Mother tongue education in SA
5 September 2022
Mother tongue education is a strategic, long-term imperative for a country with a diverse and rich cultural heritage like South Africa, coming from a divided past where certain languages and people groups were given preference over others in an unjust and an unfair manner. To mention this point, is not to be “over-emotional”, but rather to show an understanding and appreciation of the importance of ridding this country of its apartheid legacy and the colonial structure of its society.
To be sure, this will require huge investment and re-allocation of resources, but the benefits on a long-term basis of promoting our diversity and building our “Rainbow Nation” by developing all our languages, which in the end safeguard, develop and modernise our cultures, will far outweigh the costs, if such an exercise wasn’t undertaken. After all, cost and level of difficulty can never be used as a valid reason for refusing to undertake activities of particular strategic significance to the health and well being of a nation.
Languages and cultures develop as the people within a certain language group and culture become more economically affluent (e.g. Afrikaners in South Africa), so as part of the broader goal of transforming South African society and giving the African majority a greater say in the running of the country’s economy, we have to find a way to develop African languages by teaching kids in their home languages from an early age onwards.
In his Moving the Centre: the Struggle for Cultural Freedoms, Ngugi wa Thiong’o argues this quite cogently and in fact he asserts that, “for a full comprehension of the dynamics, dimensions and workings of a society, any society, the cultural aspects cannot be seen in total isolation from the economic and political ones. The quantity and quality of wealth in a community, the manner of its organisation from production to the sharing out, affect, and are affected by the way in which power is organised and distributed. These in turn affect and are affected by the values of that society as embodied and expressed in the culture of that society. The wealth and power and self-image of a community are inseparable.”
Ngugi further argues that the battle to move the centre from a Eurocentric worldview to one that recognises and affirms local culture(s) and tradition(s), within the context of a universalist approach that is appreciative of the fact that all cultures are evolutionary and are in fact constantly being influenced by interactions and exposure to other cultures, is one that entails moving the centre “between nations and within nations”, because of our colonial past, which has created societies which are dominated and subjugated by the Eurocentric worldview.
It is within this context that the struggle for mother tongue education becomes an existentialist revolutionary imperative for a nation such as ours with its rich diversity. As Ngugi states, “hence the need to move the centre from all minority class establishments within nations to the real creative centres among the working people in condition of gender, racial and religious equality.”
A discussion of this nature is germane within our current political discourse, especially as we celebrated World Teacher’s Day on the 05th of October 2022, with the Minister of Basic Education, in honouring this day, re-affirming government’s commitment to change the language policy in the country in order to make education accessible to all, in line with the Basic Education Laws Amendment (BELA) Bill and the National Curriculum Statement (NCS) Grades one to twelve, which is about the enablement of the equal use of all eleven languages, including sign language, in the basic education schooling system. This is of course a right that is enshrined in the constitution, as per Section 29(2) of the Bill of Rights.
Promoting our African languages in this manner is critical to enabling the African majority to develop themselves educationally as well as in the fields of science, technology and innovation, as these languages themselves will have to develop a conceptual vocabulary that is commensurate with modernity and its advances in science and technology.
It is also important in doing what Ngugi calls “decolonising the imagination”, a necessary precondition to enabling Africans within our society to contribute meaningfully in the crucial economic development field of innovation as well as contributing to the creative arts, which are at the heartbeat of stimulating the creative energy and entrepreneurial spirit that are at the heartbeat of the upward economic mobility of any group of people(s) within any society. Non-racialism and multiculturalism are also enhanced and advanced through promoting mother tongue education within the broader ambit of building our aspirant “Rainbow Nation”.
Mugabe Ratshikuni works for the Gauteng provincial government; He is an activist with a passion for social justice and transformation. He writes here in his personal capacity.
