Decolonising Multilingualism in Africa

Recentering Silenced Voices from the Global South

Finex Ndhlovu, Leketi Makalela

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781788923378
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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.

1 Myths We Live By: Multilingualism, Colonial Inventions

The things we supposedly know so foundationally about the notion of multilingualism and associated metalanguages are not as straightforward as they seem. In her ground-breaking book aptly titled The Myths We Live By, Mary Midgely (2003: 1), says ‘Myths are no lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. They shape its meaning’. Multilingualism is no exception. Mainstream notions of multilingualism and their metadiscourses have to be understood in this light – they are related to the larger global cultural, ideological, and mythic context. Looking at mainstream multilingualism as a product of myths that have crystallised into normative social reality is important. It points us away from over-reliance on parsimonious explanations, and towards critical awareness of the ‘regimes of truth’ about multilingualism discourse. Additionally, such critical awareness opens opportunities for greater engagement with how mainstream ‘regimes of truth’– about language, multilingualism, multilingual education, multilingual national language policies and so on – impinge upon the mundane everyday human condition, including myths we live by.

In recent years, multilingualism has become a buzzword in public, political and scholarly debates and discourses around the world. It has come to represent and to be equated with best practices in numerable social and educational policy areas such as bi-(multi-)lingual education; social inclusion; immigrant social service provision; social and political equality; regional and continental integration; active citizenship participation; and inclusive education. The definitions and practical applications of multilingualism are characterised by a litany of competing and contested interpretations (Liu, 2016). In a 2009 article titled ‘Multilingual Education Policy and Practice: Ten Certainties (Grounded in Indigenous Experience)’, Nancy Hornberger (2009) paints a rosy picture of perceived t;promises of multilingualism in general and multilingual education in particular. She posits that

Our 21st century entrance into the new millennium has brought renewed interest and contestation around [the multilingual] education alternative. Ethnolinguistic diversity and inequality, intercultural communication and contact, and global political and economic interdependence are more than ever acknowledged realities of today’s world. (Hornberger, 2009: 1)

Hornberger (2009: 1) goes on to say that multilingual education ‘offers the best possibilities for preparing coming generations to participate in constructing more just and democratic societies in our globalized and intercultural world’. She characterises multilingual education as constituting a wide and welcoming doorway towards the peaceful coexistence of peoples as well as the restoration and empowerment of communities and societies that have historically been oppressed – by such forces as global coloniality, racial ideologies, class, gender and so on. To this end, Hornberger postulates 10 certainties of multilingualism, which she argues hold the promise for equality and access to educational and socioeconomic opportunities, especially for indigenous and other peripherised communities around the world.

However, though Hornberger’s arguments are insightful and push the envelope of academic discourses and language education policy conversations into previously uncharted territory, two problems beset her project: one phenomenological and the other philosophical. The phenomenological problem has to do with her notion of the ‘lingual’ that undergirds the ‘ten certainties’ of multilingual education advanced in her thesis. Like many other previous scholars who have advanced similar arguments, Hornberger adopts mainstream understandings of multilingualism that view languages more as quantifiable objects and less as relational social practices that are not always amenable to processes and procedures of enumeration. This problem runs across the lines of arguments posited in all ‘ten certainties’ of multilingual education – and applies to her discussion of multilingual education policy and practice in both indigenous and non-indigenous contexts.

The philosophical problem we find in Hornberger’s thesis is one about the concept of ‘certainties’, which arguably betrays the positivist habits and practices of Euro-modernist epistemologies. While there is no doubt that multilingual education policy – however conceived or conceptualised – is a good starting point in tackling the pervasive effects of hegemonic monolingual policy frameworks, pitching it in terms of certainties seems t;quite untenable. How are we able to postulate certainties in a world of diverse peoples, cultures, knowledge systems and ontologies, and ways of reading and interpreting social realities? This conundrum becomes even more complex when considered in the context of indigenous communities where Hornberger’s project is grounded. The language practices and epistemologies of indigenous communities are quite dynamic and excessively complex to fit within reductionist schemas of ‘certainty’ that are informed by the Euro-modernist positivist tradition. In other words, the notion of ‘certainty’ in the domain of knowledge and knowledge production has to be seen in terms of what it is: a historical construct whose emergence is located in the context of ‘the larger history of the expansion of modern, Western reason’ (Peet, 1997: 75).

Writing about the logics of Western reason, Raewyn Connell (2007) draws our attention to four geopolitical assumptions that underpin such discourses. First is the claim to universality whereby the very idea of mainstream social theory (including theories on multilingualism) involves talking about universals and generalisations as if the whole world was a homogeneous continuum. The fallacy of this claim rests on the fatalistic assumption that ‘all societies are knowable in the same way and from the same point of view’ (Connell, 2007: 44). The second contour is that of reading from the centre; that is, the notion of ‘certainty’ constructs a social world read through the eyes of the metropole and not through an analysis of the metropole’s action on the rest of the world. What is overlooked here is the fact that the experiences of the colonised cannot be fully represented in models that arose out of a colonial metropolitan reading of the world.

The third contour of mainstream discourses originating from the Global North is one that Connell (2007) calls ‘gestures of exclusion’. This is about the total absence or marginalisation of theorists from the colonised world/Global South in metropolitan texts and discourses on multilingualism. In those exceptional instances where material culture and ideas from the colonised world are acknowledged, they are rarely considered part of the mainstream dialogue of theory. Riding on the back of colonial ethnography and social anthropological frameworks emphasising the modern/pre-modern distinction, Euro-modernist multilingualism discourses render the cultures and thought processes from the Global South irrelevant and treat them as belonging to a world that has been surpassed. This leads us to the fourth contour, which has been termed ‘grand erasure’. The point here is that when empirical knowledge and theorisation about humanity in general are seen as coming solely from a positivist tradition (with its emphasis on certainty and universality), the immediate effect ‘is erasure of the experience[s] of the majority of humankind from the foundations t;of social thought’ (Connell, 2007: 46). Connell elaborates this line of argument in her more recent publications where she shows how the global metropole (Global North) has monopolised the domain of social scientific theorisation, while the global periphery (Global South) is relegated to the supply of raw data. Ultimately, concepts, methodologies and agendas from the South have remained largely unrecognised, marginalised and absent from mainstream social science theorisations (Connell, 2014, 2018, 2019).

In this book, we extend Connell’s thesis and use it as an entry point in challenging Hornberger’s framing of multilingualism in terms of certainties. Taking after Connell, we suggest that there is no singular universal notion or understanding of multilingualism. Rather, we posit that there are multiple conceptions of multilingualism that intersect with and reflect diverse global ontologies and experiences of living with languages – and these must necessarily include perspectives from the Global South. As Connell (2014: 217) advises, a world-centred, rather than a metropole-centred, approach to knowledge production, is what we need. This entails adopting an epistemological stance that requires rethinking (or unthinking) familiar concepts by posing a new set of questions we address from new perspectives that are yet to be tried and tested.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012: i–xiv) (whom Hornberger cites a couple of times in her project) raises at least four objections to research agendas that proceed through the reification of conventional Euro-modernist paradigms. The first is that we need to develop counter-practices of research that are relevant to the agenda of ‘disrupting the current hegemonic rules of research’. Secondly, she suggests that we need to ‘articulate research practices that arise out of the specificities of epistemology and methodology rooted in people’s cultural experiences’. The third is about how stories of research, examples of projects, critical examination and mindful reflection must be woven together to make meaningful and practical designs. In her fourth objection, Smith (2012: ii) says ‘we need new ways of knowing and discovering, and new ways to think about research in order to demonstrate the possibilities of re-imagining research as an activity that can be pursued outside the narrow box of the scientific experimental design’. This is essentially about integrating praxis, theory, action and reflection in ways that provoke revolutionary thinking about the way we do research. These alternative trajectories suggested by Smith and shared by many other scholars (indigenous and non-indigenous alike1) would be inconceivable if we were to follow the logic of ‘certainty’ in our engagement of multilingualism discourses and multilingual education policies.

In a book aptly titled Uncertainties of Knowledge, Immanuel Wallerstein (2004) says

I believe that we live in a very exciting era in the world of knowledge, precisely because we are living in a systemic crisis that is forcing us to reopen the basic epistemological questions and look to structural reorganizations of the world of knowledge. It is uncertain whether we shall rise adequately to the intellectual challenge, but it is there for us to address. We engage our responsibility as scientists/scholars in the way in which we address the multiple issues before us at this turning point in our structures of knowledge. (Wallerstein, 2004: 58; author’s emphasis)

This is a poignant reminder about the need to be open-minded in our research agendas. That is to say, we need to set aside grand narratives about universal ‘certainties’ in a world where the boundaries of epistemologies are in constant flux. The epistemologies of the South that underpin the overarching argument we advance in this book ‘choose to build bridges between comfort zones and discomfort zones and between the familiar in the fields of struggle and oppression’ (de Sousa Santos & Meneses, 2020: xviii). As Wallerstein reminds us in the above quotation, because the structures of knowledge are uncertain, we have no other choice but to continuously revisit epistemological questions, including ones that seem settled and have now crystallised into some kind of common-sense/traditional orthodox. Multilingualism presents us with some such questions that seem to have been settled and yet remain troubling due t...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• 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