by Pamela Johnson, Mail & Guardian
For
centuries the language has defined what knowledge and truth are and by
embracing it Africa will always be in a unequal position.
How transformative is our practice of "academic
development" in South Africa? I pose the question in the light of several
recent articles in the Mail & Guardian on the subject, most recently by
Chrissie Boughey and Penny Niven ("Common sense fails our students",
August 10 to 17).
I was briefly involved in academic development in the early
1990s after returning from Spain, where I had been teaching English as a
foreign language during the 1980s.
In a post-fascist society that had been politically isolated
from Western Europe, Spain was trying to make up for lost time and insert
itself into a global system in which computer and English language skills were
seen as the basic prerequisites for development and progress.
Of course, that was only one element of the subjugation of
Spain to various requirements for integration into the European Economic
Community. Having followed the recipe for economic success, the Spanish economy
today lies in ruins as large sectors of national industry have been closed
because of their inability to compete with powerful German and French
competitors.
However, this slow deterioration occurred after my return to
South Africa in 1991. At the time I experienced a sense of déjà vu on
discovering that, when I started teaching at post-school level, the prevailing
concerns and priorities in education were much the same as they had been in
Spain. Without proficiency in English and computer skills, no education was
complete as South Africa prepared for its debut in the theatre of neoliberalism.
A
pedagogical base
After 18 months of working on a pilot project in which
nearly all the students were isiXhosa speakers and the teachers non-isiXhosa
speakers, it occurred to me that it would probably have been more worthwhile to
spend the same amount of time and money developing good study materials and
glossaries in isiXhosa to establish a sound pedagogical base.
Despite the intentions of "enhancing the effectiveness
of teaching and learning", which seems to be an ubiquitous tag line in
academic development, what we practitioners were doing was perpetuating a
relationship of power and a division between those with and without
proficiency in English while contributing to the growth of a vast and lucrative
global industry that is premised on the assumption that Western forms of
knowledge constitute the "truth".
The size and scope of the academic development publishing
industry is mind-boggling in geopolitical and financial terms, not to mention
its impact on the way that citizens the world over perceive their own languages
and cultures vis-à-vis English.
In Frantz Fanon's seminal work Black Skin, White Masks,
first published in French in 1952, Fanon illustrated the effect of colonisation
in that the dominated continue to aspire to the culture of the dominant, as a
result of which black people end up emulating their oppressors.
He also pointed to the lasting effect of the inculcation of
inferiority on Africans and African nations, who continue to seek affirmation
from their former oppressors.
It is this hidden and insidious element that we need to be
aware of because, even though we may not consciously perpetuate a relationship
of domination in which the former colonisers still exercise control over what
constitutes knowledge and truth, we unwittingly retain positions of power by
defining the nature and purpose of teaching and learning.
If there is a genuinely transformative aim in academic
development, can it be achieved by advancing the language and academic
literacies whose origin lies in dominant societies to the foreground?
An
awkward position
This question places us in awkward positions we may not wish
to acknowledge, but we have to do it. Notwithstanding the sincerity of intent
of academic development practitioners, what can be done so as not to groom
students towards particular ways of thinking about what constitutes knowledge
within the parameters of a hegemony that has been exercised by the Western
world for centuries?
Those who "join the club" abide by the rules and
norms, so academic development of necessity aims to enable students within the
domain of the dominant without engaging critically with the very substance of
what constitutes knowledge and the role that this "knowledge" serves
in perpetuating relationships of power.
I would like to invite reflection on Fanon's observation on
a post-colonial Africa in which he foresaw continued subjugation.
"Colonialism and its derivatives do not, as a matter of
fact, constitute the present enemies of Africa," he wrote in his notebook
while on the battlefront in Algeria.
"In a short time this continent will be liberated. For
my part, the deeper I enter into the cultures and the political circles, the
surer I am that the great danger that threatens Africa is the absence of
ideology."
This, I think, is the critical issue. By aiming at a global
homogeneity and compatibility within an education framework that is defined
according to the criteria established by the hegemon, will Africa not be locked
for perpetuity into a relationship in which it is always the recipient of
knowledge and therefore deemed deficient relative to the Western world?
