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1. Introduction
1.1 Africa – current preoccupations
In a review of world poverty in 1995, Tabatabai commented that there was “an unmistakable trend towards the Africanization of poverty” (Tabatabai, 1995: 31). Ten years later, the UN Human Development Index Report of 2005 confirmed this gloomy prediction: sub-Saharan African countries showed a steady decline, and occupied 28 of the bottom 30 places in the world ranking of human development. Between 1990 and 2001 the proportion of very poor people in Africa, defined as those living on less than a dollar a day, increased from 44.6% to 46.4%. In terms of numbers this represented an increase of from 227 millions to 313 millions. At the same time the average income of these very poor people went down from $0.62 per day to $0.60 (UN, 2005: 6–7). The African Renaissance, envisioned by Nelson Mandela following the fall of apartheid in South Africa, and much heralded in the closing years of the 20th century, by such as Bill Clinton and Thabo Mbeki (Tikly, 2003), has not yet arrived.
This book argues that one reason, embedded in a complex of others, for this lack of improvement is the failure of the formal education sector. We explore the reasons behind that failure, and argue that an important factor is the dominant use, at all levels of African education, of ex-colonial languages as languages of instruction. The principal colonizers in sub-Saharan Africa (referred to from now on simply as Africa) were the British, French and Portuguese, each bringing with them their own language; we shall focus upon English, but other exoglossic languages have occupied similar positions in Africa. (“Exoglossic languages” refers to languages which are not the first language of the majority of the population e.g. English in Malawi.)
However, in addition to the dominant position English has occupied in African education since the colonial era, it has also in recent years become the language of choice of the global village (an ironic phrase given that villagers, especially those from Africa, are its least favoured denizens). African parents have accordingly become increasingly convinced of the value of English as a stepping stone to prosperity, and African governments increasingly reliant on it for international communication. The globalization of English has thus had the effect of consolidating its position within the African education sector, and buttressing the questionable language policies which prevail in many of the continent’s “anglophone” states. While it would be misguided to attribute the lack of development in African countries solely to inappropriate language policies in education, it will be argued that significant responsibility does attach to the advocates of these policies. The prevailing language ideology in Africa has resulted in massive over-estimation of the value of English, while over-reliance on English in the educational domain has been a barrier, rather than a bridge, to development.
A variety of labels have been attached to countries which are economically poor, including underdeveloped, developing, less developed and least developed countries (LDCs – the fluent deployment of this acronym in the literature of poverty betokening the institutionalization of the condition). The labels may change over time, but sub-Saharan African countries have always featured prominently in the lists which they generate. Although development has long been a concern for Africans, it has in recent years loomed larger as an issue for those in the developed world. The motivations for this are various and contested (see, for example, Bond, 2001) and may include: an altruistic concern for humanity, an interest in reducing the number of economic migrants to rich countries, a wish to ensure access to huge mineral wealth, a desire for new markets for consumer goods and services, a fear that “failed states” may harbour “international terrorism”, empire building by the “lords of poverty”, or simply a quasimissionary zeal to convert Africans to “our way of life”.
Whatever the motivations, the view that amelioration in Africa is urgently needed has generated a number of initiatives from inside and outside the continent. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), proclaimed in 2000 by the United Nations, though global in their intended scope, are especially relevant to Africa. (The eight goals were irreproachable: to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; to achieve universal primary education; to promote gender equality; to reduce child mortality; to improve maternal health; to combat disease; to ensure environmental sustainability; to develop a global partnership for development.) These MDGs underpin subsequent initiatives, such as the Blair-inspired Commission for Africa, established in 2004 with 17 members, 9 of whom were African, and which delivered its report in 2005. Within Africa, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) was in 2002 relaunched as the African Union (AU), the old organization having proved unable to galvanize development in the continent. The AU revived the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD, originally established by the OAU in 2001) the aim of which was that Africans should themselves take on as much responsibility as possible for the development of Africa.
Prominent in the Western media in 2005 (declared the “Year of Africa”, Wickstead, 2005: 37) was the Make Poverty History campaign, which was led by a coalition of 540 aid organizations (Oxfam, Action Aid, etc.), and which gained massive publicity through the Live8 concerts held in five of the G8 countries (France, Italy, Germany, UK, US) in July of that year. The Live8 concerts, the initiative of Bob Geldof, which coincided with the G8 summit in the UK, were not without criticism. Some claimed Live8 was a vehicle to revive the careers of fading Western pop-stars (African musicians were largely absent); others that it was hijacked by the British government, who gave it enthusiastic public support in order to obscure the reality that the rich countries of the G8 were making few real concessions to poor countries.
Whatever may be the truth, this series of events generated huge publicity, further raising the rich world’s awareness of poverty in Africa. Indeed the resulting construction of Africa has perpetuated a “development deficit” view of the continent, not unlike the “civilization deficit” view of the 19th century. Thus the World Summit Outcome of late 2005 notes that Africa is “the only continent not on track to meet any of the goals of the Millennium Declaration by 2015” (whether the goals were achievable by that date is not questioned). The development deficit story is not, of course, the whole of Africa’s story, and the Western gaze may indeed be over-fixated on calamities and failures in the continent. However, while the 19th century British construction of Africa was arguably based on fragmented and unrepresentative evidence interpreted from a heavily Euro-centric perspective, the current view, albeit somewhat selective, is based on a significant accumulation of objective facts – relative to the rest of the world, malnutrition is widespread in Africa, infant mortality is high, and average life spans are short (UN, 2005). While much “received opinion” in the UK at the start of the 20th century held that the solution to Africa’s problems lay in Christianity (e.g. Stewart, 1903), the consensus (at least at government level) in rich countries in the opening years of the 21st century is that these problems are now to be addressed through debt relief, aid and trade.
African debt stood in 2005 at £125 billion. Servicing the repayments is a huge financial burden for most African countries, leaving little to spare for development. Although in 2005 it was agreed that, for 15 heavily indebted poor countries in Africa, there would be relief for debts owed to the World Bank, to the International Monetary Fund, and to the African Development Bank, the implementation of this agreement made very slow progress. Furthermore, there was no relief for debts which Africa owed to other institutions, which, at £110 billion, constituted the bulk of Africa’s debt, with repayments continuing to drain money from the continent (Smith, 2005: 29).
As far as aid is concerned, the G8 meeting in 2005 agreed the target of 0.7 per cent of GDP from each G8 country by 2010. A similar commitment was made by the established member states of the EU, to be achieved by 2015 (Wickstead, 2005: 37). Not all this aid, of course, is intended for Africa, and furthermore, within months of the G8 declaration it was acknowledged that their target would not be met (The Independent, December 2005). Irrespective of such targets, however, the term “aid” can be misleading if the amounts publicized are regarded as simple donations, for a large proportion of aid – estimated as from 10 to 70 per cent depending on the project – does not reach the intended recipients but goes into administrative costs, much of which “trickles back” to the donor countries. Again, while there are complaints that development aid is wasted, the 2004 world total of $79 billion spent on aid is less than one tenth of the $1 trillion spent on arms in the same year. Nonetheless, the value of even that relatively meager amount of aid is contested: some critics (e.g. Smith, 2005: 31) maintain that 50 years of aid (which coincidentally is also estimated at $1 trillion) have impoverished Africa by fostering a culture of dependency.
A further criticism (e.g. Easterby, 2005) is that large-scale aid plans are doomed to failure because of their very size and complexity: the UN’s eight Millennium Development Goals are composed of 18 groups of targets, which in turn consist of 54 indicators, for which 449 separate interventions are proposed. Other aid agencies, of course, put forward their own separate plans. Thus in 1999 there was the Comprehensive Development Framework (World Bank), quickly superseded by the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (World Bank and International Monetary Fund), while the World Trade Organization proposed the Integrated Framework for Least Developed Countries. The integration and implementation of these plans requires planning “that would overwhelm the most sophisticated government bureaucracy anywhere, much less the under-skilled and under-paid government workers in the poorest countries” (Easterby, 2005: 4). Meantime, in 2005, the UN Secretary General’s five-year progress report on the MDGs revealed that: “In sub-Saharan Africa, which already had the highest poverty rate in the world, the situation deteriorated further and millions more fell into poverty” (UN, 2005: 6). Easterby’s conclusion is not that aid is useless, but that aid agencies should be “searchers”, exploring problems on the ground through trial and error, adapting solutions to local demand, and expanding on those that work. This proposal is not without its own difficulties: What or who constitutes “local demand”? How are conflicts to be resolved if short term local demand (e.g. for borehole wells or chemical fertilizer) is predicted to cause longer term problems (reduction in the water table or leaching of the soil)?
Unlike debt relief and aid, the effects of which are a matter of dispute, there is a consensus that a key factor in African development is trade. The increased globalization of the world economy from the 1980s onwards is claimed by some (e.g. Bond, 2001) to have increased Africa’s marginalization, and indeed the continent’s share of world trade fell from 6% in the 1980s to 2% in 2005. Others (e.g. Khor, 2002) argue that globalization is a fact, and that African countries must inevitably engage with it. To raise Africa’s share of world trade by only 1% would give Africa an extra $70 billion annually in export earnings, more than aid and debt relief combined. The reality, unfortunately, is that increasing trade is easier said than done: Europe, Japan and the US currently hand out more than £150 billion annually in subsidies to their own farmers. This keeps prices of agricultural produce from Africa artificially low; many African cotton farmers, for example, are put out of business because the price of American cotton is lower than the cost of production, thanks to US government subsidies. However, politicians from the rich countries dare not upset their agricultural lobbies by abolishing subsidies forthwith. Likewise in the short term there are unlikely to be significant changes in import tariffs, which make it difficult for Africa to export value-added products to rich countries. While it is true that African countries also impose their own import tariffs, to insist that they immediately be removed all round would expose African countries to competition that their fledgling industries would not be able to bear.
The effect of financial corruption in Africa on debt relief, aid and trade, estimated by the African Union in 2005 to cost at least $150 billion per year, is a matter of dispute. Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the UN Millennium Project, and a determined optimist with regard to African development (see especially Sachs, 2005), claims that many Asian countries with even greater corruption than that in African countries achieved rapid economic growth, suggesting that corruption alone is not the cause of poverty (Sachs, 2005: 23). On the other hand, other observers (e.g. Swain, 2005: 25; Mbeki, 2005: 31) consider the corruption of rulers as a prime cause of Africa’s economic problems. Yet again, the French political scientist Bayart (1993: xviii) claims that the “condescending, sneering attitudes of the West towards politics in Africa are fuelled by misconceptions” and sees Western accusations of corruption as one such misunderstanding of the nature of African political life.
It is difficult to draw firm conclusions or make predictions from such ideologically disparate views – indeed to seek to make such generalizations would be presumptuous, given the variety of geography and of societies within the continent. Nonetheless two consistent themes do emerge: one is that the agency of Africans is key. The Commission for Africa (2005: 134) is typical “Unless Africa makes a concerted effort [to strengthen states] we believe that all other reforms, in international trade, debt and aid – essential though these reforms are – will have only limited impact”. This view, commendable though it may be, by packaging the agents as “Africa”, begs the question of who precisely are envisaged as the human actors.
The second theme is that there is no “quick fix” to be expected that will solve Africa’s economic problems (King, 2005: 46). This acknowledges that not only do development process operate over the long term, but also that the application of Western-inspired remedies is not guaranteed to succeed (cf. Tikly, 2003: 4). Likewise, Ellerman (2005: 25) maintains that similar remedies for African problems have already failed in the 1980s. Ellerman is also not the only commentator to observe (ibid. 26) that “Where development has been most successful as in East Asia, they have taken their own path, and where countries have been mostly under the thumb of external advisors, lenders and donors (e.g. Africa) progress has been least.”
1.2 Education, language and development
If African agency is crucial to African development, then it is reasonable to assume that African education has a role to play. Calls for educational improvements in the continent have grown more strident from the mid-1990s (cf. World Bank 1995a; DFID 1997). Moreover, given that the ability to read is of crucial importance in formal education, and further that education can contribute to development, then it follows that investigation into the reading capacities of learners, and into pedagogic practices relating to reading, may be of relevance to development and the alleviation of poverty in Africa. The wording of the preceding sentence is deliberately cautious, since the nature of the relationships is not one of cause and effect, but involves a variety of factors and interaction between them that are not clearly understood – indeed if they were, then poverty might long ago have been history.
The simple conception of the role of education in development, namely that it enables individuals to acquire knowledge and skills, which in turn promote national development, dates back at least as far as the industrial revolution, but developed as a science only in the late 1950s. Denison (1962), for example, concluded that, between 1930 and 1960, 23% of annual growth in the national income in the United States could be attributed to the increased educational level of the labour force1. There has, likewise, long been a belief that investment in education would have a similar effect in developing countries, and in some cases, such as Malaysia and Korea, this is what occurred. However, poverty in African countries remains both deeply rooted and widespread; it is also relevant to note that in African countries the medium of education in schools is usually a language that is not the first language of teachers and learners. In Malaysia, on the other hand, and indeed, all the “Asian tigers” (except for Singapore where special circumstances obtain), the language of schooling is for the most part, the language of the majority of the people.
Given the crucial role of language and communication in education, it is surprising that until the late 1990s, the issue of language received little attention in the literature dealing with development, with Arcand (1995) noting that the Handbook of Economic Development contains nothing on language, while the same is true of An Introduction to Development Economics (Elkan, 1993). Although there are volumes whose titles suggest a link between language and development, notably Language and Development, edited by Kenny and Savage (1997), and an identically entitled collection edited by Crooks and Crewes (1995), they are largely concerned with teaching language in developing countries, rather than exploring the links between language and development. Robinson (1996a: 6) speculating on the general neglect of the linkage, surmizes that for the developed world “development problems are not experienced first hand, but rather seen from a macro perspective, for instance as a matter of international trade, of large climatic regions, of disaster or famine”; he further suggests that governments in poor countries, with limited resources, may choose priorities other than communication. While the Commission for Africa Report (2005) is something of an exception in that it does contain a number of references to language, it is not seen as other than a peripheral and even a troublesome issue in Africa – the many languages of Africa yield problems of coping with diversity and ensuring access to information. On the other hand, the UN’s Millennium Development Goals Report (2005) makes no mention of language, despite the fact that Goal Two is to achieve universal primary education by 2015.
Perhaps more surprising is that a large amount of educational research on developing countries, even that concerned with literacy and school effectiveness, for long evinced little concern with language issues (e.g. Postlethwaite and Ross, 1992; Pennycuick, 1993), while The Oxfam Education Report (Watkins, 2000)...
