Given South Africa’s stated commitment to multilingualism, you might not think that a requirement from one of the country’s universities that its students learn an indigenous African language would raise much alarm. Yet alarm has nonetheless been the reaction from a few unexpected quarters to the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s announcement that all first-year students enrolled from next near onwards will be required to develop “some level” of isiZulu proficiency by the time they graduate.
The
university’s announcement doesn’t mean that it will become a
dual-medium English-isiZulu institution in 2014. Far from it. In
keeping with the gradualism of South Africa’s transition from
apartheid, the requirement is flexible and allows faculties to exempt
students with evidence of isiZulu proficiency at the required level.
At the moment, that’s well over half of the university’s annual
intake of new students. And even though there are plans to introduce
isiZulu as a medium of instruction, the university estimates that it
won’t happen until at least 2018, because centuries of colonialism
and apartheid have meant that very little work has gone into
developing isiZulu and the country’s other indigenous languages for
use in higher education.
In
some quarters, the mostly
lauded decision
has been called unconstitutional, which it
isn’t,
while others said it was impractical and unfair, as it will mean that
many non-isiZulu speakers will encounter the language for the first
time in an educational setting over a decade later than the optimal
time to be learning a new language. Others have argued it will be
expensive. Indeed, it was estimated in 2006 that the cost of this
first phase of the university’s isiZulu development policy would
cost almost $1.5 million at today’s exchange rate.
Some have
even said the decision is further evidence of the preeminence of the
Zulu hegemony in current politics.
Stanley
Mabuza, an aggrieved listener of public radio station SAfm, emailed
the station’s The Forum@8 morning talk show to register his
dissatisfaction. Mabuza’s email, read by the show’s host, said,
“When we speak of transformation in our tertiary institutions, we
are not inviting the introduction of unpopular policies by senseless
individuals who are intent at institutionalizing tribalism in our
public institutions. You cannot force an Indian child who wants to
study at the UKZN to now include isiZulu in their programme. I’m
not being tribalistic, but I’m afraid some people are trying to
force their language and culture upon all groups in the country.”
Mabuza’s
comment underlines what has perhaps been the most surprising aspect
of the reaction, which is that some of the backlash has, for various
reasons, come from black South Africans against what is perceived as
an act of Zulu domination.
Much
of the criticism is answered by the late educationist and
anti-apartheid activist Neville Alexander (portrait
above) in
his posthumous collection of essays, Thoughts
on the New South Africa.
Alexander, who played a central role in developing the country’s
higher education language policy, argues that developing African
languages is necessary because English and Afrikaans—the West
Germanic language whose imposition on black high school students was
the final straw that triggered the 1976
Soweto Uprising—are
not functioning adequately in South Africa as languages of higher
education. He says many students aren’t making it to graduation
owing in large part to a lack of proficiency and grasp of idiom in
languages not their own. He also rebuts as a non-question the notion
that developing African languages in the way UKZN and other South
African universities are will create “ethnic universities”.
Alexander has
also, in other essays and papers, charted the development of an
appetite for multilingualism in post-apartheid South Africa, despite
what he described as the persistent fallacy that assigning indigenous
languages an official status in post-colonial African states would
lead to ethnic rivalry and separatist movements. He put it down to
South Africa’s liberation movement—in its true, broad multiparty
sense, not just the African National Congress—understanding
multilingualism’s role in intercultural communication and social
cohesion.
That some
black South Africans have reacted angrily to this announcement could
be due to a misunderstanding of the rationale behind the UKZN’s
choice of isiZulu as its African language to punt—a choice informed
by the university being located in a mostly isiZulu-speaking province
(in a country where isiZulu is the most common first language). The
choice was also informed by the purpose of this initial phase of the
policy, which is to provide the university’s non-isiZulu-speaking
graduates with the facility to interact with the communities where
they’ll be living and working.
The reaction
may also be due to not knowing that the country’s other
universities have also adopted a similar policy to develop other
indigenous languages. The University of the Witwatersrand in
Johannesburg, for example, is focusing its language development work
on Sesotho and Rhodes University in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape
is developing isiXhosa. All of them are doing so following the path
advocated by the national policy: first focus on building proficiency
in the language among all staff, enrolled students and graduates
while at the same time developing the language for introduction at a
later stage as a full-fledged language of instruction at the
institution.
This
nonetheless has not stopped some influential pundits from arguing
that UKZN’s decision is further evidence of the so-called
“Zulufication”
of the country, as intimated by Mcebisi Ndletyana, head of the
faculty of political economy at the Mapungubwe Institute think tank.
Ndletyana said, during an interview on The Forum@8 this week, that
language policy in the country should be directed towards encouraging
people to speak languages other than their own because regional
monolingual communities, which he said South Africa has many,
propagate ethnic stereotypes that can be co-opted for political
campaigning.
Absent from
Ndletyana’s analysis is the recognition that no such monolinguistic
communities exists in South Africa, save for a few enclaves of
English and, to a lesser extent, Afrikaans speakers. The majority of
South Africans have a basic knowledge of English and are fluent in at
least one other language. Ndletyana’s definition of monolingualism,
it appears, scopes out English and Afrikaans, and refers only to
speakers of one indigenous South African language.
But Alexander
warned of this specific type of casual acceptance of the English and
Afrikaans linguistic dominance. He said English and Afrikaans gained
their position as “legitimate languages” first through colonial
conquest, then through the consent of the victims of colonial
subjugation who accepted and internalised the superiority of the
languages. South Africans would do well to keep his warning in mind.
