From: Josef Schmied, English in Africa: An Introduction (Burnt Mill, Harlow: Longman,
1991), 6-22. – While the presence of English in Africa goes back to the mid-16 th century, colonial language policies with regard to utilizing and teaching English in
Britain’s African colonies only emerged in the 19 th century. In the first chapter of his authoritative study, Josef Schmied, a renowned linguist who has published widely on
English in Africa, provides a succinct overview of British language policies in Africa and their legacies for the postcolonial present.
When the British were finally drawn into the ‘scramble for Africa,’ which took place in the early 1880s and ended with the partition of Africa among the European imperial powers at the Berlin conference in 1884, formal imperial rule was established in all territories. This meant, of course, that an English-speaking superstructure was imposed with appropriate administrative, legal and educational substructures.
The administrative, legal and educational language in the British African colonies, protectorates and dependencies was English; but to a certain extent African languages were also used officially, and at times even encouraged, at the lower levels. The relationship between English language expansion and British imperialism was not, however, a straightforward one. On the one hand British colonial officers had to learn African languages before they went to Africa, and their subsequent promotion depended to some degree on passing African language tests.
1
On the other hand even non-British missions often started English classes either because they wanted to obtain special government grants that were only available for English-medium education or because they wanted to cater for Africans who wanted to ‘complete’ their education.
From an African perspective English had some advantages. People soon realized the usefulness of English for economic advancement, and saw English as being synonymous with education in general. This position, that Africans willingly took to English, is not undisputed however. There is a school of thought that argues that English was imposed on Africans, for example through a system of
‘certification.’ English, according to Omolewa (1975), was not really made com-
1 See Mohammed H. Abdulaziz, “East Africa (Tanzania and Kenya),” in: Jenny Cheshire
(ed.), English around the World: The Social Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 391-401.

84 Section III pulsory, but to obtain government employment Africans had to have a certificate
– and in order to obtain a certificate a candidate was expected to be reasonably proficient in English.
2
The colonial perspective is reflected in the report of a commission sponsored by the Phelps-Stokes Fund, based on a visit by the commission to West Africa in
1921 and to Central and East Africa in 1925/25. The report neatly summarizes the aspects deciding the issue of languages in education […]:
[…]
1. The tribal language should be used in the lower elementary standards or grades.
2. A lingua franca of African origin should be introduced in the middle classes of the school if the area is occupied by large Native groups speaking diverse languages.
3. The language of the European nation in control should be taught in the upper standards.
3
These principles remained more or less the same in most parts of British Africa during the whole of imperial rule, but the weight given to them changed, causing modifications from more paternalistic to more assimilationist approaches in different territories and by different colonial governments. The better integration of the African perspective, or what the colonizers saw as that, is reflected in general development theory as well as in language policy […]. After the First World War,
Lord Lugard, Britain’s most influential African administrator, developed his Dual
Mandate, which implied that the colonial powers had an obligation, not merely to govern justly, but also to promote the colonial peoples economically and politically.
4 The combination of African languages for the lower ranks and English for the higher ones also reflects the Dual Mandate. On the whole the British were by no means completely pro-English in their language policies, which were admittedly rather ad hoc and sometimes inconsistent.
For a long time British administrations in Africa did not want to invest much money in the education of Africans. It was thus left to ‘voluntary agents,’ and therefore the influence of the missions on language in education was very significant. In consequence missionary language policies, which were often more consistent than those of the colonial administrations, came into being. Generally speaking, Protestants tended, in accordance with their tradition since the Reformation, to favour African mother tongues in church and school, while Catholics favoured the European language, if there was no major African language or lingua franca available.
5 [...]
2 Michael Omolewa, “The English Language in Colonial Nigeria 1862-1960: A Study of the Major Factors which Promoted the English Language,” Journal of the Nigerian Eng-
lish Studies Association, 7 (1975), 103-17.
3 See text 34 below.
4 See text 1 above.
5 See John Spencer, “Colonial Language Policies and their Legacies,” in: Jack Berry and
Joseph H. Greenberg (eds.), Current Trends in Linguistics 7: Linguistics in Sub-Saharan Afri-
ca (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 537-47.

Language 85
After the Second World War, which had shown the logistic value and economic possibilities of African colonies, and after the independence of India (in
1947), it became clear to the British that self-government (within the framework of the Commonwealth) would one day also come to Africa. And although they thought, despite growing African resistance, that it might still take half a century, they started putting their African colonies on the path towards modernization.
Although this strategy was obviously aimed at securing British political and economic influence, it gave African countries a boost towards development. Besides extensive agricultural and industrial schemes an expansion of educational systems began. Whereas before the war generally apathetic colonial governments managed to provide two to four years of schooling for perhaps a quarter of their young citizens, 6 now secondary schools were expanded and a few universities founded:
University College of the Gold Coast for what became Ghana, Ibadan for Nigeria and Makerere in Uganda for East Africa. The English language was considered a key factor in this strategy, as can be seen from the following document:
116. English is important to Africans for three main reasons; as a lingua franca; as a road to the technical knowledge of modern inventions; and a means of contact with world thought.
117. The movement of population and rapid improvement of communications is bringing together people from scattered regions of Africa, so that Swahili (or another major African language, for that matter) no longer has a wide enough spread to be a useful lingua franca, even in East Africa. As the territories develop closer associations the need for English will steadily increase.
118. Africans are avid to secure the technical knowledge and skill which will, they hope, raise them out of poverty and the ever-present fear of drought and famine, and they know that this knowledge in any amount is only available to the man who can read English. Every week new links are forged through trade with the outside world and so the utilitarian reasons for learning English grow stronger.
119. The knowledge of English introduces the reader to the vast storehouse of English literature and indeed of world literature, for more foreign books have been translated into English than any other language. Now broadcasting and films penetrate into the remotest parts and can only be fully enjoyed by those who understand English.
7
The British post-war policy of modernization was more than ever before conceived and implemented through the medium of English. Since English was straightforwardly equated with modernization it gained enormous prestige. More and more Africans themselves demanded as much English as possible, or petitioned for ‘English as early as possible’ in schools. Now the same disputes between ‘orientalists’ and ‘modernizers’ or ‘anglicists’ in educational administration took place as in India (where they had been fought for almost a century since
6 Roland Oliver and J.D. Fage, A Short History of Africa, 5 th edition (Harmondsworth:
7
Penguin, 1975), 215.
Great Britain, Colonial Office, African Education: A Study of Educational Policy and Practice
in British Tropical Africa (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office , 1953), 82.

86 Section III
Macaulay’s famous minute).
8 When African politicians (who had already started to form political organizations like the African National Congress in South Africa in
1912 and the West African National Congress in 1918) joined in this demand for
English, as part of their campaign for equal education for Africans, and the abolition of separate education for Europeans, Indians and Africans, they had a second motive, too: for them English was also the language of emancipation and liberation.
The great African leaders like Nkrumah, Nyerere and Kaunda found support for their liberationist ideas from European socialists and philosophers, and began to use the colonizers’ legacy against the colonizers themselves. They adopted the
English language because they also needed it to criticize and attack their rulers in international contexts. […]
It is not surprising therefore that the newly independent African Governments continued on their modernizing English-dominated path at least for the first few years after their independence in the early 1960s.
9 Under these conditions it may be less surprising that some commissions even considered whether “literacy in
English should be the immediate goal, rather than a subsequent goal after literacy has been achieved in a vernacular”.
10 Although African politicians owed part of their success to the African languages which had been used in ‘grass-root politics’ to mobilize the masses, they did not replace the colonial language at the same time as the colonial system. In fact, the English language proved far more durable than other parts of the inheritance (e.g. the Westminster model of government was soon given up in favour of a one-party system or even military rule in most African Commonwealth states).
Since the time most African colonies gained independence the status of the
English language has not drastically changed […]. Despite the withdrawal of the
British colonial administration the English language was retained as a kind of oil which kept the administrative, military, political, legal and educational systems running smoothly when the switchboards of power were handed over. It goes without saying that this state of affairs caused controversy in some of the new nations. Sometimes conscious and determined language policies have been used to weaken or strengthen the position of English […] and such attempts are likely to
8 See Braj B. Kachru, The Alchemy of English: The Spread, Functions and Models of Non-Native
9
Englishes (Oxford: Pergamon, 1986), 35.
The earliest to gain independence were the Sudan, which had always been seen as more developed by the British administration, in 1956, and Ghana, the leader of the pan-African independence movement, in 1957. The other major African possessions became independent in the early 1960s. Smaller or economically less stable states took a little longer (e.g. Swaziland and Mauritius in 1968, the Seychelles in 1976). The major problem cases were the strong settler colonies in Southern Africa, which were more or less under direct South African influence; this delayed the independence of Zimbabwe
10 until 1980 and that of Namibia until 1990.
UNESCO, Education in Northern Rhodesia: A Report and Recommendations Prepared by the
UNESCO Planning Mission 1963 (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1964), 84.

Language 87 continue. A few general reasons why this part of the colonial inheritance has been so largely retained must suffice here.
For purely pragmatic reasons it was much easier for the government machinery to maintain the linguistic status quo and concentrate on more immediate and acute issues. Whereas after independence many African nations embarked on ambitious modernization programmes, today they are so absorbed in day-to-day problems that they have neither the energy nor the means to attempt fundamental changes in the sociolinguistic situation.
For pure reasons of national cohesion many governments have so far not chosen to use indigenous languages with sub-national ethnic affiliations in a national context, in case this endangers the ethnic equilibrium within the nation. Whereas this is a question of political feasibility in multiethnic nations (e.g. Nigeria or even
Gambia), it is one of economic feasibility in smaller nations with their international dependency (e.g. Malawi or Lesotho). Few countries, apart from Tanzania, where Swahili is seen as a supra-ethnic lingua franca, or Somalia, which is exceptional in being a state with only a single ethnic and linguistic group with strong national feelings, were in a position to use an African language as a national means of communication; most preferred to rely on other symbols to demonstrate their
Africanness and intensify national unity.
For international purposes English has become more, not less, important since colonial times, and this is not only because the influence of the British as the leading world power has in many ways been replaced by that of the Americans. Although for many Africans the feelings about English may subjectively be very mixed, it is an objective necessity for discussing national problems and expressing national points of view in pan-African and international forums (such as OAU or
UNO) and for claiming a fair share of international communication processes, be it in the political, economic, or technological fields. [14-21]
From: The Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser, Vol. XVII, Saturday, July 6th, 1822, No.
860: 1. – Somerset was governor of the Cape from 1814 to 1826. An important feature of British imperial administration and control in South Africa was to impose the sole use of the English language. The Cape was no exception. In the present document
Somerset outlines the three-stage process which would lead over a five-year period to the exclusive use of English. This measure should be considered in the light of estimates according to which at the time only one in eight residents of the colony could actually speak English. The Proclamation may also be regarded as the first official step towards establishing the hegemony of English over Dutch and as the first spur to the later creation of the Afrikaans language movement.
PROCLAMATION

88 Section III
By His Excellency, the Right Hon. General Lord CHARLES HENRY SOMER-
SET, one of His Majesty’s 11 Most Honourable Privy Council, Colonel of His
Majesty’s 1st West India Regiment, Governor and Commander in Chief of His
Majesty’s Castle, Town, and Settlement of the Cape of Good Hope, in South Africa, and of the Territories and Dependencies thereof, and Ordinary 12 and Vice
Admiral of the same, Commander of the Forces, &c.&c.&c.
WHEREAS it has been deemed expedient, with a view to the prosperity of this Settlement, that the Language of the Parent Country should be more universally diffused, and that a period should be now fixed, at which the English Language shall be exclusively used in all judicial and official Acts, Proceedings and
Business within the same. The long and familiar intercourse which has happily taken place between the good Inhabitants of this Colony, 13 and the very numerous
British-born Subjects, who have established themselves, or have been settled here, has already greatly facilitated a measure, which is likely still more closely to unite the loyal Subjects of their common Sovereign. The system, which I had previously adopted, with a view to this exigence of employing British-born Subjects, conversant in both languages, in the parochial duties of the Reformed Religion, 14 as established in this Colony, has likewise paved the way to the amelioration now contemplated.
It has pleased His Majesty most graciously to approve that measure, and to enable me to act more extensively upon it, not only by having commanded Clergymen of the Established Church of Scotland (whose religious tenets are precisely similar to those of the Reformed Church of this Country), who have received instruction in the Dutch Language, in Holland, to be sent hither, to be placed in the vacant Churches, 15 but by having authorised competent and respectable Instructors being employed at public expence, at every principal place throughout the Colony, for the purpose of facilitating the acquirement of the English Language to all classes of society.
These Teachers having now arrived, the moment appears favorable for giving full effect to His Majesty’s Commands: and I, therefore, hereby order and direct, by Virtue of the Power and Authority in me vested, that the English Language be exclusively used in all Judicial Acts and Proceedings, either in the supreme or inferior Courts of this Colony, from the 1st Day of January, of the Year of our
Lord, One Thousand Eight Hundred and Twenty-seven and that all official Acts and Documents, of the several public Offices of this Government, (the Documents and Records of the Courts of Justice, excepted) be drawn up and promulgated in the English Language, from and after the 1st Day of January, One Thousand Eight Hundred and Twenty-five; and that all Documents, prepared and issued from the Office of the Chief Secretary to this Government, be prepared in the English Language, from and after the 1st Day of January next, in the Year of
11 The reference is to King George IV. [GVD]
12 An ordinary was a judge. [GVD]
13 The reference is to the Cape Dutch, who had occupied the Cape since 1652. [GVD]
14 The Dutch Reformed Church. [GVD]
15 These were those at Caledon, Cradock and Beaufort West. [GVD]

Language 89 our Lord, One Thousand Eight Hundred and Twenty-three; from and after which periods, respectively, the English Language shall, in such judicial and official Acts and Proceedings, be exclusively adopted.
And that no Person may plead Ignorance hereof, this shall be published and affixed in the usual manner.
GOD SAVE THE KING!
Given under my Hand and Seal, at the Cape of Good Hope, this 5th Day of
July, 1822.
(Signed) C. H. SOMERSET
By Command of His Excellency the Governor,
(Signed) C. BIRD Secretary
From: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Writers in Politics: Essays (London: Heinemann, 1981), 53-65. –
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, novelist, playwright and critical essayist, is one of the best-known
African writers today. He was born in Kenya in 1938, studied English Literature in
Uganda and Britain and taught at the Literature Department at the University of Nairobi.
In 1977, he produced a play critical of the Kenyan Government in his mother tongue
Gikuyu and was detained without trial for a year. Following international protests, he was released in 1978, but was banned from academic life in Kenya, and later went into exile, first to Britain, later to the USA, where he is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. After having gained international fame through novels such as A Grain of Wheat (1967) and Petals of
Blood (1977), Ngũgĩ decided to give up writing in English in the late 1970s and to publish his future writings in his mother tongue; in many of his subsequent essays and speeches, he attacked “Europhone” literature in Africa as a legacy of imperialism and advocated a return to Africa’s indigenous languages. While Ngũgĩ is honoured worldwide as one of
Africa’s most important writers, his uncompromising Marxist stance and his often outspoken critiques of fellow African writers remain highly controversial in African letters. The following essay is an edited version of a speech originally given at the Kenya
Press Club, Nairobi, on 17 July 1979, and Ngũgĩ’s first major statement on the issue of language in African literature.
[This is not the version of this essay printed in Writers and Politics 1981. I have checked against the original and it seems to have been fairly massively edited]
When in 1963 Obi Wali, in his now classic article, “The Dead End of African Literature,” […] argued that the whole uncritical acceptance of English and French as the inevitable medium of educated African writing had no “chance of advancing African Literature and Culture” and that it would end up only producing “a minor appendage in the mainstream of European literature,” he was met with

90 Section III responses ranging from disdain to outright hostility by the leading lights of African letters .
16 Wole Soyinka demanded to know “what Obi Wali has done to translate my plays or others into Ibo or whatever language he professes to speak.” 17
Chinua Achebe was later to write defiantly that he had been “given the language and I intend to use it .” 18 Ezekiel Mphahlele was even more forthright in his embrace of the English language; at times he wrote as if he ascribed mystical political powers to European languages.
For him English and French had become “the common languages with which to present a nationalistic front against white oppressors.” And in independent African states “these two languages are still a unifying force.” Turning to South Africa, Mphahlele criticized the racist apartheid regime for encouraging “vernacular” languages:
… the [South African] government has decreed that the African languages shall be used as the medium of instruction right up to secondary schools. The aim is obviously to arrest the black man’s mental development because the previous system whereby
English was the medium for the first six years of primary education produced a strong educated class that has in turn given us a sophisticated class of political leaders and a sophisticated following – a real threat to white supremacy.
19
Mphahlele could not see that the South African government did not want English, not because of any mystical political qualities inherent in the language, but because of the uncensored and uncensorable wide range of material available in the language. Japanese and Chinese languages have produced any degree of sophistication among their leaders and followers without English being the medium of instruction.
[I gave up going through the article at this point] Why this assumption that African languages would necessarily arrest the mental development of
Africans? Ancient Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Songhai, Zimbabwe, Mali used African languages and there is no evidence of mental underdevelopment. What Ezekiel
Mphahlele genuinely feared was that with the government in control of the publishing houses of African languages and with its control of the education system including the curricula, the government hoped to control the content of what people would read. This was easy because there was relatively little written in
African languages as opposed to what was available in European Languages.
English was also the language of power and exclusion from it meant being weakened when it came to articulation of desires. If Zulu was the language of power those who did not know it would equally be disadvantaged. The Apartheid regime’s sinister policies had nothing to do with the inherent superiority of
English and European Languages over African languages. [...]
The root cause of the African writers’ predicament is historically explicable in terms of the colonial and racist encirclement and suppression of African languages
16 See Obi Wali, “The Dead End of African Literature?” Transition, 3,10 (1963), 13-16.
17
[FSE]
Wole Soyinka, “Letter to the Editor,” Transition, 3,11 (1963), 9.
18 Chinua Achebe, “The African Writer and the English Language,” in: Achebe, Morning
19
Yet on Creation Day: Essays (London: Heinemann, 1975), 62.
Ezekiel Mphahlele , “Letter to the Editor,” Transition, 3,11 (1963), 8.

Language 91 and cultures. African writers, by virtue of their education, were part of the petty bourgeoisie which had been made to imbibe western bourgeois education and cultures and the world outlook they carried. It was a petty middle class which, if and when it saw the necessity of rebellion, tended to see that rebellion only within the inherited tradition of language and culture. Nearly all the major texts of anti-colonialism are in European languages.
I do not want to suggest that the writers quoted above still cling to the same views on the question of national and foreign languages. They may in fact have changed their positions. I certainly have changed mine. But the fact remains that none of us was able satisfactorily to answer Obi Wali’s challenge, because the only way in which we could have meaningfully met the challenge was through a conscious and deliberate rejection of our class base and our equally deliberate and conscious total identification with the position of the peasant and the worker in their struggles against exploitation and domination by the unholy alliance of the comprador and imperialist bourgeoisie. Such identification would have compelled us to put all our intellectual resources into the service of the working people’s struggles not by haranguing the ruling class and their regimes and appealing to their conscience but by giving correct images of the struggle for the direct consumption of the alliance of the African worker and peasant, the only alliance that can and will ensure success in Africa’s historical struggle for real freedom and dignity.
Instead we heaped indignity on indignity upon the African peasant and worker dictated by the very choice of language and audience. Often the peasant characters were made to appear naive and simpleminded because of the kind of simplistic and distorted foreign language registers through which they were made to articulate their world view. More often than not, the characters were given the vacillating mentality and pessimistic world outlook of the petty-bourgeois. But even where the characters were given their due in terms of dignity and world outlook, they were made to express these awkwardly in foreign languages. And yet some of these characters would have been some of the best speakers and users of their own languages. Thus the tongues of millions were mutilated. The peasants were then given some kind of plastic surgery in the literary laboratories of Africa and, lo and behold, they emerged with English, French and Portuguese tongues. The final indignity consisted in this death wish for African-language speaking communities and the literary creation of a European-language speaking peasantry and working class. Quite clearly it was a death wish because it never reflected the actual social and historical reality. African languages were the ones actually spoken in the villages and towns.
I do not want to ascribe any mystical qualities to the mere fact of writing in
African languages without regard to content and form. But the question which
Obi Wali posed about the peasant and worker audiences as the strongest source of stamina and blood for African literature is primary and we, Kenyan African writers in particular, must meet the challenges of language choice and audience before we can meaningfully talk of a national literature and a national theatre, two of the most important roots of a modern national culture.

92 Section III
What in fact has been produced by we Kenyan writers in English is not African literature at all. It is Afro-Saxon literature , or better still, Anglophone Kenyan literature, part of that body of literature produced by Africans in European languages like French and Portuguese that we should correctly term Afro-European literature, or better still, Europhone African literature. We can then talk of its three major divisions: Anglophone African Literature; Francophone African literature; and Lusophone African literature. Kenyan African literature would be that literature produced mostly in the languages of all the African nationalities that make up modern Kenya. And Kenyan National literature would be the totality of all the literatures written in all the Kenyan nationality languages. Kenyan national literature can only get its stamina and blood by utilizing the rich traditions of culture and history carried by the languages of all the Kenyan nationalities. In other words Kenyan national literature can thrive only if it reaches for its roots in the languages, cultures and history of the Kenyan peasant masses, the majority class in each of Kenya’s national communities.
Let me for a moment dwell on this: a language, any language, has its social base in a people’s production of their material life – in the very practical activities of human beings co-operating and communicating in toil as they wrestle with nature to procure their means of life – food, clothing and dwelling place. Language as a system of verbal signposts is a product of a people communicating in the production, exchange and distribution of wealth. Languages in their particular forms arise historically as social needs. Over a time, a particular system of verbal signposts comes to reflect a given people’s historical consciousness of their twin struggles with nature and with one another. Their language becomes the memory bank of their collective struggles. Such a language comes to embody both continuity and change in their historical consciousness. It is this aspect of language as a collective memory bank of a given community which has made some people ascribe mystical independence to language. It is the same aspect which has made nations take up arms to prevent total annihilation or assimilation of their language. To so annihilate a language is tantamount to destroying that people’s collective memory bank of their past achievements and failures, say their experience over time, which forms the basis of their identity as a people. It is like uprooting that people from history:
History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which exploits the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all the preceding generations, and thus, on the one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances, and on the other, modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity.
20
Language is both a product of that succession of the separate generations, as well as being a bank for the way of life reflecting those modifications of collective experience in the production and reproduction of their life. Literature, thinking in images, utilizes language and draws upon the collective experience embodied in
20 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, ed. and introd. C.J. Arthur (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1959), 57.

Language 93 the language. In writing one should hear all the whispering and the shouting and the crying and the laughing and all the loving and hating of the many voices gone, and those will never speak to a writer in a foreign language.
We Kenyans can no longer avoid the question: whose language and history will our literature draw upon? European languages and the culture and history carried by those languages? Or national languages – Dholuo, Kiswahili, Gĩkũyũ, Luluhya,
Kikamba, Kimaasai, Kigiriama, etc – and the histories and cultures carried by them? The totality of these languages constitutes our heritage as Kenyans. This brings us back to the question of audience. If a Kenyan writer wants to speak to the peasants and workers of any one Kenyan community, then he should write in the language they speak and understand. If on the other hand he wants to communicate with Europeans and all those who speak European languages, then he must use English, French, Portuguese, Greek, German, Italian and Spanish. If a
Kenyan writer wants to be part of the national mainstream, seeking inspiration and strength from the many voices past and present, and giving something back to the mainstream, then he should utilize nationality languages or the All-Kenya national language which is Kiswahili. But if he wants to be part of an alliance of a
European mainstream and a national minority social stratum, then he should use
European languages. In making their choices, Kenyan writers should remember that the struggle of our languages against domination by those of Europe is part of a wider historical struggle of the Kenyan national culture against imperialist domination. The question of languages, African or European, has in fact been at the centre of Kenyan politics. [53-58]
From: Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays, (New York: Knopf,
2009), 96-106; the essay was first published in Doug Killam (ed.), FILLM Proceedings
(Guelph, Ontario: University of Guelph, 1989). – (For more detailed biographical information on Achebe see text 8 above). From the very beginning of his writing career, Chinua Achebe, the ‘founding father’ of the anglophone African novel, has written on the role of English in modern African literature in general and his own creative writing in particular; for an early publication see “The African Writer and the
English Language” in Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (London: Heinemann
1975), 55-62. In the following essay, Achebe responds to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s critique of ‘Afro-European’ literature by highlighting the centrality of English in Nigeria’s public affairs and pointing out the political and cultural complexity of Africa’s multilingual landscape.
Of all the explosions that have rocked the African continent in recent decades, few have been more spectacular, and hardly any more beneficial, than the eruption of African literature, shedding a little light here and there on what had been an area of darkness.

94 Section III
So dramatic has been the change that I am even presuming that a few of my readers may recognize my title as a somewhat mischievous rendering of the subtitle of the book Decolonising the Mind, by an important African writer and revolutionary, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.
21 The mischief lies in my inserting after the word
“politics” the two words “and politicians,” like dropping a pair of cats among
Ngũgĩ’s pigeons.
Ngũgĩ’s book argues passionately and dramatically that to speak of African literature in European languages is not only an absurdity but also part of the scheme of Western imperialism to hold Africa in perpetual bondage. He reviews his own position as a writer in English and decides that he can no longer continue in the treachery. So he makes a public renunciation of English in a short statement at the beginning of his book. Needless to say, Ngũgĩ applies the most severe censure to those African writers who remain accomplices of imperialism, especially Senghor and Achebe, but particularly Achebe, presumably because Senghor no longer threatens anybody!
Theatricalities aside, the difference between Ngũgĩ and myself on the issue of indigenous or European languages for African writers is that while Ngũgĩ now believes it is either/or, I have always thought it was both. [97-98]
I write in English. English is a world language. But I do not write in English
because it is a world language. My romance with the world is subsidiary to my involvement with Nigeria and Africa. Nigeria is a reality which I could not ignore.
One characteristic of this reality, Nigeria, is that it transacts a considerable portion of its daily business in the English language. As long as Nigeria wishes to exist as a nation, it has no choice in the foreseeable future but to hold its more than two hundred component nationalities together through an alien language, English. I lived through a civil war in which probably two million people perished over the question of Nigerian unity. To remind me, therefore, that Nigeria’s foundation was laid only a hundred years ago, at the Berlin conference of European powers and in the total absence of any Africans, is not really useful information to me. It is precisely because the nation is so new and so fragile that we would soak the land in blood to maintain the frontiers mapped out by foreigners.
English is therefore not marginal to Nigerian affairs. It is quite central. I can only speak across two hundred linguistic frontiers to fellow Nigerians in English.
Of course I also have a mother tongue, which luckily for me is one of the three major languages of the country. “Luckily,” I say, because this language, Igbo, is not really in danger of extinction. I can gauge my good luck against the resentment of fellow Nigerians who oppose most vehemently the token respect accorded to the three major tongues by newscasters saying good night in them after reading a half-hour bulletin in English!
Nothing would be easier than to ridicule our predicament if one was so minded. And nothing would be more attractive than to proclaim from a safe distance
21 See Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature
(London: James Currey / Heinemann, 1986). [FSE]

Language 95 that our job as writers is not to describe the predicament but to change it. But this is where the politics of language becomes politicking with language. [100-101]
The point in all this is that language is a handy whipping boy to summon and belabor when we have failed in some serious way. In other words, we play politics with language, and in so doing conceal the reality and the complexity of our situation from ourselves and from those foolish enough to put their trust in us.
The politics Ngũgĩ plays with language is of a different order. It is a direct reflection of a slowly perfected Manichean vision of the world. He sees but one
“great struggle between the two mutually opposed forces in Africa today: an imperialist tradition on one hand and a resistance tradition on the other.” 22 Flowing nicely from this unified vision, Africa’s language problems resolve themselves into
European languages, sponsored and foisted on the people by imperialism, and
African languages, defended by patriotic and progressive forces of peasants and workers.
To demonstrate how this works out in practice, Ngũgĩ gives us a moving vignette of how the enemy interfered with his mother tongue in his “Limuru peasant community”:
I was born in a large peasant family: father, four wives and about twenty-eight children. … We spoke Gikuyu as we worked in the fields.
23
The reader is given nearly two pages of this pastoral idyll of linguistic and social harmony in which stories are told around the fire at the end of the day. Even at school, young Ngũgĩ is taught in Kikuyu, in which he excels to the extent of winning an infant ovation for his composition in that language. Then the imperialists struck, in 1952, and declared a state of emergency in Kenya; and Ngũgĩ’s world is brutally shattered.
All the schools run by patriotic nationalists were taken over by the colonial regime and were placed under District Education Boards chaired by Englishmen. English became the language of my formal education. In Kenya, English became more than a language: it was the language, and all others had to bow before it in deference.
24
A really heartrending scenario, but also a scenario strewn with fatal snags for the single-minded. I had warned about this danger in one of the earliest statements I ever made in my literary career – that those who would canonize our past must serve also as the devil’s advocate, setting down beside the glories every inconvenient fact. Unfortunately, Ngũgĩ is too good a partisan to do this double duty.
So he files the totally untenable report that imperialists imposed the English language on the patriotic peasants of Kenya as recently as 1952! What about the inconvenient fact that already in the 1920s and 1930s
22 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, 2. [FSE]
23 Ibid., 10.
24 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, 11.

96 Section III the Kikuyu Independent Schools, which were started by the Kikuyu after their rift with the Scottish missionaries, taught in English [my italics] instead of the vernacular even in the first grade.
25
Inconvenient though it may be, the scenario before us here is of imperialist agents
(in the shape of Scottish missionaries) desiring to teach Kikuyu children in their mother tongue, while the patriotic Kikuyu peasants are revolting and breaking away because they prefer English!
What happened in Kenya also happened in the rest of the empire. Neither in
India nor in Africa did the English seriously desire to teach their language to the natives. When the historic and influential Phelps-Stokes Commission report in
West Africa in 1922 favored the native tongue over English, 26 its recommendations were eagerly picked up by the official British Advisory Committee on Native
Education in Tropical Africa.
27
In Nigeria, the demand for English was already there in the coastal regions as early as the first half of the nineteenth century. A definitive study of the work of
Christian missions in Nigeria from Professor J.F.A. Ajay reports that in the Niger
Delta in the 1850s, the missionary teachers were already “obliged to cater for the demand … for the knowledge of the English language.” 28
In Calabar by 1876, some of the chiefs were not satisfied with the amount of
English their children were taught in missionary schools and were hiring private tutors at a very high fee. Nowhere in all this can we see the slightest evidence of the simple scenario painted by Ngũgĩ of European imperialism forcing its language down the throats of unwilling natives. In fact, imperialism’s ways with language were extremely complex.
If imperialism was not to blame, or not entirely to blame for the presence of
European languages in Africa today, who, then, is the culprit? Ourselves? Our parents? Awkward as it may be, we should be bold enough to contemplate it and deal with it once and for all, if we can, and move on. We will discover, I am afraid, that the only reason these alien languages are still knocking about is that they serve an actual need. [102-105]
It would seem, then, that the culprit in Africa’s language difficulties was not imperialism, as Ngũgĩ would have us believe, but the linguistic pluralism of modern African states. No doubt this will explain the strange fact that the Marxist states in Africa, with the exception of Ethiopia, have been the most forthright in adopting the languages of their former colonial rulers – Angola, Mozambique,
Guinea-Bissau, and most lately Burkina Faso, whose minister of culture once said
25 Richard Symons, The British and Their Successors (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern UP, 1966),
26
202.
For an excerpt from the Phelps-Stokes Report, see text 34 below. [FSE]
27 David R. Smock and Kwamena Bentsi-Enchill (eds.), The Search for National Integration in
28
Africa (London: Collier Macmillan, 1975), 174.
J.F. Ade Ajayi, Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841-1891 (London: Longmans, 1965), 133-
34.

Language 97 with a retrospective shudder that the sixty ethnic groups in that country could mean sixty different nationalities.
This does not in any way close the argument for the development of African languages by the intervention of writers and governments. But we do not have to falsify our history in the process. That would be playing politics. The words of the
Czech novelist Kundera should ring in our ears: Those who seek power passionately do so not to change the present or the future but the past – to rewrite history.
There is no cause for writers to join their ranks. [106]
From: Research in African Literature, 23,1 (1992), 153-157. – Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941-1995) was not only one of the most outspoken environmental activists and intellectual critics of military rule in Nigeria (for more biographical details, see text 9 above), but also a writer experimenting with a wide variety of popular genres (including theatre, radio plays and television formats such as the famous “Basi and Company” series broadcast in Nigeria in the late 1980s). Saro-Wiwa also employed a wide variety of ‘Englishes’ in his work ranging from Standard and West African English employed in most of his satirical novels through the usage of “Pidgin English” in many of his radio and television broadcasts to experiments with “Rotten English,” a literary variety of non-standard English, in his novel Sozaboy (1985). In the following essay, Saro-Wiwa reflects on the role of English in Nigeria’s multilingual social reality from the vantage point of a speaker of one of Nigeria’s minor languages and explains his choice of Standard English as the most effective medium for literary and political communication.
I was born to Ogoni parents at Bori on the northern fringes of the delta of the
Niger during the Second World War. I grew up speaking one of the three Ogoni languages – Khana, my mother-tongue – and listening to and telling folk tales in that language.
When I went to primary school in 1947, I was taught in my mother-tongue during the first two years. During the other six years of the primary school course, the teaching was done in English, which soon imprinted itself on my mind as the language of learning. Khana was the language of play, and it appeared on the class time-table once or twice a week as “vernacular” – wonderful, story-telling sessions in Khana. We spoke Khana at home, and we read the Bible at church in Khana. It was enough to make me literate in Khana to this day.
The Ogoni lived a simple, circumscribed life at that time; farming and fishing were their sole occupations. There were a number of primary schools in the area, but no secondary school. All those who wished or were able to go to secondary school had to move to other parts of the country.
Accordingly, in 1954, at about 13, I proceeded to Government College, Umuahia, which was the best school in the area. I was the only Ogoni boy in the entire school. Others were mostly Igbo, Ibibio, Ijaw, and representatives of other ethnic

98 Section III groups in what was then Eastern Nigeria. A few came from the Cameroons, which was at that time administered as a part of Nigeria. The English language was a unifying factor at the school; in fact, there was a regulation forbidding the use of any of our mother-tongues at work or during recreation. This rule ensured that boys like myself did not feel lost in the school because we could not communicate with any other boy in our mother-tongues. There were no books in any other language, apart from English, in the school’s excellent library. We worked and played in English. One result of this regime was that in a single generation, the school produced Chinua Achebe, Gabriel Okara, the late Christopher Okigbo,
Elechi Amadi, Vincent Ike, and I.N.C. Aniebo, who was my contemporary.
There, at Government College, I began to write poems, short stories, and plays in English, the language which, as I have said, bound us all together. There was no question of my writing in Khana because no one else would have understood it.
From Government College, I proceeded in 1962 to the University of Ibadan, where I met young men and women from different parts of a vast country. By then, Nigeria had become independent. The language of instruction at Ibadan was
English of course. There was no restriction as to what language we could use outside the lecture halls. So, those who were there in sufficient numbers invariably spoke their mother-tongues among themselves. However, English was what enabled students from different ethnic backgrounds to communicate with each other. English was also the official language of the country, by necessity. I wrote poems, short stories, and plays in English. Once again, there was no question of my using my Khana mother-tongue, which no one else at the university would have understood. I was studying English and, at that time, had come across the argument of Obi Wali (whom I was later to meet and to know intimately). According to him, English was the dead-end of African literature.
29
In those days, African literature was a fashionable course of study, although I did not find it so. I had read most of the novels published by Africans in English and did not feel that they added up to much as a course of study. I was also preparing to be a writer, and I was not impressed by Dr. Wali’s arguments for the simple reason that I did not consider myself as a writer of African literature. I wanted to be a good storyteller, no more, no less. Putting me in a category would be the business of the critics. In any case, I was yet to publish anything. That was
1963 or thereabouts.
Nigeria had become independent three years earlier, and the country was gradually gravitating towards war. As a boy, I knew that I was an Ogoni. Of that, there was never any doubt. I also knew that Khana was my mother-tongue. Most Ogonis spoke Khana. It was a secure world.
Growing up at Government College in Umuahia, I interacted with boys my age from different parts of the Eastern Region of Nigeria. And because the school taught us to be good citizens, I had learned the necessity of being a good Nigerian.
By independence in 1960, I had taken the fact for granted. I had travelled to different parts of the country and knew something of the great mixture of peoples
29 See text 24 above. [FSE]

Language 99 that is Nigeria. Somehow, as long as I could speak and read English, it was easy to relate to the rest of the country away from my Ogoni home. So, English was im- portant. Not only as the language which opened new ideas to me, but as a link to the other peoples with whom I came into contact during my day-to-day life. [153-
154]
All the foregoing might seem irrelevant to the question of the language of African literature. Yet what I have tried to show is that, using Nigeria as an example, different languages and cultures exist in Africa. The fact that we share a common color or certain common beliefs or a common history of slavery and exploitation are not enough to just lump all Africa into a single pigeon-hole.
If Europeans speak of French literature, Spanish literature, and English literature, why do we insist on having an “African literature” and debating what language it should be written in? Africa is the second largest continent in the world.
It has a multiplicity of languages and each language has its own literature. So, there is an Ogoni literature, a Yoruba literature, a Wolof literature. Most of this literature is oral because these societies are, in most cases, preliterate. That is a fact.
However, the need to communicate with one another and the rest of the world, and the fact of colonialism (which is also real) have forced us to write in the languages of our erstwhile colonial masters. I, for one, do not feel guilty about this. Were I writing in Khana, I would be speaking to about 200,000 people, most of whom do not read and write. Writing in English as I do, I can reach, hypothetically speaking, 400 million people. That cannot be bad. So, for me, English is a worthy tool, much like the biro pen or the banking system or the computer, which were not invented by the Ogoni people but which I can master and use for my own purposes. Writing in English has not prevented me from writing in my
Khana mother-tongue. I am, indeed, working on a Khana novel at the moment, but that is not because I want to prove a point. I am writing this novel so I can offer it to my seventy-year old mother. She is always reading the Bible – the only book which exists in the Khana language – and I would like to give her some other literature to read.
But I am also writing this novel because I can self-publish it. I am lucky to be in a position to do so; none of the established publishers in Nigeria or anywhere else in the world would have accepted to publish it for the simple reason that it would not be profitable to do so. I have also self-published most of the twenty books I have written in English because publishers of fiction by African writers are few and far between. But that is another story.
I am aware of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s argument about decolonizing the mind and his determination to write in his native Gĩkũyũ.
30 He is of course welcome to do so. In Nigeria, many writers have been writing in their mother-tongues for a long time. There are newspapers in Hausa and in Yoruba. There is no need to blow this matter out of proportion. Besides, I detect some posturing in Ngũgĩ’s stance. Because he had already made his mark as a writer in English, his works have become instant subjects of translation into English, enabling him to live by his writing. If
30 See text 24 above. [FSE]

100 Section III this were not the case, he might not be so sure of his decision. I also wonder if he has thought or cares about the implications of his decision for the minority ethnic groups in Kenya and for the future of Kenya as a multiethnic nation or, indeed, as a nation at all.
Furthermore, I have examined myself very closely to see how writing or reading in English has colonized my mind. I am, I find, as Ogoni as ever. I am enmeshed in Ogoni culture. I eat Ogoni food. I sing Ogoni songs. I dance to Ogoni music. And I find the best in the Ogoni world-view as engaging as anything else. I am anxious to see the Ogoni establish themselves in Nigeria and make their contribution to world civilization. I myself am contributing to Ogoni life as fully, and possibly even more effectively than those Ogoni who do not speak and write English. The fact that I appreciate Shakespeare, Dickens, Chaucer, Hemingway, et al., the fact that I know something of European civilization, its history and philosophy, the fact that I enjoy Mozart and Beethoven – is this a colonization of my mind? I cannot exactly complain about it.
I am also aware of the proposition that Africa should adopt one language – a continental language. Wole Soyinka once suggested the adoption of Swahili.
31
Quite apart from the fact that the idea is totally impracticable, it seems to me to lack intellectual or political merit. Once a language is not one’s mother-tongue, it is an alien language. Its being an African language is a moot point. As I said earlier, Africans have practiced colonialism as much as Europeans. In most cases, this colonialism has been harsh and crude; it is as detestable as European colonialism.
The position in today’s Nigeria is a case in point. The Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba, and
Igbo have inflicted on three hundred other ethnic groups a rule that is most onerous. Were I, as an Ogoni, forced to speak or write any of these languages (as is presently proposed), I would rebel against the idea and encourage everyone else to do the same. Moreover, people of the same tongue are not always of the same mind.
African literature is written in several languages, including the extra-African languages of English, French, and Portuguese. As more and more writers emerge, as criticism responds to their works, as African languages increasingly acquire written form, and as communities become more politically aware of the need to develop their languages and cultures, African literature will break down into its natural components, and we will speak of Ogoni literature, Igbo literature, Fanti literature, Swahili literature, etc. But there will continue to be an African literature written in English and French and Portuguese. The fact that these languages have been on the continent for over a hundred years and are spoken by many African peoples entitles them to a proper place among the languages that are native to the continent.
With regard to English, I have heard it said that those who write in it should adopt a domesticated “African” variety of it. I myself have experimented with the
31 See Wole Soyinka, “Language as Boundary,” in: Soyinka, Art, Dialogue and Outrage:
Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. and introd. Biodun Jeyifo (Ibadan: New Horn Press,
1988): 132-145. [FSE]

Language 101 three varieties of English spoken and written in Nigeria: pidgin, “rotten,” and standard. I have used them in poetry, short stories, essays, drama, and the novel. I have tried them out in print, on stage, on the radio, and with television comedy.
That which carries best and which is most popular is standard English, expressed simply and lucidly. It communicates and expresses thoughts and ideas perfectly.
And so I remain a convinced practitioner and consumer of African literature in
English. I am content that this language has made me a better African in the sense that it enables me to know more about Somalia, Kenya, Malawi, and South Africa than I would otherwise have known. [155-157]
From: Africa, 3,1 (Rhodes University: Grahamstown, 1976); reprinted in André Brink,
Mapmakers: Writing in a State of Siege (London: Faber & Faber, 1983), 108-110. – André
Brink (b. 1935) has taught at Rhodes University and at the University of Cape Town.
He is the author of eighteen novels and two collections of essays. In 2009 he published the autobiographical memoir A Fork in the Road. Brink’s work owes much to the early experience of studying in France in the 1960s: his literary ideas were influenced by contemporary European writing, while the radical political thought of the student movement caused him to adopt a more politicised role as a South African writer. He has sought in his work to engage with Afrikaner history and identity and to analyse the social and political consequences of racial discrimination. Brink wrote initially solely in
Afrikaans but after his novel Kennis van die Aand (1973) became the first novel in Afrikaans to be banned he rewrote the book in English (as Looking on Darkness; 1974) and took up the practice of writing in both languages. The extract below considers the rationale for this decision.
The English language that arrived at the Cape at whatever date one might care to choose – 1875, 1803 or 1820 – was altogether different from the conglomeration of Dutch dialects in 1652. Naturally all languages continue to change and develop; but the English transplanted to the Cape was undeniably a language already largely formalized and structured: whatever changes may have occurred since then have made little difference to the basic semantic, morphological and syntactic systems and processes of the language, and (apart from minor problems with accent) the
Londoner of today has very little trouble in understanding English as she is spoke in South Africa. (Whereas Dutch literary reviews, with a highly erudite readership, are reluctant to publish any material in Afrikaans unless accompanied by a Dutch translation.)
Moreover, while the majority of the British Settlers of 1820 were from the lower classes, the very nature of the South African economic situation soon established English as a bourgeois language on the continent. (Afrikaans, on the other hand, retained its working-class connections until at least the Second World War.)
It was, in fact, as difficult for the English language to adapt to Africa in the nineteenth century as it would have been for a gentleman in top hat and tails to adjust to life in the bush. Adapt and adjust it did, let there be no doubt about that – and the current renaissance of English literature in South Africa provides splendid

102 Section III confirmation of the fact – but for a very long time, it seems to me, the nature of the language itself acted as a deterrent in the evolution of a significant indigenous literature. It seems almost incredible, in retrospect, that The Story of an African
Farm 32 could evoke, in 1883, so convincingly the essential African-ness of Olive
Schreiner’s experience: and her achievement is all the more remarkable if compared with what followed during the next half-century or so – a period when, with a handful of notable exceptions, English writers in South Africa seemed interested in the land only for what colour it could provide, with a number of misspelt kopjes, sjamboks, veldschoens 33 or Vrouw Grobbelaars 34 thrown in for good measure.
And it was the language as such which stood in the way – at least until the triumvirate of the magazine Voorslag (Whiplash), 35 Roy Campbell, 36 William Plomer 37 and Laurens Van der Post 38 effected an emancipation of South African English from its colonial bonds.
During the 1930s a remarkable reconnaissance of the country started, expressed in a language more fully shaped to the needs of the situation. And out of that venture, via the great contribution of Herman Charles Bosman 39 (himself, like
Van der Post, an Afrikaner writing exclusively in English), Alan Paton 40 and others, emerged a vital and viable new literature bearing the paradoxical stamp of art in being both utterly local and utterly universal in its exploration of man in space and time.
Today, it appears to me – and I can as yet attempt only a tentative statement about it – a most interesting situation has come about. In the past, most Afrikaans
32 The Story of an African Farm (1883), published under the pseudonym Ralph Iron by
Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), is remarkable for its portrayal of Boer life in the semidesert of the Karoo and its advanced feminist views. [GVD]
33 These familiar Afrikaans words mean respectively: a small hill, a whip used for driving animals, and a shoe made of rough hide. [GVD]
34 The reference is to a short-story collection by Perceval Gibbon (?1879-1926) first published in 1905 under the title The Vrouw Grobelaar’s Leading Cases. [GVD]
35 Voorslag, a short-lived and highly controversial literary journal was edited in 1926 by three young writers, who went on to become very prominent writers. [GVD]
36 Roy Campbell (1901-1957), long regarded by some as South Africa’s most important poet, is the author of many volumes of technically brilliant and often bitterly satirical poetry, including The Flaming Terrapin (1924) and The Wayzgoose (1928). [GVD]
37 William Plomer (1903-1973), the author of the novel Turbott Wolfe (1925), which he had written at the age of 20, left South Africa after the Voorslag episode and spent most of his life in England, where he gained a considerable reputation as a poet. [GVD]
38 Laurens van der Post (1906-1996) is known not only for novels such as In a Province
(1934) but also for his anthropological studies, which include Venture to the Interior
(1952) and The Lost World of the Kalahari (1958). [GVD]
39 Herman Charles Bosman (1905-1951) is best known for his series of 84 stories featuring one of the most celebrated characters in South African literature, Oom Schalk
Lourens. The best known collection of these is Mafeking Road (1947). [GVD]
40 Alan Paton (1903-1988) was the author of the novel Cry, The Beloved Country (1948), the most famous and widely translated work of South African fiction. [GVD]

Language 103 works seemed more or less untranslatable into English (and an anthology like Afri-
kaans Poems with English Translations proved the point), 41 and vice versa. I know from experience that it is easier to translate from French or Spanish or German into Afrikaans than from English. Yet I have, with sweat and close to tears, attempted translations from the works of Graham Greene, Henry James, and even
Lewis Carroll and Shakespeare. But I would hesitate to attempt Nadine Gordimer in Afrikaans, just as I would be reluctant to translate Van Wyk Louw 42 into English: in dealing with the experience of living-in-Africa, the one is so quintessentially “English,” the other so “Afrikaans” (which is intended as a compliment to both) that their remoteness from one another is increased by their contingency.
And this goes for much of the best work written in Afrikaans and in South African English until quite recently.
But this situation appears to be changing, at least in the work of certain authors. If I read Stephen Gray’s Local Colour 43 or J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands 44 , the fact that both are written in English seems almost coincidental. If I were stopped in the middle of a passage and asked whether I was reading a book in English or
Afrikaans I might have to check the text before I could be quite sure. The same goes for, say, an Afrikaans novel by John Miles.
45 And I find it even more obvious in much of the poetry written in either language in the country today. The change must, at least to some extent, lie in the language itself. Yet there is nothing “English” about John Miles’s Afrikaans and nothing “Afrikaans” about Coetzee’s English. (And I am deliberately not choosing examples like Van der Post, Athol
Fugard 46 or Bosman where the syntactic patterns of Afrikaans are evident just below the surface; or some passages of Etienne Leroux 47 which are obviously
“English” in inspiration.) So the major change must have occurred in what surrounds the language, in its framework of reference, its patterns of possibilities,
41 An anthology edited by A. P. Grove & C. J. D. Harvey and published in Cape Town by Oxford University Press in 1969. [GVD].
42 Van Wyk Louw (1906-1970) is a central figure in the history of Afrikaans literature, well known for his poetry and his essays. [GVD]
43 Local Colour (1975) is a satirical novel by Stephen Gray (b. 1941), who is an extremely versatile and influential man of letters, having distinguished himself as critic, editor, anthologist, essayist, poet and playwright. [GVD]
44 Dusklands (1974) was the first novel published by the later Nobel Prize-winner. [GVD]
45 John Miles (b. 1938) is a poet, novelist and short story writer, who writes in Afrikaans and whose novel Kroniek uit die doofpot (1997) was translated into English as Deafening
Silence. [GVD]
46 Athol Fugard (b. 1932) is without doubt South Africa’s most important playwright.
Beginning in the late 1950s he has written plays – including The Blood Knot (1961), Boes-
man and Lena (1969) Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972), The Island (1973), ‘Master Harold’… and
the Boys (1983), and The Road to Mecca (1984) – which have been staged throughout the world. [GVD]
47 Etienne Leroux (1922-1989) was an avant-garde novelist and, like Brink, a member of the Sestiger group. Perhaps his best known novel is Magersfontein, O Magersfontein! (1976), which was also translated into English. [GVD]

104 Section III semantic or otherwise. And this would imply that both languages have reached a point where they are now fully geared to the realities of Africa: both have become sufficiently Africanized to cope with Africa. Both have roots in Europe, but both have chosen Southern Africa as their “operational area.” If this is so – and at this stage I can offer it only as conjecture – it would explain why Afrikaans authors may find it more “natural” at this stage than before to communicate not only in
Afrikaans but in English as well.
From: African Publishing Review, 9,1 (2000), 1-3. – The Asmara Declaration was drawn up at the conference “Against All Odds: African Languages and Literatures into the 21st
Century” held in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, in January 2000. Writers, scholars, cultural activists, educators, civic groups, students, publishers and artists converged for seven days to attend workshops, meetings and performances dedicated to discussing the current role and future potential of African languages. The Asmara Declaration issued at the end of the conference and reprinted in full below, has since become a major reference point for debates on the role of African languages in public life, education, publishing and literature. Neither the Permanent Secretariat nor the biannual conferences on African languages envisaged in the Declaration have yet been implemented, however.
We writers and scholars from all regions of Africa gathered in Asmara, Eritrea from January 11 to 17, 2000 at the conference titled Against All Odds: African
Languages and Literatures into the 21st Century. This is the first conference on
African languages and literatures ever to be held on African soil, with participants from East, West, North, Southern Africa and from the diaspora and by writers and scholars from around the world. We examined the state of African languages in literature, scholarship, publishing, education and administration in Africa and throughout the world. We celebrated the vitality of African languages and literatures and affirmed their potential. We noted with pride that despite all the odds against them, African languages as vehicles of communication and knowledge survive and have a written continuity of thousands of years. Colonialism created some of the most serious obstacles against African languages and literatures. We noted with concern the fact that these colonial obstacles still haunt independent
Africa and continue to block the mind of the continent. We identified a profound incongruity in colonial languages speaking for the continent. At the start of a new century and millennium, Africa must firmly reject this incongruity and affirm a new beginning by returning to its languages and heritage.
At this historic conference, we writers and scholars from all regions of Africa gathered in Asmara, Eritrea declare that:
1. African languages must take on the duty, the responsibility and the challenge of speaking for the continent.
2. The vitality and equality of African languages must be recognized as a basis for the future empowerment of African peoples.

Language 105
3. The diversity of African languages reflects the rich cultural heritage of Africa and must be used as an instrument of African unity.
4. Dialogue among African languages is essential: African languages must use the instrument of translation to advance communication among all people, including the disabled.
5. All African children have the inalienable right to attend school and learn in their mother tongues. Every effort should be made to develop African languages at all levels of education.
6. Promoting research on African languages is vital for their development, while the advancement of African research and documentation will be best served by the use of African languages.
7. The effective and rapid development of science and technology in Africa depends on the use of African languages and modern technology must be used for the development of African languages.
8. Democracy is essential for the equal development of African languages, and
African languages are vital for the development of democracy based on equality and social justice.
9. African languages like all languages contain gender bias. The role of African languages in development must overcome this gender bias and achieve gender equality.
10. African languages are essential for the decolonization of African minds and for the African Renaissance.
The initiative which has materialized in the Against All Odds conference must be continued through biennial conferences in different parts of Africa. In order to organize future conferences in different parts of Africa, create a forum of dialogue and co-operation and advance the principles of this declaration, a permanent secretariat will be established, which will be initially based in Asmara, Eritrea.
Translated into as many African languages as possible and based on these principles, the Asmara Declaration is affirmed by all participants in Against All Odds.
We call upon all African states, the OAU, the UN and all international organizations that serve Africa to join this effort of recognition and support for African languages, with this declaration as a basis for new policies.
While we acknowledge with pride the retention of African languages in some parts of Africa and the diaspora and the role of African languages in the formation of new languages, we urge all people in Africa and the diaspora to join in the spirit of this declaration and become part of the efforts to realize its goals.
Asmara, 17th January 2000
From: Journal of Sociolinguistics, 5,1 (2001), 131-142. – Jan Blommaert is Professor of Linguistic and a specialist in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis who has published

106 Section III widely on grassroots literacy, language standardization and policy, and the relationship between standard and vernacular languages in Africa. In the following essay, he presents a critical analysis of the Asmara Declaration (see Text 28) and some of its underlying assumptions about language, culture and society from a sociolinguistic perspective.
I recently received through an electronic list the text of the Asmara Declaration, a declaration about linguistic rights of African languages and their speakers drafted by African scholars and writers at a conference in Asmara, Eritrea, in January
2000. I am very sympathetic towards a declaration such as this one, having spent a substantial portion of my academic life on precisely the issues advocated in the
Declaration and having gone on record repeatedly in this respect. At the same time, declarations such as the Asmara Declaration confront us, sociolinguists, with a problem (or a series of problems) which can be described as a tension between the principles and rights advocated in the declaration, and some of the things we know as sociolinguists. [131]
I have to reaffirm a sociolinguistic truism now (baffled to see how often it is forgotten): within ‘French’, ‘English’, ‘Dutch’ or ‘Swahili’ there is massive diversity and there too, difference is equated with inequality. There is, for instance, considerable difference in symbolic value and social effectiveness between spoken Swahili and written Swahili. Thus the massification and increase in prestige of Swahili in Tanzania (to the detriment of the former colonial language English) has not led in itself to greater equality or increased social mobility for all Tanzanians: what counts is not the existence and distribution of languages, but the availability, accessibility and distribution of specific linguistic communicative skills such as competence in standard and literate varieties of the languages. Granting a member of a minority group the right to speak his or her mother tongue in the public arena does not in itself empower him or her. People can be ‘majority’ members (e.g. they can speak the language of the ruling groups in society) yet they can be thoroughly disenfranchised because of a lack of access to status varieties of the socalled ‘power language’.
The sheer coexistence of languages in one state cannot be an aim in itself when seen in terms of equality and equal rights; the aim should be to make available the power varieties of languages – any language so chosen – to all citizens. Overlooking internal inequalities within what is commonly defined as ‘languages’ is overlooking the political economy of linguistic-communicative resources in a society.
It means that ‘linguistic community’ (an ideological unit) and ‘speech community’
(an ethnographic-sociolinguistic unit) are taken to coincide.
48 Needless to say, this is highly objectionable. Furthermore, the equation between linguistic communities and ‘nations’ […] and the further equation of language communities with ‘cul-
48 Michael Silverstein, “Monoglot ‘Standard’ in America: Standardization and Metaphors of Linguistic Hegemony,” in: Donald Brenneis and Ronald Macaulay (eds.), The Matrix
of Language: Contemporary Linguistic Anthropology (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), 284-
306.

Language 107 tures’ and thus with ‘species’ of human kind, is hard to sustain. Nation is an elusive concept anyway; the ‘one culture – one language’ ideology has been under attack since the days of Sapir and should have been completely discredited since
Labov, Gumperz and Hymes. There seems to be a clear influence on the kind of work discussed here from politicized narratives produced by politically mobilized ethnolinguistic groups with a developed political ideology that celebrates language as the distinctive feature of nationhood. Political self-identification and descriptive-analytic scholarship seem to overlap. There is nothing wrong with adopting members’ perspectives in social scientific investigations; but these perspectives have to stand the test of ethnographic analysis. [135-136]
At this point, a more general remark needs to be made, for it is closely related to the previous one. In the colonial era, an oligolinguistic paradigm dominated because of practical and ideological reasons; 49 oligolingualism was perpetuated after independence in many African states for nation-building reasons: multilingualism was equated with multi-ethnicity, and this in turn was opposed to national unity.
50 What was needed was a policy in which one (or a handful of) language(s) could be classified as un-ethnic, hence neutral, and thus promoted to the status of national language. This pattern of equations and associations (moulded into an explanatory mode which also dominated much of the sociolinguistics of Africa) was the ideological foundation for advocating the use of English, French and Portuguese in Africa. […] This ideology stressed ethnicity as the basic divisive force in society, not social and socio-economic difference. Hence the ‘national languages’ may have been ethnically neutral, but they were socially marked, and whereas they may have avoided fueling ethnic conflicts, they marked and accentuated extreme social inequalities.
I am afraid that a program of ethnolinguistic pluralism is based on exactly the same ideology as the one it claims to combat. The call that every linguistic group should have institutional linguistic rights, and the suggestion that this attribution of rights would be a form of conflict prevention, is a mirror image of the colonial and early postcolonial ideology, because here as well, ethnic harmony prevails over social harmony. The suggestion is that linguistic rights would appease ethnic forces in society and would so make societies less conflict-ridden. That can be true and useful, but it would be so in exactly the same way as the colonial and early postcolonial language policies were: ethnicity would be appeased, but linguistic and social inequalities would be sharpened. Institutionalization (starting with standardization) means elitization, and it would disenfranchise as many people as it
49 For a discussion see Jan Blommaert, “Language Planning as a Discourse on Language and Society: The Linguistic Ideology of a Scholarly Tradition,” Language Problems and
Language Planning, 20 (1996), 199-222.
50 See Ayo Bamgbose, “Pride and Prejudice in Multilingualism and Development,” in:
Richard Fardon and Graham Furniss (eds.), African Languages, Development and the State
(London: Routledge, 1994), 33-43; Richard Fardon and Graham Furniss, “Introduction: Frontiers and Boundaries – African Languages as Political Environment,” in:
Fardon and Furniss (eds.), African Languages, Development and the State, 1-29.

108 Section III would enfranchise others. Ethnolinguistic minority elites would benefit enormously; the groups-at-large, however, would more likely than not experience little difference (unless one believes that all people are fundamental democrats).
We are already at the level of close empirical inspection here. Rights are fine, only, in practice they tend to be overruled by other factors of inequality. Declaring languages equal does not make their speakers equal in real societies, because far more than language is at play. Discussions of linguistic rights, for instance in Africa, often seem like instances of the tail wagging the dog. In Tanzania – a country renowned for a relatively good education system in Africa – there has been a perpetual debate on the generalized introduction of Swahili as the medium of instruction in the whole post-primary school system, Swahili already being the medium of instruction in primary schools.
51 The reasons given by advocates of full Swahilization (and I count myself among them) are sound and justified: theirs is a discourse of anti-(linguistic) imperialism, of national development, of maximizing the human resources potential of the country, democratizing education and improving standards in education by removing linguistic barriers for knowledge transfer. But underlying the issue of the language of instruction is a deeper problem: who goes to school? The official statistics for State schools (overwhelmingly the largest school system in the country, and certainly the most democratic one) in 1995 show the following sobering figures.
52 711,777 pupils enter primary school. Only
419,507 actually finish primary school: a drop-out rate of 41 percent. Only 25,201 enter secondary school, i.e. about 6 percent of those who finish primary school.
And only 3,903 finish secondary school, creating a drop-out rate in secondary schools of 84.5 percent. About 0.5 percent of all the children who start an education in Tanzanian State schools actually get the opportunity of finishing secondary education. It was once pointed out to me that the statistics of the educational stratigraphy in Tanzania did not so much look like a pyramid as like a Burmese temple.
Yet Tanzania offers us a relatively optimistic picture in Sub-Saharan Africa; in other parts of Africa (taken together, far exceeding the size of the European
Union) there is simply no education at all due to war or extreme poverty: Sierra
Leone, Liberia, Somalia, large parts of Congo, Sudan and Angola, parts of Chad,
Ethiopia and Eritrea, parts of Uganda. In places where the State has ceased to operate, what is left of education is often completely in the hands of missionary societies. Paradoxically, they often use local languages as media of instruction.
51 See Casmir Rubagumya (ed.), Language in Education in Africa: A Tanzanian Perspective
(Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1990); Mugyabuso Mulokozi, “English versus Swahili in Tanzania’s Secondary Education,” in: Jan Blommaert (ed.), Swahili Studies: Essays in
Honour of Marcel Van Spaandonck (Ghent: Academia Press, 1991), 7-16; Zaline Roy-
Campbell and Martha Qorro, Language Crisis in Tanzania: The Myth of English versus
Education (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota, 1997); Jan Blommaert, State Ideology and
Language in Tanzania (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 1999).
52 United Republic of Tanzania, Statistics in Education 1991–1995: National Data (Dar es
Salaam: Ministry of Education and Culture, June 1996).

Language 109
Coming back to an issue raised earlier, one of the well-known big problems in
Africa is the powerlessness of the State. In many places, the State is a fiction; in other places, the power of the State is regionally confined (sometimes concentrated only in the urban areas); in still other places the State functions, but as the figures for Tanzania illustrate, it functions in ways that cannot be compared, not by a long shot, with State systems in industrialized first world societies. So calling for more legislation, for covenants and explicit policies, suggesting that these policies would in practice have a deep effect on the life conditions of the masses, is an illusion which I deeply regret but which has to be recognized. [137-138]
I now have to return to the Asmara Declaration. I have no doubt that any right-minded sociolinguist would support the ten resolutions contained in it. But I equally have little doubt that any right-minded sociolinguist would not fail to spot the weaknesses in such a declaration. They offer us a wonderful image of language as an instrument for emancipation – an image which bumps into the brutal realities of language in society as soon as one starts looking at these realities. [140]
From: Critical Choices for South Africa: An Agenda for the 1990s, ed. Robert A. Schrire (Cape
Town: Oxford University Press, 1990): 134-138. – Neville Alexander (b. 1936), a noted educationalist and socialist theorist, was awarded a Humboldt Fellowship to the University of Tübingen, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on Gerhart Hauptmann. He subsequently spent eleven years (1963-1974) in prison on Robben Island for oppositional political activities. He has taught at schools and universities and has always evinced a particular interest in language policy and planning. He has been Director of the South African Committee for Higher Education (SACHED) and is now a director of the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA) at the
University of Cape Town. He received the Lingua Pax Prize for his contribution to the promotion of multilingualism in post-apartheid South Africa. In this research paper written as the country was beginning the transition to a post-apartheid society Alexander examines its options in the field of language planning, emphasising the future role of English as a lingua franca and advocating greater multilingualism.
The elements of a new language policy
English as the lingua franca
It is clear that for economic reasons, knowledge of English and to a les ser degree,
Afrikaans, will be integral to the expansion of the South African economy regardless of the particular forms in which economic development occurs. In a postapartheid South Africa, Afrikaans will rapidly lose its most favoured language status and for economic reasons, the promo tion of English as the lingua franca will become the most rational policy option. Since considerations of national unity, cultural access and international communication now a lready reinforce these economic imperativ es, little opposition to thi s component of a new national language policy will be forthcoming, except from the inevitable band of irredentist Afri-

110 Section III kaner bittereinders (those who will not accept defeat). It is, incidentally, one of the most fascinating twists of fate that through their forty-year sojourn in the wilderness of Afrikaner nationalis t rule, most black people have come to associate notions of freedom and democracy with the English langu age and tend to stereotype
Afrikaans as ‘the language of the oppressor’. In a free South Africa/Azania, 53 it can be anticipated that the English that will become the spoken norm will be very different from the standard South African English which today in effect discriminates against the vast majority of the population.
To promote national unity in a multilingual society, a lingua franca (which becomes such usually for precisely instrumental, economic reasons) plays a pivotal role. There is no doubt that English will increasingly play such a role in a South
Africa released from the mortgage of apartheid language policy. On the other hand, however, we should not underestim ate the magnitude of the task ahead .
[…] It is an incontrovertible fact that in 1980 under 50 per cent of the entire population of South Africa understood English. However , the increased access to formal education for black children together with the fact that in the schools of the Department of Education and Training, as well as the homelands, 54 less than 2 per cent of all instruct ion takes place through the medium of Afrikaans where there is a cho ice betwe e n English and Afrikaans-medium instruction means that this situation is changing rapidly.
Encouraging all languages
The second component of a new national language policy is to encourage the growth of all the languages spoken.
55 Here the cultural-political, rather than the economic, dimensions of language policy are paramount. If it is accepted that one of the explicit and implicit goals of the anti-aparthe id or national liberation movement is to build a nation, then the conventional Eurocentric theory takes it as axiomatic that only one language ought to be selected a s the national languag e, the means of verbal comm unication which weaves together all th e disparate e l eme nts and groups of the nation-to-be. However, this Risorgimento definition of the nation where every nation has it s particular language so that the language group and the nation are co-extensive, has been exploded in many recent studies. […]
Our future as a nation is indisputably a multilingual one. All proposals for a monolingual future not only go against the global trends, but contain the dangerous seeds of future ethnic conflicts . A consistently democratic approac h to the l anguage question has to be based on the sound linguistic premise that all l an-
53 Azania is an ancient name for the east coast of Africa. It was used by members of the
Black Consciousness and Pan-Africanist Movements to designate post-liberation South
Africa. [GVD]
54 Under apartheid legislation “homelands” such as the Transkei, the Ciskei and Bophuthatswana were rural areas reserved for black Africans which, it was intended, would eventually become independent states, where blacks would have the citizenship rights
55 they were denied in South Africa. [GVD]
As a step in this direction post-apartheid South Africa now has eleven official languages. [GVD]

Language 111 guages are equa l in their capacity to serve as means of communication, thought, and bearers of culture. Any a ttempt to suppress the rights of l anguages will inevitably give ri se to the most bitter resistance, as the rec e nt hi sto ry of all languageba sed political movement s, including Afrikaners in British-ruled South Africa, proves again and again. We have the task of transforming the languages of our country from instruments of division int o instruments of nati ona l unification. It is perhaps also ne cessary to scotc h the racist-ethnic assumptions of apartheid language and national theory in terms of w hich eac h language group s h ou ld have the right to form its own nation-stat e (Bantustan). The National Party itself has abandoned this chimera of Verwoerdianism, 56 but it is still important to insist that the
Risorgimento conceptualization of the national question i s quite false as a gene ral theory in the modern world. Should such a partitioning of South Africa take place eventually, it will certainly not be primarily or fundamentally because of the unfolding of so me logic inherent in the evolut ion of language groups.
All the lan guages in South Africa, including Afrikaans, should be en couraged to flourish . While the impl ementation of this principle will undoubtedly be limited by the availability of material and human resources in the short-to-medium term, it is necessary to enunciate it and to initiate the processes a nd the patterns that will eventua lly make possible its realization. Because the economic imperativ e for learning indigenous African langua ges by English- and Afrikaans-speakers does not exist, an act of political will is required to encourage them to do so. The fact that many politically conscious p eop le from these groups are beginning to learn these languages indicates that this trend will inevitably accompany th e liberatory process in South Africa. Official encouragement from the government’s own reform programme as well as the formal relations with the independent and selfgoverning homelands gives an added impetus in more stat u s-quoorientated circles. Employment opportunitie s in homeland bureaucracies, and even in their private sector, are enhanced for those who are able to speak the rel evant African language. We would do well to observe what is happening in other southern African countries. […]
The tendency […] has emerged in all post-colonial states that after an initial period of promoting the colonizers’ language for pragmatic rather than sentimental reasons, indigenous languages come into their own once again. A post-apartheid South Africa will probably move along sim il a r lines. Those South Africans who are not of English or Afrikaans background a re compelled, by the sp ur of economic necessity, to broaden their languag e sk ills, whereas those who try to learn one or other indigen ous languag e are hampered by th e Berlin walls of the
Group Areas Act 57 and separate sc h oo ling. Clearly, a major campaign to encourage the learning of the different language s at all l eve l s will have to be undertaken .
56 H.F.Verwoerd was Minister of Native Affairs (1950-58) and Prime Minister from 1958
57 until his death in 1966; see text 37 below. [GVD]
The Group Areas Act was the apartheid law passed in 1950 in terms of which members of an ethnic group had to live in a separate residential (or group) area. [GVD]

112 Section III
It ought to be clear that one of the m a in sp in-off s of this proposal i s that it s realization will facilitate communication among th e different language groups in our country. The ideal solutio n is a trifocal one in whic h each person will know a mother t ongue or h ome language , English, and another ( re gionally important) language. Another important aspect of this proposal is that Nguni-speakers s h ould be encou r aged to learn a Sotho language and vice versa.
58 Theoretically, in this conste ll ation, every individual in South Africa will be able to find a language in which to converse with any other South African.
From: Abiola Irele, The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), 3-38. – Abiola Irele (born 1936), Nigerian literary scholar and one of Africa’s leading literary critics, studied at the University of Ibadan and at the
Sorbonne in Paris. After teaching at the University of Ghana and the Universities of Ife and Ibadan in Nigeria, he became professor of African, French and Comparative Literature at Ohio State University in 1989; after his retirement in 2003 he became Visiting
Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His many publications include The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (co-edited with Simon Gikandi, 2004) and two collections of essays, The African Experience in
Literature and Ideology (1981) and The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black
Diaspora (2001), from which the following reflections on the cultural dimensions of literary languages and the relationship between orality and written literature in modern
African writing have been extracted.
Although it is only in recent times that African literature has been attended to by the rest of the world, literary expression is not by any means a recent development in Africa. This statement, for all its banality, is dictated here by the need to direct attention to the oral tradition, which has for ages served on the continent as an institutional channel for the intense involvement with language that we recognize as the foundation of literary form. More recently, with the introduction of writing, a new dimension has been given to imaginative expression on the continent; indeed, it can be said that, given the circumstances of this transition, literature has more recently come to acquire in its status as a social institution and as a form of cultural production a new prominence and urgency. From being a natural manifestation of the processes, structures, and dispositions of the various societies and cultures that made up our precolonial, traditional world, it has more recently developed into a mode for the articulation of a new, modern experience. Literature in Africa has thus become the area of an active and focused self-consciousness that extends in its implications into both a sustained interrogation of history and a determined engagement with language.
58 The major Nguni languages are Zulu (isiZulu) and Xhosa (isiXhosa); the major Sotho languages are Pedi (Sepedi) and (Sotho) Sesotho. [GVD]

Language 113
A significant part of this process of the revaluation of literature in Africa is the preoccupation with the nature, possibilities, and formal modes of literary expression itself. To put this another way, in trying to formulate the state of disjunction between an old order of being and a new mode of existence, literary artists in modern Africa have been forced to a reconsideration of their expressive medium, of their means of address. In the quest for a grounded authenticity of expression and vision, the best among our modern African writers have had to undertake a resourcing of their material and their modes of expression in the traditional culture. Because the traditional culture has been able to maintain itself as a contemporary reality and thus to offer itself as a living resource, the modern literature strives to establish and strengthen its connection with a legacy that, though associated with the past, remains available as a constant reference for the African imagination. The oral tradition has thus come to be implicated in the process of transformation of the function of literature and in the preoccupation with the formal means of giving voice to the African assertion.
These remarks, which apply primarily to the relationship between the oral tradition and the new literature in the European languages, can be further amplified by reference to the steady development of written literature in the indigenous languages, which represents, in many instances, a direct outgrowth from the oral tradition. The complexity of the literary situation in Africa can thus be appreciated when we present the full picture of imaginative production on the continent. We have a line of progression that can be said to have begun with the oral literature whose forms and functions still operate over a wide range of social and cultural activities in the traditional context and to a considerable extent in the modem world as well. This primary domain of literary expression is extended by a body of written literature in the African languages, which maintains a natural linguistic and formal relationship with the oral tradition but is already dissociated, as a result of writing, from the immediate insertion into collective life that orality entails. The emergence of a modem expression in the European languages has resulted in the creation of a third domain of African literature whose connection with the other two consists in the process in which it is engaged for the recuperation of the values – aesthetic, moral, and social – associated with orality. […]
The literature in the European languages is now generally recognized, in its formal significance, as an effort to approximate to the oral model, albeit within a literate tradition taken from the West; it is this feature that marks the most important African writing of contemporary times. The point that emerges here is that, through these two channels, the oral tradition continues to function as a fundamental reference of African expression, as the matrix of the African imagination.
This brings us to a direct consideration of the oral literature itself. There is an obvious sense in which it can be considered as the “true” literature of Africa. It is the literature that is still the most widespread and with which the vast majority of
Africans, even today, are in constant touch, and it represents that form of expression to which African sensibilities are most readily attuned. The reason for this is not far to seek, for despite the impact of literacy, orality is still the dominant mode of communication on the continent, and it determines a particular disposition of the imagination of a different order from that conditioned by literacy.

114 Section III
We might consider at this juncture a question that arises immediately at the outset of any discussion of the phenomenon of orality in relation to imaginative expression: the levels of articulation that distinguish ordinary communication from what may be considered the literary uses of language. I have suggested elsewhere the three levels at which we might envisage the articulation of language in
African orality and I will recall these and develop them further here in an effort to provide a clearer understanding of the distinctive features of oral literature, at least in the African context, as well as what I shall be proposing in due course as their comprehensive significance.
To begin with, there is, as in all cultures, an elementary level of ordinary, everyday communication, which is largely restricted to the denotative sphere of language; about this level, nothing more needs to be said. In African orality, we are plunged at once into the connotative sphere with the second level, signaled by the presence of those figurative and rhetorical forms of language that, as anyone who is familiar with African habits of speech is aware, occur as a frequent element of linguistic interaction on the continent. The culture itself offers prescribed forms of discourse, which define what one might call a “formulaic” framework for the activity of speech and even for the process of thought. To this rhetorical level of linguistic usage belong the proverbs and the aphorisms, which have a special value in practically every African community, a fact that accounts for their widespread development as fixed forms, culturally prescribed. What is more, the proverb can be considered as practically a genre in itself, and it enters as a device into almost all kinds of speech activity and is regularly made to serve a formal function in the extended forms of oral literature. When Achebe writes, adapting an Igbo proverb into English, that proverbs are “the palm oil with which words are eaten,” he is drawing attention to the central position that the form occupies in African speech.
59 He is also indicating the relish in words that has been cultivated in nearly every African society as a matter of cultural conditioning, a sensitivity to language that orality encourages, and the aesthetic function of the proverb which this cultural factor promotes.
But the consciousness of the role that the proverb fulfills in speech is not confined to the aesthetic appreciation indicated in the Igbo saying but involves as well a recognition of its possibilities for mental processes and even for cognitive orientation. For the proverb represents a compaction of reflected experience and functions as a kind of minimalism of thought. It is this awareness of the intellectual value of the proverb that is summed up in the Yoruba metaproverb: Owe l’esin oro;
ti oro ba sonu, owe l’a fi nwa (Proverbs are the horses of thought; when thoughts get lost, we send proverbs to find them). As genre, the proverb provides a link between what I have called the rhetorical level of language and the third level, that at which, in African orality, the imagination finds its proper manifestation as organized
text and even, in many societies, as a body of consecrated texts. I am aware that the
59 See Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London; Heinemann, 1958): 5, and the essay by
B. Lindfors in the “Identities” section of the present volume (text 19 above). [FSE]

Language 115 notion of text as applied to oral expression can be ambiguous, but I believe it is just as relevant to orality as it is to literacy. […]
From this perspective, we can define a text quite simply as an organized series of enunciations that combine to form a coherent discourse. In literary expression, the element of coherence is supplied by the imaginative path of the discourse and by the deployment of form in a stylized mode of language. Literary texts exist in this fundamental sense; indeed, what I have said of the proverb indicates that it is in fact a text in this sense but in a highly compacted form. It has now been established that in many African societies, extended texts based on the definition I have proposed can be identified quite frequently; they exist as autonomous and isolated works each of which is highly organized as a full and independent imaginative statement. What is more, in certain cases, these oral texts can be so rigidly fixed as to attain what can only be called canonical status; they represent “monuments,” in
Paul Zumthor’s phrase, of the particular cultures in which they occur.
60 [29-33]
The point that emerges from all this relates to the status and situation of the oral text in what I have called elsewhere the “organic mode of existence” of oral literature. By this phrase I mean that the text in any of its manifestations is never an entity divorced from the conditions of its realization. Its existence is dependent on the human frame itself, first as an inert form in the memory and then in its dynamic form in performance, the point at which it becomes embodied in the full sense of the word. For it is at this point carried by the living voice that, through the modulations of various extratextual effects weaving through the text a network of resonances, gives it an immediate and effective presence. Beyond this, it is dramatized through the paralinguistic features of language itself and the extralinguistic devices of movement and gesture, often accented into dance (a reminder that meter in poetry was originally related to dance), devices by which language enters into active association with the expressive possibilities of the human body.
Orality dictates then a total experience of literature, one in which the textual or verbal component is only one element, an important one it is true but nonetheless a partial dimension of a wider range of resources brought into play in the aesthetic and imaginative framework of that experience as a function of the whole sensibility. This amounts to saying that in the cultural and artistic context of African orality, literature is nothing when it is not enactment.
It is easy to understand that, under these circumstances, the faithful reproduction of the text on each occasion of its realization cannot be a norm. This faithful reproduction is neither a relevant nor a useful criterion of judgment, for it is obvious that we are dealing here with a non-Aristotelian conception of discourse; the principle of orality is essentially one of nonclosure. A concomitant of this principle is that of multiple creation, so that even where the text is fixed to an extent, it emerges as the end result of a continuous process of accretion of the textual elements going hand in hand with displacement and tending toward a synthesis that is almost always provisional. In other words, although there is always in oral literature a minimal text and often a master text, it functions basically as a defining
60 Paul Zumthor, Introduction à la poésie orale (Paris: Seuil, 1983): 39.

116 Section III context of imaginative projection initiated by the experience that gives it inspiration. The reference to the reality of the world of events and phenomena provides a pre-text, which is in turn given elaboration in language, constituted by the verbal resources that comprise the elements of the text and sustained by ancillary devices that can be termed paratextual but that enter into the total field of its meaning and contribute to its force of impression. Furthermore, the mobility of the text implies that the entire process of the generation and maintenance of oral texts – composition, performance, and transmission – obeys the principle of intertextuality, which impels every instance of oral literature toward a condition of collective appropriation.
This interplay of discursive forces within oral literature suggests that an attention to the modalities of oral expression, as exemplified notably by the African situation, stands to confirm a new consideration of literature in its immediate manifestation as constituted by the living forms of speech and thus illuminates those grounded aspects of literary experience that writing as a modality of human communication necessarily obscures. Whereas writing decontextualizes and disincarnates, orality demonstrates the contextual dimension of communication and restores the full scope of imaginative expression, which writing in its reductive tendency cannot fully capture or even adequately represent. Thus, orality proposes a dynamic conception of literature, one that envisages literature as text in situation.
It is no longer, then, a question of considering oral literature as verbal art but as a totality that conjoins communication and participation in the affective field of a communal event. And what may be designated as the “spectacular” aspect of orality becomes essential to what Bronislaw Malinowski has termed the “phatic” function of language, 61 a function that underlies the communicative impulse of all literature and relies for its unhindered effect on the immediacy of the linguistic situation. It seems to me that it is only in an oral environment that this condition of immediacy is properly met, and where imaginative expression is concerned, only such an environment provides the live sense of situation in which literary values can take on their full human significance. […]
It is this intrinsic quality of presence to which all forms of discourse aspire – none more than literature – and which is so fully exemplified in the African oral tradition, that our modern writers are striving to reinterpret on a large scale. For what gives interest to the literary situation today in Africa is the way our written literature, in both the indigenous languages and the European languages, enacts a dialectic between orality and literacy. I would like to suggest that this relationship of expression and function among the three domains of imaginative expression in
Africa represents a renewal of the literary phenomenon with what may well be universal import. It promises not only a revitalization of the internal process of literary creation but also a reaffirmation of the significance of literature as some-
61 Bronislaw Malinowski, “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,” in: The
Meaning of Meaning, ed. C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards (1923; repr. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1989): 315.

Language 117 thing more than a cultural ornament that a society may provide itself but rather as an essential human value.
This seems to me then a direction in which Africa stands to make its greatest contribution to the world literature that the great German poet Johann [Wolfgang] von Goethe envisioned long ago as the most enduring heritage of the human community. Africa stands to offer, as its proper accomplishment of that heritage, a conception of literature as not merely an intense medium of human communication, but also, and more important, as the privileged mode of a ceremonial whose vital necessity springs from the deepest impulses of the human disposition itself.
[36-38]
From: Duncan Brown (ed.), Oral Literature & Performance in Southern Africa (Oxford: James
Currey; Cape Town: David Philip; Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), 1-5. –
Duncan Brown is a Professor of English Studies and Deputy-Head of the School of
Literary Studies, Media and Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in
Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. He is also the author of Voicing the Text: South African
Oral Poetry and Performance (Cape Town: Oxford University Press) which came out in
1998. The present text provides a useful brief overview of the oral tradition as it has emerged in South Africa and points to some of the scholarly problems involved in researching it. Brown reminds us that oral forms are part of a cultural history which was largely suppressed during the period of colonialism and apartheid; they were not lost, however, but were preserved amongst the African people and used in many contexts from marriage to mining. He traces their development since the earliest times, describes some of the different forms the oral tradition has taken and the uses to which they have been put in African culture, recalls some of the major practitioners and shows how the old forms have recently gained renewed vitality though their adaptation to modern contexts as, for example, in the trade union movement. Brown sees the recuperation of the oral tradition as a major task of literary scholarship, but he remains aware of the complex issues of cultural translation which arise when oral forms are transcribed in printed form.
The democratisation of South African society presents important challeng e s for
Southern African studies . Amongst the most pressing of these i s the recuperation of a cultural history which has been suppressed by colonialism and apartheid . Ora l forms have been important means of s ocial articu lation throughout the history of
South Africa, and continue to adapt to new contexts. Y e t oral forms have not been given centra l attention in cultural or social histories of this country , and the study of orality has only recently received impetus through political chang e s and developments in literary theory and oral/performance studies . […]
Oral literature and performance have been important feature s of South African society since the development of the earlie s t human communities on the subcontinent, from the songs and stories of the Bushmen and Khoi to the praise poems
(Zulu/Xhosa: izibongo; Sotho: lithoko) of African chiefdoms.

118 Section III
In addition to prominent ‘public’ forms of panegyric to the l eader, other forms of oral poetry have flourished – and continue to flourish – in African societies: songs to the clan; family songs (especially at weddings and funerals); love lyrics; children’s verse; work songs; lullabies; personal praises; religious songs; songs to animals; and songs of divination. There are also highly developed traditions of storytelling, including historical narratives (Zulu: indaba) and folk tales (Zulu: izin-
ganekwane; Xhosa: iintsomi). The influence of missionaries on the oral tradition gave ri se to forms which drew on th e harmonies and poetics of the Christian hymn , such as Ntsikana’s “Great Hymn” 62 or the compositions of the Zulu evangelist
I saiah Shembe.
63 With urbanisation following rapidly on colonial occupation , oral forms began to be – indeed continue to be – adapted to changing industrial and political situations. Migrant workers on the mines have used forms of praise poetry for most of this century in order to praise or criticise indunas or shift bosses.
64
Sotho miners have dev eloped a new genre of oral poetry called sefela which aesthetically encodes their experiences as migrant workers, while in shebeens 65 and bar s Sotho women perform poetic narra tives (sevelevele) through the medium of so ng and dance, and they comment on gender relations through the performance of kiba songs . Zulu musical performers have negotiated the difficulties of urban experience through the syncretic forms of maskanda and isicathamiya. In the apartheid ‘homelands’, particularly Transkei , 66 praise poets played an important role in orchestrating resistance to rulers like Chief Kaiser Matanzima and others . A number of poets have through the years adapted oral forms to the printed page, amongst them H.
I.E. Dhlomo, 67 Mazisi Kunene, 68 B.
W. Vilakazi 69 and A.C.
Jordan , 70 while in the first four decades of the twentieth century S.E.K. Mqhayi, 71
62 Ntsikana kaGabha (1760-1821) became a Christian. His “Great Hymn” was translated
63 into English by the famous missionary, the Reverend John Philip. [GVD]
Isaiah Shembe (ca.1868-1935) wrote hymns in Zulu. [GVD]
64 The reference is to work shifts on the gold mines. [GVD]
65 “Shebeen” is an Irish word used in South Africa to describe drinking establishments set up in private houses in the townships, legalised after the demise of apartheid.
[GVD]
66 Under apartheid legislation “homelands” were rural areas reserved for black Africans which, it was intended, would eventually become independent states, where blacks would have the citizenship rights they were denied in South Africa. In 1976 Transkei was the first of these to become “independent”; it was recognised only by South
Africa. Chief Kaiser Matanzima was the first head of state. The homelands were disbanded after the end of apartheid. [GVD]
67 H.I.E. Dhlomo (1903-56) wrote the long poem Valley of a Thousand Hills as well as
68 plays.
Mazisi Kunene (1930-2006) was the author of the epic poem Emperor Shaka the Great
(1979).
[GVD]
69 B.
W. Vilakazi (1906-47) was noted for his poetry in Zulu.
[GVD]
70 A.C. Jordan (1906-68) was best known as a literary critic and for a novel he wrote in
Xhosa which was translated into English under the title The Wrath of the Ancestors
(1980). [GVD]

Language 119 possibly the best known twentieth-century oral poet in South Africa, had successfully combined African modes of oral performance with the Western technology of print. (He was named imbongi y es izwe jike l ele – praise poet of the whole nation .)
During the political upheaval of the 1970s, Soweto 72 poets like Ingoapele Madingoane 73 and Dumakude kaNdlovu 74 experimented with oral performance as a means of disseminating their m essages while avoiding not only threats of state censorship, but the ‘gatekeeping’ of white-controlled literary magazines, and
Mothobi Mutloatse 75 produced oral-influenced forms which he called ‘proemdras’
– ‘Prose, Poem and Drama a ll in one!’ Oral poetry h as also been linked for many years to trade union activity in South Africa with reports, for example, going back to a traditional imbongi (praise p oet) named Hlongwe who in the 1930s in Durban praised the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union. During the 1 980s poets like Alfred Temba Qabula 76 and Mi S’ dumo Hlatshwayo 77 utilis ed the form of izi- bongo to m obilise support for the union movement, while Mzwakhe Mbuli, who was called ‘the people’s poet’, achieved acclaim for his po etry performances at mass meetings and political funerals. […] More recently, Nelson Mandela was the subject of a poem by Mzwakhe Mbuli 78 and two izibongo on his inauguration as
State President. An imbongi also performed at the opening of South Africa ’s first democratic parliament and at a celebration of a rec e nt victory by the South African cricket team!
Despite the abundance of forms, many of which still ‘live’ in the daily experie nces of South African people, there has been a lack of critical debate about oral literature and performance in South African literary, cultural a nd historical studies .
While some valuable research has been conducted on oral literature and performance genres in African languages (see, for example, the work of H.I.E. Dhlomo,
71 S.E.K. Mqhayi (1875-1945) wrote poetry, biographies and an autobiography in Xhosa.
[GVD]
72 Soweto is an acronym for South Western Townships and refers to the vast conurbation outside Johannesburg to which black South Africans were forcibly removed.
73
[GVD]
Ingoapele Madingoane ( died 1997) was one of the so-called Soweto poets influenced by Black Consciousness. He was best known for Africa My Beginning (1979), which was banned.
74 Dumakude ka Ndlovu (b. 1954) is a South African theatre practitioner and writer.
[GVD]
75 For details on Mothobi Mutloatse see the extract from Forced Landing in this volume, text 49 below.
[GVD]
76 Alfred Temba Qabula was a trade union activist and oral poet, who put his poetic talent to powerful use at trade union meetings.
[GVD]
77 Mi S’ dumo Hlatshwayo (born 1951) is a poet and cultural activist associated with the trade union movement, like Qabula, who influenced his work.
[GVD]
78 Mzwakhe Mbuli (b.1958), is a popular oral performer and activist who spoke at many political meetings and commemorations as well as at the inauguration of President
Mandela in 1994. In 1989 he published his first volume of poetry entitled Before Dawn.
[GVD]

120 Section III
B.W. Vilakazi, D.P. Kunene, 79 Mazisi Kunene, and others), and important collections of oral texts have appeared, the oral tradition has l argely been ‘written out’ of cultural and social histories, or has been co opted by apartheid education to promote fossilised and highly questionable versions of ‘tribal’ history and life. This oral tradition is only now being recovered or reinterpreted, both through the work of socio lo gists and anthropologists, and through a revisionist awarene ss of the processes of exclusion, occlusion and effacement that have occurred in the construction of the cultural history of this country.
The recuperation of oral literature and performance genres for critical s tudy involves the broader question of ‘cultural translation’ with its onto logical and paradigmatic challenges and problems. As regards the ontologi cal question, the nature or status of many oral texts as they have come to be recorded in print is at bes t ambiguous. Except at th e witnessing of an actual live performance – which is only possible with contemporary, local poets, s torytellers or singers – oral texts survive beyond their moment of delivery through a process of mediation. They are generally transferred from an oral to a printed form through the agency of a literate intermediary , who often holds a position of political, and of publishing, power over the performer or informant. Such is the case with the bulk of the African praise poetry that survives: it has been transcribed and sometimes translated into another langu age (usually English) by missionaries, colonial administrators, anthropologists, hist orians and the like. Similarly, the songs and stories of th e nineteenth-century Xam Bushmen, including their own ‘memory’ of earlier myths or legends, are available to modern readers largely through the work of W.H.I.
Bleek and L.C. Lloyd, who in the 1870s conducted a series of interviews with a group of Bushman convicts in Cape Town. More recent Bushman oral texts have been made available through the fieldwork records o f anthropologi sts […] . To talk s imply of ‘tran scribing’ the songs, poems or stories has a neutrality which igno res the fact th at a literate epistemology is necessarily at work in the transfer from th e oral to th e printed m ediu m , and that the ‘transcriber ’ may lack the cultural und erstand ing, or phonetic repertoire, to capture th e full ‘meaning’, including that of an aesthetic impact: an aesthetic impact as measurable against a set of specific circumstances and audience expecta tions. The prin ted form may also give performance genres a fixity that obviates their very significance as ora l performance: the texts of Zulu royal izibongo – such as those of Shaka or Dingane 80 – varied to a greater or lesser extent with every delivery, and the specific demands of the occasion made each performance a distinct ‘event’. Yet the ontological question is not limited to tho se texts which are mediated by a second party , for even when we ‘know’ that the printed record is accurate, as in the case of the oral poets from the 19 80s who are literate and have produced books, the sta tus of oral poems on the page is at best uncertain .
79 Daniel P. Kunene is well-known for his work on Sesotho literature. See particularly his study Thomas Mofolo and the Emergence of Written Sesotho Prose (1989) and his translation of
Mofolo’s novel Chaka (1981). [GVD]
80 Shaka and Dingane were both nineteenth-century Zulu kings; Dingane murdered his half-brother Shaka in 1828 and claimed the succession. [GVD]