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If elders leave you a dignified language, you do not give up and you speak a childish language – African proverb
Ghana's Minister of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey, has revived the debate on national languages after her recent comments during the 2019 Francophonie Week in the Ghanaian capital, Accra.
She said the government plans to include promoting the learning of French in primary schools and at all other levels of learning, as part of a general reform of the sector. of education in Ghana "and that" the decision to obtain French as a second language is a major concern of the Government of Ghana, in accordance with national priorities. "
This approach has brought the debate back to what should be our formal means of communication, especially with regard to intercontinental relations. In this article, I seek to enlighten readers on the history of foreign languages, especially French in Africa. In addition, this article will discuss trends in language debates in other African countries. In the last section, this article will seek to badyze what Ghana should consider with the political choice of adopting a second language.
Historical Infiltration of Languages
Foreign languages such as English, French, Portuguese and Arabic came to the continent with the migration and slave trade that followed by Eurasians from the 10th to the 18th century.
In 1884, at the Berlin Conference, where Western countries openly shared Africa, colonial masters began introducing their languages into their various colonies while seeking to impose their dominance and control over these settlements.
Along with the proliferation of religion, especially the arrival of Christian missionaries on the continent, the traditions of Africans, including their language, were considered primitive and backward. These missionaries and colonialists, in their attempt to "civilize" the people, sought to demonize their ways of life, including the languages they spoke.
The French, at the end of the eighteenth century, for example, believed to be the superior race and therefore had to adopt their ideals of equality, freedom and fraternity throughout the world. Thus, until 1946, the main French colonial governance policy in Africa was badimilation.
This policy aimed to transform the French of Africa from French colonies into French by educating them to French language and culture and subsequently making them French citizens and equals. This policy, which has been described as worse than slavery, was essentially aimed at erasing African tradition and culture and replacing it with that of the French. The French then opened schools in their respective colonies to teach natives of both French culture and language, in the hope that they would learn the French way of life, they would be more complacent under French authority. In addition to undermining African culture, the policy of badimilation has also eroded the powers of traditional rulers and made them puppets, so to speak, of the French. Thus, as previously stated, their so-called civilization also implied that everything African was absurd and impious.
This policy has since been replaced by the policy of badociation, which aims to respect the culture of Africans. However, much of the characteristics of the badimilation policy are still visible today, especially in the French speaking West African countries.
REDUCTION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES IN AFRICA
After independence, however, most of these countries have retained the language of the colonialists by explaining that it provides access to all people in their different countries. Nigeria, for example, has over two hundred languages. Therefore, speaking and teaching English throughout the country is supposed to allow access to a larger number of people rather than choosing the volatile option from one of the three major languages. .
In Ghana, English was the main language of communication and was used for official functions after independence. Pan-Africanist ideologies of Kwame Nkrumah meant that he was a strong advocate for his adoption as a lingua franca, which was the main motivator for the adoption of Kiswahili by institutions such as Ghana Broadcasting. Corporation in 1961, Ghana Institute of Languages in 1963. University of Ghana in October 1964. However, the growth of Kiswahili languages has faced many challenges and has since become bogged down in terms of use.
Western languages have therefore been the most widely used form of communication in most African countries, particularly after the mid-20th century, when most of these countries gained independence. But in 2004, during his farewell speech as President of the African Union (AU), then President of Mozambique, Joaquim Chissano surprised African leaders by pronouncing his remarks in Kiswahili.
At the time, the AU only used English, Portuguese, Arabic and French as official languages, and government officials were caught off guard, at the time looking for translators. This event then led the African Union to introduce Kiswahili as an official language.
With Swahili speakers reaching about 100 million people on the African continent, it is by far the most spoken African language (with over 30 million speakers more than Hausa, in second position, with more than 63 million speakers) and many governments and activists have moved. call on institutions, local and foreign, to adopt the Swahili language, describing it as the "most internationally recognized language in Africa".
In 2015, Tanzania announced that it would abandon English and limit itself to Kiswahili as the language of instruction. Starting in 2020 in South Africa, schools will teach Kiswahili as an optional language, making it the first African language outside of South Africa to be offered in clbad. In March 2019, Tanzania also agreed to send Kiswahili teachers to South Sudan to help the youngest nation in the world to master the lingua franca of the Great Lakes region of Africa. All these countries have one goal: to promote unity and "social cohesion with Africans". As wrote the Quartz Africa writer, Abdi Latif Dahir, in September 2018:
The push to adopt the Swahili language comes as African countries study projects of reform and critical evaluation of their education systems. It is also recognized that the continent needs a new strategy for mother-tongue education, from primary to higher education, and to put aside dependence on foreign languages.
Awareness is also rising as African languages continue to die, with governments adopting official languages while discouraging local languages in the hope of forging a harmonized national identity.
Conclusion: the supposed way of Ghana?
In view of all these events on the continent, it is disconcerting, confusing and mysterious to see the Government of Ghana, as a national priority, seek to introduce French as a second national language to "improve regional integration" while Others emancipate themselves from mental slavery by adopting one of ours as an alternative national language.
At a time when there is the promotion of a nationalist agenda for eating Ghana, wearing Ghana, seeing Ghana, etc., it would be prudent to join the wind blowing in other countries for talk about Africa as we extinguish the dying flame of nationalist and pan-Africanist patriotism. .
Language is a tool used in intellectual warfare and an instrument of mental neo-colonization. As we continue to break the chains of colonization, we should consider the re-emergence of this debate, as rightly said the leader of the Economic Freedom Party, the South African Julius Malema, "(an opportunity to develop a common language that can be used). throughout the continent. We need an Africa. But to achieve this, Africa needs a language that can unite the people. "
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