Dilip Menon, Kafila
Susa
lo-mtunzi gawena. Hayikona shukumisa lo saka
Move your
shadow. Don’t rattle the bag
JD Bold,
Fanagalo Phrase Book, Grammar and Dictionary, the Lingua Franca of Southern
Africa, 10th Edition, 1977
In the bad old days in
South Africa, whites spoke English or Afrikaans, the languages of command. When
they did engage with those that did not speak English, there was Fanagalo, a
pidgin based on Zulu peppered with English and some Afrikaans. Fanagalo was
developed in the mines and allowed directives, if not conversation. The
struggle against apartheid produced its freedoms, its heroes and heroines and
new dreams of equality. As Richard Pithouse in his article shows, twenty years
down the line the sheen has worn. Unemployment, xenophobia, violence, crime and
a seemingly entrenched inequality dog our dreams. We live with the constant
premonition of becoming an ordinary country, a nation like any other.
There are many battles to
be fought on this landscape. The bosses of the mining industry pay themselves
unconscionably large salaries while denying a raise in wages to miners. The
economy is still controlled by big capital and small entrepreneurs struggle to
find a niche. The ruling sign of South Africa’s economy are the strictures
against street trading in the cities: the space of enterprise and generational
mobility within the global south. And at the Universities, prohibitive fees
still govern entry as much as continuance within the educational establishment.
Pithouse in his essay captures the sense of anxiety about the future that
colours all discussions but I want to look in particular at the question of
knowledge and the Universities. A struggle is afoot to change the racial
composition of the faculty and students at our Universities to move towards
transformation. It is a moot question as to whether equal attention is being
paid to the questions of both the language of instruction as well as the
content of syllabi in the South African University. English still dominates
instruction at the major universities as does Euro American knowledge. So not
much has changed. Zulu, Sotho, Xhosa, Tswana do not cast their shadows on a
University education. As the distinguished South African intellectual Neville
Alexander said, “we have to change radically the inherited linguistic habitus
in terms of which English is the only feasible candidate for language of high
status”.
The University of
Witwatersrand, where I work, recently tabled a multilingual policy that will
incorporate Sesotho and isiZulu as co-languages along with English as an
official part of campus life, in and outside the classroom. Meanwhile on the
western coast, the University of Cape Town was involved in a battle where
students launched a month-long campaign to bring down the statue of Sir Cecil
Rhodes on campus. The statue was finally toppled in early April bringing to the
mind of many the fates of Lenin statuary after 1989 and Saddam Hussein after
2003. However, the beheading of kings has never been attended by social
transformation and has in fact been a substitute for change. The alacrity with
which the administration of the University of Cape Town agreed to the taking
down of the statue is in direct contrast with the glacial pace of actual
transformation of the composition of the faculty or syllabi. Statues all over
South Africa bore the brunt of this symbolic politics— a random assortment of figures
ranging from missionaries to the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, were drawn
in. Last week, the statue of Mohandas Gandhi in the centre of Johannesburg was
defaced with white paint, supposedly as a reaction to his early views on
Africans as being inferior to Indians in South Africa. Whether these random
attacks on pigeon perches are connected in any way to the present xenophobic
attacks on “foreigners” in Kwazulu Natal and Johannesburg is not clear as yet.
However, as South Africa struggles towards decolonizing its mind (and the idea
of the migrant as foreigner certainly is an inheritance from darker times), the
question of language and the content of knowledge at the University will be of
crucial significance.
Are there any lessons to
learn from India, considering that from the very moment of independence, there
was a debate about the landscape of language in the University? The three
language formula-mother tongue, regional language, English – was hammered out
in 1956 and represented a whittling down from the original six language formula
in which the learning of Sanskrit, Persian/Arabic, and a European language was
envisaged. As a child with a father in government service, our family moved
across the Indian landscape from south to north, east to west and over the
years of schooling, apart from Malayalam, my mother tongue, I acquired a
smattering of Tamil and Marathi, and a working knowledge of Bengali and Hindi.
Because of the three language policy of the government, schoolchildren learnt
English, Hindi and the language of the region they grew up in. If their mother
tongue was different from the above three, they could enrol in schools run by
the community where they could also learn their mother tongue. In effect, a
child was nearly always trilingual, and more often than not knew four
languages. In many schools Sanskrit was compulsory till high school and if a
student wanted to pursue learning the language till the school leaving
examination, it was possible to opt for Sanskrit as a subject. Which meant
another language in addition to the four already being taught at school and
home. Broadly speaking, the languages deriving from Sanskrit, or influence by
Sanskrit shared some linguistic terrain but not enough to allow for an easy
transition. Knowing Hindi was no guarantee that one could learn Bengali or
Marathi easily. And Tamil being a Dravidian language was another story
altogether. However, the landscape of languages meant that while English had
cachet, it was domesticated so that one could tell the mother tongue of the
person who was speaking English by the inflection they put on words. Unless, of
course, the student had attended what were the posher English medium schools
(curiously called convent schools after the fact that a majority were set up by
Christian missionaries), in which case they spoke a register that aspired to
the BBC or at least the accents of the Anglo Indian teachers at schools. Not
that this policy produced polyglots, nor indeed that it diminished the cultural
value of English, but a landscape of language was made available to the
learner. A cynic might say that all that the policy achieved was that Indians
now speak four languages badly, but it remains a fact that Universities are not
dominated by English as much as an elite would like them to be.
In Universities run by
the state governments, one had to learn the language of the region within the
period of probation or risk losing one’s job. Even at the Central Universities
while English was the medium of teaching, lecturers always had to allow for the
fact of the sheer diversity of the educational backgrounds of the students who
came from a variety of linguistic landscapes. Of course, there were inequities.
Hindi was the assumed default national language in north India, and when I
taught at a Central University in Hyderabad, Telugu was the fall back option.
Students coming from regions like the north east of India, if they were not
familiar with English, they were not familiar with Hindi either, or languages
of other regions. In communicating in the University a certain economy of
language emerged in which English was one among the many languages of
instruction as much as sociability. While I was teaching in Kerala, formal
lectures in English were supplemented by after class conversations in
Malayalam; in Delhi, formal lectures were sometimes bilingual, but after class
interactions were nearly always bilingual, if not trilingual. While students
who spoke English well dominated the discussions in class, the opportunity at
Delhi University, for example, of answering the examination in Hindi meant that
the best students were never disadvantaged, though they had the additional
burden to bear that nearly all of the readings were in English. The playing
field of course, was not levelled, but everyone in theory, could play together.
However, all of this
never meant that any of the regional languages acquired the epistemological
status that English possesses. While Universities set up Hindi language
translation bureaus, these were often poorly funded and irregularly staffed.
What got translated also reflected in many cases, the patronage systems within
Universities so that academics with local heft were translated into Hindi but
not international social science and humanities staples. Within languages like
Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, Telugu and Tamil to name a few, where social and
political movements made arguments about accessibility of knowledge a
commentary-in-translation industry did come about outside of the academic
realm. In Malayalam, for example, there are books discussing post modernism,
Derrida, Levinas et al but they function at the level of popular access and
promote a semblance of engagement while being not of very high intellectual
quality. Texts like Ranganayakamma’s exposition of Marx’s Das Kapital in three
volumes in Telugu are rare exceptions as with K Damodaran’s ten primers on
Marxism in Malayalam. There is little social science being done in the regional
languages of India.
However, that is the tip
of the iceberg. Indian academia is very much in thrall to the Euro American
paradigm as most developing nations are. Our most prominent academics are those
who know their Marx, Foucault and Derrida or depending on their intellectual
concerns ranging from environmentalism to feminism and the history of science
the relevant icons and academic literature from Europe and America. We have
hitchhiked very well on the grand narratives of European theory. While most
Indians of a certain age came of age in an era that invoked the imagination of
the Third World and decolonization, the mind remained colonized. Ranajit Guha
once said that there was one battle that the English never won and that was the
battle for the Indian mind. Arguably, that indeed, is the battle that they
comprehensively won. Indian languages and Sanskrit or indeed Arabic and Persian
were seen as the repository of a literary imagination and at Universities, one
could opt to study these languages but not as repositories of concepts and a
social imagination. The engagement with Sanskrit has had a fractious history
given the obsessions of a decolonized liberal elite as much as radical
sublaterns with the language being seen as the refuge of the Hindu
fundamentalist; an antediluvian imagination; or merely the language of classicism.
We have had engagements with the political and ethical language of Islam, but
as history. There has been a sustained scholarship on Sanskrit poetics, ritual
and political concepts but within the realm of Indology. Whether it is the
Arthasastra or akhlaq literature it has been denied contemporaneity and has not
fed into a language of social theory or the temerity to forge a social science
vocabulary derived from indigenous concepts and experience. There are other
Asian models before us as in Wang Hui’s magisterial four volume study on the
rise of modern thought in China interpreting a wide temporal swathe through
Confucian categories. Or Japan’s example where even “universal” science is
studied in Japanese originating in the impulse of the Meiji Restoration where
western knowledge was translated into Japanese. Whether it was Hegel and Kant
or physics, they were read and researched in Japanese. Macaulay sought to
produce a vast clerkhood in India working in the service of empire, with a
knowledge of English that would allow Indians at best to become mimic men
excised from their intellectual past. And indeed, when the intellectual class
revolted it was only inevitable that they would turn to another European
inheritance, that of Marxism. And Marxism has become the opium of the
decolonised intellectual. As Walter Mignolo would say, it is decoloniality that
we need, an emancipation of the mind, rather than the mere fact of
decolonization.
So there has been a
robust engagement with the question of languages in the university but not an
equally vigorous engagement with the politics of knowledge. To think through
categories of experience, ethics and politics from indigenous concepts has been
an enterprise abandoned even before it was begun. Indeed, as GN Devy put it: we
live after amnesia, in the realm of what we have forgotten or perhaps not even
known that we have forgot. This experience stands before us as warning in South
Africa even as the University of Witwatersrand moves towards a deeper politics
of broadening the landscape of language in the University. To quote Alexander
again, “at undergraduate level, there ought to be absolutely no hesitation on
our part: let the local languages be used to inculcate the habits of mind and
the fundamental concepts and approaches of the different disciplines at the
same time as the students are exposed to the relevant knowledge and registers
in English…” Instead of a mere functional multilingualism, that is but a higher
version of Fanagalo, all academic faculty must be supported to become bilingual
and translation funds set up for creating a corpus of social science and
scientific literature within local languages. It must be remembered that
Afrikaans, the world’s youngest language, developed a literary and academic
register as late as the 20th century assisted by a concerted policy.
If making the University
multilingual addressed merely the question of communication this may amount to
little more than the toppling of yet another metaphorical statue, this time of
English. The politics of knowledge needs to be addressed, in a way it never was
in India. The desire to be among the top 100 universities in the world compels
universities in the global south to jump the hoops and show that we are capable
of reproducing Euro American social theory competently. It is not without
significance that the most radical intellectual initiative to emerge from India
in the last generation-the subaltern studies collective- did not address the
question of the politics of knowledge at all. It was the moment of arrival of
the third world intellectual who showed that they could perform a western
tradition of intellection as well as the European could. The very act of
provincialising Europe was done through an assidous engagement with European
thought and a studied indifference to Asian or African modes of thinking.
Countering this cannot be a merely sentimental enterprise. What does it mean to
think with traditions of intellectual inquiry within Africa- and not just
through a notion of ubuntu that is little more than a Readers Digest version of
everyone getting along fine with each other? What would it mean to think a
decolonised imagination drawing upon Islam, Confucianism, or the different and
radical modernities of the Caribbean and Latin America? What would it mean to
impose our shadow on an intellectual world that has created an abbreviated
sense of time for us? In our universities we think with and teach a theoretical
tradition forged in Europe in the last 400 years, rather than affirming that questions
of self, community, politics and ethics have been the marrow of traditions of
intellection in our spaces for a few thousand years. We need to rattle our bags
to begin with and not just caddy for those who play.
Further
reading
Neville
Alexander, Thoughts on the new South Africa (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2013)
A Mazrui and
A Mazrui, The power of Babel: language and governance in the African experience
(Oxford: James Currey, 1998)
Paulo
Freire, The pedagogy of the oppressed 2nd revised edition (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1996)
