Decolonising Multilingualism in Africa: Recentering Silenced Voices from the Global South
By Finex Ndhlovu and Leketi Makalela
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About this ebook
This book interrogates and problematises African multilingualism as it is currently understood in language education and research. It challenges the enduring colonial matrices of power hidden within mainstream conceptions of multilingualism that have been propagated in the Global North and then exported to the Global South under the aegis of colonial modernity and pretensions of universal epistemic relevance. The book contributes new points of method, theory and interpretation that will advance scholarly conversations on decolonial epistemology by introducing the notion of coloniality of language – a summary term that describes the ways in which notions of language and multilingualism in post-colonial societies remain colonial. The authors begin the process of mapping out what a socially realistic notion of multilingualism would look like if we took into account the voices of marginalised and ignored African communities of practice – both on the African continent and in the diasporas.
Finex Ndhlovu
Finex Ndhlovu is Associate Professor of Language in Society at the University of New England, Australia. He is the author of Language, Vernacular Discourse and Nationalisms: Uncovering the Myths of Transnational Worlds (2018, Palgrave Macmillan).
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Decolonising Multilingualism in Africa - Finex Ndhlovu
Decolonising
Multilingualism
in Africa
CRITICAL LANGUAGE AND LITERACY STUDIES
Series Editors: Professor Alastair Pennycook (University of Technology, Sydney, Australia) and Professor Brian Morgan (Glendon College/York University, Toronto, Canada) and Professor Ryuko Kubota (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada)
Critical Language and Literacy Studies is an international series that encourages monographs directly addressing issues of power (its flows, inequities, distributions, trajectories) in a variety of language- and literacy-related realms. The aim with this series is twofold: (1) to cultivate scholarship that openly engages with social, political, and historical dimensions in language and literacy studies, and (2) to widen disciplinary horizons by encouraging new work on topics that have received little focus (see below for partial list of subject areas) and that use innovative theoretical frameworks.
All books in this series are externally peer-reviewed.
Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.
Other books in the series
Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls: Being 'Half' in Japan
Laurel D. Kamada
Decolonizing Literacy: Mexican Lives in the Era of Global Capitalism
Gregorio Hernandez-Zamora
Contending with Globalization in World Englishes
Mukul Saxena and Tope Omoniyi (eds)
ELT, Gender and International Development: Myths of Progress in a Neocolonial World
Roslyn Appleby
Examining Education, Media, and Dialogue under Occupation: The Case of Palestine and Israel
Ilham Nasser, Lawrence N. Berlin and Shelley Wong (eds)
The Struggle for Legitimacy: Indigenized Englishes in Settler Schools
Andrea Sterzuk
Style, Identity and Literacy: English in Singapore
Christopher Stroud and Lionel Wee
Language and Mobility: Unexpected Places
Alastair Pennycook
Talk, Text and Technology: Literacy and Social Practice in a Remote Indigenous Community
Inge Kral
Language Learning, Gender and Desire: Japanese Women on the Move
Kimie Takahashi
English and Development: Policy, Pedagogy and Globalization
Elizabeth J. Erling and Philip Seargeant (eds)
Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity
Jan Blommaert
Power and Meaning Making in an EAP Classroom: Engaging with the Everyday
Christian W. Chun
Local Languaging, Literacy and Multilingualism in a West African Society
Kasper Juffermans
English Teaching and Evangelical Mission: The Case of Lighthouse School
Bill Johnston
Race and Ethnicity in English Language Teaching
Christopher Joseph Jenks
Language, Education and Neoliberalism: Critical Studies in Sociolinguistics
Mi-Cha Flubacher and Alfonso Del Percio (eds)
CRITICAL LANGUAGE AND LITERACY STUDIES: 26
Decolonising
Multilingualism
in Africa
Recentering Silenced Voices
from the Global South
Finex Ndhlovu and
Leketi Makalela
MULTILINGUAL MATTERS
Bristol • Blue Ridge Summit
DOI https://doi.org/10.21832/NDHLOV3354
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Names: Ndhlovu, Finex, author. | Makalela, Leketi, author.
Title: Decolonising Multilingualism in Africa: Recentering Silenced Voices from the Global South/Finex Ndhlovu and Leketi Makalela.
Description: Bristol, UK; Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Multilingual Matters, 2021. | Series: Critical Language and Literacy Studies: 26 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: This book interrogates and problematises African multilingualism as it is currently understood in language education and research. It challenges the enduring colonial matrices of power hidden within mainstream conceptions of multilingualism that have been propagated in the Global North and then exported to the Global South
— Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021011127 (print) | LCCN 2021011128 (ebook) | ISBN 9781788923347 (paperback) | ISBN 9781788923354 (hardback) | ISBN 9781788923361 (pdf) | ISBN 9781788923378 (epub) | ISBN 9781788923385 (kindle edition)
Subjects: LCSH: Multilingualism—Africa. | Language policy—Africa. | Decolonization—Africa.
Classification: LCC P115.5.A35 N37 2021 (print) | LCC P115.5.A35 (ebook) | DDC 306.446096—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011127
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011128
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-335-4 (hbk)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-334-7 (pbk)
Multilingual Matters
UK: St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.
USA: NBN, Blue Ridge Summit, PA, USA.
Website: www.multilingual-matters.com
Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/multilingualmatters
Blog: www.channelviewpublications.wordpress.com
Copyright © 2021 Finex Ndhlovu and Leketi Makalela.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned.
Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in the UK by the CPI Books Group Ltd.
Printed and bound in the US by NBN.
Finex – To the memory of my son, Sindiso, for closing all the gaps at home while I was away on project trips that culminated in this book.
Leketi – To my two beloved daughters, Leleti and Koketso, and to all students of multilingualism.
Contents
Series Editors’ Preface
Preface
1 Myths We Live By: Multilingualism, Colonial Inventions
2 Unsettling Colonial Roots of Multilingualism
3 Unsettling Multilingualism in Language and Literacy Education
4 Decolonising Multilingualism in Higher Education
5 Decolonising Multilingualism in National Language Policies
6 African Vehicular Cross-Border Languages, Multilingualism Discourse
7 African Multilingualism, Immigrants, Diasporas
8 Multilingualism from Below: Languaging with a Seven Year Old
9 Recentring Silenced Lingualisms and Voices
Index
Series Editors’ Preface
Applied linguistics is often subject to various ‘turns’ as they sweep across the social sciences: we’ve seen social, somatic, sensory, ecological, performative, discursive, spatial, material, ontological, practice-based and other turns come and go. Some have a more lasting effect, while others engender a brief period of excitement and then dissipate. Two contemporary turns of particular importance to the field that intersect in this book are the multilingual and the decolonial. Both are of real significance for socio- and applied linguists, the one urging us to understand multilingualism not just as common, but as the norm, the starting point from which any studies of language use, language education, or language learning should flow; the other urging us to change the ways in which knowledge in the field is tied to coloniality, to ways of thinking embedded in inequitable historical and contemporary global relations. The important question raised by this book, however, is how these two emphases work together: what needs to be done from a decolonial perspective to change the ways that multilingualism is understood, particularly in contexts of the Global South?
Unlike some of the other turns from cultural studies, geography, or anthropology, the multilingual turn (May 2014) seems central to applied linguistics, and one we perhaps like to ‘own’ since it is so obviously close to our core concerns. Indeed, this book is published by Multilingual Matters, who have always considered multilingualism as the necessary starting point. This emphasis emerged in part as a reaction to perceived increases in multilingualism in cities in the Global North, as studies or migration, mobility and community language use revealed the scale of urban linguistic complexity. This newfound interest has been critiqued for a lack of historicity (diversity has been around a long time), a fascination with linguistic diversity at the expense of other significant factors in migrant lives (sociolinguists may find language diversity intriguing, but migrants have more pressing concerns in their lives to do with housing, employment, education, discrimination and so on), an obsession with urban contexts (while cities may intensify the contiguity of difference, non-urban contexts may be equally diverse), an emphasis on fluidity over fixity (flexible language use may indeed be common, but people are nonetheless confronted by the static and rigid norms of institutional language regulations) and a lack of geopolitical awareness (what has been seen as remarkable diversity in the Global North is the norm in the Global South).
Whatever misgivings there may be about some of this recent reframing of multilingualism, it nonetheless puts ‘multilingualism from below’ – the use of varied linguistic resources by people going about their daily lives, rather than the elite multilingualism of those from privileged linguistic-educational backgrounds – centre stage in a new era of linguistic-ethnographically-informed research. In conjunction with this move, studies of language learning and use more generally have started to turn a critical eye on the ways that monolingualism (and the strange idea that such a state is really possible) has been assumed to be the starting point for analysis. We need instead to start our sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic analyses with multilingualism rather than monolingualism as the norm. This shifting focus, which has been slow to gain ground in the narrowly normative domains of second language acquisition (SLA) studies, has also started to raise questions about other common and taken-for-granted ideas in the field, such as first and second languages, native speakers, code-switching, and so on. Attention has been drawn to the monolingual bias in SLA, which tends to assume that people speak one identifiable language, after which they learned another. Reacting to the ways SLA has ‘erased bilingualism and multilingualism from the object of inquiry’, Ortega (2019: 24) calls for an understanding of ‘multilingualism as the central object of inquiry’. Despite some concerns about how multilingualism has been framed within this new focus, it has become, according to May (2014: 1), ‘the topic du jour, at least in critical applied linguistics’.
Looking more broadly at the social sciences, meanwhile, Maldonado-Torres (2007) suggests that a decolonial turn is under way, a ‘shift in knowledge production of similar nature and magnitude to the linguistic and pragmatic turns’ (2007: 261). This decolonial turn ‘involves interventions at the level of power, knowledge, and being through varied actions of decolonization’ (2007: 262). Across a wide range of academic fields – economics, philosophy, anthropology, international relations, religious studies, psychology, among others – there has been a call to decolonise knowledge. In the field of ecology, Ferdinand (2019) shows how environmentalism hides behind a universalist narrative that overlooks the colonial, patriarchal and slavery foundations of modernity that have to be addressed if environmental equality is to become a reality. Connell (2018: 405) argues for the importance of decolonising sociology, a project that ‘requires rethinking the composition of sociology’s workforce and changing the conditions in which it produces and circulates knowledge’. This is, she reminds us, a process of redistribution of both knowledge and resources.
As these remarks make clear, this is not just an epistemological question, but also both an ontological one, and a project to address institutional structures, racism, curricula, social interactions, forms of funding and more. These are broad challenges that necessitate understanding Eurocentrism as a structural problem, perpetuated by people, institutions, texts, conferences, and many aspects of our academic disciplines (Richardson, 2018). The solution to these exclusionary frameworks of knowledge is not through ‘rhetorics of inclusion’ (Furo, 2018: 282) – moves to include ideas from the Global South, people of colour, Indigenous knowledges into the curriculum (though these are of course part of the picture) – but a much deeper questioning of the procedures of knowledge production. We should also be cautious, as Zeleza (2017) warns, not to limit a decolonial project to the undoing of colonial frameworks of knowledge, lest we overlook the many other forms of knowledge and ways of being that have always existed beyond the grasp of colonialism. And as Kubota (2019) cautions, a project to decolonise applied linguistics can only be successful to the extent that it makes questions of race and gender central. Mignolo and Walsh (2018: 17) emphasise the need for decolonial insurgency that would align with other forms of praxis and pedagogy ‘against the colonial matrix of power in all of its dimensions, and for the possibilities of an otherwise’.
So what happens when the multilingual and decolonial turns come together? While in some ways they may appear to sit comfortably alongside each other – the multilingual turn perhaps suggests a decolonising of the monolingual bias in applied linguistics – their relationship, as the authors of this book suggest, is a far more complex one. As Mufwene (2020: 290) comments, the idea of decolonial linguistics ‘entails reducing the Western bias and hegemony in how languages of the global South and the (socio)linguistic behaviours of their speakers and writers are analysed’. It is not enough, therefore, just to emphasise multilingualism over monolingualism: what is at stake here is a far more extensive questioning of how we think about languages. Can we bring perspectives on multilingualism developed in the Global North to bear on language and education elsewhere, or does this become yet another form of knowledge colonisation? If the idea of multilingualism and associated views of language, language use and education are premised on understandings of language from the Global North – a view of languages as countable entities or an assumption that small-scale multilingualism is unsustainable – does the idea of multilingualism provide new terrain for discussion of language and diversity, or do its origins in the Global North render it inevitably compromised (Pennycook & Makoni, 2020)?
For the authors of Decolonising Multilingualism in Africa, many of the common ways of thinking about multilingualism, as exemplified in notions such as mother tongue education, bilingual education, or multilingual language policies need critical interrogation. They simply do not match the ways in which languages are used or understood in many African contexts. So the point is indeed not that a focus on multilingualism can constitute a decolonial enterprise, but rather that multilingualism itself is in need of decolonisation. The multilingual and decolonial turns rub up against each other. As Ndhlovu (2018: 118) puts it, while the invocation of ‘high-sounding metaphors of human rights, anti-imperialism and biodiversity resonate with contemporary international conversations around social justice and equity issues’, they struggle to achieve much because ‘standard language ideology remains ensconced as the only valid and legitimate conceptual framework that informs mainstream understandings of what is meant by language
’. This is not a question of language standardisation – the problem that language revival projects generally need to reduce language variety to a much narrower set of options – but that these projects all too often operate with a constricted understanding of what language is and how it operates.
The straitjacket of monolingual thought is not so easily thrown off. The monolingual/ multilingual dichotomy ‘misdirects and misrepresents the notion of language diversity’ (Ndhlovu, 2018: 118). Monolingual mindsets go far deeper than favouring monolingualism over multilingualism, or viewing multilingualism in monolingual terms: The issue at stake is a set of deep-seated language ideologies, or language ideological assemblages (Kroskrity, 2021) that are in need of a much more profound decolonising. The problem more broadly is that any approach to language education that assumes, for example, that there must be a dominant community language misses the point of Southern multilingualisms. There is a major gap in thinking about educational multilingualism, especially in Southern contexts, ‘a singular failure to engage with the nature of multilingualism in these areas and how multilingualism can be harnessed as a resource, say, in a sector like education’ (Mwaniki, 2018: 36). The problem with ‘language-specific approaches’, Nakata (2007: 175-6) points out, is that whether they focus on bilingual education, English as a second language, or local languages, they assume ‘that all students have a common language’. The idea of a multilingua franca (Makoni & Pennycook, 2012), by contrast, views language as a multilayered chain that is constantly combined and recombined and in which ‘secondary’ language learning takes place more or less simultaneously with language use. In many Southern contexts, Global North concepts of languages, mother tongues or multilingualism do not reflect the ways languages are used and understood, which can be better described as forms of multilanguaging (Makalela, 2018).
The notion of translanguaging has been a point of contention in these debates. For García, (2019: 162) translanguaging has ‘the potential to decolonize our conception of language and, especially, language education’. Translanguaging, as both ideology and pedagogy, can challenge the ways in which bilingualism and multilingualism are commonly construed as the use of separate, named languages – ideas that ‘consolidated power among white majorities while stigmatising the practices of multilingual speakers’ (García, 2019: 166) – opening up spaces for different ways of doing language pedagogy. Yet notions such as translanguaging have been critiqued on the grounds that to ‘lay claim to an uncovering or (re-) discovering of multilingualism as more than the sum of languages understood as monolingual entities’ by scholars from Europe and North America (and writing predominantly in English) ‘appears ahistorical and dislocated from the experiences and scholarship of marginalised and minoritised people who live in both the geopolitical north and south’ (Heugh & Stroud, 2018: 2).
This recent scholarship, Heugh and Stroud argue, not only appropriates, and claims as new, ideas that have been long circulating in the Global South, but also does so from a position that views multilingualism as a ‘singular phenomenon’ rather than embracing the full implications of a ‘plurality of multilingualisms’ (2018: 6-7). Here we confront one of the difficult issues of the uneven push and pull between North and South, as terms are taken up, reworked, reinvested with meaning, rejected, and so on. We know that the Global South is generally highly multilingual, and that this multilingualism is not best described via the language frameworks of the Global North. So what is the best way forward: to see how the idea of translanguaging can fit language use in the Global South, or to look for quite different ways of approaching the topic? Makalela (2018: 4; and this book) talks of ubuntu translanguaging, the view that in the context of complex multilingualism, ‘no language is complete without another’.
We have to ensure that neo-colonial assumptions about language, culture and revitalisation, these ways of categorising and theorising ‘Indigenous languages using norms for major global languages’, or ‘Western constructs of what language
is when engaging in Indigenous language research, teaching, and advocacy’, are put aside, in favour of local control of language reclamation projects (Leonard, 2017: 15). In short, we have to ‘decolonise language
’ (Leonard, 2017: 32). We will not be able to change conditions of linguistic inequality on political grounds alone; it is only by also challenging linguistic paradigms that we can change the operations of language in terms of disparity and discrimination. Once language revitalisation is understood as ‘an act of decolonisation’, (Stebbins et al., 2018: 237), the research process has to be seen in decolonial terms, involving different ways of understanding language and its relation to community and place, different relations between linguists and community members, different knowledge status between academic and community ways of knowing, different ways of writing and exploring voice. In this context, the subtitle of this book – Recentering Silenced Voices from the Global South – is an important reminder of what this is about.
This book is therefore a very welcome and very important addition to our series. Other books in this series – such as Higgins (2009) on English as a local language in east Africa, or Juffermans’ (2015) on literacy practices in the Gambia – shed light on the ways in which language and literacy practices work at a local level in different parts of Africa. But the locus of enunciation of Ndhlovu and Makalela brings different perspectives, different voices, different kinds of knowledge to the table. As a similarly titled book from another Multilingual Matters series (Phipps, 2019) urges us, the challenge to decolonise multilingualism is a significant demand of our times, calling for the learning of non-colonial languages, the citing of scholars from the Global South, rethinking citation and copyright more generally, and a search for other ways of thinking and doing. Another book in this series reminds us that the task of critical applied linguistics is to decolonise language and literacy. The difference between official, standard and access-based approaches to education and grassroots, community, resistant education is that while the first ‘aims to educate people to acquire skills and habits to fit and function in society as it is (unjust, organized in castes, individualistic, market-driven, etc.), the aim of alternative forms of education has always been the decolonization of minds’ (Hernandez-Zamora, 2010: 200). It is towards such a decolonising goal that this book moves, suggesting that Motha’s (2020) challenge as to whether a decolonial applied linguistics is possible may be answered (tentatively) in the affirmative: yes, it’s possible, and this book is a very useful start in what is going to be a long and difficult struggle.
Alastair Pennycook
Ryuko Kubota
Brian Morgan
References
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Ferdinand, M. (2019) Une écologie décolonniale. Paris: Seuil.
Furo, A. (2018) Decolonizing the Classroom Curriculum: Indigenous Knowledges, Colonialism, Logics and Ethical Spaces. Ottawa: University of Ottawa.
García, O. (2019) Decolonizing foreign, second, heritage, and first languages: Implications for education. In D. Macedo (ed.) Decolonizing Foreign Language Education: The Misteaching of English and Other Colonial Languages (pp. 152–168). New York: Routledge.
Hernandez-Zamora, G. (2010) Decolonizing Literacy: Mexican Lives in the Era of Global Capitalism. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Heugh, K. and Stroud, C. (2018) Diversities, affinities and diasporas: A southern lens and methodology for understanding multilingualisms. Current Issues in Language Planning 20 (1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/14664208.2018.1507543.
Higgins, C. (2009) English as a Local Language: Post-colonial Identities and Multilingual Practices. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Juffermans, K. (2015) Local Languaging, Literacy and Multilingualism in a West African Society. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Kroskrity, P. (2021) Language ideological assemblages within linguistic anthropology. In A. Burkette and T. Warhol (eds) Crossing Borders, Making Connections: Interdisciplinarity in Linguistics (pp. 129–142). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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