Grassroots Literacy

Writing, Identity and Voice in Central Africa

Jan Blommaert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134092437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

What effect has globalization had on our understanding of literacy? Grassroots Literacy seeks to address the relationship between globalization and the widening gap between 'grassroots' literacies, or writings from ordinary people and local communities, and 'elite' literacies.

Displaced from their original context to elite literacy environments in the form of letters, police declarations and pieces of creative writing, 'grassroots' literacies are unsurprisingly easily disqualified, either as 'bad' forms of literacy, or as messages that fail to be understood. Through close analysis of two unique, handwritten documents from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Jan Blommaert considers how 'grassroots' literacy in the Third World develops outside the literacy-saturated environments of the developed world. In examining these documents produced by socially and economically marginalized writers Blommaert demonstrates how literacy environments should be understood as relatively autonomous systems.

Grassroots Literacy will be key reading for students of language and literacy studies as well as an invaluable resource for anyone with an interest in understanding the implications of globalization on local literacy practices.

Part I
GRASSROOTS LITERACY

1
INTRODUCTION

Grassroots literacy and literacy regimes

Yes I can write

This text was written by a woman from the Congo, who was arrested by the Belgian police on grounds of shoplifting. The text was written on official police stationery. In the Belgian legal system, everyone has the right to go on record with his/her own account. That means: one would be asked whether one ‘can write’, and if so, one would be invited to write one’s own account of the events. This document, then, becomes a legally consequential element in the criminal prosecution case: it is ‘the story of the accused’ and both the defence lawyer and the prosecution will refer to it as such. Observe that under Belgian law, suspects have the right to write in a language of their choice. In this case, the woman obviously confirmed that she ‘could write’, and she chose to write in Lingala, the lingua franca of Kinshasa and of the Congolese diaspora.

The phrase ‘can write’, however, is deceptively simple. In a country such as the Congo, literacy skills are generally rare and access to advanced and sophisticated forms of literacy is severely restricted. That means: while Congolese say they ‘can write’ when they are able to perform basic writing skills, that description would not cover the production of a long, nuanced and detailed written narrative in a standard, normative language variety and a standard orthography. Let us have a closer look at what and how the woman wrote. Here is a transcript of the text, followed by a translation. In the transcript I will try to preserve the graphic features of the original:

BaKANGI NGAI NAYIBI, eZALI YALOKUTA
baKANGI NGAI na bilamba minei
4 Pantalon na yebi

moSuSu
oyo baZALAKI na

te
They caught me (because) I had stolen, that is a lie
They caught me with four pieces of clothing
4 pantalons I don’t know the other people
who were with me in the magasin

This text, I should emphasise, enters an institutional space of literacy, a rather strict and punitive one. And if we take this strict and punitive viewpoint, the woman — even if her writing was procedurally prefaced by a clear affirmation that she ‘could write’ — obviously struggles with several very basic literacy requirements. There is orthographic instability articulated through the alteration of upper case and lower case; punctuation is erratic, and several corrections betray a struggle with the grammatical and narrative norms she knows are at play here. She also switches to French — ‘pantalons’, ‘magasin’ — and so offers us a glimpse of the vernacular everyday (but ‘non-standard’) Lingala she speaks. And finally, she manifestly fails to produce a narrative that can stand as her ‘account of the events’. There is no sequential development of actions, no plot nor storyline, no argued conclusion. The woman has written something, but in the legal procedure this something will not be of much use to her. Her writing has failed to produce voice in the specific communicative environment in which it was produced, and writing here silences her voice. The simple question ‘can you write?’ seems to be one that does not withstand the test of globalisation. Answers to it refer to practices and skills that belong to local, and very divergent, economies of literacy. Institutional regimes that emphasise uniformity in communication practices will exclude, marginalise and silence people whose repertoires do not match the normative expectations. Globalisation is likely to intensify this form of exclusion, because the super-diversity it spawns precludes any presupposability of linguistic or literacy resources among growing numbers of people. Processes and phenomena such as those are the topic of this book.

Writing

What we, in everyday parlance, call ‘writing’ is a very complex set of semiotic practices that involve the visualisation and materialisation of ideas and concepts, their archivability and transferability across time and space. Any consideration of writing, consequently, is forced to address material aspects as well as ideational ones, and both categories of aspects are of course in turn lodged in social, cultural, historical, economic and political contexts. The complexity that is hidden by the simple word ‘writing’ is tremendous, and many studies of writing have been plagued by the legacies of this suggestive simplicity, assuming a degree of homogeneity in the practices of writing, and their products and functions, which can no longer be sustained. As Hymes (1996: 35) observed, '[w]riting is usually seen as a record of something already existing’. Writing is an ethnographic object par excellence, something which, because of its sheer complexity and context-dependence, can only be fully understood when an analytical tactic is used that focuses on the object in relation to its contexts and relinquishes a priori claims about what this object would or should mean to the people who use it. For underneath every examination of writing — or literacy more generally — there is the question: what counts as writing for people who write and read? What is the meaning of writing practices for those who deploy them as well as for those among whom the products of writing — ‘texts’ or ‘documents’ — circulate?

The question can be reformulated sociolinguistically as: what is the particular place of writing in the sociolinguistic repertoire of people (Hymes 1996: 36)? And right from the start we can state that the answer to this is by no means easy or predictable. A repertoire comprises communicative resources as well as knowledge about their function and their conditions of use, and all of this is a very concrete matter. It is not enough to say that ‘literacy’ is part of someone’s repertoire: it matters which particular literacy resources are there. It is evident that there is a difference between someone who is able to write with pen and paper and someone who in addition to that skill also writes on a keyboard; between someone who is able to read short and simple texts in one language variety and someone who is a competent reader of multiple genres in multiple languages and language varieties. Thinking about repertoires forces us to abandon totalising notions in the field of language and communication, and to replace them with terms that identify actual, specific practices. The range of factors we need to consider in analysing literacy, consequently, is expanded and now includes social, cultural, historical and political factors.

The distinctions made above do not usually occur by accident: they can be systemic, be part of the general structure of societies and characterise societies in distinction from others. Thus, keyboard writing on a computer and access to the kind of reading environment created by broadband internet are more or less widely distributed in a small number of societies while being extraordinarily rare in most other societies. Where such ‘computer literacy’ occurs, it quickly occupies a status position in the repertoires of its users as a ‘higher’ and more sophisticated form of literacy; it starts dominating certain genres of writing and transforms them — think of email as the new form of ‘correspondence’. Becoming educated and getting access to middle-class jobs then depends on being competent in these particular forms of literacy, and while keyboard writing was until recently a highly specialised professional skill (I wrote my very first article with pen and paper and had it typed by an obstinate departmental typist), it is now a skill that defines a large middle-class educated cohort in societies such as mine. To be computer illiterate these days equals being illiterate tout court. As soon as I leave my society, however, or even as soon as I leave my middle-class environment, I find myself in a world where keyboard writing is all but absent, and where people pride themselves on being able to produce handwritten texts in a more or less stable orthography and language variety. We see differently organised repertoires there, and the repertoires reflect wider societal divisions and inequalities. Thinking about repertoires thus not only compels us to focus on actual practices, but it also compels us to set these practices in a field of power and inequality. Repertoires are internally and externally stratified, with all kinds of internal distinctions marking differences between ‘better’ and ‘worse’ resources, and external distinctions defining the resources from one repertoire as ‘superior’ or ‘inferior’ to those of others (Hymes 1996; Blommaert 2005a). Literacy is organised in literacy regimes, in structures of distribution, access, value and use that are closely tied to the general make-up of societies.

Most of what I have said so far is fairly common and hardly controversial sociolinguistic knowledge. The fact that literacy practices need to be seen and understood as contextualised, socially and culturally (ultra-)sensitive is the cornerstone of the New Literacy Studies and I do not feel I can add much to the arguments developed in some outstanding work within that paradigm (e.g. Gee 1990; Barton 1994; Graddol, Maybin & Stierer, eds. 1994; Baynham 1995; Besnier 1995; Collins 1995; Street 1995; Prinsloo & Breier, eds. 1996; Barton & Hamilton 1998; Collins & Blot 2003). The matter gains complexity as soon as we move these issues into the field of globalisation, when literacy products — texts and documents — move from one society into another in an everintensifying flow. What is correct in one society becomes an error in another society; what is perfectly appropriate writing in one place becomes a meaningless sign system in another. Texts may travel easily, but the system of use, value and function in which they were produced usually does not travel with them. Globalisation imposes a new grid on our analysis: we are now facing the task of designing an ethnography, not of locality but of transfer, of mobility — not of product but of process, and not in one ‘ecologically’ described community but across communities. These are poorly charted waters, and that is where I let my story begin.

This book is an attempt towards an ethnographic understanding of grassroots literacy in an age of globalisation. It will examine documents from the ‘periphery’: two sets of handwritten texts written by people from the southern province of Katanga in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Both documents are exceptional with respect to their formal features — their length, for instance, and their genre characteristics — as well as with respect to the communicative framework in which they came into being: both are written for a specific purpose and for a ‘Western’ readership. Both, thus, are instances of grassroots literacy written for globalisation, with the explicit purpose of being read by people from outside the community of their composers. The two sets of documents are exceptionally large and complex bodies of grassroots literacy, and it is precisely their exceptional nature and scope that offers us opportunities for generalisation and extrapolation, as I hope to demonstrate in the chapters of this book.

The particular histories of these texts as well as of how they became my data will be told later on in the book. Now, I must introduce some of the basic theoretical considerations that will underlie this study: I must unpick and unpack what I mean by ‘an ethnographic understanding of grassroots literacy in an age of globalisation’.

Grassroots literacy

Grassroots literacy is a label I use for a wide variety of ‘non-elite’ forms of writing (and the elite forms will be flagged by means of the hyphenated ‘ortho-graphy’ ‘writing right’ — in this book). It is writing performed by people who are not fully inserted into elite economies of information, language and literacy. The term can only be defined in a loosely descriptive way here; the analysis further in the book should add detail and clarity. In the materials I examine, grassroots literacy can be identified by:

1. Hetero-graphy. The deployment of graphic symbols in ways that defy orthographic norms. This is manifest in (i) spelling difficulties — words are spelled in different ways, and very often reflect ‘accent’, the way in which they are pronounced in spoken vernacular varieties. (ii) It is also manifest in erratic punctuation and the use of upper and lower case without clear rules apparently guiding their usage. (iii) The texts very often look like ‘drafts’: there are corrections and additions, often revealing uncertainty about linguistic and stylistic rules. (iv) At the same time, and apparently paradoxically, we also often see a clear dimension of visual aestheticisation of documents: texts would be ‘drawn’, so to speak, and they would often contain sketches, drawings and other visual means of structuring and representing information. Grassroots writing often looks like calligraphic writing.
2. Vernacular language varieties being used in writing. The ‘code’ in which documents are written often betrays absence of access to ‘Standard’ normative (and thus prestige) language varieties. People write in local, so-called ‘substandard’ varieties of language, they use code-switching, colloquialisms and other ‘impurities’ in their written texts.
3. Distant genres. People write in genres to which they have only been marginally exposed and for whose full realisation they often lack the required resources. The genres often evoke (and suggest) distant sources for the texts: texts are ‘assembled’ out of the available and accessible materials in attempts to construct such perceived genres.
4. Partial insertion in knowledge economies. People often construct texts on the basis of locally available knowledge resources: the things they can find out by asking or listening rather than by searching in literate corpuses.
   
   These four characteristics combined lead to a fifth one:
   
   
5. Constrained mobility. Texts are often only locally meaningful and valuable. As soon as they move to other geographical and/or social spaces, they lose ‘voice’. This is a derived feature of grassroots literacy, and it bears on the ways in which in times of globalisation, grassroots literacy products and resources move around.

A description of texts these days must therefore necessarily have two sides: one, a description of the local economies in which they are produced, and two, analyses of what happens to them when they become translocal documents. The two corpuses of text I shall examine in the main body of this book have been moved around, they have travelled, and part of the analysis will address their problematic uptake elsewhere. They have been produced in a local literacy regime and then projected into translocal trajectories, but their reception was, in both cases, problematic.

I came across the term ‘grassroots literacy’ in Fabian’s History from Below (Fabian 1990a). This remarkable book discusses a printed booklet from Lubumbashi, called the Vocabulaire de Ville de Elisabethville. The text is a local (or regional) history of the city, written by a former houseboy called André Yav. It is 33 pages long, typewritten and reprographed, with illustrations and other embellishments that make the document visually appealing. Fabian presents a facsimile edition, a’re-oralised’ transcript, a translation, and linguistic (by Walter Schicho, Schicho 1990) and anthropological notes. In the preface to this book, Fabian writes:

The Vocabulaire is a document of grass-roots literacy; it remains rooted in orality. Texts of this sort, as we shall see, cannot be read (understood, translated) by outsiders except ‘ethnographically’, by way of ‘performing’ the written script according to the rules that govern oral communication in this culture.

(Fabian 1990a: 2)

It is this connection of a written document with an oral substrate culture that motivates Fabian’s ‘re-oralisation’ procedure. In a later paper reflecting on the work on the Vocabulaire, Fabian returns to the issue of grassroots literacy, and I quote him at length (Fabian 1993: 90):

Apart from its extraordinary content, it was its literacy, or more specifically, its graphic form that made the Vocabulaire such a challenge. I referred to it as an instance of ‘grass-roots literacy’, that is, of the appropriation of a technique of writing by speakers of Shaba Swahili which was relatively free from the ideological and technical constraints that characterized literacy taught to the same speakers in other languages (French, some regional languages, and a variety of Swahili spoken by no one but considered fit for literacy). From the results […] we can infer that it is a literacy which works despite an amazingly high degree of indeterminacy and freedom (visible in an erratic orthography, a great disdain for ‘correct’ word and sentence boundaries and many other instances of seemingly unmotivated variation).

This concern for ‘graphic form’ was central to Fabian’s analysis of the Vocabulaire, and he formulates it as a thesis: ‘much of what the document tells us about colonial history and experience is inscribed in how it was conceived, composed, presented and diffused’ (Fabian 1990a: 164) because ‘we want to read the features of a text, a static record, as evidence for process. Patterns we detect can then be made to tell the story of events in the work of producing this document’ (204).

Later in this book, I will discuss the epistemological and methodological issues involved in this view. In a nutshell and roughly put, documents such as the Vocabulaire and the texts I will examine here are so packed with features that defy our expectations of full literacy that we stop reading them and treat them as things that require reconstruction. Fabian’s re-oralisation procedure is one tactic for reconstructing the document; seeing the document as primarily visual and material is another. In both cases, however, we will have to be careful not to invite abstract distinctions between ‘form’ and ‘content’; we must be aware that, in the end, we are always looking at something material and visual (let us not forget that our own texts are material and visual objects), and that we always face an object that intentionally conveys meaning.

Fabian’s description of the literacy variety in the Vocabulaire was, as I said, my first encounter with the term ‘grassroots literacy’, as well as an introduction to a particular way of analysing documents. We shall see that I will have to take my analysis in different directions than Fabian’s. One reason is that I am not comfortable with the connection between a literate document and an ‘oral culture’ sketched here. Naturally this connection is based upon a distinction between a dominant orality and a peripheral literacy, in which only a hierarchical and unidirectional influence can occur: from orality into literacy. This, to my taste, smacks a bit too much of Great Divide images of orality and literacy, and it presupposes the primarily ‘oral’ character of the local culture (see Street 1995 for an elaborate discussion). In the data I shall discuss, I’m afraid things are rather more complex and nuanced. I have not felt any need to use the notion of an ‘oral culture’ as an element of explanation and I will not be forced to make statements about African cultures a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures
• Preface
• PART I Grassroots literacy
• PART II The lives of Julien
• PART III Tshibumba the historian
• PART IV Julien, Tshibumba, and beyond
• Notes
• References