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ABSTRACT
Postcolonial linguistics has shown that African languages emerged from a complex figuration of missionary, scientific and colonial practices. The article interprets this emergence as the result of an existential onto-epistemological dislocation stabilised through the hegemonic project of colonialism. It rests on an apparatus of modernity that separated nature and culture/society and stabilised this new order with a particular notion of language as an autonomous object. In the nineteenth century, language enters a conjunction of territory and culture, which played out in Europe in the terms of a nationalist, hegemonic trajectory and in Africa as the fractionation of ethnic/linguistic groups and the pervasive linguo-ethnification of contemporary societies. Thus, language can be understood to be an apparatus productive of nationalism as well as ethnicity. In an attempt to demonstrate the plausibility of this conceptualisation, I show how today these trajectories have effects in that Afrikaans in South Africa as ethnified language loses and Swahili in Tanzania as national language gains ground at the respective universities. Both languages compete with global academic English, which despite its colonial heritage appears as a deterritorialised, culturally neutral language.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Helmuth Berking, Natascha Bing, Lloyd Hill, Manuela Kirberg, Hanna Nieber, Hartmut Rosa, Stephanie Rudwick, Dmitri van den Bersselaar and Kees van der Waal for their discussion, inputs, additions and comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Rose Marie Beck is Professor of African Languages and Literatures at the Institute of African Studies, University of Leipzig. Her fields of specialization comprise linguistic anthropology, postcolonial linguistics, sociology of language and linguistics, ethnographic conversation analysis, urban sociology and technoscience. She has extensively published on Swahili popular culture, Herero and urban languages.
Notes
1. Valentin Y Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988; Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; Thomas Spear, ‘Neo-traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa’, The Journal of African History 44(1), 2003, pp 3–27.
2. My use of concept here draws on a preliminary defintion of ‘formative concept’, a term coined during a discussion with colleagues from the universities of Erfurt, Jena and Leipzig and further developed during a workshop at the University of Leipzig, 14–15 December 2017, in the context of the Central German Forum for the Study of the Global Conditon. ‘Formative concepts’ seem to describe a quasi-ontological whole that sets into relationship and homogenises numerous other concepts, phenomena and practices and enables its users to make sense of, appropriate, form and thus provide ‘things’ a place the world. It is characteristic that such formative concepts render historical contingencies in/visible, have normative power and thus often become hegemonic instruments for defining or forming the world. Because of their relative distance from empirical findings they are essentially contested; at the same time they cannot be verified or falsified, but must be rendered plausible.
3. See the findings and debates around translanguaging, multilingualism, and language as a new linguistic dispensation, cf. Ofelia Garcia and Li Wei, Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; Marilyn Martin-Jones, Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism, Abingdon: Routledge, 2012; David Singleton, Joshua Fishman, Larissa Aronin and Muiris Ó Laoire (eds), Current Multilingualism: A New Linguistic Dispensation, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2013.
4. Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power. The Appropriation of Swahili in the former Belgian Congo, 1880–1938, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986, p 3.
5. For Tsonga see Patrick Harries, ‘The Roots of Ethnicity: Discourse and the Politics of Language Construction in South-East Africa’, African Affairs 87(346), 1988, pp 25–52; Patrick Harries, ‘Discovering Languages: the Historical Origins of Standard Tsonga in Southern Africa’, in Language and Social History: Studies in South African Sociolinguistics, ed. Rajend Mesthrie, Cape Town: David Philip, 1995, pp 154–175; on Shona see Sinfree Makoni, ‘In the Beginning Was the Missionaries’ Word: the European Invention of an African Language: the Case of Shona in Zimbabwe’, in Between Distinction and Extinction: the Harmonisation and Standardisation of African Languages, ed. Kwesi K Prah, Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press, 1998, pp 157–164; for Igbo see Dmitri van den Bersselaar, ‘In Search of Igbo Identity. Language, Culture and Politics in Nigeria, 1900–1966’, PhD Thesis, University of Leiden, 1998; Dmitri van den Bersselaar, ‘Creating “Union Ibo”: Missionaries and the Igbo language’, Africa 67(2), 1997, pp 273–295.
6. Joseph Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World. A Story of Language, Meaning, and Power, Malden and Cambridge: Blackwell, 2007, p 3.
7. Jan Blommaert, ‘Artefactual Ideologies and the Textual Production of African Languages’, Language and Communication 28, 2008, pp 291–307.
8. Ariel Heryanto, ‘The Making of Language: Developmentalism in Indonesia’, Prisma 50, 1990, pp 40–53, pp 41–47.
9. Ariel Heryanto, ‘Then there Were Languages: Bahasa Indonesia Was One among Many’, in Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages, eds Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2007, pp 42–61.
10. Bambi B Schieffelin, Kathryn A Woolard and Paul Kroskrity (eds), Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, London: Oxford University Press, 1998.
11. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
12. Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs, Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
13. Stuart Hall, ‘When Was “the Postcolonial“? Thinking at the Limit’, in The Post-Colonial Question, eds Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, pp 242–260.
14. Bauman and Briggs, Voices of Modernity, p 7.
15. Bauman and Briggs, Voices of Modernity, p 32.
16. Bauman and Briggs, Voices of Modernity.
17. Alastair Pennycook and Sinfree Makoni, ‘Disinventing Multilingualism. From Monological Multilingualism to Multilingua Francas’, in The Routledge Handbook, eds Marilyn Martin-Jones, Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese, London and New York: Routledge, 2012, pp 441–453.
18. Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney, cited in Dominik Perler and Markus Wild, ‘Der Geist der Tiere – eine Einführung’ in Der Geist der Tiere. Philosophische Texte zu einer aktuellen Diskussion, Dominik Perler and Markus Wild (eds), Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005, pp 10–74, p 53.
19. Blommaert, ‘Artefactual Ideologies’; Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World.
20. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1991.
21. Ayo Bamgbose, Language and Exclusion: The Consequences of Language Policies in Africa, Hamburg: LIT Verlag, 2000.
22. For example, Marilyn Martin-Jones, Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese (eds), The Routledge Handbook.
23. For example, Mahmood Mamdani, Scholars in the Marketplace. The Dilemmas of Neo-liberal Reform at Makerere University, 1989–2005, Dakar: Codesria, 2007; Paul Tiyambe Zeleza and Adebayo Olukoshi (eds), African Universities in the Twenty-First Century, Volume 1, Liberalisation and Internationalisation, Dakar: Codesria, 2004a; Paul Tiyambe Zeleza and Adebayo Olukoshi (eds), African Universities in the Twenty-First Century, Volume 2, Knowledge and Society, Dakar: Codesria, 2004b.
24. Anderson, Imagined Communities.
25. Katja Faulstich, ‘Die deutsche Sprachnation. Zur Entstehung kultureller Identität im deutschsprachigen Sprachnormierungsdiskurs des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Diskurslinguistik nach Foucault. Theorie und Gegenstände, ed. Ingo H Warnke, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007, pp 247–272.
26. For example, Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition; Fabian, Language and Colonial Power.
27. Kees Van der Waal, ‘Essentialism in a South African Discussion of Language and Culture’, in Power, Politics and Identity in South African Media, eds Adrian Hadland, Eric Louw, Simphiwe Sesanti and Herman Wasserman, Pretoria: HSRC, 2008, pp 52–72.
28. Pierre Alexandre, Languages and Language in Black Africa, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972, p 86. Alastair Pennycook demonstrates the stability of the very same debates about language and class across colonial times until today for Chinese and English high schools in Hong Kong: ‘intimately linked to this elitist education system is English since “a successful English-medium secondary education has become the principal determinant of upward and outward mobility for the people of Hong Kong”’, Pennycook, English and the Discourses of Colonialism. The Politics of Language, London: Routledge, 1998, p 197, citing B K P Leung.
29. Jan Blommaert, State Ideology and Language in Tanzania, Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, 1999.
30. Jan Blommaert, ‘Language Planning as Discourse on Language and Society: the Linguistic Ideology of a Scholarly Tradition’, Language Problems and Language Planning 20(3), 1996, pp 199–222; Jan Blommaert, ‘Language Policy and National Identity’, in An Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method, ed. Thomas Ricento, Malden: Blackwell, 2006, pp 238–254.
31. Fabian, Language and Colonial Power, p 78.
32. Pennycook, English and the Discourses of Colonialism.
33. Lloyd Hill, ‘Language and Status: On the Limits of Language Planning’, Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics 39, 2010, pp 41–58.
34. For example, Feliciano Chimbutane, ‘Multilingualism in Education in Post-colonial Contexts. A Special Focus on Sub-Saharan Africa’, in The Routledge Handbook, eds Marilyn Martin-Jones, Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese, London and New York: Routledge, 2012, pp 167–183.
35. I understand the university as an institution that includes disciplinary organisation, research and publication, teaching and administration.
36. See Pennycook, English and the Discourses of Colonialism.
37. Gregor Schiemann, ‘Is an Epoch-Making Change in the Development of Science Currently Taking Place? A Critique of the “Epochal-Break-Thesis”, in Science in the Context of Application, eds Martin Carrier and Alfred Nordmann, Berlin: Springer, 2011, pp 431–453; Gregor Schiemann, ‘Wir sind nicht Zeugen einer neuen wissenschaftlichen Revolution’, in Strukturwandel der Wissenschaft. Positionen zum Epochenbruch, eds Alfred Nordmann, Hans Radder and Gregor Schiemann, Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2014, pp 39–53.
38. Jürgen Renn and Malcolm D Hyman, ‘The Globalization of Knowledge in History: An Introduction’, in The Globalization of Knowledge in History (based on the 97th Dahlem Workshop), eds Jürgen Renn and Malcolm D Hyman, Berlin: Ed. Open Access, 2012, pp 27–51; and see the impressive body of literature following Karin Knorr-Cetina’s Epistemic Cultures. How the Sciences Make Knowledge, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999.
39. However, for about 20 years we have seen the emergence of the entrepreneurial university and following the franchising of universities, especially in the so-called South, where nation-states have few legal and institutional resources to either control such franchising or provide high-quality universities of their own (see Achille Mbembe, ‘Decolonizing the University: New Directions’, Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 15(1), 2016, pp 29–45).
40. John D Hargreaves, ‘The Idea of a Colonial University’, African Affairs 72(286), 1973, pp 26–36, p 27. For a general history of the university, see Walter Rüegg, ‘Themes’, in A History of the University in Europe. Volume III: Universities in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries, ed. Walter Rüegg, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp 3–31. For universities outside Europe, especially in the South, see Philip G Altbach, ‘Globalization and the University: Realities in an Unequal World’, in International Handbook of Higher Education, eds James J F Forest and Philip G Altbach, Dordrecht: Springer Press, 2007, pp 121–139; for sub-Saharan Africa, see Eric Ashby and Mary Anderson, Universities: British, Indian, African. A Study in the Ecology of Higher Education, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1966; Edward Shils and John Roberts, ‘The Diffusion of the European Models Outside Europe’, in A History of the University in Europe. Volume III: Universities in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries, ed. Walter Rüegg, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp 163–230; Damtew Teferra, ‘Higher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa’, in International Handbook of Higher Education, eds James J F Forest and Philip G Altbach, pp 557–569; for francophone Africa see Juma Shabani, ‘Higher Education in French-Speaking Sub-Saharan Africa’, in International Handbook of Higher Education, eds James J F Forest and Philip G Altbach, Dordrecht: Springer Press, 2007, pp 483–502.
41. See Ashby and Anderson, Universities: British, Indian, African.
42. E M K Mulira, cited in Carol Sicherman, ‘Makerere and the Beginnings of Higher Education for East Africans’, Ufahamu, A Journal of African Studies 29(1), 2002, pp 91–120, p 91.
43. Sicherman, ‘Makerere and the Beginnings of Higher Education’.
44. Pennycook, English and the Discourses of Colonialism, p 192.
45. See, for example, signposts on Cameroonian campuses that discredit Pidgin English as academic language, http://ayibamagazine.com/pidgin-english-language-of-unity/ (accessed 18 December 2017).
46. https://www.facebook.com/openstellenbosch/ (accessed 18 December 2017).
47. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF3rTBQTQk4 (accessed 18 December 2017).
48. See the draft language policy at http://www.sun.ac.za/english/about-us/language (accessed 18 December 2017).
49. Chris Brink, No Lesser Place. The Taaldebat [language debate] at Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch: Sun Press, 2006; see also Lloyd Hill, ‘The Decline of Academic Bilingualism in South Africa. A Case Study’, Language Policy 8(4), 2009, pp 327–349.
50. Van der Waal, ‘Essentialism in a South African Discussion’, pp 61, 62.
51. Afrikaners have always been oriented towards Europe. Students’ linguistic biographies that I collected during a stay in February/March 2016 at the Department of General Linguistics still show this, with students valuing the language acquisition of English through media and television much higher than the Xhosa they learnt in their formative years from nannies, consuming mostly European and US-American film and music, or often rather taking Dutch, French or Mandarin classes as supplements to their study programmes at the university.
52. Brink, No Lesser Place, p 18.
53. See also Chika Trevor Sehoole, ‘South Africa’, in International Handbook of Higher Education, eds James J F Forest and Philip G Altbach, Dordrecht: Springer Press, 2007, pp 159–205; Brink, No Lesser Place, 2006; and http://www.sun.ac.za/english/about-us/historical-background (accessed 7 August 2016).
54. With regard to Zulu, see Stephanie Rudwick and Andrea Parmegiani, ‘Divided Loyalties: Zulu vis-à-vis English at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’, Language Matters 44(3), 2013, pp 85–104; Stephanie Rudwick, ‘Language Policy at a South African University’, in The Language Management Approach: Focus on Research Methodology, eds L Fairbrother, J Nekvapil and M Sloboda, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016.
55. See Johanita Kirsten, ‘What Is in a Language: Essentialism in Macro-Sociolinguistic Research on Afrikaans’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 248, pp 159–195, p 164: ‘ … dat die handhawing van Afrikaans noodsaaklik is, omdat die identiteit van die Afrikaner en die kulturele volksbestaan van die Afrikaner ten nouste met die dryfkragfunksies van die Afrikaanse taal saamhang … ’
56. Kirsten, ‘What is in a Language … ’, p 178, ‘Dis vir ’n taal belangrik om deel te hê aan alle soorte hoë funksies anders begin dié besondere taal die kreeftegang gaan’.
57. Theo du Plessis, ‘From Monolingual to Bilingual Higher Education: the Repositioning of Historically Afrikaans-Medium Universities in South Africa’, Language Policy 5(1), 2006, pp 87–113. See also Kirsten, ‘What is in a Language … ’, 2017, p 166, who attests to an essentialised notion of Afrikaans in the expression ‘die Afrikaanse karakter van die universiteit’, that is, ‘the Afrikaans character of the university’.
58. Personal communication, Yusuf Lawi, 17 October 2015.
59. TATAKI, Pendekezo la Kutumia Kiswahili Katika Vikao Ndani ya Chuo Kikuu cha Dar es Salaam (Recommendation about the Use of Swahili at Internal Meetings of the University of Dar es Salaam), unpublished paper, University of Dar es Salaam, 2015. Little research is available about actual language use in academic instruction at tertiary levels (see Zaline M Roy-Campbell and Martha Qorro, The Language Crisis in Tanzania: The Myth of English versus Education, Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, 1997; Grace K Puja, ‘Kiswahili and Higher Education in Tanzania: Reflections Based on a Sociological Study from the University of Dar es Salaam’, in Language of Instruction in Tanzania and South Africa (LOITASA), eds Birgit Brock-Utne, Zubeida Desai and Martha Qorro, Dar es Salaam: E&D Publishers, 2003, pp 113–129. From everyday observation and informal talk with staff at UDSM, it is likely that fluid practices between English and Swahili depend on the disciplines and their identity with regard to the local/national and international/global reach of their topics.
60. ‘Lugha ya Kiswahili imekuwa kielelezo thabiti cha utamaduni wa Mtanzania na kitambulisho kuku cha taifa’ (p 3).
61. For example, Carol M Eastman, ‘Who Are the Waswahili?’, Africa 41(3), 1971, pp 228–236.
62. Kai Kresse, Philosophising in Mombasa: Knowledge, Islam and Intellectual Practice on the Swahili Coast, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
63. Gudrun Miehe, ‘Preserving Classical Swahili Poetic Traditions: A Concise History of Research up to the First Half of the Twentieth Century’, in Muhamadi Kijuma, Texts from the Dammann Papers and Other Collections, eds Gudrun Miehe and Clarissa Vierke, Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, 2010, pp 16–38; Elena Bertoncini, Outline of Swahili Literature. Prose Fiction and Drama, Leiden: Brill, 1988.
64. Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World; for Swahili see Alamin Mazrui, Swahili beyond the Boundaries. Literature, Language, and Identity, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007.
65. Charles Pike, ‘History and Imagination: Swahili Literature and Resistance to German Language Imperialism in Tanzania, 1885–1910’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies 19(2), 1986, pp 201–233; Ali A Mazrui and Alamin M Mazrui, Swahili State and Society. The Political Economy of an African Language, Nairobi and London: East African Educational Publishers and James Currey, 1995.
66. Fabian, Language and Colonial Power.
67. Blommaert, State Ideology and Language, p 128; Anna M Kishe, ‘Kiswahili as Vehicle of Unity and Development in the Great Lakes Region’, Language, Culture and Curriculum 16(2), 2003, pp 218–230.
68. TATAKI, Pendekezo la Kutumia Kiswahili Katika Vikao Ndani ya Chuo Kikuu cha Dar es Salaam, p 5.
69. Blommaer, State Ideology and Language, p 100.
70. See Rose Marie Beck, ‘Configurations of Language, Culture and Society in Swahili Studies’, MS, 2014, 30 pp.
71. Jan Blommaert, ‘Situating Language Rights: English and Swahili in Tanzania Revisited’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 9(3), 2005, pp 390–417, p 398.
72. See also Blommaert, State Ideology and Language; Blommaert, ‘Situating Language Rights’.
73. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Linguistic Genocide in Education – or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights? Mahwah and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000; Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert Phillipson (eds), Linguistic Human Rights: Overcoming Linguistic Discrimination, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 1995; Yoneda, Nobuko, ‘“Swahilization” of Ethnic Languages in Tanzania: The Case of Matengo’, African Study Monographs 31(3), 2010, pp 139–148; critically Rugatiri D K Mekacha, ‘Language Death: Conceptions and Misconceptions’, Journal of Pragmatics 21, 1993, pp 101–116.
74. Birgit Brock-Utne, ‘Research and Policy on the Language of Instruction Issue in Africa’, International Journal of Educational Development 30, 2010, pp 636–645; Birgit Brock-Utne and Halla Bjork Holmarsdottir, ‘Language Policies and Practices in Tanzania and South Africa. Problems and Challenges’, International Journal of Educational Development 24(1), 2004, pp 67–83.
75. Blommaert, ‘Situating Language Rights’.
76. This I take from a student’s paper that was written as homework on the topic of Afrikaans and Open Stellenbosch in February 2016 at the University of Stellenbosch.
77. Personal communication, Aldin Mutembei, May 2014.
78. TATAKI paper.
79. John D Hargreaves, ‘The Idea of a Colonial University’, African Affairs 72(286), 1973, pp 26–36, p 26, citing ‘a radical young sociology lecturer called Dr Onoge’.
80. For example, the regulation of franchising of higher education, quality management, syllabuses and curricula, sources of finance, choice of consultants for policy-making, etc. These topics show a remarkable continuity since the establishment of the university on the African continent (cf. Hargreaves, ‘The Idea of a Colonial University’; Ashby and Anderson, Universities: British, Indian, African; Forest and Altbach, International Handbook of Higher Education; Sehoole, ‘South Africa‘).
81. David Singleton, Joshua A Fishman, Larissa Aronin and Muiris O’Laoire (eds), Current Multiplingualism: A New Linguistic Dispensation, New York: De Gruyter, 2013.
82. Alastair Pennycook, Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows, London: Routledge, 2006; Philip Seargeant and Joan Swann (eds), English in the World: History, Diversity, Change, Abingdon: Routledge, 2013.
83. Pennycook, English and the Discourses of Colonialism; Blommaert ‘Situating Language Rights’.
84. Pennycook, Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows.
85. Bauman and Briggs, Voices of Modernity.