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Language education policy in post-colonial Africa 187 7.2.2 Economic and practical constraints Not to be forgotten in any discussion of medium of instruction policies in Africa is the presence of constraining external forces, the nature of whose operation is perhaps most clearly visible in Tanzania, a country where, as noted above, there are relatively few sociolinguistic impediments to an indigenous national language medium. In 1982 there were, in fact, well-founded expectations that the country would shortly move to Kiswahili medium in secondary education, but not long after, in 1984, these hopes were dashed with an official announcement that English would after all be retained. Relevant to understanding this apparent policy ‘u-turn’ are two key factors. First, by the early 1980s Tanzania had entered a period of prolonged economic crisis, increasing the country’s dependency on external support and undermining, simultaneously, confidence that the country could successfully implement such a farreaching reform at a time of financial stringency. Second, the then president, Julius Nyerere, mindful perhaps of this economic weakness, was in favour of maintaining English medium instruction to ‘guard against parochialism’ and to protect the country’s international links within and beyond the African continent. He was fearful too, according to Russell (1990: 370), that ‘the use of English might die out altogether if it were taught only as a subject’. Illustrated here is the not unfounded anxiety, felt by governments in other parts of Africa and indeed elsewhere (e.g. Malaysia: see Gill 2004: 144), that a shift away from English medium at secondary level would isolate the country from the international community, limit inward investment from the richer countries of the North and above all, obstruct access to science and technology – thus diminishing economic competitiveness. 7 These fears, one might add, become especially acute where the country in question (e.g. Tanzania) is economically weak and dependent on external donor support. Nor can one ignore the influence of globalisation. The autonomy of African states as policy-making units is, in common with nation states elsewhere, increasingly constrained by global economic and political forces. Increasing numbers of African academics, writers, politicians, business executives, financiers, civil servants and university students inhabit a ‘globalised landscape’ (Fardon and Furniss 1994: 16). Electronic forms of communication (email and the Internet) and improved transport increase the permeability of national boundaries to the flow of information and people. The net effect is greater interdependence, which, in turn, strengthens the need and demand for proficiency in international lingua francas, especially English. Set alongside these external macro forces are impediments of a more practical nature that can conveniently be grouped into three rough categories: (1) linguistic resources, (2) books and learning materials and (3) financial resources and educational infrastructure.
188 Language Planning and Education 7.2.2.1 Linguistic resources One of the more commonly cited, and even more frequently exaggerated, obstacles to the use of African languages as media of instruction is that they lack the requisite level of linguistic resources for performing this function: graphisation, standardisation, codification, scientific and technical terminology and an extensive elaborated vocabulary. Certainly, it is true that many indigenous languages remain understandardised, lacking the developed orthographies and vocabulary that would facilitate their introduction as educational media. It is also true that developing and ‘intellectualising’ (Liddicoat and Bryant 2002: 10) many languages simultaneously would be a costly undertaking. That said, considerable progress has been made, especially with regard to national languages. Kiswahili, for example, already possesses the necessary attributes of standardisation, codification and a sufficiently elaborated vocabulary for use as a secondary level medium of instruction, a monolingual dictionary of Kiswahili having been published in 1981 followed in 1990 by a dictionary of scientific terms (Roy-Campbell 2003: 89). In Zimbabwe, likewise, a monolingual Shona dictionary (Duramazwi RechiShona) appeared in 1996, with work underway on a similar Ndebele monolingual dictionary as well as glossaries of scientific and technical terms (Roy-Campbell 2003: 92). In South Africa, meanwhile, PanSALB, the main South African language planning agency, has been mandated to elaborate terminology for the nine historically disadvantaged official languages (e.g. Tshivenda, Xitsonga, etc.), which, though partially developed in possessing ‘written forms, literary work, dictionaries and terminology lists’ (Finlayson and Madiba 2002: 40), require further development in the area of modern terminology. These instances, and successful corpus planning activity elsewhere on behalf of languages such as Malay8 – which is now a medium in tertiary education – show that the cultivation/intellectualisation of indigenous African languages is perfectly feasible technically. The greater obstacle, then, is not so much the technical operations of elaboration or standardisation, administratively and logistically complex though these may be (Finlayson and Madiba 2002: 48), as the availability of resources and the political willingness to commit them, which, in turn, hinges on attitudes to these languages. This leads us to a further point of some importance, which is that it is by no means obvious that corpus planning should always and necessarily precede the implementation of a given language as a medium of instruction. Form tends to follow function, and, as Nadkarni (1984: 154) suggests, if a language is not first put to use in a given function, it is hardly likely to develop the relevant linguistic resources. It is not so much the ready availability of scientific and technical terminology in a language that is crucial … as the actual use of the language to ‘do’ science and to ‘do’ technology … what comes first, is scientific discourse … It is the quality and quantity of scientific and technical discourse and not the creation of terminology that is the crucial factor in the modernisation of languages. (Nadkarni 1984: 154)
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