Language Knowledge and Decolonizing the University

Rattling the bag – Language Knowledge and the transformation of the university in South Africa and India: Dilip Menon

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.

On Language & Disruptive Pedagogy

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.

iGay, iLesbian, iBisexual – Xhosalisation of English

Lwando Scott, Holaa!

A few months ago I received an e-mail asking my advice about IsiXhosa equivalents of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender.

IsiXhosa equivalents of these words only seem to exist in derogatory terms.

Growing up I had no language to talk about sexual identity; even the concept of having a “sexual identity” was a revelation in my late teens. Although visibly gay while growing up, there was no concrete articulation of my gayness as a sexual identity.

Let's speak the languages we dream in

Mandla Langa, Mail & Guardian

The vexed question of language dominated last Wednesday evening’s launch of my novel The Texture of Shadows at the auditorium of the Steve Biko Centre in Ginsberg in the Eastern Cape.

Earlier in the day I had visited the museum, library and archive. Stammering with memory and unresolved aspirations, the images, artefacts and an encounter with the widowed Ntsiki Biko at the centre took me back to the heyday of the black consciousness movement, as did the visit to Biko’s well-tended grave. It had originally been planned as a mausoleum. Uncomfortable with ostentation in a region struggling with the deaths of young people from HIV and Aids, the Steve Biko Foundation quickly scotched this notion.

Let's speak the languages we dream in

Mandla Langa, Mail & Guardian

The vexed question of language dominated last Wednesday evening’s launch of my novel The Texture of Shadows at the auditorium of the Steve Biko Centre in Ginsberg in the Eastern Cape.

Earlier in the day I had visited the museum, library and archive. Stammering with memory and unresolved aspirations, the images, artefacts and an encounter with the widowed Ntsiki Biko at the centre took me back to the heyday of the black consciousness movement, as did the visit to Biko’s well-tended grave. It had originally been planned as a mausoleum. Uncomfortable with ostentation in a region struggling with the deaths of young people from HIV and Aids, the Steve Biko Foundation quickly scotched this notion.

Gaza conflict: Lives that matter

Gabeba Baderoon and Nadia Davids, Letter to the Editor, Mail & Guardian

The reality of war is bitter.  A Vietnamese writer once confided that, for her, nighttime and its peaceful silence was a time of visceral fear because when she was a child, the silence of night was when the bombs would fall. Now, silence took her back to the moment before the explosions and so she could not rest. This is how the fear and destruction – the reality – of war enters our bodies immediately and forever.

Yet it seems we weigh realities differently.

Jamila Lyiscott: 3 ways to speak English

Language policy in South Africa and the unfounded fears of a Zulu hegemony

by T.O. Molefe, Africa is a Country 

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.

Neville Alexander's books available online

Education and the Struggle for National Liberation in South Africa
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/35930902/Education%20and%20the%20Struggle.pdf 

Language Policy and National Unity in South Africa/Azania
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/35930902/Language%20Policy%20and%20National%20Unity.pdf 

Three essays on Namibian history
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/35930902/Namibian%20History.pdf 

Achebe The Native Intellectual

by Jeremy  Weate, Chimurenga Chronic

There Was A Country, Chinua Achebe’s autobiographical account of the Nigerian Civil War, has raised a dust storm of reaction in Nigeria and exposed the unprepossessing tectonics of ethnicity. Opinions have been largely divided by differing allegiances either side of the river Niger. What is an outsider to make of it all?

In the celebrated text The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon outlines three phases in the development of the “native intellectual”. In the first phase, Fanon writes that

the native intellectual gives proof that he has assimilated the culture of the occupying power […] His inspiration is European and we can easily link up these works with definite trends in the literature of the mother country. This is the period of unqualified assimilation.

Slavish insistence on English limits us

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).

The English Language & Social Change in South Africa

by Njabulo Ndebele, 1986

Click here to download this speech in pdf.

Neville Alexander - a linguistic revolutionary

by Khadija Patel, The Daily Maverick

Neville Alexander

In April this year, higher education minister Blade Nzimande raised the ire of many South Africans when he suggested proficiency in an “African” language would be a prerequisite for graduating from higher education institutions. Speaking in isiZulu, Nzimande said: "Akukwazi ukuba yithi kuphela ekuthiwa sifunde isingisi nesibhunu bakwethu, kodwa ezethu iyilimi nabanye bangazifundi [We can't be expected to learn English and Afrikaans, yet they don't learn our languages"].

Wrong to confidently claim ownership of English

by Jacob Dlamini, Business Day

A FRIEND recently sent me the following fragment from the 1983 annual report of the English Academy of Southern Africa: "To complete the picture as far as our specifically language-related activities are concerned: we (the English Academy of SA) were represented at a ‘Military Language Congress’ organised by the SA Defence Force (SADF) at Voortrekkerhoogte, in May this year; we have finally won our battle to have the ‘equals’ sign banished when a word is broken at the end of a line — the hyphen is back, in both English and Afrikaans."

A serious case of, convenient, Ardziemers

by Danielle Alyssa Bowler, The Star & The Daily News

“Morena baloo ke, na na sari steve, opec di say peeper lemur train yeah ho”. Sound familiar? Let’s try again “Morena boloka setjhaba sa heso, O fedise dintwa le matshwenyeho”. The latter is the national anthem of South Africa, the former, Ard Matthew’s rendition of the national anthem, according to Daily Maverick writer Rebecca Davis. Whilst it might seem unbelievable, Davis’s take is not far from what South African’s saw and heard on their television screens a couple of weeks ago.

Decolonizing the Mind

Ngugi wa Thiong’o
 
Excerpted from  Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey, Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 1986. 

Introduction: Towards the Universal Struggle of Language

This book is a summary of some of the issues in which I have been passionately involved for the last twenty years of my practice in fiction, theatre, criticism and in teaching literature. For those who have read my books Homecoming, Writers in Politics, Barrel of a Pen and even Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary there may be a feeling of déjà vu. Such a reaction will not be far from the truth. But the lectures on which this book is based have given me the chance to pull together in a connected and coherent form the main issues on the language question in literature which I have touched on here and there in my previous works and interviews. I hope though that the work has gained from the insights I have received from the reactions — friendly and hostile — of other people to the issues over the same years. This book is part of a continuing debate all over the continent about the destiny of Africa.

Meena Kandasamy: I Dream of an English

A Response to Simphiwe Dana on Taking African Languages Seriously

by Pumla Dineo Gqola, Loudrastress

Although I have written about this topic in the papers before, several years ago in the Mail and Guardian, this post is motivated by Simphiwe Dana’s courageous opinion editorial in this past weekend’s Sunday Times. There are a few aspects of Ms Dana’s argument that I disagree quite strongly with, but I do share many of the concerns that she articulates.

To have nothing to lose

by Danielle Alyssa Bowler

In 2004, an article written by Zenzile Khoisan titled “Crime hits coloureds hardest-study” was published in the Cape Argus. It drew on Phil Leggett’s “research”, which claimed coloured people have a greater propensity for violent crime. The article engendered much discord, particularly over the acceptance or rejection of the term “coloured”. Gino Fransman, an academic from the University of the Western Cape, wrote a response in which he embraced the term, while questioning the homogenisation of the racial group, which triggered this response by (Chief) Joseph D. Little: 

If you truly want to take this matter of your identity seriously, as some of us have, then you will stop calling yourself a coloured. You will call yourself what our first nation indigenous ancestors called themselves: Khoi-Khoi (or Khoi-San). It simply means people or humankind. In order to be a true Zulu or Xhosa, you must have a language and a land… I have not found a coloured who speaks coloured and lives in colouredland (Fransman, 2005: 25, my emphasis)