South Africa’s Minister of Higher Education and Training Blade Nzimande has called for a debate to inform the use of African languages for teaching and research in higher education.
He said South Africans must move from merely developing African languages as languages of scholarship in academia, to giving these languages identity as part of the academic discourse.
Nzimande, who addressed the 10th anniversary of the Stellenbosch University language centre on Thursday on the advancement of African languages, was concerned that their use at most South African universities was merely symbolic.
The minister accepted that different universities were at different levels of promoting multilingualism within their operations. He said some universities were genuinely pursuing multilingual language policies that they had developed.
“I am also aware that, to some universities, multilingualism and the promotion of African languages remain mere policy expressions that have no articulation in reality,” Nzimande said, adding this was just window dressing to show compliance with policy but without commitment to developing indigenous languages.
He said 18 years into democracy, South Africa should be past the stage where there were “so few” dissertations written or research conducted in any of the country’s many indigenous languages. The country has 11 official languages, but English and Afrikaans take precedence as languages of communication.
“Over the years we have witnessed the gradual death of our languages, apart from English and Afrikaans, in the absence of their development as languages of teaching and learning, commerce and academia more generally,” Nzimande said.
The trend, however, was not peculiar to South Africa – in post-colonial Africa, many countries have struggled to develop and maintain indigenous languages, particularly in higher education.
Nzimande decried the culture of teaching and speaking in English to children whose mother tongue was not English, which happened mostly with those from middle-class families. He said this weaned children from the language of their parents and grandparents, ultimately causing them to lose their heritage.
Though he acknowledged that fluency in English presented a great advantage for opportunities in higher education and later in the world of work, Nzimande stressed the need for soul-searching debate on including African languages as integral and equal players in the world of higher education.
“The development of African languages is tied to social justice, which is an indispensable element of nation building and the promotion of social cohesion in our country.
“The development of all official languages is a necessity for human rights and dignity, access and success at post-school institutions, preservation of our heritage, communication and culture,” he said.
While accepting that global imperatives for communication and academic transfer, engagement and knowledge building thrived on using English, Nzimande said there was no need to neglect indigenous languages.
He noted that while English was international, many advanced countries – such as France, Germany, Japan and Spain – used their own languages for teaching, learning and scholarship.
Nzimande said that a ministerial advisory panel seeking ways to ensure the development of indigenous African languages in higher education would present its findings in June next year.
“We view language not as a barrier but as an instrument of empowerment,” said Stellenbosch University Vice-chancellor Professor Russel Botman.
Stellenbosch pursues parallel-medium teaching in Afrikaans and English, and provides economic and management sciences terminology in English, isiXhosa and Afrikaans.
“We need an ubuntu of languages – an acknowledgement that a language is a language through other languages. How to live in a multilingual world – that is the linguistic challenge of the 21st century,” said Botman.
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