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Language and Literacy inAfrican ContextsKate Parry a ba Hunter College , City University of NewYorkb Fulbright Scholar , Makerere University ,Kampala, UgandaPublished online: 31 May 2008.

To cite this article: Kate Parry (1999) Language and Literacy in AfricanContexts, Language Matters: Studies in the Languages of Africa, 30:1,113-130, DOI: 10.1080/10228199908566148

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Language and Literacy in African Contexts

Kate Parry Hunter College, City University of New York

Fulbright Scholar, Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda

ABSTRACT

Most African countries are notoriously multilingual: they also have notoriously high rates of illiteracy. These two issues and the relationship between them will be examined with particular reference to two widely different African contexts: a remote region of northern Nigeria, and a rural but central area of Uganda. It will be argued that if socially constructive literacy practices are to be developed in such contexts, multilingualism must not only be lived with but should also be embraced. Practical suggestions will be made as to what linguists can do to help in the process.

INTRODUCTION

Africa is a huge and diverse continent, and one must always be careful of making general statements about it. Yet there are certain key issues that manifest themselves in various forms in different parts of Africa. In this paper I shall try to identify some such issues in the areas of language and literacy, and I shall describe them with respect to two particular and widely distant African contexts. Northeastern Nigeria, where I worked from 1976 to 1984, and central Uganda, where I have worked from 1997 to the present. These two contexts cannot be taken as representative of the entire continent, but they are at least far apart and significantly different from one another: Nigeria a large country, Uganda a small one; Nigeria, at that time, relatively prosperous, Uganda, now, only beginning to recover from the depredations of

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dictatorship and civil war; Nigeria dominated, in the north, by a strong Islamic culture, Uganda, by a well established Christian one.

Moreover, my own position in the two contexts has been quite different. In Nigeria, I was working as a secondary level teacher and teacher trainer in various posts in the northeast. Most of the work referred to here was done at a Catholic mission school in Yola, which is a state capital, but at the time was a small town and notoriously remote from the perspective of anyone who did not live there. My students came from town and villages that were more remote still, being members of small minority groups that has escaped the attention of the Muslim Fulani empire builders a hundred years earlier and so were open to mission work. In Uganda, by contrast, I have been based at the country's major university, which is located in the national capital, in the most developed and until recently the most prosperous part of Uganda I have also spent a good deal of time in Masaka District, some eighty miles to the southwest of Kampala, where I have been working with students in a rural secondary school. This district is still in the central region and, like Kampala, is part of the traditional kingdom of Buganda; the district prospered under colonial rule, but it has fallen on hard times now, and the school where I am working is desperately poor.

Different as these two contexts are, there are many points of comparison, and, indeed, points in common, between them, and it is those points that I shall emphasize here. My reasoning is that what is true of both these contexts is likely to be true elsewhere, if not everywhere, in Africa. By considering the same or similar problems in such different environments, I hope to be able to establish their parameters and indicate what might be considered, true of the continent as a whole and to suggest how different parts of Africa learn from one another.

COMMONALITIES ACROSS THE AFRICAN CONTINENT

One general point that can be made quite safely is that sub-Saharan Africa is notoriously multilingual; and multilingualism is a dominant fact of life in both Uganda and Nigeria. Uganda includes four major language groups, which themselves include, according to Ladefoged

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and colleagues (1971:31) different languages and other estimates put the number at forty or even fifty. In Nigeria the diversity is even greater: the most authoritative count (Hansford, Bendor Samuel & Stanford 1976) puts the total number of languages at 395. This could be an overcount, but even the much lower number that is reported in newspapers 250 (Noble 1991) is quite enough to complicate the nation's life.

To appreciate what such diversity may mean in personal terms, consider the group of students with whom I did my research in Nigeria (Parry 1986). There were twenty boys in the group, who had twelve first languages between them, and 24 languages altogether. Similarly, though not so dramatically, a group of fifteen that I was teaching at Makerere included native speakers of at least seven different languages.

The sociolinguistic relationship among all these languages are extremely complex and of course vary from one situation to another. It is useful, however, to think in terms of a general model. The one shown in Figure 1 is derived chiefly from what I observed in Nigeria, but it is helpful for thinking about Uganda as well; so perhaps it is not too gross a simplification.

Figure 1: Sociolinguistic relationships in multilingual African contexts

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The twelve different first languages spoken by my students in Nigeria are represented here by small circles. The preferred term for such languages in both Nigeria and Uganda, is "mother tongues", and they are indeed mother tongues in two senses: first, they are the languages that students like mine speak with their mothers and with other elders of their own families and local communities; second, they are the languages with the strongest emotional hold over them, representing home and ancestry.

The larger circles on the model with still larger semi-circles drawn halfway round them represent languages that are mother tongues too, to larger groups of people, and that are also spoken as a second language by people of many other groups. Hausa, in Northern Nigeria, is such a language; Luganda, in Uganda, is another. The model shows several such languages because although they function as linguae francae (and that is what I shall call them) they often do not extend over a whole country. At least, that is the case in both Nigeria and Uganda. Hausa is spoken through nearly all of northern Nigeria, but not so in the south; the lingua franca of the southwest is Yoruba, while that of the southeast is Igbo, and pidgin English is also used widely in both west and east. In Uganda, Luganda is used as a lingua franca right across the south and especially in the southeast, but it is not used at all in the north, where the lingua franca is Kiswahili. Kiswahili is represented on the model by a semicircle with not complete circle within it because, in Uganda, it has no indigenous community of native speakers; Nigerian pidgin could be represented in the same way, although the language is becoming increasingly creolized (Mafeni 1971).

Finally, the large arc at the top of the model represents what I will call a supralanguage. In both Uganda and Nigeria, that language is English, or, as Spencer (1971) has termed it, "establishment English". I have called English a supralanguage in these contexts for two reasons: first, it was imposed from above, as it were, with the imposition of colonial rule, and second, it now represents the top echelons of society, being spoken by an educated and relatively

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wealthy elite. The numbers who speak it are relatively small, and it is a first language to very few people indeed.

Again, let us think how these relationships among languages work out in individual lives. Among my twenty Nigerian students, everyone knows at least three languages - his mother tongue, Hausa, and English and would switch between these languages according to who he was talking with and what he was talking about. In the school context the mother tongues did not get spoken much: while the students used English for their studies and with their teachers, they used Hausa for casual conversation among themselves. Indeed, if two whom shared a mother tongue did use it, they would be accused of "abusing" anyone else who was present. When I climbed up into the Mandara Mountains with one of the students to visit his village, I was struck by the fact that even there, where everyone could speak Higgi, this boy still used Hausa with his age mates and Higgi only with the elders. With me he invariably used English, although he knew that I spoke Hausa quite well. Another of these students, also a Higgi speaker, belonged to a family that had moved down into the plain, into a village that was also inhabited by Margi speakers. Accordingly, this student spoke both Higgi and Margi, in addition to Hausa. Another, who came from the same village, did not speak Margi, but he used Hausa much more, because his father had recently died and the boy had moved into the nearby town to live with his mother. In spite of their Higgi background, this brother's household spoke Hausa all the time, so Hausa as a second language was becoming the first language of the children.

In Uganda, I have encountered a different social group, and the part of the country that I am in is at a different stage of educational development. Here the most striking feature is the extent to which English is used in the professional classes. One of my students documented her two year old niece's use of languages. Both Luganda and English are used in the home, and the child generally responds in the language she is addressed in; when she initiates a conversation, however, she usually uses English. Most words that she knows in Luganda she knows in English as well, and vice versa, but she does

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code switch from time to time. My student records a rather charming conversation between this child, Ruth, and her cousin, Hamza. The children were drinking soft drinks and comparing their speed, so Ruth said to her aunt (my student):

"You see Aunty Mona, mine is full". Hamza then claimed, "Ruth, I'm winning you!" "Olimba," said Ruth, in Luganda "you're lying"; then she went on, "I'm going to kiss you. Give me your maaso (face), give me your nose"

(Kasumba 1999:5)

Another student, whose husband is a lecturer at Makerere, recorded that her children usually speak Rutooro in the home, but English outside. In particular, they use English at school, partly because it is required by the teachers, but more importantly, because the children come from different language backgrounds. As my student's seven year old son said, "I like speaking English because my friends can understand me" (Agaba 1999:4).

This child apparently sees no problem in using English, but plenty of older people do. It still has what my friend Rhoda Nsibambi (in press) calls "colonial stigma" and to use it in preference to an African language can be interpreted as a denial of African identity. In Nigeria, such feelings go back a long time. In 1882, some twenty years after the British had occupied Lagos, the administration introduced an Education Ordinance which stated, among other things, English should be used for reading and writing in elementary schools. The editors of the Lagos Times wrote an angry response:

Is the ulterior motive behind the Education bill to promote the conquest of Africa by England morally through the English language and secure that morally which African fevers prevent it acquiring physically? We are Africans and have no other wish than to be Africans, and in Lagos Yoruba Africans .... Lagos would not sit tamely to witness the murder, death and burial of one of those important distinguishing national and racial marks that God has given us.

(Cited in Omolewa 1978:90)

A hundred years later, I found similar sentiments expressed in the new Nigerian :

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While the English as a race have a common origin and objectives which justify their continued use of the English language, apart from the slave and master relationship of the past, there is nothing in common between us and the English race that would justify our retaining English as a lingua franca.

In addition, we have our own languages. The damages the English language is doing to our cultures are so obvious. Suffice to say it costs us more to educate ourselves in English than in our native languages.

(January 23, 1984; cited in Parry 1992:63)

Hostility to English is not generally articulated so clearly in Uganda, but there was and is a strong feeling that it should not be designated a "national language, even though it is accepted as the "official" one (Nsibambi, in press). The sense that it is an elite language and therefore socially divisive was also expressed to two of my students when they were doing research in a local market. One of their informants, speaking in Luganda, said:

Because our elders here don't use English, we cannot use it with them, unless when our fellow friends with whom we are in the same level come, that is when we speak English. But we cannot fit in the group when we use English since the best believe that English is meant for those who have gone to school and work in offices.

(Lubega & Munaba 1999:7)

There is, however, a deep ambivalence about English. Although the sentiments illustrated above are widespread, everyone still want to learn it - precisely because it is associated with higher social status, and also with an external and more powerful and prosperous world (Nsibambi, in press). Moreover, there is a practical problem: if the supralanguage is rejected, there is often no alternative that is acceptable, or even comprehensible, to all ethnic groups in the nation. In laying out its language policy in the late 1970s Nigeria designated all the "big three" Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo as national languages, because to opt for only one of them would have been both impractical and politically unthinkable (Parry 1992). In an attempt to build relationships across the language boundaries, the government decreed that children should learn one of these languages, in addition to whichever one they spoke already, in school, but this ruling may never

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have been put into effect, it certainly has not by the time I left Nigeria, and Josef Schmied describes it only as, "plans" (1991:86). In Uganda, governments have for years, according to Kasozi (in press), looked wistfully at their neighbours, Kenya and Tanzania, where Kiswahili is well established in Kenya as a lingua franca that is used throughout the country, and in Tanzania as the national and official language as well (see Whiteley 1969). The present Ugandan government has, indeed, expressed a strong determination to develop Kiswahili for national use on the grounds that "The potential for Kiswahili to promote the badly desired national unity is far greater than that of any other Ugandan languages (Uganda Government 1992:18). But there are enormous difficulties to be overcome. Kiswahili has few native speakers in Uganda, and even the government admits that only some 35% of the population speak it as a second language (1992:18). Worse still, the largest ethnic group, the Baganda, who comprise about 30% of the population, steadfastly resist Kiswahili, saying that it is the language of thieves and of the brutal military regimes of the recent past.

Such attitudes are based largely on prejudice, but African linguae francae, in some cases even more than the supralanguage, do constitute a threat to other indigenous languages. I have also mentioned the household I visited in Nigeria where Hausa has taken over from Higgi. Similarly, Conrad Brann (1977) has recorded a rapid expansion of Hausa, at the expense of Fulani, in Maiduguri. In eastern Uganda Luganda itself, in its function as a lingua franca, dominates over Lugisu and Lusoga; and people from Masaka District say that the Luganda spoken there has vestiges of a previously distinct but long since absorbed language.

In the contexts considered here, any threat to the mother tongues, whether perceived or real, is significant, for people are deeply attached to their languages. As one of the contributors at a recent conference in Uganda put it: "People derive a sense of identity and belonging, first, from the language that brings them together and, second, from their culture ... If language and culture are not passed on, then the people concerned have no tradition and thus no basis for their own

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behaviour" (Kwikiriza in press). Divided as African nations may be among languages, everyone is united in this sentiment, and the governments that I have worked under all acknowledge the fact. So, in the Ugandan case, for example, the statements on Kiswahili are accompanied by ones affirming the intention of promoting the mother tongues as well.

But politicians may talk as much as they like; what they say may make little practical difference, since it is impossible, out side the most formal environments, to legislate what people will speak. Governments and other organisations can, however, influence what is available for people to read, and this is where the question of literacy comes in. Literacy, as Cooper (1989) has pointed out, is one of the most powerful means of linguistic and hence social engineering.

In Uganda literacy is talked about a good deal, not as a means of manipulating language choice or of regulating relationships among ethnic groups, but as a desideratum in itself. A recent Government White Paper on Education (1992) echoes the received wisdom of the international community in saying that illiteracy must be "eradicated"; it is associated with "mass poverty, poor sanitation and health facilities, ... poor housing, lack of good water, bad roads (and) diseases" while literacy, on the other hand, is expected to lead to "the intellectualization of all the people" (pp. 15, 16). There are, of course, enormous problems with such assumptions, as Brian Street (1984, 1995) has made clear; and important work here in South Africa has corroborated Street's argument (Prinsloo & Breier 1996). But, rather than go into that debate at this point, I would like to focus on how the problems of literacy interact with those of multilingualism, referring primarily to the Ugandan context and making secondary reference to the Nigerian one.

INTERACTION BETWEEN LITERARY AND MULTILINGUALISM

Uganda's "literacy policy" (Parry in press) is to teach reading and writing in the mother tongue wherever possible. That means, in practical terms, in rural primary schools and in adult basic education

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classes, since in urban schools and even some rural ones the population is too mixed; in the urban schools, therefore, English is to be the language of instruction, while in mixed rural areas teachers will go for whichever local language is dominant (Sanyu in press). There is clearly a problem of equity here someone, in each of these situations, is sure to be disadvantaged.

Still greater difficulties are encountered when it comes to producing the materials for teaching literacy. May Ugandan languages, even ones like Lusoga, that are spoken by large numbers of people, have no standard orthography (although Lusoga is moving towards it since its first tranlsation of the Bible has just been launched). In beginning the process of developing vernacular teaching materials, educational reformers have had to focus on those languages that already have a written tradition, namely a set of five that are now spoken of as "area languages". These area languages correspond to those designated by the colonial government more than half a century ago as languages of elementary education (Kasozi in press; Byakutaga & Musinguzi in press) and the colonial government's choice, in turn, was based on decisions made by Protestant missionaries on which languages to translate the Bible into. Even in these area languages, producing elementary materials is proving inordinately difficult. People with the linguistic expertise can be found, but these people know next to nothing about how to break down information so as to make it accessible to children. Again, the languages have proved to be much more diverse than the policy assumes, so that materials writers have to make hard choices between one variety, with all its local associations, and another (Keshubi in press; Byakutaga & Musinguzi in press).

Training teachers to teach in the mother tongues is another major problem. So far, teachers have received all their training in English, so if they are to teach in the mother tongues they have to translate for themselves what they have been taught. An attempt is being made now at least to train teachers for teaching the area languages, but even this is difficult because the teachers' colleges are so mixed. For example, Loro Teachers College is located in Apac District, where

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Lango (one of the Luo family of languages) is spoken; but it also serves students from Kibanda County in Masindi District, whose language is Runyoro, a language not merely of a different family, but of a different phylum. Another example is Nakaseke Teachers College, which is in a Luganda speaking community, but many of whose students speak Ateso. Should these students be trained to teach in their own mother tongue or in the language of the pupils they can expect to have Keshubi in press)?

Many years previously, I encountered similar problems in Nigeria too. My first posting in Nigeria was to a rural primary teachers' college where, again, my students had many different language backgrounds. They did their teaching practice in local schools and often complained that they could not communicate with their pupils: the children spoke the local language, Tangale, which the student teachers did not know, and in Primary 1, at least, the children could not yet speak either Hausa or English. As for materials, there were none in Tangale; most initial reading texts were in Hausa, except for a series called Straight for English, which was in English.

Not to paint too grim a picture, let me add that there have been some success stories in teaching literacy in African languages. In the case of Uganda, Luganda is quite well established as a language of writing, and in Masaka District the official literacy rate is given as 62%. My impression is that in the sub-county where I am working it is higher than that; at least, the students that I am working with tell me that nearly all the adults in their families can read. Literacy was much less well established in northern Nigeria when I was there (and I am sure it is not better now); but it is much more widespread in the south, and impressive results have been reported from teaching reading in Yoruba (Fafunwa, Macauley & Sokoya 1989).

In my experience, it is undoubtedly more effective to teach reading in the mother tongue or at least in a local lingua franca than it is to use the supralanguage. At one point in Nigeria I had two schoolboys in my household who wanted me to teach them how to read. The younger, a ten-year old, wanted to learn to read in English, so I began

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by making word cards for familiar objects and so on. But it was hopeless, he could remember up to about 50 items and then, if I added any more, he forgot the ones he had already learned. To learn the language and the skill together was just too much. The other, who was about fourteen, said that he could already read in English (which he couldn't speak) but not in Hausa, (which he could). It turned out that he had learned his English textbooks by heart but could not identify individual words. So we began reading Hausa books together (which was a second language for all of us). It was quite wonderful to see the light dawn as the boys sounded out the letters and suddenly realized that they could recognize the words.

At some point, however, in both Uganda and Nigeria, a shift has to be made to English. Popular pressure in Uganda is to make this change sooner rather than later, for literacy is not really deemed to be literacy if it is only in a local language. One headmaster I interviewed, for instance, told me that the parents of the students were "illiterate", yet he also told me that they often sent him notes, written in Luganda. Accordingly, private nursery school in Uganda advertise that they teach in English, and a team evaluating the Functional Adult Literacy Programme reports that English is a major demand of adults in basic literacy classes (Uganda Government 1997). Even one of my colleagues has recently told me that although she will speak her own and her husband's first languages with her child, any books she buys for her will be in English.

English, then, is still the primary language of literacy, and it is likely to remain so for some time to come. But what kind of literacy is it? Here I would like to revert to that questionable relationship between literacy and economic development, as well as intellectual development. There is a good deal of literacy, especially in Luganda, but also in English, in the rural area in Masaka District that is the site for my present research. That area has not, however, broken out of poverty; indeed, it is worse off now than it was in the 1960s. An interesting study in northern Uganda, by Omoding-Okwalinga (1986), tells the same story: he compared literate and illiterate rural craftspeople and found that there was no difference between them in

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the way they learned or carried out their trade, nor were the literate ones any more successful than their illiterate counterparts.

So why has literacy not made a difference? These are two main reasons for this. It is partly because of a general dearth of reading material. There used to be more books, my Ugandan friends tell me, but may of them were looted and destroyed during the years of civil war. The education system survived - it is remarkable testimony, indeed, to the value that Ugandans put on it - but, in the absence of books, book learning was passed on by word of mouth, in the form of dictated notes. The second reason stems from the way in which reading is taught. In all the primary level classes that I have observed (and my students, with wider experience, tell me that they are typical), reading lessons consist of chanting letters and syllables written on the board or on charts. Of course, if there are no books, there is no opportunity, in any case, to work with longer texts. Later in their careers, after the switch to English has taken place, students do reading comprehension, but the common way of teaching this is to read aloud to the class, or else to have the students read in turn, and then discuss the comprehension questions; the students get no opportunity to grapple with the text themselves (Izizinga in press). With such a combination of factors, it is not surprising that, as my Ugandan friends put it, there is no reading culture.

It is a long time since I have been in Nigerian primary school classrooms, but I saw similar practices being followed there. I even attended one class where children were "reading" a text - that is, they were reading it aloud after the teacher, first in chorus and then individually - and I noticed that some of them were holding the book upside down. As to the state of literacy at secondary level, I examined closely my own students' reading, when they were in Form 5 and were just about to take their school certificate exam. I had taught these boys in Form 1 and had worked hard to develop their reading skills by supplying them with a class library of simplified readers, but they still did not do well with the exam comprehension tests that I gave them to work with. They studied the texts earnestly and drew richly on their extratextual knowledge to do so, but too often that knowledge differed

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from what the writer of the text was assuming, and thus it led them to the "wrong" answers. Part of the problem was because the texts were both alien from the students' experience and in ridiculously complex language; and part of it was because the strategies the students used which were extremely effective in oral communication in a multilingual situation - simply were not appropriate for the kind of manipulation of language that the tests required (Parry 1986, 1994). The net result was that, once again, in spite of the teaching they had received in their early years of secondary school, the students were not encouraged to use reading as a means of accessing information.

PROMOTINGLITERACYDEVELOPMENTVIAMATERIALS DEVELOPMENT

If more appropriate material is made available, and if it is presented outside the framework of exams, a more productive literacy can, I believe, be developed. That is the premise that underlies the project on which I am working now. It is in the Luganda-speaking village that I have mentioned in Masaka District, and it is based on one of the two secondary schools in the sub-county. The school is a new one, for day students only, and it has virtually no resources; but it does have an interprising headmaster who is also the director. He is eager to provide an education that will help students to make a living in the area rather than draw them away from it. Among other things, he wants the school to include a library, which sould cater not just for the students' school needs but for the community at large. The problem with such a scheme is how to find out what books to provide. The people who are supposed to benefit are not in a position to say, because until they have had some access to books they cannot tell what they would like to read. My project is designed to find out what sort of material would be valued in this particular community.

Our first step is to supply a box of books. We lend these books to the students on a weekly basis, asking them to report on each as they return it. The report form that we supply elicits the readers' own reactions to the books and also the reactions of those to whom they may have read it or lent it, and we encourage them to pass it on in

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either or both of these ways. The students are responding enthusiastically, and some interesting points are emerging. First, they are indeed passing the books on so that each time a book is borrowed it gets heard or read by at least three people in addition to the original borrower. Second, they are talking to one another about the books, and developing definite ideas about which ones they find interesting. Reading in other words, is becoming part of their social life. Third, their interests seem to be developing in a particular direction: by far the most popular category of books seems to be "Traditional Stories" -that is, collections of tales taken from traditional oral culture, usually from Africa.

Would this finding be replicated in other rural African contexts? I hope to extend this research in order to find out, for if such findings are widespread, they suggest another way in which the twin problems of multilingualism and literacy may be addressed.

To explain the idea that I have in mind, let me refer briefly to a project that I carried out, not in Africa, but in China. It was inspired by Shirley Brice Heath's account of work done by herself and her students in the Piedmont region of South Carolina in the United States, in which, essentially, students learned reading and writing skills by finding out and teaching their teachers about the practices of their local communities (Heath 1983). I adapted this principle to teaching academic reading and writing skills in English as a foreign language in China. I wanted to know about Chinese literacy practices and how these practices affected the student's learning of English, so I supplied them with articles in English about literacy practices elsewhere and asked them, first, to respond to these readings in writing, and, second to write essays of their own about such practices as they knew them in China. Each essay was revised twice, so that it could be fully developed and edited, and I promised that I would include at least one essay from each person in a book I intended to put together about the project. Thus, the students were instructing me, and also writing for a larger audience that I represented. The resulting essays were fascinating, and the students reported astonishing progress in their

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reading skills too. The book was, indeed, published last year, and each student has received a copy (Parry 1998).

Now, how can this principle be applied in Africa? Given the problems that I've described of producing written materials in the mother tongues, I suggest that students themselves, at every level, should be put to the task. They could use their first languages to collect information about their own cultures - stories, certainly, but also accounts of farming and other cultural practices - and teachers could help them to write these materials down. Then the materials could be translated, into an african lingua franca or into English as appropriate, and those from different sources could be compared. In this way the conflicting demands of validating the mother tongues and teaching the linguae francae and supralanguages can be reconciled; and students can get to own their literacy, because it is used to express as well as extend their own knowledge.

Many will say that this suggestion is impossibly idealistic. Certainly, it depends on a conception of teaching that is certainly not well established at present. But how can it become established unless we start somewhere? As a university teacher now myself, I suggest that we start at the universities. As linguists, we should learn as much as we can from our students, so that they too, when and if they go out to teach, can perceive and respect their own students as sources of information. And when students realize that what they have to say is valued, they will become far more interested in learning how to say, or write, it. They will learn, too, first in the classroom and then beyond it, to listen to, and read, what others have to say.

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