There was a social media
storm recently after a Rhodes University lecturer used isiXhosa in a history
class – and then told unhappy students it was their duty to learn the local
language. A version of this event posted on Facebook prompted many discussions
on issues of language, privilege and power. After two weeks of debate, the
lecturer, Naledi Nomalanga Mkhize, explains the reasoning behind her assertion. The Con
With almost 10 years’
experience in teaching and education activism behind me, having taught hundreds
of students each year, one of the things that remains a mainstay of my career
is that delicate combination of teaching through nurturing and through disruption.
Most undergraduates who
arrive at university have had much school experience of nurturing, and very
little experience of disruptive pedagogy. Lecturers are aware of this. We
expect that much will be awkward in the first few weeks of university, and we
delight in provoking and challenging students. It produces independent and
critical minds.
Disruptive pedagogy is
always context-specific – what one does at Rhodes will not be the same as what
one does at Stellenbosch or Tukkies or Turfloop or the University of the
Western Cape. Each of these institutions has a dominant culture based on their
own histories and traditions of scholarship. What one does at Rhodes may not
apply to another university. Certainly one cannot equate the use of a Sintu
indigenous language in an African history course with the stubborn
institutional use of Afrikaans at universities that once devoted themselves
entirely to Verwoedianism.
It is a given in most
humanities courses that lecturers will invoke other languages. The basis of our
entire humanities tradition is in the study of language and literature. It is
not unusual for lecturers to go off in a bit of Latin, Greek, French or German.
Mostly, we launch into other languages with a hint of mischievousness, to shake
undergraduates up a bit, to make them squirm a little so that after the lecture
they head for the library or to the nearest third year student to find out how
much they need to do, what they need to know. This is how independent learning
is provoked. It signals to students, especially first years, that there’s a
whole lot more than a textbook and an exam to university learning.
During one such episode,
the students experienced what amounted to no more than five minutes of
code-switching between isiXhosa phrases and English translations in a 45-minute
lecture. Code-switching is a common practice in South Africa, although it seems
unnecessary to have to make such a banal statement. Given our history,
code-switching is used a method of social inclusion, not exclusion.
The topic under
discussion, in English, was the question of evidence in the 1996 case of “a
‘sangoma’ who claimed that his dreams had pointed to him to where the skull of
the murdered King Hintsa lay in the United Kingdom”. It is apparent to any
African language speaker that the word ‘sangoma’ is inadequate once used in
English. This is why I then code-switch into isiXhosa. I might say “eli gqirha
lathi ithonga lakhe lam’bonisa indawo apho intloko kaKumkani uHintsa ilele
khona”. I might continue to code-switch in English and isiXhosa – “Many black
people in the Eastern Cape supported and agreed with him saying kuba kaloku
thina maXhosa siyathonga” – and then code-switch back to English to translate
–“because we Xhosas dream”. And so this little segment went for a few minutes.
This was perfectly
relevant as we were studying theories and approaches to history. By introducing
the isiXhosa, part of the mischief was to show the students what can happen
when the historian needs translation. Not being a first-language isiXhosa
speaker myself, the aim was to make the students aware of how tricky itias to
write history when one has no sense or feel for a language.
I was in the middle of
this (brief) code-switching class when I suddenly launched into a stern
denunciation of “monolingualism”, and proclaimed the need for a new generation
of African historians to come to grips with African languages. The reason it
seemed sudden was because of the strange set-up of the lecture theatre. The
lecturer has the advantage of being able to see and hear and lot more from the
front (including not-so-hushed grumbles). Students, on the other hand, see
less, because they are looking down at the backs of one another’s heads. Based
on what I was hearing and seeing from the front, I responded in the manner I
did.
Perhaps the students
ought to use this as an exercise in and of itself about perspective, reality,
‘truth’, about how a story gets told, how institutional context shapes a story,
whose reactions ‘create’ the story, how storytelling unfolds, how different
experiences result in different narratives. The teacher in me can’t help but
see it as a teachable moment.
One of the aims when I
code-switch is to give students a direct sense that to produce good history
takes effort, work, humility. Producing scholarship, engaging with it, is as
much cerebral as it is a strenuous physical experience of grappling with
languages one does not speak, and of course, with the people who speak those
languages when they tell you their story.
In a country as torn
apart by history, writing history takes knowing that you, your feelings, your
discomfort, your personal world, is not the concern. You need to sometimes live
with the uneasiness of being insignificant.
There are also deep
implications for scholarship. As writer Amina Mama points out, the English word
“identity” has no equivalent in many Sintu languages. What are the
philosophical implications of this? In the 1970s, in his classic critique of
the discipline of anthropology, the late Archie Mafeje pointed out that the
word “tribe” does not exist in Sintu languages as it does in English. This was
the same brilliant Mafeje the University of Cape Town refused to appoint in
1968.
Most students arrive at
university with no idea of what has gone before them or what debates and
developments are happening among scholars. They arrive believing knowledge is
something stable and cohesive, which their lecturer will lovingly and
passionately transmit. Within the first week, most of them will have this view
of knowledge undone and disrupted. They will realise by the end of the first
term that, in fact, there is major contestation, the space is robust, and they
are being trained through all kinds of methods to engage, including through the
supportive tutorial system.
So far, the majority of
first-year History students seem to have taken up the broad intellectual
challenge the department sets for them to become.
Where exchange students
are concerned, most South African students will be shocked to discover that it
is the foreign students who make the effort to sign up to learn indigenous
Sintu languages when they travel to Africa. It is considered normal to want to
study the local language wherever you study. It will also surprise South
African students that they do not know much African history, because our
schooling system gives them very little exposure, but this is not a
disadvantage at Rhodes University because the university knows the limits of
South African schooling, so we give them a basic survey of African history when
they arrive.
It being the era of
social media, the isiXhosa discussion has gone beyond the boundaries of the
university. This is beyond my control. I have opted to not to engage deeply
with the social media response because it has become Baudrillardian spectacle
where there is no distinction between what happened, the students’ reactions to
what happened, and the mediated discussion of what happened.
I am proud, though, to be
in the only Rhodes humanities department where every lecturer has a PhD, a
department that has the most diverse composition of staff, and where every
lecturer is recognised or is gaining recognition for initiating new questions
in humanities studies. Our major concern is to produce students who learn to
advance knowledge and think out of the box.
