Carol A. Chapelle - The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics

The literature indicates that no Western country utilizes a language for education and other national purposes which is of external origin and the mother tongue of none, or at most few, of its people (Spencer, 1985, p. 390). The Germans, the British, the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the French are all schooled through the medium of their respective national languages: German, English, Portuguese, Spanish, French. Likewise, other European countries, such as Poland, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Austria, to list but these, use their respective languages—Polish, Czech, Dutch, German—in all formal domains, including education. In Africa, however, children receive an education through the medium of an excolonial language such as French, English, Spanish, or Portuguese. Although these languages have been used in Africa for almost 400 years, efforts to promote literacy in and make them accessible to the African masses have failed. As Laitin and Ramachandran (2016) and Djité (2008) point out, more than 80–90% of the population in most African countries do not speak excolonial languages—French, English, Portuguese, Spanish—and this is especially true for the older generations. Along these lines, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO, 2014) states that Africa has the highest illiteracy rates in the world, estimated in 2011 to be 41% and 30% for adults and youth, respectively. The organization notes that, of the 11 countries with the lowest recorded literacy in the world, 10 are in Africa. According to UNESCO (1995, 2003), in 1990 there were 138 million illiterate persons in sub‐Saharan Africa. In a more recent report, the UNESCO Institute of Statistics notes that more than 1 in 3 adults in the African continent cannot read, 182 million adults are unable to read and write, and 48 million youths (ages 15–24) are illiterate (UNESCO, 2013).

Put differently, the social distribution of excolonial languages in Africa remains very limited and restricted to a minority elite group; the majority of Africa's population remains on the fringe, language‐based division has increased, and economic development has not reached the majority (Alexander, 1997, p. 88). Against this background, Prah (1995, p. 67) notes pointedly that most African states constitutionally create space for African languages but hardly attempt to alter what was handed down through the colonial experience. And since excolonial languages are not equally accessible to all, they do not equalize opportunities but rather reproduce inequality. African countries have, for the past 50 years, been grappling with the question of how to remedy this state of affairs and promote the indigenous African languages as the medium of instruction in the educational system. The debate around the medium of instruction is being rekindled by the widening gaps between the elite, who overtly profess the promotion of indigenous languages as medium of instruction while at the same time sending their own offspring to schools where the medium of instruction is a former colonial language, and the masses, who are marginalized because they have no access to excolonial languages. Also, this debate is informed by two competing language ideologies: the ideology of development and the ideology of decolonization.

The ideology of decolonization of education requires that excolonial languages be replaced with the indigenous African languages as media of instruction, whereas the ideology of development requires continual use of excolonial languages in the educational system and other higher institutions of the state. The ideology of development appears to be based on a wanting dichotomy: Socioeconomic development is possible only through the medium of European languages versus indigenous African languages are good only for preserving African cultures and traditions. Scholars who subscribe to the use of an indigenous African language as the medium of instruction maintain that colonial schools deprived African children of their cultural heritage (Ngugi wa Thiong'o, 1983; Alexander, 1997). Also, they point to the cognitive advantages associated with the mother tongue of the learners, as highlighted in UNESCO's (1995) report on the merit of vernacular education. Those who subscribe to the ideology of development view instruction in the language of the former colonial power as an approach that will lead to greater proficiency in that language, representing a further step toward economic development and participation in the international global economy (Mfum‐Mensah, 2005). It is argued that indigenous languages do not have the linguistic complexity to enable them to be used in technical and scientific contexts (Balfour, 1999, p. 107). Linguistic scholarship has, however, shown conclusively that the notion that some languages inhibit intellectual or economic development is a myth. As McArthur (1983, p. 21) explains, “all languages are equally capable of expressing whatever their users need them to express, and have equal potential, although historical events may significantly benefit or impede a particular language.”

In retaining former colonial languages as official languages, language policy makers expected that the adopted European language would develop into a viable medium of national communication, that it would be adopted by the African population, that it would spread as a lingua franca, and perhaps eventually also as a first language by replacing the local languages, as was the case in large parts of Latin America (Weinstein, 1990). However, as the next section explains, those expectations have not as yet been met.

The African Union (AU) is an intergovernmental organization consisting of 53 African states. It was established on July 9, 2002 and became the successor of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). The AU's objectives are to accelerate the political and socioeconomic integration of the continent; to promote and defend African common positions on issues of interest to the continent and its peoples; to achieve peace and security in Africa; and to promote democratic institutions, good governance, and human rights. With respect to language, the constitution of the AU stipulates that the organization recognizes six official languages: Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swahili. In practice, however, the AU uses mostly English and French for the conduct of its business.

This section discusses the AU's efforts to promote the use of the indigenous African languages in the higher domains, with a focus on the educational system. These efforts are made against the failure of excolonial languages to meet the goals for which they were retained when colonialism ended, whether in terms of bringing about national unity, national economic development, or literacy. Instead, it has become increasingly clear that excolonial languages do not equalize opportunities but rather reproduce socioeconomic inequalities. The essentialist sanction of European languages as the only appropriate languages of schooling has marginalized and precluded the development of African vernaculars. As Spencer (1985, p. 395) remarks, the introduction of the colonial languages into African societies, and their use as media of education and as communicative instruments for the modernizing process, froze not only competition between languages for access to new domains, but also the opportunities for functional development of almost all the African languages. It is this state of affairs that the OAU, the precursor to the AU, tried to change by championing the ideology of decolonization of African education, with the specific goal of promoting the use of the indigenous African languages as the medium of instruction in African schools. OAU (1986) articulated the need for the decolonization of education in what the organization called the “Language Plan of Action for Africa,” among whose goals were