Keeping African languages out of African schools?

Humiliation of Ugandan students who speak their mother tongue in school, and Malawi's recent decision to move to an English-only instruction policy, reflect the continued low status of African languages in African education. In much of Africa, the first languages of students are formally excluded from African schools by national policies, and/or accorded low or even negative value in school culture. In the extreme, this situation can be seen in terms of denial of human rights (per work by Tove Skutnabb-Kangas), but in any event seems to run contrary to ample research on the benefits of  learning in the mother tongue and of bilingual education.

"Why are schools punishing children for speaking African languages?"

Punishment for speaking Luganda at school.
Image from Facebook via ThisisAfrica.me.

A recent article by writer and lawyer Bwesigye bwa Mwesigire called attention to ongoing practices in some Ugandan schools of humiliating students who speak African languages. A particular example is requiring students caught speaking a language other than English to wear a sack, until they catch one of their peers transgressing the English-only rule, who will then have to wear the sack.

This is not a new linguistic human rights issue, nor a practice limited to one country. It extends back to colonial rule, though enforcement of "no vernacular" has evidently moved from corporal punishment by teachers to humiliation and enforcement by students. I previously mentioned this in a 2008 blog posting entitled "Burning textbooks, beating schoolchildren."

New "English-only" policy in Malawi

In a decision made last March by then Malawian Minister of Education, Lucious Kanyumba, changed Malawi's longstanding bilingual education policy to one where students will be taught in English only from day one of their schooling. The stated object of the change, which is now implemented, was to improve English language levels of students.

Previous language of instruction policy (per a 2000 paper by Henri G. Chilora) had all students learning in the national language Chichewa for the first four grades, and then shifting to English. However this policy, adopted in 1968, had the effect of eliminating other Malawian languages from schools (see Chilora's paper, and one by Misheck Dickson Issa and Shoko Yamada on perceptions of language of instruction policy).

The decision to move to English-only has been controversial, with arguments against it citing advantages of MTB/MLE, lack of teachers prepared to instruct in English, and questions about equating good English with good education. It elicited an early protest from students of Chancellor College. A good summary of the debate - which begins by acknowledging the students' action - is provided by Steve Sharra (a later version of this article was highlighted by Ndesanjo Macha in his blog).

A study by Helen Abadzi, Radhika Iyengar, Alia Karim and Florie Chagwira of Columbia University's Center on Globalization and Sustainable Development found that even if the goal of education was good English, it would make sense to begin teaching reading in children's first languages (which happen to be written with orthographies where letters have more consistent values than in English).

Language of instruction policy in Malawi has moved away from use of its children's first languages in stages - first using only Chichewa (national language, first language of a majority, and also a second language for some number) in the name of national unity, and now to only English (official language, first language of almost no one, and a second language for some number) in the name of better job opportunities.

Language of Instruction (LoI) in Uganda and Malawi

In the process of researching this blog post, I came across an article (actually a book chapter) that examines and compares language in education policies in the two countries mentioned above: Ismail S. Gyagenda and Wardah M. Rajab-gyagenda, "Examining Ugandan and Malawian Language of Instruction Policies From a Linguistic Human Rights Perspective," in Zehlia Babaci-Wilhite, ed., Giving Space to African Voices: Rights in Local Languages and Local Curriculum (SensePublishers, Rotterdam, 2014). For now I'll just pass on the reference, but one passage from the content available online leaves us with a relevant perspective and question:

"In the human rights approach [to language policy], language is a manifestation of one's identity and cannot be willy-nilly suppressed without deep educational consequences for the students as well as society in general. How do the LoI policies of Uganda and Malawi over the years fare within this human rights perspective?"

Burning textbooks, beating schoolchildren

African languages have not only been passed over as languages of instruction and even omitted from school curricula in much of Africa, they have in some cases been actively excluded. While a full discussion of the issues involved would take something much longer than a blog post, I wanted to review a few facts and anecdotes. It should be noted that the worst abuses were in the colonial past.

Burning Tigre textbooks

One of the more striking examples from Ghirmai Negash's article (see the previous entry) was how in the 1970s in Eritrea, the ELF declared illegal a school curriculum in the Tigre language and ordered all copies of the school book to be burned.

This may be an extreme example but one from Madagascar in the 1980s may be more typical. Apparently the government of Madagascar at one point needed foreign assistance to produce textbooks for its schools. At the time the instruction was in Malagasy, but when France offered aid, it was with materials in French. (Unfortunately I don't have the reference at hand). It has been noted elsewhere that the UK and US are very forthcoming with materials in English. It would be hard to say how often English, French or Portuguese materials have replaced African language ones, or to what degree their availability has been a disincentive to develop African language materials.

Even when there are materials in African languages, they are not always well distributed. The article on International Mother Language Day in Ghana (available here, and mentioned in an earlier posting) mentions:

It is however very pathetic to note that while schools complain of lack of Ghanaian Language books which affects the teachers' delivery of lessons and consequently the performance of their pupils in their schools, publications of the Bureau [of Ghanaian Languages] are locked up in our ware houses in Tamale and Accra and are not being patronised.

So at least in some cases, books for learning in African languages have been burned, replaced by books in other languages, or "locked up" in warehouses. This is not even to mention those that are out of print and only available in distant libraries.

Beating or shaming schoolchildren for speaking their mother tongue

The history of schooling in Africa has many stories of how African languages were excluded from classes and school grounds (not always, but in many places) and punishments were meted out for transgressing the rule. I recently posed a question on the H-Africa list about the degree to which this is still happening. (It does still happen, but probably not as extreme as in the past.)

It is not only a question of teachers punishing students but also ways of involving peers in the punishment (see this example from a blog on Lesotho). There are some other links here (post #8).