One of the vestiges of colonialism is the imposition of European languages of the colonizers on the indigenous communities. English, French and to a lesser extent Portuguese are spoken in many African countries. This was done not with the consent of Africans but by using those languages as tools of spreading colonial cultures and for political control. Native Africans were, through time, forced to shun their languages and adopt the European languages whether they liked them or not.
Instead of allowing African native languages to flourish, during the colonial era, “Indo-European languages such as Africans, English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish are widely spoken generally as lingua franca and had held official status in many countries.” So far so good about the effects of colonialism on language and economic development. In order to have a fuller picture of this cause -and-effect relationship, it would also be relevant to consider the post-independence period in African attempts to conjugate language development with economic growth.
Linguistic colonialism in Africa is less than 100 years old but the vestiges are still continuing to produce and reproduce the indirect cultural domination of Africa by the old metropolises. Although the challenges are formidable, some of the African languages have managed to become the dominant linguistic groups in many African countries. This was not due to the fact that one language is superior to another one in Africa; but because a few African languages had witnessed the opportunity or coincidence to be the languages of the majority of the people in many African countries.
According to Wikipedia, “The total number of languages spoken in Africa is variously estimated (depending on the delineation languages versus dialects) at between 1,250 and 2, 100 and by some counts at over 3000. Nigeria alone has over 500 languages, one of the greatest concentrations of linguistic diversity in the world.”
Generally speaking, language, whether in multicultural societies or in mono-cultural and mono-linguistic ones, plays a defining role in the development or backwardness of a continent or a country. Africa is no exception. While hundreds if not thousands of languages or dialects are spoken across Africa, the continent is still economically backward because these languages have not been so far adopted to the needs of economic and social development as well as modernization in general.
The predominance of one national language in many countries of the world has served as a unifying factor, a potent input for economic development. This is due to the fact that a country where only one language is spoken by the majority of the people not only lead to less conflicts but also it becomes a weapon of stability that is indispensable if that country wants to achieve socio-economic development. China is a good example of this kind of process. In China, the Han nationality forms more than 90% the Chinese people and this has proved a blessing for stability and for the Chinese economic miracle of the last 70 years.
True, having one majority ethnic group and one or two languages greatly facilitates communication, trade and development. But having one language is not a prerequisite for getting ‘fast and furious’ development like what happened in China since the 1960s. There are many countries in Africa and elsewhere that have fewer languages but have not achieved development while countries that have linguistic diversity have attained higher levels of socio-economic development.
What educated intellectuals, or the educated elites, have so far failed to do in Africa is to promote language in such a way as to make it a catalyst of economic development and/or modernization in order to overcome the old colonial legacy and the continent’s own inherent economic retardation. We should not blame colonialism for all the cultural and political mess that is a reality in many countries. This kind of approach is not only fair but is sometimes used to cover up our own policy failures as far as linguistic and cultural unification of Africa is concerned.
It is true that colonialism did retard European colonialism had broken the backbone of Africa’s potential economic development by prohibiting its peoples to communicate, trade and express themselves in their God-given native languages. African educated elites have also failed the continent and its people in this regard. As someone observed, “Colonialism not only blocked further political development but indirect rule made local elites less accountable to their citizens.”
In the introduction to a study entitled, “Language and Colonialism”, Bettina Midge says that, “the literature on colonialism tends to focus on Europe’s economic exploitation many regions and peoples around the world and Europeans’ use of excessive force towards the natives. While these issues are undoubtedly of great importance, it is equally important to understand the cultural and specifically the linguistic and discursive practices that came to be associated with European colonial rule. These practices played an instrumental role in assigning low prestige to non-European languages and cultures, including cultural and linguistic forms that emerged due to Europe’s colonial expansion and in establishing the superiority of the colonizer’s language and culture.”
With the end of colonialism, Africans could reclaim their sovereignty, control over their destiny as well as the opportunity to restore their language diversity not only as an expression of free use of their native tongues but also as agents of continental communication and the promotion of economic activities both horizontally and vertically between the diverse tribal and ethnic identities and with the new decolonized but divided world between the center and periphery of the international system.
In a book entitled Language and Development in Africa-Perceptions, Ideologies and Challenges, H. Eckhart Wolff, says that, “Development is based on communication through language. With more than 2000 languages being used in Africa language becomes a highly relevant factor in all sectors of political, social, cultural and economic life. This important socio-linguistic dimension hitherto remains under-rated and under-researched in Western mainstream development studies.”
Herein lies the failure of our educated elites who are rather focused or obsessed on getting their higher education in English or French but also serve the same language after they graduated. If at all they decide to go back to their countries, they often use these same languages to advance their personal interests or political careers instead of building up linguistic uniformity in many regions as possible tool of mutual understanding and economic integration.
Competence in one or a few major languages at the national and continental levels is considered a good thing while the need to strike a balance with the prevailing diversity is a major challenge because linguistic diversity if properly managed would be an asset for economic development. As the choice of working language may demonstrate in certain African contexts, we cannot exclude one at the cost of the other and adopt a single policy or try to apply both at the same time. In other words, we may not succeed in adopting the one to the detriment of the other if we want to avoid chaos. People might think that language barriers may hinder communication under certain circumstances but the proliferation of languages in the African context is an asset rather than a liability.
As experts in the field maintain, “Economic studies have shown that fluency in a dominant language is important to economic success and increases economic efficiency. However, maintaining linguistic diversity also has value since language is also the expression of people’s culture.” Without a balanced approach it may be difficult to attain the desired developmental objective while in the worst case a kind of functional chaos may result with failure to reconcile the two.
The process of language integration in Africa cannot be promoted by individual African countries. This is rather a process that can only be promoted by the African Union (AU) one of whose objectives is to realize the economic integration of the continent as well as the integration and adoption of African languages as working languages. The official languages of the African union are Arabic, English, French Portuguese, Spanish and “any other African language”. The primary working languages of the AU are English and French.”
Other languages are being added in the process and Swahili, the widely used language in East Africa has become one of the AU’s working languages back in 2004. The story of Swahili’s rise to prominence by becoming the most widely spoken language in Africa is interesting and instructive as to the way an African language can be adopted as the AU language. John M. Mugabe, A Harvard academic, in an article entitled “The Story of How Swahili Became Africa’s Most Spoken Language writes that, what was “once just an obscure island dialect on an African Bantu tongue, Swahili has evolved into Africa’s most internationally recognized language. It is peer to the few languages of the world that boast over 200 million users.”
The process of selecting African languages to meet the objectives of continental integration as well as expediting economic development and modernization will continue to dominate the cultural agenda of the organization in the years and decades to come. Other African languages are bound to join the ranks of most important languages and join the other candidates.
According to available data, the most important African languages are, Amharic from Ethiopia, Hausa from Nigeria, Arabic from North Africa well as Yoruba from Nigeria again and Zulu from South Africa. These are not languages that are only widely spoken in individual African countries but also serving as linguistic tools to promote regional communication if not regional integration as their major function.
The benefits of speaking many languages or learning a new language are many, according to available data, learning a new language expands your mind and worldview. It opens you up to new cultures and to the fruits of diversity. Speaking a second and third language boosts self-confidence and increases self-esteem. In a globalizing world, knowing a second or third language give people an advantage in terms of careers.
It can also facilitate interaction among different cultures and promotes trade among communities in many African countries that were divided by colonialism. So language integration can be seen as language facilitation both at individual, community, national and global levels. At the end of the day, all these factors add up to make languages the drivers of economic development or modernization in Africa.
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD FRIDAY 16 FEBRUARY 2024
