Education, Part 9
Languages, Politics and Education
“The ANC is committed to the development of
indigenous languages. We call on our government to prepare for the introduction
of the teaching of our indigenous languages by 2014.”
ANC January 8th
Statement, 2013
South Africa has 11 official languages, and these are not
the only languages spoken, read and written in, in our country.
The latest South African legislation having to do with
languages is the Use of Official
Languages Act, 2012, gazetted on 1 October 2012.
South Africa has a Pan South African
Languages Board, and there is a separate institution known as Kha Ri Gude Literacy Campaign, whose
several objectives include the teaching of mother-tongue literacy, basic
numeracy, and oral English to “adults who missed out on their
schooling” .
What is the concern of the Communist University in relation
to languages? What would be the matters to discuss, about languages, in
Communist University study circles, political schools and e-mail forums?
These questions must remain open, but we can attempt some
answers.
Language in the
Communist University
The Communist University has its own language policy. It is
that participants may use any language of their choice. It is not the
responsibility of the speaker or the writer to translate his or her output.
Of course, this may mean that less people read or hear what
the contributor is saying. That is something that contributors have to keep in
mind and make choices about.
But in principle, we prefer that comrades use their first
language, even though, in practice, most of the time they use English. We
prefer that comrades use their first language because if they do not, then the
spreading of our political dialogue will only reach as far as the boundaries of
the English-speaking part of the population.
The Communist University wants to break through that
barrier.
Our Communist University objective is dialogue. The
Communist University’s first and main necessity, therefore, is to foster
reading and writing, and to adopt a method that is most conducive to the
development of reading and writing habits among the participants.
There are other skills of communication, and we will set
aside a full course called Agitprop that will cover song, graphic design,
layout, clothing, and all kinds of means of expression.
But here we are dealing with verbal communication, and from
the point of view of language. Let us repeat: The Communist University wants
people to compose their thoughts and express themselves in their first
language, or mother-tongue. Therefore, the CU needs to apply its mind to the means
by which people can be more able to do that.
Dictionaries
This will involve the development of dictionaries in all of
the official languages that do not have them, which are all nine of the African
official languages (isiNdebele, isiXhosa, isiZulu, seSotho sa Lebowa, siSwati,
Tshivenda, and Xitsonga) of South Africa. Such a project could be assisted by
the use of Wiktionary, a collaborative
project for the development of language dictionaries (not translation
dictionaries. An example is the “Wikamusi
ya Kiswahili”, which contains 13,780 Kiswahili words, defined in
Kiswahili. Every language needs a dictionary in the language itself. Every
language needs a literature, composed and published in the language. Every
language needs production of new literature in the language.
Language in School
The institution of 11 “official” languages in South Africa,
sanctified by the Constitution, is as far as we know based on “human rights”
precepts. Consequently, because human rights are passive, what has been done so
far has not been very effective in terms of bringing the languages to life.
The teaching of children in the mother-tongue that they have
from home when they enter school for the first time may be a human right. But if
so, then it is not yet being well observed in South Africa. Motivation for
change in this regard comes not from “human rights” but from the relatively
poor rate of success in attempting to educate people in languages (English or
Afrikaans) that they did not learn in the home and therefore do not, in the
beginning, know.
Imposing on young children the stress of attempting, at a
very young age, to learn in language that they do not understand and have not
yet been taught, is a cruelty and of course, it is not successful. On average,
children who are presented with this hurdle, do not advance as fast as children
who are welcomed into the formal education system in their own language.
Teaching of children first in their mother-tongue, and then
teaching them English, using their mother tongue, with this transition taking
place over several years of schooling, is now a political demand.
Broader Political
Considerations in relation to language
Politics, from the communist point of view, is the
development of people, this being a social process that to happen properly must
involve all. The National Democratic Revolution, to succeed and to complete its
historic project, must organise the entire country into a communication, and a
constant dialogue.
To do so by imposing, whether by design or by default, one
single language, is something we as the SACP do not support, no matter what may
have been thought in the past about nations needing to have a single, common
language.
Translation
It follows that the matter of translation must be approached
with care. It will not do to have the two former colonial languages, or more
likely only one of them (English) being used as the bridge for translation
between the speakers of indigenous languages. Such a situation will carry too
much of a danger that the English language, which is enormously larger in
vocabulary and literature than the South African indigenous languages are, will
cease from being a medium, and will instead become a dominant source.
Hence the problem of translation is not prior, but is downstream.
Priority is the creation of new indigenous-language literature, including a first
dictionary, in each language. The publication of existing literature is a
prerequisite.
The problem of translation is now the problem of serving a
culture that is expressed in multiple languages, where such a culture exists.
This is a different project from the colonial translation project, which had
the aim of dominating the indigenous language-systems, taking ownership of
them, and making a bridge by which all of the mother-tongue intellectuals could
enter and dwell within the realm of the colonial lingua franca.
This distinction has to be asserted politically. Once
accepted, it has technological implications which also have to be asserted. If
not, then the gains won politically will be smuggled away in the technological
execution.
An example
Hugh Tweedie has contributed the following link: http://www.njas.helsinki.fi/salama/index.html
This web site appears to present an automatic generator of
dictionaries, which would in principle be a good thing, and a very good thing.
But it is not very clear as to whether these are what it
calls “monolingual” dictionaries (i.e. proper dictionaries that define words in
the language itself), or whether they are dictionaries which are definitions of
words in English. If the latter is the case, then one would want to look
elsewhere, because the mediation of languages via English translation is not
what we want in the post-colonial time.
Summing-up
The compilation of dictionaries of our official languages need
not be done by speakers of the language, or even by South Africans, and it may
even be done by, or assisted by, machines. But the first destination must be a pure,
stand-alone dictionary in each language.
The second step is making means of translating directly from
any one of the official languages to any other one, and not via a coding in
English. If we had such an engine, then we could take a giant step forward.
Translation requires a critical conscience. Machines cannot,
and never will be able to, provide such a critical conscience. The translation
is a new work, with a new, or an additional, author. This, too, must be
politically asserted in contradiction to those bourgeois who would commodify
everything, up to and including the spoken word and the air upon which it is
borne.
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