 |
|
Tessa Dowling (source: http://www.afrilang.uct.ac.za/staffnews.html)
|
Tessa Dowling responds to a recent article in the Cape Times regarding the Funza Lushaka bursaries.
The Department of Basic Education’s Funza Lushaka Bursary is available only to mother-tongue speakers of African languages in order to encourage them to become foundation phase teachers. (Policy dictates that learners be taught in their home language up to grade 4, then switch to English.) This means that English- and Afrikaans-speaking students who want to become teachers are effectively denied this source of funding. Although hugely frustrating to dedicated students, the stipulation does make sense: surely you cannot walk into a foundation phase classroom in Khayelitsha without being proficient in Xhosa?
The issue surfaced again in a recent eNCA television debate on transformation at universities. Chumani Maxwele, when asked by host Denis Davis how mathematics could be Africanised, responded: “They won’t teach a different mathematics. They are bringing a different culture, a different knowledge practice that is based in their cultural practice. … What we are saying, there’s a difference between two times three that is taught by an African lecturer to an African child, who can explain it in isiXhosa, isiZulu, isiTswana. You’ve got white people with their arrogance who can’t even speak an African language.”
I agree with Maxwele, but what if the white (or coloured or Indian) person is not arrogant and can, in fact, speak an African language? What if this student has bothered to understand and study different cultures, different knowledge practices? What if they have so immersed themselves in an African language and culture that they can demonstrate sufficient proficiency to teach maths in Xhosa, for example? Surely the bursary administrators should acknowledge that there are such students and include some way of testing them to ensure that if they are fluent enough, they too can receive the bursary. Just denying someone funding on the basis of what was ticked under “home language” is not fair.
And something else that seems unjust is that some people – not ordinary people who are delighted with even basic efforts at learning their language, but high-up government representatives – seem to want to keep African languages private, not to be publicly shared, as English is, with anyone who wants access to them. Once, after a talk I gave on the changing nature of African languages, a government official who disagreed with me said, “You took everything from us. Now you want to take our language too.” In the context, I can only assume that by “you” the official meant “whites”.
But who owns language? Why have African languages become such a convenient ghetto for some African language speakers? An arcane, secret society that has its own rules: “This is our language. This is our culture. You can’t know us.” One even encounters a contrived fussiness about the boundaries between cognate languages: “That’s isiZulu, it’s just not isiXhosa! Awazi nto! You don’t know a thing!”
Why is it OK to speak English any old way, never to treat it with reverence, revelling in the many varieties and accents of first- and second-language speakers, while African languages have to be reduced to artificially pure, literary, rule-bound forms that are the exclusive property of speakers born into that linguistic heritage? Make no mistake, I’m delighted that English is so democratic and promiscuous. I’m more concerned about the inconsistency of treatment.
Where are the superb African language courses and teachers for second-language speakers? Where is the funding for developing those courses? And why can’t a brilliant Afrikaans-speaking foundation phase teacher teach in a Xhosa-medium school if she has mastered the language? If the best teacher in my area was Sotho-speaking without a word of English, I would want to do something to fast-track her to fluency in the language so that my child could reap the benefits of her pedagogical expertise and talent. The ability to teach should also be a priority, not just language.
But then something else nags: Why don’t English and Afrikaans speakers learn African languages? Most African language speakers learn to communicate in English out of a mixture of necessity and desire. They are not given creative immersion courses and cutting-edge pedagogies to get them fluent. They just do it. A recent study by an honours student in linguistics suggests that second-language speakers of African languages avoid immersion-like situations because they are afraid of losing control, losing their sense of comfort – so they confine themselves to learning the language in the classroom, thus stunting their ability to speak naturally.
So Chumani Maxwele is correct: we South Africans who are not first-language speakers of African languages need to lose our arrogance, our feelings of superiority and our fear of making fools of ourselves, and learn what it is like to flounder in a language that is not our own, but still make sense.
Also read:
Lees Christo van der Rheede responds.
Kommentaar
Dowling se artikel is meer sinvol as die van Van der Rheede, Beukes en Le Cordeur wat verlede week gepubliseer is. Die kern van die saak is: Die ANC-regering bevoordeel swartes en diskrimineer teen wittes; ook by die toekenning van studiebeurse.