Languages, Part 9
Language,
Culture and Content
Aiming for Socialism with South African Characteristics has
to mean that South African things are important to South Africans.
This includes all of their languages. But further than that,
it means that each language is recognised as a bearer of culture, and that
similarly, all the South African languages must expand to embrace the content
of our joint South African reality.
Each language is a medium, and languages as such are media
with special characteristics. To illustrate the special character of language
as a cultural medium, consider that it appears to be impossible to illustrate
with a graphic image, what “Language with South African Characteristics” might
be.
Hence, although in all of these interactions there is one,
and occasionally more than one, image used to epitomise what is being
discussed, yet on this occasion it proves not to be possible to find such an
image. Nor will a touristic combination of many images help. Nor will a slogan
like “unity in diversity”.
Nothing can compare with a language in the sense of it being
a single body, but capable of expressing everything that it needs to express.
If it is not capable, then it can borrow or invent new ways, while still
continuing to be its unique self as a language.
“In the beginning was the Word”: Human beings are
distinguished from other animals by their possession of language. It is
language that allows humans to generate a collective consciousness that can
create, and continue to create itself.
Kenya's
Independent School Movement (extract)
James Stanfield,
University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Economic Affairs, June 2005
Following a ban on female circumcision by
three missionary societies in 1929, the Kikuyu in Central Province began to
boycott mission schools and demanded an end to the monopoly on education held
by the missions. After failing to
persuade the government to open its own secular schools free from missionary
control, the Kikuyu began to open their own.
During the early 1930s extensive fundraising activities therefore took
place, school buildings were erected and self help groups formed.
Each independent school was governed by a
local committee, responsible for the recruitment and payment of teachers, the
setting of school fees and other fundraising events. As independent schools became established
joint meetings were organised and at a gathering in August 1934 the Kikuyu
Independent Schools Association (KISA) was set up. While KISA emphasised the need to negotiate with
the colonial authorities some independent schools wanted to remain entirely
free from direct European influence. A
rival association, the Kikuyu Karing’a Education Association (KKEA), was
therefore established soon after.
By 1939 there were 63 Kikuyu independent
schools educating a total of 12,964 pupils.
To help meet the increasing demand for
trained teachers both KISA and KKEA agreed to support the opening, in 1939, of
Kenya’s first teacher training college at Githunguri, the site of the Kikuyu’s
first independent school. Originally
intended to train teachers, the College soon included an elementary, primary
and secondary school, with enrolments increasing to over 1,000 by 1947. It was
this independent school/college which Jomo Kenyatta would later become the
principle of, providing a base for his future campaign for Presidency. The rest of course is history.
A police investigation of Mau Mau early in
1952 sealed the fate of the independent schools. When the government declared a
state of emergency later that year, both KISA and KKEA schools were closed.
The above account of the Kikuyu Independent Schools poses
them as a reaction, not in the first place to colonialism, but to the
missionaries’ banning of female circumcision (genital mutilation), a practice
that has few open defenders today, although male genital mutilation is having a
come-back in the guise of being a prophylactic against HIV and AIDS.
But in fact these schools were part of the resistance to
colonialism, and part of a cultural/political movement that helped to preserve
the whole Kikuyu culture, quite apart from the question of female circumcision.
No doubt they contributed to the health of the language, which is the language
in which Ngugi wa Thiong’o continues to write, today.
In the last part of the Course we will use a piece of
Ngugi’s writing
How to learn
languages?
In African countries, and notably in South Africa, people
commonly speak many languages, but very little language-teaching is taking
place. So, how are people managing to learn so many languages?
It would appear that informal methods of propagating
language-learning are far more efficient than the formal ones, at least to the
level of conversation, and oral commerce.
The CU is based on a theory of teaching and learning (in
fact, on a pedagogy of the oppressed) in which dialogue is the source of
learning, the practice and the method. We see no reason why languages should
not also be taught and learned in this same fashion. Collective groups or study
circles can be used for language, so that language is learned socially.
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