Mother tongue versus Arabic: the post-independence Eritrean language policy debate

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the controversial discourses around the significance of the Arabic language in Eritrea. It challenges the arguments of the government and some scholars, who claim that the Arabic language is alien to Eritrean society. They argue that it was introduced as an official language under British rule and is only spoken by the Rashaida minority and by a small educated elite. By contrast, this paper demonstrates that Arabic has served as the established lingua franca among the Eritrean Muslims and as the administrative language and medium of education for centuries. The main focus of the paper is a critique of the government's post-independence language policy, which replaced Arabic as the medium of instruction by mother tongue education under the purported aim of establishing the equality of all nine Eritrean languages. I argue that the promotion of this policy has political implications and that one of its purposes is to alienate the Muslim community from the use of the Arabic language as a marker of their common identity. The article is written from a sociological perspective and draws on numerous conversations with mother tongue school teachers, students and parents, and on participant observation of the public debate.

KEYWORDS:

• Eritrea
• mother tongue education
• multilingualism
• language policy
• Arabic
• Tigrinya

Acknowledgements

My profound gratitude goes to the University College of Oslo and Akershus, Institute of Development and International Studies and the Scholars at Risk Network in Norway for supporting my research activities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Under the authoritarian regime in Asmara research is restricted, and collecting data related to ethnicity and religion is taboo. In spite of these difficulties, I dedicated myself to explore the language policy issue systematically over an extended time period. I conducted numerous narrative interviews with parents, teachers and students from ethnic minorities, and I have been in close contact with employees of the Ministry of Education (MoE)’s Department of Curriculum Development who were involved in the implementation of mother tongue instruction. All names of my informants are withheld.

2. According to Ibrahim Sultan, the General Secretary of the Muslim League (ML), the Muslim population in this period was around 75% of the total population. Miran states that the Muslims comprised approximately 60% of the population in the early colonial period (2005, 105).

3. The anti-Arab stance of the EPLF leader echoes the Ethiopian government's allegation against the ELF that it attempted to sell Eritrea to the Arabs by establishing an Islamic state connected to the Pan-Arab World which would leave Ethiopia isolated and land-locked (Erlich 1983, 57–59; Venosa 2007, 103).

4. Between 1993 and 1995 public and private schools in Asmara conducted evening Arabic classes for teachers and government employees. Due to the high demand some Arabic teachers gave private classes, because Tigrinya-speaking government employees were afraid they might lose their jobs in the administration if Arabic was going to be introduced as a working language. However, the government eventually closed all the Arabic evening classes.

5. Nur Ahmed, a former ELF fighter and Eritrean Ambassador to China, who eventually defected and became active in the opposition camp, raised important issues at the conference. In his paper ‘Our Languages and Education’ (1996), he stressed the decisive historical role of Arabic and Tigrinya in the formation of Eritrean nationalism, which culminated in the armed struggle. According to him ‘the imposition of the mother tongue in education can result in isolationism among the different linguistic groups’ (cited by Negash 1999, 54).

6. The ‘International Conference Against All Odds: African Languages and Literature into the 21st Century’, from 11 to 17 January 2000 and ‘The Eritrean Studies Association Conference’, 22–26 July 2001.

7. Informants, personal communication, 2008. Similarly, between 2005 and 2008 the author observed heated discussions at the Curriculum Department of the MoE about the translation of textbooks into vernacular languages. The heads of the Arabic and science panels requested permission to translate these books directly from English into the mother tongues. However, they were forced to translate them first from English into Tigrinya and then from Tigrinya into vernacular languages including Arabic. Those who protested were ‘frozen’, a practice in which a person is kept as employee, but not given any meaningful task; others managed to flee the country.

8. A minority of the teachers said that mother tongue education had opened job opportunities for themselves. Another group stated that schools were only erected in remote rural areas because of the government's mother tongue policy (personal communication of the author on various occasions between 2001 and 2010).

9. The author acted as director of the Freshman Program and chairman of the Admission and Placement Committee at the University of Asmara from 1994 to 2000. He experienced cases where TTI graduates who had succeeded in the national examination were not allowed to join the university. According to the MoE, they were privileged to be exempted from military training at Sawa and supposed to work as mother tongue teachers.

10. Most copies of the Arabic government-owned newspaper (Eritrea al-Haddisa) are kept in the stores of the PFDJ, which only delivers some copies to the Eritrean embassies in the Middle East for propaganda purposes. Otherwise, even in Muslim-dominated regions only small numbers are available at PFDJ offices. The author witnessed in 2009 how people gathered at a tea shop in Tessenei (Gash-Barka) around one person who had grasped a copy of the newspaper and read it aloud to his audience. Other Arabic print media have been banned since 2001, and people who are caught smuggling them across the borders are interrogated. The few copies circulating in the country are distributed secretly like narcotic stuff.

11. The author remembers an event in the 1960s, when Egyptian Orthodox priests visited their Orthodox colleagues in Asmara, and they prayed and preached in Arabic. Initially, the Tigrinya priests were scared and the general population identified them as Muslim Sheikhs disguising themselves as priests, and they refused to socialize with them