Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

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