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Language education policy in post-colonial Africa 183 education is ineffectively delivered, a situation clearly wasteful of financial and human resources. And, while the causes of this underperformance are multiple and various, relatively successful experimentation with bilingual media incorporating local languages (see Benson 2000, 2002; Fafunwa et al. 1989) provide a reasonably plausible basis for believing that the use of foreign language media, unfamiliar to many pupils, is at least one contributory factor. Certainly, this is a guiding assumption of the many applied linguistics academics (e.g. Rubagumya 1990, Trappes-Lomax 1990, Arthur 1994, Williams 1996, Mazrui 2004, etc.) who have argued that English (or French for that matter) should be replaced by an indigenous language medium, which, because it is better understood by pupils, will produce a better quality of classroom interaction and promote higher levels of scholastic attainment. This proposal is, as we have seen, theoretically and empirically defensible, and is supported, moreover, by some quasi-experimental evidence. For example, Prophet and Dow (1994) in a Botswana study taught a set of science concepts to an experimental group in Setswana and to a control group in English. They then tested understanding of these concepts and found that form one secondary school students taught in Setswana had developed a significantly better understanding of the concepts than those taught in English. In addition, the latter group experienced some difficulty in expressing their ideas in English. At the form three level, however, they found that ‘the language of instruction had no real impact on their understanding of the science concepts covered in the lesson’ (Prophet and Dow 1994: 214). The Setswana and English groups performed equally well. Given this kind of evidence, the plausibility of the theoretical arguments, and the weight of academic opinion in favour of reform, it may be wondered why English has not long since been replaced by indigenous languages as the medium of instruction. The answer is that choice of medium is not just an educational matter but also a profoundly political one, and that in Africa the tendency, as mentioned earlier, has been for educational considerations to be subordinated to socio-political ones. We now turn to consider these. 7.2 CHANGING THE MEDIA OF INSTRUCTION: CONSTRAINTS ON POLICY The impediments to policy change on the media of instruction are various: some socio-political, some economic, some practical. We turn first to a consideration of the socio-political constraints. 7.2.1 Socio-political constraints Historically, one of the more frequent justifications, or explanations, for the retention of former colonial languages as official languages and as media of education is that they are ethnically neutral, and therefore advance rather than retard the cause
184 Language Planning and Education of nation-building and national unity (see Chapter 1). By contrast, so the argument goes, choosing any one (or more) languages(s) from a range of competing indigenous languages as media of education at upper primary/secondary level would advantage one ethnic group over another and in this way risk political discord or worse. In some quarters, these arguments are dismissed either as mere self-serving rhetoric, masking the interests of neo-colonialists or those anxious to maintain their privileged position, or as signifying an uncritical attachment to an outmoded European one-nation one-language nationalist ideology. It would be unwise, however, in discussion of a continent troubled, like parts of Europe, by ethnically based conflicts (e.g. in Congo DRC, Ivory Coast, Sudan, Somalia, Uganda), to dismiss them entirely, despite the germs of truth the criticisms contain. (Outside Africa, after all, for instance in Sri Lanka, there are historical grounds for believing that decisions on media of instruction have played a part in the exacerbation of ethnic tensions.) A brief example from Zambia may help illustrate the point. Van Binsbergen (1994: 144–5) describes in detail the situation in the western province of Zambia, where in colonial and pre-colonial days the Nkoya, a minority ethnolinguistic group, were subjugated and incorporated into a larger Lozi state. Nkoya resentment at Lozi domination persisted into the post-colonial period and they interpreted the lack of official recognition of their language as Lozi oppression. 6 With this history, it is not difficult to imagine the tensions that would arise from the imposition of Silozi as a regional medium of learning, or for that matter the potential for conflict on a national scale occasioned by, say, the imposition of a Silozi medium of instruction on the Bemba. The wider point here is that closer study of the history of the internal politics of regions or subregions, not only in Zambia but elsewhere in Africa, highlights the tensions that could be exacerbated by elevating one indigenous language over another in the educational field. That said, there are two major considerations to mention, which significantly attenuate the force of the argument from national unity. The first is that while colonial language media may be ethnically neutral, they are far from neutral socioeconomically in that they substantially advantage the wealthier, urban class, whose children have easier access to books, satellite television and private English classes over the disempowered rural poor, who have access to none of these things. In this sense, the former colonial language, while ethnically neutral, is socially divisive (see Chapter 5). Paradoxically, however, it is this very propensity to divide socially and to advantage a small but powerful urban social elite that furnishes a motive for the retention of English medium education, as we shall see. The second point is that in a minority of African states (e.g. Tanzania, Swaziland, Burundi, Botswana), by reason either of extreme multilingual diversity (Tanzania) or relative linguistic homogeneity (Swaziland), there already exists a widely accepted indigenous national language (e.g. Kiswahili in Tanzania), whose selection as an educational medium of secondary education could in no manner be realistically represented as a potential threat to national unity. Yet even here, in the most sociolinguistically propitious circumstances for reform, English remains the medium of
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