Carol A. Chapelle - The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics

to liberate the African peoples from undue reliance on utilization of nonindigenous languages as dominant, official languages of the state in favor of the gradual takeover of appropriate and carefully selected indigenous languages in this domain;

to ensure that African languages by appropriate legal provision and practical promotions assume their rightful role as the means of official communication in public affairs of each member state in replacement of European languages which have hitherto played this role. (OAU, 1986)

Recent recommendations to promote African languages in education and other higher domains appear in the Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literatures of January 2000, which reads as follows:

1 All African children have the unalienable right to attend school and learn their mother tongues at all levels of education.

2 The effective and rapid development of science and technology in Africa depends on the use of African languages.

3 African languages are vital for the development of democracy based on equality and social justice.

4 African languages are essential for the decolonization of African minds and for the African Renaissance. (Cultural Survival, 2001)

Subsequent efforts to promote the indigenous languages in the higher domains have resulted in the creation of the African Academy of Languages (ACALAN). This is a Pan‐African organization founded in 2001 by Mali's then president Alpha Oumar Konaré, under the auspices of the OAU (now the AU), to promote the usage and perpetuation of African languages among African people and to serve as a specialized scientific institution of the AU. Bamgbose (2006) highlights the goals of ACALAN as follows:

1 To foster the development of all African languages and empower some of the more dominant vehicular languages in Africa to the extent that they can serve as working languages in the African Union and its institutions.

2 To increase the use of African languages in a variety of domains so that the languages become empowered and revalorized.

3 To promote the adoption of African languages as languages of learning and teaching in the formal and nonformal school system.

4 To promote the use of African languages for information dissemination and for political participation to ensure grassroots involvement in the political process and demystification of the elite.

Unlike previous language policies, the AU's policies do not call for African languages to replace excolonial languages in education or other domains. Rather, it is expected that excolonial languages will assume a new role as partners to African languages, but not in an unequal relationship, as is currently the case. To aid in the efforts to achieve its goals, in 2014 ACALAN, the official language agency of the AU, launched Kuwala , an international multilingual peer‐refereed journal. Kuwala means “light” in Chichewa, a vehicular cross‐border Bantu language spoken in Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia. It is intended to be a forum where African scholars in Africa and in the diaspora share experiences on language policies in Africa and investigate the factors impeding their implementation. The first issue of Kuwala appeared in January 2014 and comprises 11 articles, all of them written in English. It remains to be seen whether subsequent issues of the journal will carry articles written in the official African language, Swahili, or in any of the other official languages of the AU—French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Arabic.

In sum, the policy statements presented previously, namely, the Language Plan of Action for Africa, the Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literatures, the African Academy of Languages, and related subsequent policies, such as the African Cultural Renaissance Charter and the Statutes of the African Academy of Languages have one goal in common: They all require every member state of the Union to take urgent measures to ensure that local African languages are used as the medium of instruction in education and ultimately as languages of administration along with excolonial languages, which henceforth become “partnership languages” to African languages in the enterprise of national development. One notes, however, that not all of these policy statements are matched with practical steps to use the indigenous languages in education. The failure to promote the indigenous languages in education has its roots mainly in the negative attitudes that the policy makers themselves have toward the indigenous languages.

Generally, the attitude of the member states of the AU and the African masses toward the use of the indigenous languages in higher domains such as education and the government and administration is negative. This stems from not only the members' deep‐seated perceptions about the status of the indigenous languages vis‐à‐vis excolonial languages in society, but also the policies that govern language use in the higher domains, for they favor excolonial languages over the indigenous languages (Mfum‐Mensah, 2005). To ensure that the indigenous languages do not compete with excolonial languages, policy makers formulate language policies that are either ambiguous or that embed escape clauses.

The language clause in the constitution of the AU itself is a case in point. According to the Constitutive Act of the AU, the working languages (now renamed official languages) of the Union are “ if possible , African languages, Arabic, English, French and Portuguese” [italics added]. Swahili and Spanish have since been added to the list of the Union's official languages. Note the escape phrase, “ if possible .” It indicates that, although the AU calls on its member states to promote African languages in the higher domains, the AU itself does not seem to be bound to use these languages in the conduct of its own business. The response of the member states to the AU's call is all too predictable. Consider, for instance, the constitution of countries such as Nigeria and South Africa, as presented in the extracts that follow. In both cases, escape clauses are marked by the use of modal auxiliary verbs such as may or must , along with complementizers such as when , where , and if . Accordingly, in Nigeria, parliamentary debates are usually conducted through the medium of English, while in South Africa they are conducted mostly in English or occasionally in Afrikaans because the Constitution does not specify which 2 of the country's 11 official languages should be used in which province or by the national government.

Language clauses in the Nigerian Constitution read:

The business of the National Assembly shall be conducted in English, Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba when adequate arrangements have been made thereof (The Constitution, Section 55).

The business of the House of Assembly shall be conducted in English but the House may in addition to English conduct the business of the House of Assembly in one or more languages in the state as the House may by resolution approve (The Constitution, Section 97). [italics added] (Bamgbose, 2001, p. 193)

Language clauses in the South African Constitution read:

The national government and provincial governments may use any particular official languages for the purposes of government, taking into account usage, practicality, expense, regional circumstances and the balance of the needs and preferences of the population as a whole or in the province concerned; but the national government and each provincial government must use at least two official languages . [italics added] (Republic of South Africa, 1996)

In some cases, African countries have adopted overt language policies that constitutionally ban the use of indigenous languages in public domains. In Malawi, Kenya, Sierra Leone, and Uganda, for instance, competence in English rather than in an African language is a requisite for election to public office. In the case of Uganda, it is reported that children must be competent in English to qualify for admission into the nursery schools. In this regard, Kwesiga (1994, p. 58) remarks sarcastically that “African mothers who have knowledge of English start teaching their children this language before they are born.”