendille and Oromo as ‘gim’, suggests a
route of diffusion via Egypt and the Sudan rather than from the Arabic Peninsula
via the Swahili coast. I do not have, however, any independent historical evidence
for such contacts.
In his, otherwise laudable, effort to analyse Gabbra personal names Tablino (1980–
1) fails to point out that this set of seven boys’ names is of Arabo-Islamic derivation.
In his view ‘l’esame morfologico-semantico delle singole forme resta da compiere’
(77).
The closest parallel which has been pointed out to me (by Gillian Hansford,
personal communication) is the Hausa custom of naming girls according to the
Arabic numerals denoting the days of the week on which they were born. (Outside
the Muslim world, examples for days of the week lending their names to human
beings can be found, for instance, among Asante and Chumburung speakers,
Hansford personal communication.) Robinson Crusoe, who calls his companion
Friday, also fits this pattern.
A set of names which is not etymologically related to the names of the week
but is, nevertheless, conventionally given in accordance with the day of the week
on which a child is born seems, however, to be rare. The Gabbra practice is the
only case of which I know. While both sets of elements (the names of the boys
and those of the days) are of Arabo-Islamic origin (a fact which would support
hypothesis 1), the association between them may be specific to the Gabbra.
I have departed from Tablino’s transcription in order to reflect my ideas about
vowel length.
Tablino here translates in the plural ‘il giorno delle iene’ for reasons unknown to
me.
Note the homonymity with the corresponding name based on an Arabic numeral.
Could ‘elephant’ here be a popular etymology of the Arabic numeral ‘four’? This
would let the name appear to be older than its association with an animal species,
210
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
East Africa
because something needs to be there before it can be interpreted. Mere coincidence
of sound cannot be excluded in this case.
The term ‘Boran’ has also been used in this wider sense by Goto (1972:1, 4) who
includes the Gabbra, Sakuye and Waat (‘Watta’) under this label.
Probably derived from some earlier stage of Boran, since in modern speech the
word has been phonetically simplified to jallab.
The situation seems to be similar in the case of Mursi. They also use the term
jalaba but, not having formalized offices like the Boran, they do so with reference
to men with the skill to make significant contributions to a debate by summing up
arguments and speeding up decisions (Turton 1975:174).
Cf. Schlee 1979:102, 113, 115f, 120, 123, 296f, 445.
Cf. Schlee 1989: chapter 4b.
For a graphic illustration see Schlee 1979:165.
Nowadays some warriors fashion pieces of plastic into ear plugs which are
indistinguishable to the eye from ivory ones. Uncircumcised boys are allowed to
wear only wooden plugs.
Other Nilotes may remove more teeth.
Cf. Huntingford 1969, on Nandi (37), on Kipsigis (52), on Dorobo of the North
Tinderet Forest (62), on Elgeyo (73), on Maasai (15). The Suk (15, 89), who
belong to the Maasai/Nandi cluster linguistically, are culturally more similar to
the Karamojong.
Cf. Spencer 1973:43f.
For a pictorial illustration cf. Schlee 1979:154.
In the mid-1970s, when mirrors were still rare among the Rendille, it often
happened that warriors admired themselves for hours in the rear-view mirror of
my motorcycle, applying minor corrections to their hairdress or red ochre makeup.
Cf. Mol’s (1978) Maa dictionary.
This is the Rendille pronounciation. Mol (1978) gives en-keri, pl. in-kerin, as the
Maa form.
Mol (1978) gives the Maa equivalent, ol-kataar, pl. il-kataari.
This and the following Maa terms are rendered in Mol’s (1978) spellings.
Ehret (1971:166; 1974:90) reconstructs *-supeni for Proto-Maasai (cf. Vossen
1982:98). Rottland (1982:432, 464) reconstructs supein for Proto-Kalenjin:
Omotic. This does not necessarily mean that the word is ultimately of Nilotic
origin since it is sabéen-tii (Abrahams 1964:213) in Somali. Ehret lists this word
as an Eastern Cushitic loan in Southern Nilotic (1971:110).
REFERENCES
Abrahams, R.C. (1964) Somali-English Dictionary, London: University of
London Press .
Barth, F. (ed.) (1969) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, London: G.Allen & Unwin.
Baxter, P.T.W. (1978) ‘Ethiopia’s unacknowledged problem: the Oromo’, African
Affairs 77, No. 308:283–96.
Cerulli, E. (1926) ‘Iscrizioni e documenti Arabi per la storia della Somalia’,
Rivista degli Studi Orientali II: 1–24.
Ehret, C. (1971) Southern Nilotic History, Evanston: Northwestern University
Press.
Loanwords in Oromo and Rendille
211
——(1974) Ethiopians and East Africans: the Problem of Contacts, Nairobi: East
African Publishing House (Historical Studies 3).
Fleming, H.C. (1964) ‘Baiso and Rendille: Somali outliers’, Rassegna di Studi
Etiopici 20:35–96.
Goto, S.G. (1972) ‘The Boran of Northern Kenya: origin, migrations and
settlements in the nineteenth century’, unpublished BA thesis, University of
Nairobi.
Haberland, E. (1963) Galla Süd-Äthiopiens, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
Heine, B. (1976) ‘Notes on the Rendille language (Kenya)’, Afrika und Übersee,
59(3):176–223.
Heine, B. (1980) (with W.J.G.Möhlig) Language and Dialect Atlas of Kenya, vol.
I Geographical and Historical Introduction, Berlin: Reimer.
Hunt, J.A. (1951) A General Survey of the Somaliland Protectorate 1944–50,
Colonial Development and Welfare Scheme, D. 484, London: Crown Agents
for the Colonies.
Huntingford, G.W.B. (1955) The Galla of Ethiopia, Ethnographic Survey of
Africa, North Eastern Africa, Part 2, London: International African Institute.
——(1969) The Southern Nilo-Hamites, Ethnographic Survey of Africa, East
Central Africa, Part 8, London: International African Institute.
Kummer, W. (1990) ‘Sprache und Kulturelle Identität’ in E.J.Dittrich and F.
O.Radtke (eds.) Ethnizität: Wissenschaften und Minderheiten, Opladen:
Westdeutscher Verlag.
Lamberti, M. (1983) ‘Die Somali-Dialekte: eine vergleichende Untersuchung’,
unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cologne.
Leach, E.R. (1954) Political Systems of Highland Burma, London: Athlone.
Lewis, I.M. (1955) Peoples of the Horn of Africa: Somali, Afar and Saho,
Ethnographic Survey of Africa, North-Eastern Africa, Part 1, London:
International African Institute.
Mol, F. (1978) Maa: a Dictionary of the Maasai Language and Folklore, Nairobi:
Marketing and Publishing Ltd.
Rottland, F. (1982) Die südnilotischen Sprachen, Berlin: Reimer.
Schlee, G. (1979) Das Glaubens- und Sozialsystem der Rendille: Kamelnomaden
Nordkenias, Berlin: Reimer.
——(1982) ‘Annahme und Ablehnung von Christentum und Islam bei den
Rendille in Nord-Kenia’, in Ostafrikanische Völker zwischen Mission und
Regierung, Erlangen: Lehrstuhl für Missionswissenschaften.
——(1985a) ‘Les nomades et l’État au nord du Kénia’, paper presented at the
Colloque Européan, Perspectives anthropologiques sur l’histoire africaine:
pouvoirs et État, Paris (also, Sociology of Development Research Centre,
Bielefeld: Working Paper No. 149).
——(1985b) ‘Sprache als Vermittler, Ausdruck und Inhalt kultureller Identität:
eine vergleichende semantische Untersuchung dreier kuschitischer Sprachen’,
SFB 214, Identität in Afrika, Berichtsband 1984/84, Universität Bayreuth.
——(1987) ‘Somaioid history: oral tradition, Kulturgeschichte and historical
linguistics in an area of Oromo/Somaloid interaction’, in H.Jungraithmayr and
W.W.Müller (eds), Proceedings of the Fourth International Hamito-Semitic
Congress, Marburg, September 1983, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.
——(1989) Identities on the Move: Clanship and Pastoralism in Northern Kenya,
Manchester: Manchester University Press and New York: St Martin’s Press.
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East Africa
—(forthcoming) ‘Ethnicity emblems, diacritical features, identity markers: some
East African examples’, in D.Brokensha (ed.) Oromo Studies and Other
Essays in Honour of Paul Baxter, Syracuse, NY: Foreign and Comparative
Studies/African Series 43.
Spencer, P. (1973) Nomads in Alliance: Symbiosis and Growth among the
Rendille and Samburu of Kenya, London: Oxford University Press.
Tablino, P. (1980) I Gabbra del Kenya, Bologna: EMI.
——(1980–1) ‘Nomi personali usati dai Gabbra del Kenya’, Rassegna di Studi
Etiopici 28:77–91.
Turton, D. (1975) ‘The relationship between oratory and the exercise of influence
among the Mursi’, in M.Bloch (ed.) Political Language and Oratory in
Traditional Society, London: Cambridge University Press.
Vossen, R. (1982) The Eastern Nilotes, Berlin: Reimer.
13 The metaphors of development
and modernization in Tanzanian
language policy and research
Jan Blommaert
INTRODUCTION
This paper aims to analyse the conceptual background against which an African
tradition of thinking about language, and working on language, has emerged.1
After Independence the Tanzanian Government introduced, stimulated and
promoted research by Tanzanians on the new national language Kiswahili
(Kihore 1976; Abdulaziz Mkilifi 1972). Gradually, the structures of Kiswahili
research and language planning, initiated by the German and British colonial
administrations (Wright 1965; Snoxall 1985), were adopted by Tanzanians, and
a new discourse on Kiswahili was developed.
I will concentrate on features of this new discourse, more precisely, on
two key metaphors consistently used since Independence to denote the
intention of the Tanzanian Government and parastatal research institutes
with regard to Kiswahili: ‘development’ and ‘modernization’. For this
purpose, I shall use the journal Kiswahili (formerly Swahili), published by
the Institute of Kiswahili Research (TUKI: Taasisi ya Uchunguzi wa
Kiswahili) of the University of Dar es Salaam as primary textual evidence.
TUKI is the official Kiswahili research centre, where priorities and
requests formulated by the Tanzanian authorities are implemented. It has
an advisory function, and all its proposals have to be sanctioned by the
Government body BAKITA (Baraza la Kiswahili la Taifa, ‘National
Kiswahili Council’). Proposed terminology, coined by TUKI researchers,
thus has to be approved by BAKITA officers before it can be
disseminated. The journal Kiswahili provides us with a picture of:
1 the types of research done on Kiswahili within the official Tanzanian
linguistic circles;
2 the way in which this research is being done, viz. by whom, with what
theoretical and methodological instruments, in what domains, and for
what purpose;
3 the general attitudes and ideology underlying linguistic research.
213
214
East Africa
When combined with some other papers published by TUKI researchers
elsewhere (thereby offering the advantage of explicitness), a fairly precise
(but, of course, not an exhaustive) picture can be drawn of the way in
which an ‘official’ tradition of linguistics emerges in the context of a
‘young’, third world state.
Underlying this paper is my conviction that linguistic or sociolinguistic
research on languages such as Kiswahili is part of third world studies, and
should thus be capable of offering a contribution to the study of crucial
development problems. Considering the tremendous socio-linguistic
complexity of African states, and the communication problems following
from it, this point should be abundantly clear.
THEORETICAL PRELIMINARIES
The type of research I am proposing aims, in general, to yield insights into
the emergence of new, local socio-cultural traditions by means of a
discourse-analytic approach. It should therefore be situated at the
disciplinary crossroads of anthropology, philology and history, where
scholars such as Foucault, Bakhtin and Ginzburg have been active. My
own approach is a kind of ‘historiography of text’, in the sense that I try to
uncover features of texts which indicate larger scale historical processes of
social genesis and change (see also Fabian 1990). I assume that
decolonization has been a critical historical moment for African societies,
in which a process of tremendous socio-cultural transformation was
started. This socio-cultural transformation also implied far-reaching
conceptual changes, in which ideas and attitudes about things such as the
political system, the state, and the role of the individual citizen therein,
drastically changed.
These processes of change were and are expressed in language, in
structured and coherent discursive patterns. With respect to the discourse
on Kiswahili, these patterns can be found in the journal Kiswahili.
Moreover, these patterns of talking about Kiswahili have a metalevel.
Apart from the way in which one talks about Kiswahili, the discourse will
reveal ideas, attitudes and assumptions about how Kiswahili should
function as a medium of social interaction in general. In other words, this
is a way of speaking about ways of speaking.
Concretely, my research will be guided by three assumptions:
1 The metaphors of ‘development’ and ‘modernization’ must be seen against
the background of an emerging tradition of Kiswahili science in Tanzania.
They are embedded in
a) a set of legitimate ways of speaking about Kiswahili;
Metaphors of development and modernization
215
b) a set of correspondences between reality and theory which creates the
basis for assessments of scientific ‘truth’ and knowledgeability;
c) a series of action procedures (specific forms of research) considered to
be in line with the emerging tradition.
2 This new tradition requires a model or archetype of Kiswahili linguistics
to provide the sources for constructing the tradition. Concretely, a specific
model of linguistic research must be reflected in the emergence of a local
linguistic tradition.
3 This new linguistic tradition has a larger scale dimension: that of the
emergence of a post-colonial African society in which new layers of
society, social structures, forms of knowledge and power and forms of
social action are generated.
THE CONTEXTUAL SEMANTICS OF DEVELOPMENT AND
MODERNIZATION
We can start this analysis with a definition of ‘language development’
given by David Massamba (1987a:180):2
We might say that language development is a deliberate move by a
social group (e.g. a nation) to adopt, choose from available dialects or
languages, or even invent a language for the sole purpose of equipping
it with the capability of being used as a medium of either instruction or
communication. In order for this end to be realized a number of factors
have to be considered seriously. These are factors such as Language
Policy, Language Planning and Language Modernization.
In the elaboration of this definition,3 Massamba sketches the following
procedural model. Language development is the overall term denoting a
three-step programme consisting of:
1 language policy, i.e. an elaborate statement of priorities formulated by
the nation;
2 language planning, i.e. the scientific translation of language policy into a
plan for scientific research;
3 language modernization, i.e. concrete steps undertaken by scholars within
the frame of language planning (cf. Massamba 1987a:181ff.)
Massamba strongly emphasizes the technocratic nature of language
development work, and complains about political interference in the
process. He then spells out three exemplary domains in which language
planning could and should be elaborated (1987a:183–4):
216
East Africa
1 language planning for pedagogic purposes, i.e. the production of adequate
textbooks and didactic materials for formal education in the target language
Kiswahili;
2 language planning for normative purposes, aimed at producing descriptive/
prescriptive grammars, dictionaries and orthography;
3 language planning for modernization, i.e. designed to ‘enable the language
to cope with modern technological advancement’.
The latter domain is further defined in these terms:
Language modernization may be defined as the development of a
language in a way that will enable it to express both new and
technological concepts. The most crucial aspect of language
modernization is the development of scientific and/or technical
neologisms. With new scientific and technological innovations and
inventions new concepts are bound to emerge. Hence the need for
terminology.
(Massamba 1987a:184)
From these extracts, we can deduce that ‘language development’ is
directed at three target areas: teaching materials, language standardization,
and ‘lexicological updating’. Moreover, all this is a technocratic and selfconscious undertaking, done by trained linguists in line with political
directives. ‘Modernization’ is a specific part of this programme, defined as
the creation of new Kiswahili terms for innovations in the field of science
and technology.
These recent definitions reflect a long history of thinking about and
working on Kiswahili. Massamba himself (1989:61ff.) refers to the first
white missionaries in the Tanganyika region, who in the second half of the
nineteenth century began to use Kiswahili ‘for their purposes’. Next, he
cites the 1925 British Education Commission for East Africa, which
recommended the ‘promotion’ of Kiswahili as a medium of primary
education throughout the British East African territories. These
recommendations gave rise to the Inter-Territorial Language Committee
(founded in 1930, later the East African Swahili Committee), whose
activities were continued by the TUKI in post-colonial Tanzania. So, there
seems to be a single historical thread (started by the British and continued
by the Tanzanians) leading to the ‘development’ of Kiswahili. All
activities past and present that resulted in a larger spread, an increase of
grammatical description or standardization, or literary production, are
captured under the term ‘development’. A close look at the agenda set for
the Inter-Territorial Language Committee (reviewed by Massamba
1989:62) reveals that, already by 1930, basically the same target areas for
Metaphors of development and modernization
217
language development were selected as the ones mentioned above. The
tasks formulated by the ITLC revolved around (1) the production of
Swahili teaching materials and (2) language standardization in general
(grammar, lexicography, orthography). The modernization bias proposed
by Massamba in 1987 is, however, absent.4 This ‘modernization’ aspect
must have evolved de facto, as an additional problem for another domain,
and chronologically much later in the history of Kiswahili language
development.
To find a reason for the prominence of ‘modernization’, we must look
into the debate on Tanzanian education and the role of Kiswahili therein
(see Mulokozi 1986 and 1991 for excellent surveys). From the early days
of independence onwards, education became a high priority for the
government led by Nyerere, a former schoolteacher himself. Problems at
all levels of education led him to propose a completely new education
policy in 1967. In line with the Arusha Declaration, in which the Ujamaa
policy was presented, Tanzanian education should be Elimu ya
Kujitegemea (‘Education for self-reliance’), i.e. a form of education
adapted to the local circumstances and the needs of the country. Education
had to be ‘Tanzanian’, that is, based upon Ujamaa principles and open to
all Tanzanian citizens (Morrison 1976:255ff). Evidently, completely
Swahilized education was foreseen, since Kiswahili was the only medium
of instruction that could guarantee a democratic distribution of knowledge
and an Africanization of thought.
Already by the early 1970s, it was realised that in order to be able to
teach in Kiswahili at a high level of scientific sophistication, adequate
equivalent Kiswahili terminology would be required. Optimism was great
in that period, and researchers at TUKI started to coin terms in domains
such as politics, social sciences, engineering, medicine, mathematics,
biology, physics, etc. Various procedures and techniques were used (see
Temu 1972 and 1984; MacWilliam 1985; Mutahi 1986; Mdee 1986;
Berwouts 1989), ranging from borrowings (from Arabic and English), to
phonological adaptation of internationally standardized terms, and
outright ‘assemblage’ on the basis of existing terminology.
Word-coining is, however, a very problematic activity, especially when
it is associated with a concept such as ‘modernization’. Basically, wordcoining involves translating already existing (mainly English)
terminology. Thus, ‘modernization’, in its word-coining reality, carries a
clear implication of backwardness, since ‘inventions’ are situated outside
the Swahili speech community. If Kiswahili, in Massamba’s terms, is to be
equipped with a capacity to function as a medium of scientific
communication, then in order to do so it has to rely on the translation of
previously introduced English or international terms. Thus, Kiswahili will
218
East Africa
obviously never be equivalent to English, since English will always be the
source language from which new terms are to be introduced. It will always
seem superior, and the modernization of Kiswahili will seem neverending. This eternal backlog of Kiswahili vis-à-vis the source language
English has in fact been used by the Tanzanian Government as an
argument to delay the introduction of Kiswahili as a medium of higher
education.
Similarly, the idea of ‘developing’ Kiswahili—which is consistently
defined as a ‘developing’ language by contrast to ‘developed’ languages such
as English, French or German (see Massamba 1987a and 1989, passim)—
must be frustrating in the long run. The reason for this is the assumption of a
model or a target inherent in the metaphor of development (see Blommaert
1990a). Apart from the relative absurdity of a distinction such as ‘developedunderdeveloped’ for natural, widespread languages, there is the simple
observation that a developed language is not a steady state object, but
something dynamic. An underdeveloped language can, therefore, never
become ‘developed’, since the ‘developed’ languages themselves develop
further. Kiswahili will, on the basis of this metaphorical scheme, never be able
to close the gap between its state of underdevelopment and the state of
development of languages such as English.
THE ALLEGORICAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE
DEVELOPMENT AND MODERNIZATION
The view of Kiswahili as an underdeveloped language in need of
modernization is an allegory of more general development attitudes
in Tanzania. The gradual shift from optimism to pessimism among
Tanzanian linguists (witnessed amongst others by Massamba 1989;
Mulokozi 1991) runs parallel to the evolution of the country’s
economic and social problems (see Blommaert & Gysels 1987:12ff).
The optimism of the early Ujamaa period is reflected in euphoric
papers by Tanzanian scholars and politicians.5 Kiswahili had become more
and more ‘Africanized’ as a scientific object. African authors largely
outnumbered westerners in the post-Arusha volumes of Kiswahili; an
increase of papers on Kiswahili in education was triggered by Nyerere’s
Elimu ya Kujitegemea (‘Education for self-reliance’) paper; language
planning as a general topic was the most prominent feature of Kiswahili
between 1969 and 1973. Around the same time, literary criticism of
Kiswahili literature had taken off, and the first papers began to appear in
Kiswahili.
From 1975 onwards, when the failure of Ujamaa began to dawn upon
the people, and when the Oil Crisis had severely struck the Tanzanian
Metaphors of development and modernization
219
economy, the tone and type of papers in Kiswahili drastically changed.
First, the volume of published material decreased. Far fewer papers were
published. Second, language planning papers virtually disappeared,
except for strongly apologetic papers on the education problem. Papers on
less ideologically biased subjects such as (descriptive) ethnolinguistics,
hardcore linguistics and literary analysis figured more prominently.
When in 1982, at the height of the economic crisis in Tanzania, Nyerere
declared that Swahilization of higher education would be postponed
indefinitely, researchers reacted as might have been expected. ‘Neutral’
papers on linguistics, literature and lexicography and apologetic papers on
the education problem continued to dominate the tables of contents of
Kiswahili. Isimujamii (‘sociolinguistics’) disappeared altogether as a
separate section of the journal. The only sociolinguistic papers were
assessments post hoc of language planning measures undertaken earlier
(e.g. Ohly 1982; Massamba 1987b).
Whereas, in the early days of Independence and after the Arusha
Declaration of 1967, Kiswahili was conceived as a motor of national
development and as the language of liberation and Africanhood, from
1974/1975 onwards attitudes towards its fiercest enemy, English, changed.
In line with the increased need for foreign economic support, English
regained respectability in the eyes of Tanzanian policy makers. Even
Nyerere, a champion of Kiswahili, declared in 1974 that ‘Tanzanians
would be foolish to reject English’ (quoted in Kihore 1976:50).
The association between economic developments and attitudes towards
Kiswahili is not only a matter of the historical facts. The linguistic
ideology governing Tanzanian linguistics after 1967 dictated a close
connection between language and socio-economic structures. The
growing impact of radical socialists on the University of Dar es Salaam
since 1966/1967 certainly contributed to the growth and elaboration of
this trend. This is most prominently articulated in Rajmund Ohly’s works
(especially 1978, but see also 1982). Ohly views language as a material
thing which can be manipulated, influenced and planned very much like
other material sectors of society (e.g. industrial production or agriculture).
Linguistics, to Ohly, seems to be a matter of assessing market demand,
then producing and marketing the product. Traces of this attitude can still
be found in Massamba’s ideas quoted above.
The pervasiveness of this linguistic materialism is sufficient to give the
impression that Kiswahili is the psychological correlate of general socioeconomic development. The same model is used in both instances;
especially since the end of the Nyerere era, the west (the English-speaking
world in particular) has become the model for development, just as
English is the model for Kiswahili language development. The refutation
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East Africa
of western recipes for development, contained in the Arusha Declaration,
caused a strong commitment to Kiswahili as a medium of education and
boosted Kiswahili research. The decline of this self-reliance ideology
during the second half of the 1970s triggered a decline in Kiswahili
research and an accentuation of the role of English as a model for
language development. The turn to the west in the early 1980s was
reflected in a radicalization of the Kiswahili-in-education debate (see e.g.
Mulokozi 1986 and 1991; Massamba 1989) and a continuing decline of
(especially socio-) linguistic research.
Thus, attitudes towards Kiswahili seem to be governed by more general
attitudes concerning the way out of underdevelopment. In the aftermath of
Ujamaa, papers expressing linguistic and cultural self-confidence were
abundant (e.g. Abdulaziz 1971; Abdulaziz Lodhi 1974; Akida 1974; Ansre
1977; Besha 1972; Kombo 1972; Mhina 1972 and 1977; Burhan Mkelle
1971; Mwangomango 1970). Papers such as Mwangomango (1970)
emphatically stressed the relationship between the teaching and correct
usage of Kiswahili, and the development of a truly independent unified
nation in which the vestiges of (British) colonialism would be eradicated.
Papers by western scholars who pointed out some difficulties in Tanzanian
language planning (e.g. Harries 1968) were severely attacked by local
scholars. This euphoria and radicalism vanishes from 1974 onwards, to be
replaced by more conservative and neutral papers. The second half of the
1980s (when the Swahilization project faded together with the Ujamaa
policy) generated papers such as Mulokozi’s (1986; 1991) and
Massamba’s (1987a; 1989), in which disappointment about the
development of language policy was expressed. It also generated an
increased importance for lexicography, the type of linguistic work in
which the frustrating ‘modernization’ metaphor and the role of English as
a model are most prominent.
SOURCES OF LINGUISTIC DISCOURSE
The discourse on Kiswahili, observable in the journal Kiswahili, is
somewhat hybrid. One substantial genre of papers has a curiously nonlinguistic tone from a linguist’s point of view. The authors of these papers,
who mostly deal with sociolinguistics (language planning) and literary
criticism, blend linguistic and ethnographic observations with strongly
ideological statements. Language planning measures are motivated by
means of ideological principles, as in this typical statement:
Therefore, in teaching Kiswahili, we should realize that we are waging
war against the colonial ideas. It is necessary that we teach Kiswahili in
Metaphors of development and modernization
221
order to ‘build’ [kuwajenga] young people who adhere to the ideas of
Ujamaa.
(Mwangomango 1970:33, translation mine)
To Mwangomango and to many others, the rationale for introducing
Kiswahili in education is its nationalistic character, which contrasts with
the connotations of colonial oppression attached to English. Another
argument in favour of the introduction of Kiswahili in education is the fact
that it is a truly African language—a point which many authors have
hammered home repeatedly. Papers on Kiswahili literature very often
adopt a kind of Négritude attitude. Literature is seen as evidence of the
cultural and intellectual equivalence of Africans with Europeans—a point
the authors of many papers apparently feel to be in need of demonstration
(see e.g. Balisidya 1987).
A second genre of papers in Kiswahili concerns core-grammatical or
phonological issues, mostly applications of existing grammatical/
phonological theories to Kiswahili or other Tanzanian languages (e.g.
Batibo 1987; Mukama 1978; Mazrui 1983). Theories such as systemic
grammar, lexicase and transformational grammar are adopted in their
standard versions, aspects of which are then applied to fragments of
Kiswahili grammar. Lexicography, a prominent interest, is characterized
by a pragmatic approach which keeps in touch with recent developments
in the field of lexicography and dictionary-making (e.g. MacWilliam
1984). But here again, an ideological undercurrent can be distinguished
(e.g. Temu 1984).
On the whole, Kiswahili oscillates between two extremes. On the one
hand, there is politically totally committed science, in which scientific
research is granted the status of political action. On the other hand, there is
politically totally uncommitted science, in which theoretical elegance,
detachment and, ultimately, a low degree of applicability seem to figure.
So at the one end of the spectrum there seems to be a scientific credo
which dictates that Kiswahili research is part of politics, while at the other
end is one which denies this connection and places high hopes on
empiricism, objectivism, and the most central approaches of western
linguistic science. Whereas the committed end of the spectrum could be
seen as maximally socioculturally embedded, the uncommitted end
aspires to a totally decontextualized nature (although, as I shall show, such
decontextualization is itself socio-culturally symptomatic). There is
nothing between the extremes: peripheral linguistic subjects such as
ethnography of speaking, interactional sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics,
pragmatics or discourse analysis, are virtually absent.
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East Africa
Two outside discourses can be connected to these features of Tanzanian
linguistic discourse:
1 on the one hand, Kiswahili linguistic discourse is linked to political
discourse, particularly to Ujamaa discourse (see Blommaert 1990b);
2 on the other hand, it is linked to positivistic, formalist linguistic discourse
in the structuralist-generativist tradition.
Again, we can recognize an allegory of the overall ideology of
development and modernization. Kiswahili linguistics is part of a general
development strategy outlined by Ujamaa policy, and closely follows its
historical track (first discourse). This development strategy is geared to
modernization, vide technologization. In this context, ‘high-tech’ is
intuitively associated with ‘modern’ linguistic theories within the formal
paradigm, provided these theories have demonstrated their usefulness
(second discourse). Hence the interest in successful widespread
theoretical models such as transformational grammar, and the absence of
more peripheral types of linguistics. Just as would be predicted by the
contextual semantics of ‘modernization’, Kiswahili linguists scrupulously
adopt successful western methods, since these methods represent
‘progress’ or ‘development’ in linguistics and thereby fit into the
‘development’ ideology governing linguistic research. Hardly any local
solutions are tried or tested; Kiswahili and the other local languages are
plied into existing, borrowed frameworks of western origin. The sources
of Kiswahili linguistic discourse prevent innovation in more than one way,
because the idea of development implies a foreign model, to be copied as
accurately as possible.
THE EMERGING TRADITION
The observations made above are symptoms of the emergence of a new
subcultural tradition of linguistic research in a post-colonial society. This
post-colonial society is, as Ali A.Mazrui (1967) noted, a weird, incoherent
construction in which concepts and definitions derived from the political
culture of the former colonial powers are blended with local African
socio-cultural structures. Concretely, the western concept of a nation state
was imposed upon societies which, in most instances, were historically
unprepared for it. There was a degree of incommensurability between the
new structure and the old reality. The consequences—extremely multiethnic societies, state boundaries cutting across ethnic territories, etc.—
are well known.
This historical moment must have caused far-reaching conceptual and
attitudinal shifts. I will speculate on four points, which I think are crucial
Metaphors of development and modernization
223
for a clearer understanding of emerging traditions in Africa:
1 Independent states had to be organized on the basis of western
parliamentary democratic structures. As a consequence, political parties
became a new power basis, superior to more traditional ones (tribes, clans,
etc.). Politics, in the newly independent African states, became a totally
new domain of thinking, discourse and action.
2 The system adopted by the newly independent states had always been a
negative system for Africans. The direct experience they had of the western
type of political and administrative organization derived from a century
of oppression by the colonial powers. Almost overnight, that very same
system had to be adopted as a positive thing: as the recipe for development,
modernization, freedom and prosperity.
3 Within the independent societies, identities changed drastically. In general,
yesterday’s oppressed became today’s rulers. More concretely, social
statuses hitherto precluded to Africans (bourgeoisie, intelligentsia, senior
civil servants, senior military personnel…) became accessible to Africans.
The distribution of forms of power and hegemony among groups of the
population changed radically.
4 The struggle for independence had boosted African nationalism and selfesteem. As a consequence, the newly acquired structures and identities
necessarily had to be ‘Africanized’. So states which were typologically
and structurally completely westernized still maintained or even cultivated
an African decorum.
These four points together constitute the conditions for a formidable field
of tension, conceptually as well as behaviourally. As a consequence, we
see the emergence of a number of hybrid cultural products bearing the
genetic traces of western structures and African customs, yet irreducible to
either, or indeed both. Obvious domains in which these new traditions
have emerged are African literature and African politics.6 I have tried to
demonstrate that the linguistic tradition which emerged in Tanzania after
Independence is a similar case of hybrid coherence. We notice the same
field of tension: on the one hand there is an attempt to make linguistics
more Tanzanian in nature and ideology, on the other hand there is the
identification of ‘progress’ and ‘modernization’ with the scrupulous
adoption of western canons, rules and methods.
As soon as linguistic research and language planning became
accessible to Tanzanians, the dilemma of Tanzanian linguists became that
of a trade-off between the need to become or remain ‘good linguists’ (i.e.
being capable of using state of the art linguistic theories and methods) and
the need to be so in a Tanzanian way, by making linguistics part of a
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East Africa
broader development strategy; more precisely, by making the ideological
basis of this general development strategy also part of their theoretical
linguistic apparatus. This resulted in a focus on applied linguistic work:
dictionary-making, writing teaching materials, etc. Therefore, Kiswahili
linguistics became strongly redefining in purpose: redefining the history,
structure, function and social significance of Kiswahili, thus adapting it to
the new reality of an independent state.
NOTES
1
2
3
4
5
6
Fieldwork on this topic was done at the Institute of Kiswahili Research of
the University of Dar es Salaam, 1989. I am indebted to Mugyabuso
Mulokozi, Yohani Msanjila, David Massamba and Shaaban Mlacha for
stimulating discussions on the subject. The opinions expressed in this paper
are, however, not all endorsed by the above-mentioned; I am solely
responsible for them. Part of the research for this paper was sponsored by
the Belgian National Fund for Collective Fundamental Research.
The papers by David Massamba quoted here (1987a, 1987b, 1989) were all
written during his directorship of TUKI; he was also the editor of
Kiswahili. His papers, therefore, have a strongly apologetic or
programmatic character.
It is interesting to note that the first part of the definition is quite odd from
a sociolinguistic or pragmatic point of view. First there is the ‘either/or’
construction: either a language serves as a medium of instruction (meaning,
presumably, that it is used in formal education) or it is used as a medium of
communication (which would entail that ‘instruction’ is not
communication, and that there are languages which do not serve as means
of communication). Second there is the ‘equipping it with the capability…’
phrase, which begs the question of how a language could not be equipped
with the capability to be used as a medium of communication, and if so,
how such a language could consciously be equipped with that capability.
The ‘modernization’ bias is also absent from the original agendas of TUKI
and BAKITA (see Massamba 1989:63–4). There is, however, a close link
between the activities of TUKI and ‘current and long-term development
plans’ in other areas. Most of the tasks given to both institutions are mainly
conservative (the correct usage of the language; descriptive studies) and
logistical (support in publications; encouragement to public usage of
Kiswahili). The continuity between present research and research
undertaken by the former colonial authorities is a recurrent feature in many
contemporary papers by Tanzanian linguists.
he data in this section were partly collected by An Stans. I am indebted to
her for letting me use this material.
With regard to African politics, the amazing amount of creative ideological
writings could be interpreted as a feature of the emergence of such a new
tradition. We have, to name just a few, N’Krumah’s ‘African Socialism’,
Nyerere’s ‘Ujamaa’, Senghor’s ‘Négritude’, Biya’s ‘libéralisme
communautaire’, Kenyatta’s ‘Harambee’, Moi’s ‘Nyayoism’ and Mobutu’s
‘authenticité’.
Metaphors of development and modernization
225
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Language in Society 1:197–213.
Akida, H. (1974) ‘Language for the coming generation of the scientific age in Tanzania’,
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Tijdschrift voor Sociak Wetenschappen 35, 1:66–73.
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discourse’, Discourse and Society 1, 2:115–31.
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72–83.
Fabian, J. (1990) History from Below, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Harries, L. (1968) ‘Swahili in modern East Africa’, in J.Fishman, C.Ferguson &
J.Das Gupta (eds.) Language Problems of Developing Nations, New York: Wiley
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——(1987b) ‘The effect of language modernization on the phonological system of
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——(1989) ‘An assessment of the development and modernization of the Kiswahili
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Mazrui, Al-Amin (1983) ‘The passive transformation in Swahili’, Kiswahili 50, 1 :
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14 Language, government and the
play on purity and impurity
Arabic, Swahili and the vernaculars in
Kenya
David Parkin
THE THEORETICAL BASIS
Among current tensions in anthropological theory (see Ulin 1991), there is
one that appears to be acting as a prolegomenon to a new synthesis. On the
one hand, there is the now rapidly fading postmodernist position, dating
especially from Lyotard (1984), that technological specialization and
compartmentalization in the modern world have shattered the universalist
illusions of grand theory and have broken it up into an infinitely
expanding number of relativized discourses. On the other hand, there is
the continuing influence of political economy, emanating from Taussig
(1980), Habermas (1981), Wolf (1982) and Mintz (1985), with its
insistence on global interconnectedness as the overall determining context
of human action, development and history. With regard to the synthesis, it
might be argued that the current experimentation with such conceptual
metaphors as global ‘creolization’ and ‘post-pluralism’ (meaning, in
effect, old-type oppositional pluralism, but with the constituent elements
now in communication with each other) is a blending of the postmodernist
concern with fragmentation and the universalist premise of political
economists that social formations are grounded historically in the
irreducible reality of human labour and the exchange of its products. In
this new synthesis, the products are, of course, seen as commodities,
whose principal feature is not that they have become alienated from their
producers in the classical Marxist sense (which is taken for granted), but
that they have become embedded in endless chains of consumerism,
whose proliferation is stimulated by the promise that they will return to
satisfy the equally endless desires of the producers-turned-consumers (cf.
Baudrillard 1972).
Language has also nowadays become commoditized to the extent that it
is commonly held up as the property of an ethnic or national group, class
and even caste, often regardless of how many members of the group speak
227
228
East Africa
it and whether they do so fluently. Thus, to take obvious examples
from Europe, there are many Basques, Bretons, Welsh and Poles of
German extraction whose identification with their purported ethnic
languages is more in their promise to speak it than in their current
proficiency but who are imperceptibly merged with those for whom
these are indeed first languages. There is, then, here an overall premise
of identification with the object, language, which is ontologically
central to some persons but only peripheral to others, even if desired
by them. The distinction between linguistic haves and have-nots
reproduces the motivating force in consumerism as all-pervasive or
global and yet highlights the fragmentary and fragmenting reality of
uneven linguistic distribution.
The point here is that language proficiency is only ever partial and
never evenly distributed. Among a close community of, say, native
English or Swahili speakers, there is always at some moment or other a
recognition that someone speaks the language more ‘fluently’ (or
‘elegantly’, ‘expressively’, ‘correctly’, or whatever is chosen as the
relevant criterion) than someone else. In direct comparison with other
purported speakers of the same language from another community,
however, the differences are dissolved in favour of an unambiguous
distinction between the different characteristics of each speech
community: ‘they speak a purer/less pure form than us’. Further
comparisons move from those of mutually intelligible dialects to
allegedly unintelligible ‘foreign’ languages, sometimes acknowledged
as related and sometimes as totally unconnected historically.
This segmentary feature of comparison underlines one of the
problems in a concept like ‘creolization’ which, by presupposing the
continuing interchangeability and recombination of new and old
elements within a growing synthesis, imposes a panchrony or
globalization over and above the fragmentary aspects of language use.
Language is commoditized but, like commodities in capitalist
consumerism, is held out at one level as potentially available to all who
desire it but at another level is in practice accessible in different forms
to separate and often specialized and privileged sectors of a
community.
Government policies on language diffusion and development
commonly presuppose an egalitarian distribution of the desired
language. We could hardly expect otherwise. Yet we are never surprised
that purported proficiency is in fact unevenly spread, as a result of
unequal educational opportunites, regional remoteness from the sources
of diffusion, and differential access incurred through differences of
status, gender, age and ethnic origin. This is one side of the problem of
Arabic, Swahili and the vernaculars in Kenya
229
linguistic engineering that confronts any government, particularly one in
Africa and Asia.
The other side is that which stems from the fact that, like a commodity,
a language can be believed to develop a life of its own. In other words,
there are processes of language dispersion which may exist independently
of government policy and even in defiance of it.
THE ARGUMENT WITH REFERENCE TO KENYA
I describe such a case on the Kenya coast with reference to the role of
Arabic both as a religious register and as having practical significance for
those who seek work in the Middle East. My aim is to show that language
viewed as a commodity may be ‘produced’ in schools according to formal
government programmes and yet may also flourish independently of such
factors, as if self-determining. I suggest that this is the same tension
implicit in the metaphor of global socio-cultural ‘creolization’, which
blends the idea of fragments of supposedly autonomous or specialized
knowledge with that of a universal interconnectedness of knowledge. I
further suggest that this obliges us to reconsider the linguistic concept of
diglossia as concerned not with discrete diatypes but as resting on the idea
of unattainable linguistic desire.
First, by way of general introduction, I describe the formal distribution
of languages in Kenya and the government’s broad policy with regard to
them. English is Kenya’s official language, while Swahili is its national
one. The official language, English, is prescribed as the medium of
instruction in schools, the state central bureaucracy and in parliament.
Although Swahili is much used informally in these contexts, and
sometimes formally, there is considerable use of English, reflecting
more generally the high competence in the language nationally
compared with the neighbouring countries of Tanzania, Uganda (where
more English is spoken than in Tanzania) and Ethiopia. Swahili is a
compulsory taught subject in schools but not a medium of instruction.
There are Swahili and English radio stations and newspapers. Swahili
radio is listened to much more than English, while English newspapers
sell more than Swahili ones. Television is mainly broadcast in English.
Most people use more Swahili for everyday issues in towns and in
ethnically mixed contexts than English. The ethnic vernaculars are not
taught in schools and are not used in any governmental context. They are
exclusively ethnic and domestic languages whose significance for
expressions of regional and local identity remain strong. They are
‘mother tongues’ while, for the vast majority of people, Swahili and
English are acquired second languages.
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East Africa
On the Kenya coast are people for whom Swahili is their first or
‘mother tongue’. Although now a numerical minority, the Swahilispeaking peoples and their rich, textualized culture have shaped coastal
society indelibly. Among these Swahili-speaking peoples are some who
regard themselves and are regarded by others as ‘Arabs’, and who can to
various degrees trace ancestry from the Middle East, principally either
the Hadhramaut (the so-called Hadhrami) or Oman (the Omani). Since
these ‘Arabs’ have migrated to East Africa in different waves over many
centuries, the concept of ‘Arab’ is a contestable one, shaped
nevertheless by the recognition that the most recent arrivals are likely to
be the most ‘Arab’.
Coastal East Africa up to a depth of ten miles inland was in fact a
British Protectorate ruled by the Sultan of Zanzibar, an Omani Arab, from
1895 to 1963. The hinterland of Kenya, but not its coastal strip, was a
British colony. In 1963 the coastal strip of Kenya and the hinterland, that
is to say the Kenya part of the Protectorate and the colony, became the
single, unitary republic of Kenya. Before 1963, Arabs and some non-Arab
Kenya coastal Muslims had campaigned for the political autonomy and
even independence of the coastal strip. They failed in their attempt and,
under the new African Government, became politically less active,
especially after the Zanzibar revolution in 1964 in which large numbers of
alleged ‘Arab’ landowners were massacred.
Their demands for regional autonomy were echoed by other so-called
minority peoples, and resulted, before 1963, in the formation of a political
party, the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), which wanted a
federal Kenya in which all regions would be represented. The opposition
party, the Kenya African National Union (KANU), in fact came to power.
It was dominated by the two large ethnic groups, the Kikuyu and the Luo,
and was opposed to federation. KADU disbanded itself shortly afterwards,
allegedly in the interests of national unity. Still later, in 1969, another
opposition party, the Kenya Peoples Union (KPU), was banned and some
years later, Kenya was declared a oneparty state.
Under the Kenya Government of KANU and Jomo Kenyatta from 1963
until 1978, the small minority of Arabs and Muslims received no special
privileges and, nowadays, will often claim that their coastal area, religious
institutions and schools suffered privations.
In 1978 Daniel arap Moi became president. Although chosen as head of
the KANU Government, he had previously been a prominent member of
the now disbanded federalist party, KADU. He was himself a member of
the minority group, the Kalenjin. He survived an abortive coup d’état in
1982, and it was widely reported that he and his government had been
saved by the commander of the Kenya armed forces, a Somali and
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231
Muslim, both minority categories. Whether Moi had already embarked on
a policy of covert federalism, or at least of appointing members of
minority groups to key positions, is speculative. After 1982, however, a
rapidly increasing number of such appointments were made. By 1990,
Moi was resisting calls for multi-party democracy on the grounds that this
would simply make it possible for the two large groups, the Kikuyu and
Luo, to regain control of the state and usher in ‘tribal’ (sic) conflict.
Coupled with his dispersal of political, fiscal, administrative and military
appointments, this was almost a formal acknowledgement that a kind of
federalism through adequate minority representation was being practised.
As a result of this quiet policy under Moi, Muslims saw themselves as
benefiting from a more equitable distribution of school places at all
levels of the system and of resources for the coast. Whereas under
Kenyatta, Muslims had felt insecure regarding their religion, they did
not do so under Moi. Money for mosques, madrasa, and bursaries to
study at mosque colleges in Kenya or the Middle East flowed in freely
from individuals resident in or linked to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the
Gulf Emirates, and Iran and Pakistan. Under Kenyatta, these inflows of
money had been questioned while under Moi there was little
interference, despite his own Christian beliefs. The general verdict both
of Muslims and the Arabs among them was that Moi valued them, as
members of a minority group like himself, for their political support, an
assumption that has been borne out by later events, including most
recently a change in the Kenya inheritance law which respects and takes
full account of the Islamic sharia.
During the late 1980s, an increasing number of Kenya coastal Muslims
returned from courses at Middle East theological, or heavily theological,
universities and mosque colleges. Schooled in a profound knowledge of
Islamic sharia, texts and the Arabic language, but uninstructed in the
secular subjects taught in Kenyan schools, such returnees had little
alternative but to teach in the proliferating rural and urban madrasa
(Islamic schools) which were being sponsored by benefactors, many from
or connected with the Middle East, Iran and Pakistan. A consequence was
not only an acceleration in the number of young persons able to receive
Islamic instruction, but also a revitalization of the Arabic language.
Previously in the madrasas, pupils had only ever learned to recite the
Koran, without understanding the language itself. The recent revival
changed all that, and Arabic became a language usable for religious but
also non-religious purposes. Accompanying this development was the
propensity of many young men of Hadhrami origin to seek work in Saudi
Arabia and other Gulf countries, many of whom also returned with a
spoken, if not literary, knowledge of Arabic.
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Traditionally, a notion of ‘Arabization’ had always been regarded as a
desirable feature of high Muslim status in coastal Kenya and other parts
of the former Protectorate. But few people could do more than recite
memorized passages from the Koran. From the early and, especially, the
mid-1980s onwards, ‘Arabization’ took on new meaning as enabling
creative communication in the language and not merely a phatic
religious communication.
Although still confined to a minority of Muslims, this new Arab
articulateness has accentuated the phatic and religious value of the
language among the mass of other Muslims. These latter aspire to
competence, however limited, in a language which, for them, has sacred
value as the ‘true’ language of Islam. There has always been this
reverence for Arabic among Muslims who could not speak it. Now,
however, their reverence is reinforced by the value placed on it by the
increasing number of young Muslims learning it as a full language.
In this development, Arabic has taken on the ambivalent qualities of a
commodity as I have described it. At the level of the new teachers of the
madrasa it is purveyed as a universal good which can be deployed in a
fuller understanding of Islamic texts and in communication with other
Islamic scholars, as well as for practical work purposes. At the
continuing level of the mass of Muslims, it exists in the fragments of
memorized Koran and in the desire on the part of individuals to know
more of the language and Islamic texts as sacred sources.
Arabic is thus developing a kind of internal diglossia which is not
however that of a formal versus informal kind, but rather that of
universalizing assumptions and productive efficacy, on the one hand,
and of individual, relativized, and incomplete linguistic knowledge on
the other hand. The difference is indeed reminiscent of that
distinguishing political economy and postmodernism.
Arabic is, however, inscribed in the values and uses of other elements
that make up its linguistic environment, principally Swahili. For, just as
the two sides of Arabic have a distinctive relationship to each other, so
do Arabic as a whole and Swahili. Arabic and Swahili are thus also
diglossic in the sense of the former being set apart as a diatype from the
latter. In addition, however, Swahili is also seen as at the beginning of a
desirable route to competence in Arabic: one desires in Swahili the
sacredness and ‘civilizing’ qualities ascribed to a full knowledge of
Arabic.
However, and this is where the logic of commodity consumerism
shows its falsity, while a full, proper and perfect command of Arabic is
the desired goal of Muslims, this is in practice never attainable. There is
always a better version, phrase or speaker, an unattainability which
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233
reinforces the sacred status of the language. Moreover, Swahili becomes
regarded in the same light: there is always a more ‘Arabized’ and
therefore more desirable form of Swahili one can speak. Diglossia is,
then, not concerned only with the delineation of linguistic diatypes on
the basis of formal communication contexts and status, as was
Ferguson’s original suggestion (1964) and as has become an accepted
basis of the concept. It arises out of a pursuit of linguistic forms which,
as in the desire for the endless proliferation of commodities in modern
capitalist consumerism, can never be satisfied.
ARABIC AND SACREDNESS
In embarking on this argument, let me take as my starting point the
relation between the Koran and the Arabic language. I begin with the early
and bold assertion by Guillaume that the Koran has a different holy status
from the Christian and Jewish Bibles. He claims that ‘textual criticism and
modern study have made it impossible for modern scholars’, apart from a
minority of fundamentalists, to hold the belief that God inspired every
word contained in the Bible. By contrast, he says:
in Islam the doctrine of the infallible word of God is an article of faith,
and the few who have questioned it have for the most part expressed
their doubts in enigmatic language, so as to leave themselves away of
retreat from a dangerous position.
(Guillaume 1956:55)
For Guillaume, these believed qualities of the Koran can only truly be
appreciated in its Arabic form or version. Since Guillaume wrote,
fundamentalism may have become a more marked feature of both
Christianity and Judaism, as it has also of Islam. Nevertheless, the
difference is one with which most researchers working in Islamic
communities will be familiar. The Koran in its Arabic form is held to be
unquestionably sacred or holy, and exegetical disagreements about it
among Muslim scholars appear to be relatively few.
Guillaume also mentions that the Koran must never rest beneath other
books, but always on top of them, that, when it is being read aloud,
listeners must never drink or smoke and must remain silent, and that it is
used to counter disease and disaster (Guillaume 1956:74). It is admired by
many Arabic speakers not only for its religious import, but also as a
literary work of poetry and prose and a source of wisdom through parables
as well as through assertion and command.
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This is the Koran basking in the idealism surrounding it. By contrast,
Gilsenan also emphasizes the authoritative element in the designation in
Islam of the Koran as the holiest of holy texts. Produced as it was during a
period when the masses were illiterate, any exegeses of the Holy Book
were the sole preserve of the few who could read it. As time went on, more
and more textual specialists would add their own, distinctive
commentaries on the Koran, piling sub-text upon sub-text and so making
it ever more difficult for the religious non-specialist, even if literate, to
dare to assume the right to a personal interpretation of the original version.
At the same time, as Gilsenan notes, any Muslim can in theory be accepted
into religious training and so, in due course, join the ranks of those
deemed qualified to comment on the Koran and on the texts it has spawned
(1982:31). The process of exclusion from, and of achieving the right to be
included among the scholarly ranks serves to perpetuate the hierarchy of
and respect for learning.
For those who do not reach this position of being able to offer such
textual commentary, particularly the illiterate, the holiness of the Koran as
text is metonymically re-cast as the sacredness of its Arabic script and of
the Arabic language, especially for those who don’t know it. Set down by
the Prophet himself as the proper language of the Koran and of Islam
(Chapter 12, verse 2; Chapter 41, verse 3, see Akinnaso and Ogunbiyi
1990:1), the sanctity of Arabic is of course a view shared by many
Muslims. It may become the basis of a political protest movement, as
when the Salafiya movement in Algeria based itself in the Arabic language
of the Koran, itself regarded as a miraculous creation, and fought French
cultural and linguistic hegemony (Gilsenan 1982:153).
In many parts of Africa today, the sacred status of Arabic may be
unquestioned, and its associated administrative and judicial functions
much valued, but this by itself does not always qualify it for inclusion in
school language education. As in Akinnaso and Ogunbiyi’s study of
language planning in Nigeria (1990), the secular educational position of
Arabic may be under constant threat despite its high religious standing.
ARABIC AND KISWAHILI IN EAST AFRICA: A STORY OF
HEGEMONY, ABSORPTION AND ALTERNATING FORTUNES
In the Kenya coast area, where I have worked, as elsewhere in African and
other Muslim communities, we meet some of the same general
characteristics, although, at the same time, there are also locally
distinctive aspects.
The East African coast, from Mogadishu to northern Mozambique and
mainly comprising the Kenya and Tanzania shorelines, has experienced
Arabic, Swahili and the vernaculars in Kenya
235
extensive Arab settlement over a period of centuries, mainly from the
Hadhramaut (now south Yemen) and Oman. Arab influence on the
language of the Swahili-speaking peoples of the east African coast
primarily takes the form of religious and legal idioms, those concerned
with courtly etiquette and behaviour and with evaluations of personal
morality, and with medical therapy allegedly derived from the Koran.
Amazingly, however, the Swahili language has remained resolutely Bantu
in most of its vocabulary, and in all its syntax and grammar. Wave after
wave of new Hadhrami and Omani Arab visitors settled at the coast. The
most recent tended to assume overall power. These new arrivals would, for
a generation or so, speak Arabic as their first tongue. However, after some
few generations, sometimes through intermarriage with Swahili women,
these Arabs would speak Swahili as their first language, gradually
forgetting their Arabic. Thus, the Arabic language remained the preserve
of whatever Arab élite was in power, while other, earlier groups would call
themselves Arab and recall Arab genealogies, sometimes recruiting a wife
from the Hadhramaut or Oman, but would themselves become Swahilispeaking.
It is for this reason that I.A.Salim prefers to refer to such peoples of the
coast, of both Arab and African descent, as Swahili-speaking (1973). At
any point in time, there would always be a small minority of East African
coastal people who spoke Arabic, but they and their descendants were
parties to a more general process of assimilation into Swahili language
and culture.
Indeed, two inverse processes of assimilation occurred and continue to
occur. One is the absorption into Swahili language and culture of peoples
of Arab origins; and the other is the assimilation of coastal peoples of
African and mixed descent into the various versions of Islam. These
varieties of Islam were, and still are, carried and propagated by Muslim
arrivals, who come, not just from the Hadhramaut and Oman but from
other areas of the Middle East, and also from Pakistan and India. Despite
such variations, most by far of East Africa’s Muslims are Sunni.
Islamic and Arabic identities have had oscillating fortunes in recent
generations. As mentioned above, in 1895 the British agreed with the
Omani Sultan of Zanzibar to recognise his sovereignty over the whole
East African coast up to a distance of sixteen kilometres inland (ten miles).
This ensured Muslim dominance over the coastal area with respect to
sharia law and land and property holdings. At about the same time, the
British curtailment of the slave trade ruined the productivity of Arab
plantations in the area, as agricultural labour became scarce. Tensions
between so-called ‘Arab’ landlords and ‘African’ plantation workers
(including ex-slaves) became severe, especially when the latter preferred
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East Africa
no longer to work for the landlords and simply to use the land as their own,
and were joined by new African migrants doing the same. Many of the exworkers had themselves adopted Islam, and so the Arab-African division
cut into the wider Islamic community.
If I may focus now on Kenya, Afro-Arab Muslim solidarity was
regained for a while in the years immediately preceding Kenya’s
independence in 1963. The various political movements seeking
coastal autonomy, principally that called Mwambao, emphasized
coastal interests over and above internal differences. They sought to
counter the growing influence of non-Muslim migrants from upcountry Kenya. In census and other population returns, the numbers of
respondents prepared to call themselves Arab and Swahili was
considerable. They were seemingly prepared to announce such ethnic
and Muslim identies unambiguously and with confidence.
Coastal autonomy was never achieved, however, and the area fell
under the political control of the new, independent non-Muslim
Government of President Jomo Kenyatta. Thereafter, the numbers of
people referring to themselves in official censuses as either Arab or
Swahili dropped markedly. Arabs might call themselves Swahili, and
Swahili who could trace non-Swahili African descent, e.g. Digo, would
refer to themselves as being of that African ethnic group.
Fortunes were, from the local viewpoint, reversed yet again from
1973 onwards, the year of the Arab-Israeli war. The war prompted a
huge increase in the price of Arab-produced oil. Large amounts of
money from the Middle East were poured into East African Islamic
communities, as part of the more general Arab attempt to proselytize
and expand Arab Muslim infuence. The money was for new or
refurbished mosques, scholarships for studying religious and other
subjects in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or elsewhere in the Middle East, and
for building schools in which Islamic as well as secular subjects would
be taught.
In one area in which I worked, the southern coastal area of Kilifi
district, several new mosques were built. They were rapidly followed
by new Pentecostal churches constructed with North American funds.
Visiting Arab Muslim scholars and American Christian missionaries
and teachers proselytized in open competition with each other.
Swahili, the language common to all communities, whether Muslim,
Christian or drawn from traditional African pantheistic religion,
became the medium of such proselytization.
At the same time, the new Arab money has encouraged young men of
Sunni persuasion to study in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or, if they have
Shi’ite links or are prepared to convert, in Iran. Paralleling this is the
Arabic, Swahili and the vernaculars in Kenya
237
new desire on the part of men of Hadhrami Arab origin to try to seek
work in Saudi Arabia and to go there as migrant workers. Both
influences have led to an increased knowledge of the Arabic language
among people who, as second and even first generation Kenyan
residents, had largely forgotten it.
Take, as an example, a Hadhrami family known to me (called Bawazir)
who live in Mombasa. They consist of three brothers, two sisters, various
cousins, and an aged father and mother. Two brothers run their own
businesses independently of each other. They are ship chandlers, with one
of them also trading to and from Uganda, where his wife lives nearly all
the time and where he also spends long periods. Their father arrived in
Mombasa from the Hadhramaut in the 1920s, where he immediately
began work as a water carrier. He built up a small business of water-selling
from this humble base, employing local people. He married a woman from
a local Hadhrami family, whose children, including the man’s wife, now
spoke only Swahili. As the couple produced children, these latter, too,
learned Swahili rather than Arabic, which their father himself had less and
less occasion to use. But the wheel has come full circle. While the sons
and daughter in the 1980s had Swahili as their mother tongue, the sons had
taken a renewed interest in converting their rudimentary knowledge of
Arabic into fluency. They saw this as another possible benefit of working
in Saudi Arabia. They also listened to Egyptian-produced videos of
Arabic-speaking stars of song and dance. They saw themselves as
becoming re-Arabized. An entailed part of this process was to attend the
mosque and pray five times a day, and to observe all other ritual demands.
They were conscious of themselves becoming integrated within the
strengthening stream of Islamic fundamentalism.
On the face of it, then, this recent process of re-Arabization among
Hadhrami families of recent origin, has a religious dimension. It entails
greater commitment to Islam. But what about those other Muslims, the
vast majority, who will not be going to Saudi Arabia, and for whom
Swahili continues to be the language with which they will continue for the
rest of their lives? How are they affected by the processes of reArabization and Islamic fundamentalism?
We can begin to answer this question by tracing the ties of the same
Hadhrami family, the Bawazir, to their locus among these other, non-Arab,
Swahili-speaking Muslims. Thus, the Bawazir Arabs, while having their
main residence and businesses in Mombasa, also run shops in rural, or
semi-urban, areas outside Mombasa. They run them through other
members of the family, namely a brother or cousin. The brother, whom I
first knew well, not only ran a shop in a rural centre (called Majengo), he
also attended the local Friday mosque, which had itself been set up with
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funds donated by a prominent Muslim of South Asian origin, who had
been to Mecca and was versed in Islamic learning.
This man, let us call him Mohammed, did not himself claim to be an
Islamic scholar nor yet to know much Arabic, but he was commonly
spoken of by local people as closer to God through his rudimentary
knowledge of Arabic and his intention to go to Saudi Arabia, both to
visit Mecca and to seek work. At local maulidi celebrations in honour
of the Prophet’s birth, he could explain to those who didn’t know them,
the meanings of portions of holy Arabic script taken from verses of the
Koran and imprinted on the large cloths used to create an enclosure, or
riyadha, round the men participating in the ceremony and between the
men inside and the women outside.
The same veneration is accorded to those maalims and Muslim
healers who take paper containing verses of the Koran written in
Arabic and use it for both preventive and curative medicine. A piece of
paper containing the requisite verse may be wrapped securely in a
piece of cloth or leather and worn as an amulet. Or, Arabic verse may
be written on, say, a slate or piece of glass, and then washed off with
water, which is then drunk by the client seeking cure, good fortune, or
an end to illness or misfortune. This use of the Koran to make
talismans is well known throughout the Muslim world.
Here, in the coastal area of Kenya in which I worked, southern Kilifi
district, these practices serve as a device to illustrate the extraordinary
value given both to the utility and grandeur of a speaking knowledge of
Arabic, and to the language’s mystical powers. The people in the area
do not on the whole themselves speak Arabic, although certain of their
maalims may have anything from a smattering to a good command. Let
us call them the Swahili, an appellation which is a crude, but useful,
shorthand label. To repeat, the number of permanent residents in
Kenya who speak Arabic is very small, but they represent the
possibilities that are available to any pious Muslim scholar, Arab or
Swahili, to study Islam and the Arabic language.
There are many other ways in which I could show the local people’s
view of the sacredness both of the Koran and of the Arabic script,
especially when taken from the Koran. This veneration of the Holy
Book and its script percolates down and takes the form also of a
preeminence accorded to Arabic itself, as a whole language. It further
serves to denote the life-style of high-status Muslims, including Arabs
originating from or having spent time in the Middle East. There is in
fact a Swahili verb, ku-staarabu or ku-staarabika, which means to
acquire understanding, wisdom and civilization, and which is
Arabic, Swahili and the vernaculars in Kenya
239
sometimes taken to be derived etymologically from the idea of
becoming Arabized.
None of this is to say that, as individuals, persons designated as Arabs
are unconditionally accorded respect. They, like anyone else, must
demonstrate good manners (adabu), humility and piety, in order to earn
respect. It is rather that such people are potential carriers of a line that
reaches back to the heart and origins of Islam. This is an idea most explicit
in the designation of certain Hadhrami agnatic lines as containing Sharifs,
or Sayyids, who claim descent from the Prophet. The idea of Arabness, as
fused with the sanctity of the Arabic language, thus provides a model to be
aimed at. Some Swahili aim to marry their daughters to men regarded as
‘Arab’, while the high-status form of Swahili marriage is itself said to be
of Arabic origin.
Institutions and roles may also be characterized by local people as
either ‘Arabic’ or ‘Swahili’. Thus, people distinguish between Arabic
and Swahili maulidi, diviners, marriages, and life-styles. For example,
an Arabic maulidi opens up with Arabic prayers. Its verses, also called
maulidi (i.e. as well as the overall ceremony) are long-established ones
originally composed in Arabic, and in at least one case still untranslated
into Swahili. In some cases they are verses on the life of the Prophet
taken from the Koran. Such maulidi are relatively formal. By contrast,
the so-called Swahili maulidi begin with prayers said in Swahili, while
Arabic may not be used at all in the proceedings. The sung maulidi
verses are not only in Swahili but are commonly made up specially for
the occasion, and even created spontaneously on the spot, rather than
being of ancient origin. Moreover, the Arabic maulidi ceremonies are
said also to be larger than the Swahili ones, an observation that is
broadly correct, as far as I can judge.
The larger and more important maulidi sermons contain a much higher
proportion of Swahili words of Arabic origin than the smaller ones. On
one occasion, at the prominent maulidi ceremony held at Takaungu in
1978, not only I but also some of the Swahili speakers who accompanied
me, were baffled by certain highly Arabized passages as presented by the
sermon giver, namely the then Chief Kadhi of Kenya, Sheikh A.S.AlFarsy. Ironically, it was Al-Farsy who had produced one of the best
Swahili translations of the Koran. The irony to which I refer is that AlFarsy could, on the one hand, provide the non-Arabic speaking masses
with a Swahili version of the Koran which they could read, and yet could
also present a sermon before thousands of the same people which not all
could fully understand. An authoritative Muslim response, which I heard
once or twice from maalims, was that this was a deliberate and wise ploy
on his part to underline how necessary it was to have children and adults
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East Africa
learn to read, write and understand Arabic, for then they would have direct
and full access to the wisdom and purity of Islam. Did not the Prophet
describe the Koran as ‘A book whereof the verses are explained in detail—
a Qur’an in Arabic for a people who understand’ (chapter 41, verse 3 of
the Koran. Cited from Akinnaso and Ogunbiyi 1990:1)?
The linking of wisdom and understanding with purity, and of these with
piety, is, of course, common in Islamic pronouncements. To be pious is to
achieve understanding, and this is to achieve purity. But how widespread
in Kenya is the view that this is in practice only fully possible through a
knowledge of the Koran in Arabic, and that those who do not possess this
knowledge suffer a definite handicap? Is in fact the purity that leads to
Godly understanding linguistic as well as based on prayer and righteous
observances?
Justo Lacunza (1991) considers this question in comparing the
pronouncements of three religious writers, one of whom is Sheikh AlFarsy mentioned above. The earliest writer, Sheikh Al-Amin bin Aly AlMazrui, 1875–1949, takes a hard, pro-Arabic line. Writing in 1939, he
claims that ‘Arabic is the language of the Qur’an, Almighty God has
commanded us that we think about the meaning of the Qur’an every time
we read it, and how will we know its meaning if we do not know the
Arabic language?’ (cited by Justo Lacunza, 1991, from Sh. Al-Amin b.
Aly (1939) Uwongozi, Mombasa: EAMWS, 21). Much later, in 1976,
Sheikh Al-Farsy (1912–82), the maulidi preacher referred to above, sees
an insistence on the knowledge of Arabic as tantamount to the
colonization of religion. He does not dispute the supreme importance of
the language among the Muslim scholarly élite of the East African coast,
but, in the words of Lacunza, he ‘realised that Kiswahili had become de
facto the language of Islam in the context of East Africa…(and wished) to
harmonize, from the point of view of Islam, the coast and the interior, the
Arab and the non-Arab, the Swahili and the non-Swahili’ (Lacunza 1991
in which he cites Sh. A.S.Al-Farsy (1976) Tunda la Qur’an, Mombasa:
Adam Traders, 4–5). In 1987 the most recent of the three writers, Sheikh
Saidi Musa (born 1944), expresses unambiguously his support for the
Islamic revolution of Iran and Khomeini’s leadership, seeing it as a model
which East Africa should emulate, and finds no need at all to tie Islam to
the Arabic language, since, in East Africa, Kiswahili is for him now the
indispensable medium for teaching and propagating the religion and
organizing Muslim society.
It may well be, as these examples intimate, that among the East African
literati and scholars, the Swahili language is beginning to take precedence
over Arabic as the medium by which Islam should be communicated and
discussed. There is no doubting the impact of Al-Farsy’s Swahili
Arabic, Swahili and the vernaculars in Kenya
241
translation of the Koran, which, heavily subsidized by Middle East
benefactors, is available to all Muslims at a low price. But how far has this
relative dismissal of Arabic percolated down to the vast majority of
ordinary Muslims? I would argue that, among such people, little has
changed with regard to the sacred and purificatory healing potentialities
offered by the Arabic Koran and its scriptural text, as I have outlined
above. I would also suggest that, as a result of the proliferation of new
madrasas headed by Islamic teachers trained in the Middle East or local
mosque college in Arabic and in the religion, the sanctity of Arabic has
been further boosted.
Indeed, as we move down the social hierarchy, we see that the notion of
purity takes on even greater significance as a route to understanding and
self-improvement. Here, too, this purity is given linguistic essence.
A MUSLIM FISHING COMMUNITY IN MTWAPA, COASTAL
KENYA
More microscopically, let me move at this point to consider a small
community of Muslim fishermen inhabiting the shoreland of an area north
of Mombasa, called Mtwapa. These are poor Muslims. They use Swahili
as their first language in conversation with each other, both publicly and
privately, but the older ones among them can understand surrounding
dialects of peoples related to the Swahili but, until recently, non-Muslim,
from whom the community of fishermen derives. These dialects are in fact
the vernacular varieties of a people called the Mijikenda. Thus, we may
call the fishermen intermediary Swahili, for they no longer speak the
Mijikenda language, but instead speak Swahili, and have the appearance
of being transitional between their non-Muslim Mijikenda origins and the
full Swahili status to which they aspire. Most other Mijikenda both
continue to speak their Mijikenda dialects and remain non-Muslim.
Taking a broad view, then, people will speak of there being three
language groups, each associated with one of three, roughly defined,
groups of people standing at different distances from Islam: Arabs,
Swahili, and the non-Muslim Mijikenda. Those fishermen I am calling
intermediary Swahili thus stand between the latter two groups.
Kiswahili comprises the vocabulary both of Arabic and the Mijikenda
vernacular. It is often itself seen as intermediary in religious terms
between Arabic, which has high diglossic status, and the non-Muslim
Mijikenda vernacular which has low status in the eyes of Muslims.
But these Swahili-speaking fishermen see themselves, also, as
intermediary in a cultural and ethnic sense. This is a theme that comes out
often in sermons, divinations, and conversation. A maalim speaking at a
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East Africa
maulidi ceremony will denounce palm-wine tapping and, of course,
drinking, and will link such activities to neglect of Islamic prayer, ritual
and attendance at mosques. He will also link the origin of such behaviour
to the origin of the people themselves, namely their non-Muslim
Mijikenda ‘cousins’ (wenzetu). He argues that such misconduct is sin or
negligence bordering on sinfulness.
Outside of the context of ceremonies and sermons, maalims combine
ideas about proper religious conduct with those of proper social
behaviour. The use of language commonly features in such ideas. From
an early age, children are scolded if they reciprocate the non-Muslim
forms of greeting. Such training is easy in a totally Muslim home. It also
occurs, though with greater difficulty, in homes of mixed religion. For
example, a non-Muslim Giriama friend and I entered a Giriama
homestead, in which one of the women had converted to Islam as a result
of spirit possession. My friend greeted the woman’s six-year-old
daughter in Giriama, but the child did not answer. This is normally
unheard of, but was explained as necessary, since both mother and child
would suffer severe sickness if they were not to obey the dictates of their
possessory Islamic spirit, which is in fact called an ‘Arab’ spirit (pepo or
nyama ya kiarabu) and which refuses to be addressed by a non-Muslim
and in an ‘impure’ (chafu) language. The mother and her daughter
would only speak to and answer members of her homestead in Swahili.
Moreover, this was neither opposed nor discouraged by the homestead
members, who well recognized the power of Islamic spirits to determine
people’s destinies in this way.
Among the fishermen I have been describing, not only is Swahili the
only acceptable language of communication, but also its members will
not normally respond to any of the non-Muslim Mijikenda dialects,
despite the fact that in a few cases at least they must have a passive
knowledge of them. They explain this by claiming that to speak and
respond to such non-Muslim dialects is to lay oneself open to the
contaminating practices associated with the non-Muslim speakers,
namely their production and drinking of alcohol, their heavy reliance on
non-Koranic divination and therapy, their lengthy funerals involving
dance and drink, and the fact that their diets may include pork and other
foodstuffs forbidden to Muslims. To speak and know a non-Muslim
language is to become consubstantial with the character and practices of
its speakers.
The Swahili word that is used most succinctly to define these nonIslamic practices is ushirikina, which, deriving from the Arabic, shirk,
refers to the worship of many gods, or polytheism. Certainly, the
traditional religion of the non-Muslim peoples can reasonably be called
Arabic, Swahili and the vernaculars in Kenya
243
pantheism or animism, but its sophistication is lost in the translation as
shirk or ushirikina. It is, moreover, described by Muslim maalims and
their followers as the root cause of impurity, for they see it as opposed to
the idea of a single God and as therefore liable to re-contaminate those
whose conversion to Islam is historically only recent. They say that
speaking the language of those who practise ushirikina is like
communicating with, and in the tongues of, the Devil, who manifests
himself in the form of countless possessory spirits or demons, which,
unlike the jinns identified in the Koran, have no legitimate religious
status.
At the other end of the diglossic spectrum, children and adults in this
fishing community are encouraged by their local maalim to incorporate
as many Arabic words as possible into their Swahili vocabulary, and
children are urged to emulate the few African maalims in the district who
have studied Arabic at one of the prominent mosque colleges in either
Lamu, Kenya, or the Middle East. The Arabic terms denote concepts of
a religious and legal nature, but also prescribe and evaluate so-called
‘civilized’ behaviour. The effect is that people become aware not only of
their distinctive Muslim status but of a putatively Arabized life-style and
manner of speaking. Religious, linguistic and behavioural socialization
here go together. The purity of Arabic language and conduct becomes an
inseparable part of the unquestioned purity of Islam.
Thus, the non-Muslim dialects are shunned as contaminating, while
Arabic vocabulary, language, text and script are embraced as providing
the purest communicative access to Islam.
Lacking the possibility of almost any of them ever learning Arabic,
we might at this point imagine that the members of this fishing
community would be happy, therefore, to settle on Swahili, albeit as
Arabized as possible, as the language most appropriate to the social and
religious demands made of them by their maalim.
Incredibly, however, the process of differentiation and of
proliferation does not end here. The maalim not only specifies the use of
Swahili over and against the Mijikenda dialects, he also insists on a
distinctive form of Swahili pronunciation, which we may gloss as KiMvita or, as some put it more specifically, Ki-Jomvu, which is broadly
associated with the long-established élite of Mombasa Old Town. He
rebukes children and young people who use the standard Swahili forms
as heard, for instance, on the radio and as spoken by non-Muslim
Mijikenda or up-country people as a second language.
For example, the standard Swahili form, njoo (come!) is rendered as
ndo-oo. As one young girl put it, ‘If any of us were to say njoo, maalim
Hassan would get very angry and ask, “Who ever taught you to speak
244
East Africa
like that? That is modern Swahili (ya siku hizi), but it is not of any
importance (si ya maana) and is not polite (si ya adabu).”’ According to
maalim Hassan, one should also say mwiche, ‘call him’, and not the
standard form, mwite, and so on. For him, such standard forms are not
sources of impurity, as is the use of the non-Muslim Mijikenda
vernaculars, but they are debased or fallen forms. This is an ironic
judgement, in that standard Swahili is in fact founded on an older form
of Zanzibari Swahili (Ki-Unguja). Even when one thinks one has
mastered the distinctive consonantal changes and nasal sounds, one may
then be told by the maalim to use an Arabic word rather than a Bantu
one. ‘Say, “taib”, not “nzuri”, and say “ku-arifu” and not “ku-ambia”
whenever possible’, he will declare.
Some contrasts between standard and Kimvita Swahili are as follows:
(to) take
play
slaughter
throw
bottle
uncooked rice
leave!
hunger
outside
Kimvita
Standard Kiswahili
tukua
teza
tinda
tupa (explosive, tongue
forward)
tupa (implosive, tongue
back a little)
mtele
ata
ndaa
nde
chukua
cheza
chinja
tupa
chupa
mchele
acha
njaa
nje
CONCLUSION
At issue in this drive by this and other maalims are two contradictory
tendencies. On the one hand, the maalim attempts to differentiate ever
more finely the Islamic distinctiveness of his group of Muslim fishermen.
In seeking increasingly refined concepts of religious purity, he focusses on
language and, in doing so, identifies people with these language
differences. Alleged speech differences are the most salient identity tag
and come to summarize other differences, some desired as in the case of
Arabic and high forms of Swahili, and some unacceptable and impure as
in the case of the non-Muslim Mijikenda dialects. On the other hand, the
maalim evidently believes in some kind of core Islamic purity, an ideal
that can be attained through both speech and behaviour. But in seeking
this ideal, he sets up one line of differentiation after another: speak Arabic
Arabic, Swahili and the vernaculars in Kenya
245
and not Mijikenda; speak this Swahili and not that; incorporate Arabic
words rather than Bantu words in Swahili vocabulary. Neither he nor those
he admonishes can ever reach this core. All he can ever do is to attempt
always to move away from what he regards as the contaminating effects of
non-Muslim life and language. But this constant escape, so vividly
captured in maulidi sermons given by himself and others (see Parkin
1985), does not in fact evidently bring him closer to the core of Islamic
purity that he advocates. Like Zeno’s arrow which, in distancing itself
further and further from its point of origin, nevertheless has to move
through an infinity of mid-points, this and other maalims seem never to
reach the destination. The play on language is, after all, a play on the
endlessness of signification. Diglossia comprising high and low diatypes
is one such play, which, having a life of its own, may fall through the net
of government policy.
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Mintz, S. (1985) Sweetness and Power, London and New York: Penguin.
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Name index
Abdulaziz, Lodhi 220
Abdulaziz, M.H. 220
Abdulaziz, Mkilifi 213
Akida, H. 220
Akinnaso, F.N. 234
Alexander, N. 102, 104
Alexandre, P. 56, 143
Allardt, E. 37
Amayo, A. 64
Ansre, G. 40, 220
Appadurai, A. 15
Asad, T. 6–9, 16, 76
Badejo, R. 25 (n.9)
Balisidya, M.L.N. 221
Bamgbose, A. 4, 36, 76, 102, 103
Banks, A. 37
Bataille, L. 40
Batibo, H. 221
Baudrillard, J. 227
Baxter, P.T.W. 192
Baylies, C. 151
Bendor Samuel, J. 62
Berwouts, K. 217
Besha, R. 220
Bhebe, N.M.B. 155
Bigirumwami, A. 129
Bledsoe, C. 133
Blench, R. 62, 71
Blommaert, J. 6, 9, 218, 222
Bourdieu, P. 14
Bourhis, R.Y. 102
Brown, D. 99, 101, 102, 104
Bunting, B. 103
Burnham. P. 23
Campbell, D.J. 139 (n.16)
Caplan, G. 162
Carpez, A. 129, 139 (n.8, 9, 12)
Cerulli, E. 201
Chen, A. 104
Chinweizu, 20
Cluver, A.B. de V. 100, 101, 104
Connor, W. 38
Croll, E. 4
Crozier, D. 62
Dalby, D. 62
Davids, A. 100
Derive, J. 26 (n.11)
Derive, M.J. 26 (n.11)
d’Hertefelt, M. 129, 139 (n.8, 9, 12)
Diki-Kidiri, M. 26 (n.13)
Dirven, R. 105
Du Plessis, L.T. 100
Duggal, N.K. 36
Dumont, B. 41
Duran, R. 104
Ekeh, P.B. 5
Elugbe, B.O. 70, 71, 76, 81–3
Emenanjo, E.N. 5, 74
Epstein, A.L. 143, 181 (n.2)
Fabian, J. 168, 214
Fairhead, J. 25 (n.6), 125, 131, 136
Fardon, R. 76–7, 83, 168
Ferguson, C. 233
Fishman, J. 34, 35, 37, 38, 42
Fleming, H.C. 206
Ford. C.C. 154
246
Name index
Fortune, G. 182 (n.18), 183 (n.29, 34)
Foucault, M. 8, 26 (n.11), 131
Furniss, G. 76–7, 83, 168
Fyfe, C. 44
Fyle, C.M. 9, 44, 53
Fyle, C.N. 44, 45, 46
Gadibolae, M. 153
Gbedemah, F.F.K. 77, 81, 82
Geertz, C. 155
Gellner, E. 6–8
Giles, H. 102
Gillett, S. 154
Gilsenan, M. 234
Gluckman, M. 144
Good, K. 166
Gottlieb, A. 139 (n.11)
Goubaud, M. 133
Guillaume, A. 233
Gysels, M. 218
Haberland, E. 196, 197
Habermas, J. 227
Hakuta, K. 104
Hansford, K.J. 9, 62
Harries, L. 220
Heine, B. 91, 193
Hirson, B. 103
Hobart, M. 20
Holm, J. 156
Horton, R.M.F. 52
Hountondji, P. 20
Hunt, J.A. 201
Huntingford, G.W.B. 196
Igué, M.A. 55–8, 76
Ikara, B. 64
Isayev, M.I. 35
Jacob, I. 138 (n.3, 15)
Jenewari, E.C. 65
Jibril, M. 26 (n.15)
Jones, E.D. 45
Jordan, P. 106
Kashoki, M. 34, 36
Katuala, K.K. 136
Kelman, H. 35
Kenyatta, Jomo 230
247
Kihore. Y. 213. 219
Kombo, S. 220
Kummer, W. 191
Kwele, D. 155
Lacunza, J. 240
Laitin, D. 18–19, 25 (n.5)
Lambert, W. 104
Lamberti, M. 202
Le Page, R.B. 34, 35–6
Lee, J.D. 65
Lestrade, A. 127, 128, 135, 139
(n.8, 10, 13)
Lewis, I.M. 201
Lindholm, K.J. 104
Lithuli, A. 101
Louw-Potgieter, J. 100
Lyotard, J.F. 227
Mackey, W.F. 48
McLean, D. 99, 104, 105, 106
MacWilliam, A. 217, 221
Malikongwa, D.M. 154
Maripe, K. 155, 160, 166
Massamba, D. 215–17, 218, 219, 220
Matante, P. 155
Mautle, G. 153
Mazrui, A.A. 221, 222
Mdee, J.S. 217
Meebelo, H.S. 155
Meerkotter, D. 104
Meintjies, F. 99–100, 103
Mhina, G.A. 220
Mintz, S. 227
Mitchell, 143, 181 (n.2)
Mkelle, B. 220
Moi, Daniel arap 230–1
Molutsi, P. 156
Mongwa, T. 155
Morrison, D.R. 217
Mphahlele, E. 116
Mudimbe, V.Y. 20
Mukama, R.G. 221
Mulford, D.C. 162
Mulokozi, M.M. 217, 218, 220
Murray, A. 155
Mutahi, K. 217
Mwangomango, J. 220, 221
Mytton, G. 16
248
Name index
N’Ouéni, R. 58–60, 76
Ndebele, N. 105
Nengwekhulu, H.R. 155
Ngalasso, M.M. 26 (n. 14)
Nhlapo, J. 102
Nkomo, J. 155
Nyerere, Julius 39–40, 219
Ogieriaixi, E. 71
Ogunbiyi, I.A. 234
Ohly, R. 219
Okpewho, I. 20
Omamor, O.P. 73–4
Padilla, A.M. 104
Papstein, R. 181 (n. 2)
Parkin, D. 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 20, 170,
171, 245
Pelzer, A.N. 115, 117
Picard, L.A. 153, 156
Pool, J. 38
Pottier, J.P.J. 20, 125
Ramsay, J. 155
Reagan, T.N. 100, 101, 103
Richards, P. 20, 25 (n.7)
Riddell, J.C. 139 (n. 16)
Robin, J. 48
Said, E. 8
Salim, I.A. 235
Schapera, I. 154, 156
Schlee, G. 5, 191, 194, 195, 196, 198,
206, 208
Schoffeleers, J.M. 130
Schramm, W. 41
Schumacher, E.F. 39
Schwarz Jr, F.A.O. 34
Seruraho, N. 137
Sesay, K. 47
Silitshena, R.M.K. 154
Sitoe, A. 94
Skutnabb-Kangas, T. 17
Smith, P. 140 (n.8)
Snoxall, R. A. 213
Sofunke, B. 25 (n.9)
Soyinka, W. 20, 36
Sparks, A. 117
Spencer, P. 198, 206
Stanford, R. 62
Steyn, J.C. 100
Szeftel, M. 151
Tablino, P. 209 (n. 3, 6, 7)
Tambo, Oliver 106
Taussig, M. 227
Taylor, C. 128, 131, 139 (n. 7, 9)
Taylor, D.M. 102
Temu, C. 217, 221
Textor, R.B. 37
Treffgarne, C. 11
Troup, F. 103
Trudgill, P. 100, 103
Tshibasu, M. 136
Tucker, A.N. 102
Tucker, G.R. 104
Ulin, R.C. 227
Vail, L. 181 (n. 2)
Van Binsbergen, W. 19, 26 (n. 12) 147,
151, 166, 170
Van Diepen, M. 106
Van Waarden, C. 154
Vischer, H. 21
wa Thiong’o, N. 20, 89
Webb, V. 98
Weiner, M. 41
Whitehead, A. 135
Willemse, H. 102–3, 104, 105
Williamson, K, 65, 67–8, 74
Wolf, E. 227
Wright, M. 213
Wyse, A.J.G. 46, 53
Subject index
Aboh 70
Abua 66
Adja-fon 59
Adja-mina 59
African National Congress: and Bantu
Education 101–3; and English as
lingua franca 104; language
policy 108
Afrikaans 97; official status 98–9,
101, 113–14; and power relations
100–1; withdrawal from black
schools 100
Akan 34
Akassa 66
Akwapim 77
anthropological research 3–6
Arabization: Kenya 232–3; Muslim
communities 9; Sudan 26 (n.13)
Asante 77–8, 80, 81
Ate (Atte)-Okpela-North Ibie 70
authenticity 20–1, 26 (n. 14)
Bachama 23
Bantu: Mozambique 90–3; South
Africa 99, 101–4, 114–16
Banyabwisha see Bwisha community
Barotseland 145, 147
Bemba 145, 147
Bénin 55–61; economic growth 59–60;
education 55–8, 60; French
language 56–8, 59–60;
independence 55–6; language
policy 55–8; literacy programme
57–8; multilingualism 58
Benue-Congo languages 69,
65–6, 70–1
Biseni 66
Boran 196–8, 203–5
Botswana: Botswana People’s Party
155–6, 160;challenge to Tswana
hegemony 156–7;constitution 182
(n.13);economic boom 156;
education 154–5;ethnic groups
152–3;Kalanga see Kalanga; KhoiSan (Sarwa) 143;language policy
165–6;Ngwato administration
153–4; non-Tswana-speaking
groups 153; percentage of Kalanga
speakers 161–2;Society for the
Propagation of the Ikalanga
Language 158–9;Tswana
domination 153–4
Bwisha community 122–41;Belgian
rule 134;crop health 124–6;
ikizungu/ikinyabwisha distinction
133–7; ivitamin 124, 130–3, 135;
land ownership 134–6;linguistic
pluralism 137–8;medical care
123–4; Mwami 123, 126, 129;
procreation/production/politics/
putrefaction 126–30;state
institutions 136
Cameroon 23
Chamba 23
chi-Chewa (chi-Manganja) 90
chi-Chopi 90
chi-Makonde (chi-Maviha) 90
chi-Manyika 90
chi-Ndau 90
chi-Nsenga 90
chi-Nyanja 90, 91
249
250
Subject index
chi-Nyungwe 90
chi-Sena (chi-Ruwe, chi-Podzo) 90
chi-Shona 91
chi-Tewe 90
chi-Yao 90
Chokwe 146
Chopi 90
Chumburung: case study 77–8;
literacy projects 78–80
communication: and development
38–42; indigenous languages 41–2
Cross River languages 65, 66
cultural translation see translation
Dahomey see Bénin
Defaka (Afakani) 65–6
Degema 67
Dendi 59, 60
development 19–21; language
heterogeneity 37–8;
multilingualism 33, 37–42; role of
language 38–42
Ebira (Igbirra) 69, 71
Ebiroid languages 69, 71
Echie 67
e-Chuwabo 90
economic development see
development
Edo (Bini) 70; orthography 71–2
Edoid languages 65, 67, 69, 70
Efik 34
Egbema 66
Ehueun (Ekpenmi, Epenmi) 70
Ekpeye 66
Eleme 66
e-Lomwe 90
e-Makhuwa 90
Engenni (Egene) 67
English language in South Africa:
elitism 105–6; as lingua franca
104–6; offical status 98–9, 113–14,
120; thought control 105
e-Ngulu 90
Epie-Atisa 67
Eruwa (Erohwa, Arohwa) 70
Esan (Ishan) 70, 72
Ethiopia 192
Etuno 69, 71
Ewe 77
Fante 34, 77
Fon-aizo 59
Fongbé 60
Fon-goun 59
Fon-mina 59
Fulani 22
Fulfulde 22; Cameroon 23
Ga 77
Ghana 76–84;Chumburung language
see Chumburung; Chumburung
people 77–8; church as educator
80; English as language of
education 78, 82; Ghana Institute
of Linguistics, Literacy and Bible
Translation (GILLBT) 77–83;
language development 76–7, 80–3;
languages 34; minority languages
77; mother tongue education 80–3;
official languages 79; teacher
training
78, 82
Ghotuo (OtuF34017%-50/o, Otwa)
70; development 72, 74
gi-Tonga 90
globalization 15–16
Gokana 66
Gwari 23
Hausa language: diversity 34; as
lingua franca 21–3, 34; as mother
tongue 21–3; as national
language,Nigeria 62, 64–5, 73;
orthography 21
hegemony 17–19
Ibani 66
Ibibio 34
Igala dialects 71
Igbo 22
Igbo/Ibo (Aniocha) 20, 67, 69, 70, 72;
as national language, Nigeria
62, 64–5, 73
Igbo-Igbani 66
Igboid languages 65, 66–7, 69, 70
Ijo 65–6, 69
Ijoid languages 65–6, 69, 71
Ika 69, 70, 72
Ikpeshi 70
Subject index
Ikwere 66, 67
Isekiri (Itsekiri, Shekiri, Jekri) 71;
development 72, 73–4
Isoko 70, 72
Ivbiadaobi 70
Ivbimion 70
Izon (Ijaw) 66, 67, 69, 71, 72
Kalabar i? 66, 67
Kalanga 152–61; Bible Translation
Project 158, 167–8; language
policy 172–3, 180; linguistic
objectification 168–9; minority
status 161–2, 162–3; and Nkoya,
compared 174–9; proletarianization
169–72; Shona 152–61; Society for
the Propagation of the Ikalanga
Language 158–9; traditional rulers
164–5
Kana (Khana) 66, 67
Kanuri 22
Kaonde 145
Kenya: Arabic 229–45; Arabization
232–3; broadcast media 229;
English as official language 229;
Hadhrami Arabs 230, 235; Kikuyu
230–1; language distribution 229–
30; Luo 230–1; Muslim fishing
community 241–4; Muslims 230–3,
236; Omani Arabs 230, 235;
Oromo see Oromo; re-Arabization
236–9; Rendille see Rendille;
Swahili as national language 229;
Swahili-speakers 230
ki-Mwaani 90
Kinyabwisha 122, 137–8
Kinyarwanda 123
Kiswahili: as African national
language 36; and Arabic in East
Africa 234–41; BAKITA (National
Kiswahili Council) 213; English as
source language 217–18; grammar/
lexicography 221; Islamic medium
240–1; Kenyan Muslim fishing
community 241–4; as Kenyan
national language 229; Kenyan
speakers 230; Kimvita 243–4;
language development 215–20;
linguistic discourse 220–2;
modernization 216–18;
251
Mozambique 90, 94; research
parameters 214–15; research
tradition 222–4; Tanzania 213–27;
TUKI (Institute of Kiswahili
Research) 213; word-coining
217–18; Zaïre 138
Koma 23
Koran 233–4, 238–9
Krio language: attitude of Krio people
48–9; current situation 47–8, 82;
drama 47–3, 53; education 47, 48;
English elements 45–6; Freetown
Krio 49–50, 50–1; as lingua franca
47–8, 53; migration from Freetown
49; non-Krio Sierra Leoneans
49–51; official recognition 51–3;
origins 46–7; politics 47; up-line
Krio 49, 50–1; Yoruba elements
46–7
Krio society, development 44–7
Kugbo 66
language: artifical 36;
commoditization 227–9;
development 215–16; indigenous
41–2; languages of wider
communication (LWCs) 41–2; and
national integration 33–6;
objectification 9–15, 168–9;
patterns of discourse 14–15;
planning 5–6; politics 3–4, 6–10,
191–2; purity 193–4, 227–9;
rationalization 17–19; rights 16–17,
104; sectoral uses 13–14;
sponsorship 17–19, 24; as subject
of discourse 10
Lilima 152, 158; orthography 167
Limba 51–2
Lingala 34
lingua francas: Arabization in Muslim
communities 9; emerging 34; and
modernization 9; multilingualism
as 4; problems for Government 4–5
literacy: and development 38–42;
indigenous languages 41–2;
languages of wider
communication 41–2
Lozi 144–9, 162, 163
Luchazi 146
Lukolwe 144
252
Subject index
Lunda 145
Lushange 144
Luvale 145, 146
Makua 90
maps 10–13; refashioning 15–17
Mashasha 144
Mbundu 146, 147
Mbwela 144
Mende 47, 51–2
Mina 60
Mini 66
Mozambique 89–96; Bantu 90–3;
bilingualism 92–3, 94–5; education
system 92, 94–5; FRELIMO 91;
Kiswahili 90, 94; language policy
91–4; language situation 90–1;
news media 93; Portuguese
language 91–4; Shona 90; swingondo 94; Tsonga 90, 94
multilingualism: and development 33,
37–42; as lingua franca 4;
linguistic skills 5–6; and nationbuilding 24–5, 35; and national
integration 33–6
national development see development
national language, discussion 5
Ndebele 112, 120, 152–5
Ndoki/Asa 66
Ndoni 66
négritude movement 20, 221
Nembe 66
Niger 21
Nigeria: 6–3–3–4 programme 26
(n.13); Adamawa State 22, 23, 27
(n.16); Akwa-Ibom State 34;
Bendel State 62, 69–74; Borno
State 22; Chamba people 23;
discrimination 34–5; Edo people
34; education 63–4; English
language 64–5; Hausa as national
language 62, 64–5, 73;
Independence 64–5; language
policy 63–5; language
rationalization 19, 26 (n. 13, n.15);
languages 22–3, 34; lingua francas
22–3, 24; linguistic diversity 65–9;
literacy campaign 64; minority
languages 26–7 (n.15), 62–75, 83;
national language 22; national
unity 64; news media 67, 69;
official language 64–5; oral policy
73; Pidgin 64–5, 67, 72; Rivers
Readers Project 67–9; Rivers State
62, 65–9; Taraba State 22, 23, 27
(n. 16)
Nkoro 66
Nkoya 144–52; and Kalanga,
compared 174–9; language policy
172–3, 180; linguistic
objectification 168–9; minority
status 161–2; traditional rulers
164–5
Northern Sotho 112, 119, 120
Nsenga-Sena 90
Nyanja 90, 145
Obolo (Andoni) 66
Obulom (Abuloma) 66
Odual 66
Ogbah 66
Ogbia 66
Ogbogolo 66
Ogbronuagum 66
Ogoi 66
Okodia 66
Okpamheri 70, 72
Okpo 70; development 74
Okpo-Idesa 70
Okrika 66
Oloma 70
Opobo 66
Ora-Emai-Iuleha 70, 72
Oromo: adopted by Somalis 196;
Arabic loanwords 195–8, 199–202;
linguistic assimilation of Somaloid
groups 203–5; loanwords 193–202;
numbers of speakers 192
or© thographies, standardized: Edo
71–2; Hausa 21; Nigerian minority
languages 83
Osos0 70
politics of language 3–4, 6–10, 191–2
Rendille: Arabic loanwords 198–203;
Boran influences 203–5; loanwords
193–4; numbers of speakers 192;
Subject index
Oromo loanwords 203–5;
purification by missionaries 194;
Samburu (Maa) words/cultural
items 205–8
rights attached to languages 16–17,
104
Sahwè-fon 59
Sahwè-mina 59
Samburu 193; words/cultural items in
Rendille 205–8
Sango 26 (n.13)
Sasaru-Enwa-Igwe 70
Senegal 34
shi-Changana 90
shi-Ronga 90
shi-Tsonga 91
shi-Tswa 90
Shona: Kalanga 152–61;
Mozambique 90
Shuwa 22
Sierra Leone 44–54; education 47,
48, 51–2; English-derived language
45–6; indigenous language
teaching 51–2; Liberated Africans
(resettlers) 45; news media 51;
non-Krio people 49–51; official
language policy
51–3; post-colonial politics
50; Settlers 44–5; wardship system
49; Yoruba (Krio) people 46–7
South Africa 97–110, 111–21; African
languages 101–3, 111–21;
Afrikaans see Afrikaans; apartheid
language policy 97–8, 99, 104;
Asian languages 120; Bantu
Education 99, 101–4, 114–16;
control overz African languages
116–18; economic development
119–21; English language see
English language in South Africa;
homeland policy 113; Language
Boards 117; language distribution
111–14; language diversity 106;
language policies 114–16; language
and power relations 99–100;
language used to divide and rule
99, 104; mother tongue education
103–4, 107–8; multilingualism 103,
118–19; new language dispensation
253
106–7; official languages
120; Separatist Churches
118–19; South African
Broadcasting Corporation 117;
trade unions 119–20;
Tsonga 112, 120
Southern Sotho 112, 119, 120
strong and weak languages 7–10,
76–7 Sudan 26 (n.13)
Swahili see Kiswahili
Swazi 112
Tanzania 213–27; Arab settlement
234–5; education 217, 221;
Kiswahili see Kiswahili; linguistic
ideology 218–20, 221
technology 15–16, 42
Temne 47, 51–2
Tiv 23
Tonga 145
translation: context and 6–7; and
relations between languages 10;
strong and weak languages 7–10
Tsonga: Mozambique 90, 94; South
Africa 112, 120
Tswana 112, 152–3; as language of
discourse 165–6; as national/
regional language 163–4; subgroups 182 (n.14); see also
Botswana
Tuareg 22
Twi 34
Uhami-Iyayu 70
Ukaan (Kakumo) languages 69, 71
Ukue (Ukpe) 70
Ukwuani (Kwale) 69, 70, 72
Uneme 70, 72
Urhobo (Sobo) 70, 72
Uvwie (Effurun, Evhron) 70
Venda 112, 120
Vomni 23
Wazobia languages 22, 27 (n. 15);
see also Hausa; Igbo; Yoruba
Wolof 34
Xhosa 107, 112, 118, 120
254
Subject index
Yao 90
Yekhee (Etsako, Afenmai,
Kukuruku) 70, 72
Yoruba: elements in Krio 46–7; as
national language, Nigeria 22, 62,
64–5, 73; Sierra Leone 46–7
Yoruba-fon 59
Yoruba-goun 59
Yoruboid languages 69, 71
Zaïre: Bwisha community
(Banyabwisha) see Bwisha
community; Kiswahili 138;
languages 26 (n.13), 34
Zambia: Lozi 144–9, 162, 163;Nkoya
see Nkoya
Zulu 112, 118, 119, 120