D International Relations and Diplomacy, April 2017, Vol. 5, No. 4, 181-204 doi: 10.17265/2328-2134/2017.04.001 DAVID PUBLISHING Politics of Language Choice in African Education: The Case of Kenya and Malawi Sam Mchombo University of California, Berkeley, USA In August 2015 the government of South Africa issued Circular S10 of 2015, to inform education authorities that Mandarin would be taught in the schools beginning January 2016. Immediately, the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) expressed stiff opposition to it, rejecting it as constituting a “new form of colonization”. The notification informed national and provincial education authorities that Mandarin would be incrementally implemented in schools such that “Grades 4-9 and 10 will be implemented in January 2016, followed by grade 11 in 2017 and grade 12 in 2018” (Nkosi, 2015). Part of the justification for the introduction of Mandarin is that China is South Africa’s biggest trading partner; as such, it is important for the children of South Africa to “become proficient in the Confucius language and develop a good understanding of Chinese culture” (Nkosi, 2015). There was nothing said about China’s reciprocation through changes to the language curriculum of China’s educational system. Sadtu’s reaction conforms to the interrogation of the use of language and education as the arena of power politics, exemplified here by the asymmetric power relations between the two countries. This feeds into the realities of African education that, largely, remains shackled through its content and languages of instruction to foreign knowledge systems, reinforced through globalization, science and technology. For instance, with regard to language of instruction the Malawi Government issued the Education Act of 2012 that decreed that English would be studied and used as medium of instruction from grade 1. Language-in-education policies of other African countries differ minimally from that of Malawi. With focus on Kenya and Malawi the paper will examine the politics of language and curricula in African education. Keywords: colonialism, African education, national language, language in education, conceptual and linguistic incarceration, decolonization, multilingualism  Paper was presented in the panel on Transnational Dimensions of Language Politics at the 24th World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Poznan, Poland 23-28 July 2016. I am indebted to Zehlia Babaci-Wilhite, Herman Batibo, Hatem A. Bazian, Monica Kahumburu, Edrinnie Kayambazinthu, Langa Khumalo, David Kyeu, Patricia Pui Ki Kwok, Francis Moto, Louisa Chinyavu Mwenda, Vikuosa Nienu, Maureen Ommeh, and Amelia Hopkins Phillips for critical comments on earlier versions of the paper. None of them necessarily endorses the views expressed here nor is any one of them responsible for any errors in the paper. Those are to be blamed on me. I am grateful to Franklyn Odhiambo for assistance with proofreading and formatting. In American Canyon, California, Flora Suya came along at a critical juncture to provide much needed assistance and emotional support. Saúl Garcia worked diligently with me to ensure that I observe the fundamental right of my physique to have happy numbers. Erick Nelson, subjected to comparable requirements, was a source of inspiration and encouragement. Collin Domingo, Justin Jafari, and Nicolas Rapacon were supportive through encouraging me to adhere to the schedule. Thanks guys. Finally, at the Junction Brewery and Grill, “where family and friends meet”, Courtney Collins, José Flores, Savannah Garcia, Carole Lonzanida, Scott Turnnidge, and Vilma Francis Lanalla Illimi Wakin have made for happy times. Thank you guys for always making me feel that I am among family and friends. Sam Mchombo, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies, University of California, Berkeley. 182 POLITICS OF LANGUAGE CHOICE IN AFRICAN EDUCATION Race and the Colonial Experience Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou open their 2013 paper “The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa” with the blunt observation that “The predominant explanations on the deep roots of contemporary African underdevelopment are centered around the influence of Europeans during the colonial period… but also in the centuries before colonization when close to 20 million slaves were exported from Africa…” Undeniably, the effects of slavery and colonialism continue to impact the political and economic lives of people of African descent both on the African continent and in the diaspora. Political and economic domination of the Europeans over the Africans destroyed traditional institutions and relationships that protected people and constrained power, imposed authoritarian governments, and, effectively eliminated democratic practice (Wiseman, 1990). It reduced individuals’ rights while simultaneously creating a very high degree of social stratification and the maintenance and intensification of parochial tribal identities (Silk, 1990). The destruction of indigenous institutions was accompanied by the introduction of western systems of government, western knowledge systems, religious beliefs, cultural values, and languages. The most effective institution in achieving such domination and control, and the forced acceptance of the superiority of European values, was “formal education”. African education became the vehicle for the accomplishment of the colonial agenda, couched in the propagandist view of comprising a civilizing mission. Cammack, Pool and Tordoff (1988) state clearly that “French political officers believed in France’s civilizing mission and the thrust of their assimilationist policy was to substitute French language, culture and nationality for indigenous social and cultural systems” (p. 22). The civilizing mission was predicated upon the Europeans’ construction of race and denigration or downright denial of the humanity of people of color. Omi and Winant (1994) provide insight into the challenge to Europeans’ conceptions of the origins of the human species when they encountered people who looked different from them in the New World. These “natives” did not merely challenge the prevailing conceptions of the nature of humanity, but also “raised disturbing questions as to whether all could be considered in the “family” of man. Religious debates flared over the attempt to reconcile the Bible with the existence of “racially distinct” people. Arguments took place over creation itself, as theories of polygenesis questioned whether God had made only one species of humanity (“monogenesis”). Europeans wondered if the natives of the New World were indeed human beings with redeemable souls” (Omi & Winant, 1994, p. 61). The skepticism or denial of the humanity of other races became the basis for the expropriation of political rights, the introduction of slavery and other forms of coercive labor, as well as outright extermination of those races. This was because the European conceptual framework presupposed a world-view that distinguished Europeans, children of God, human beings, etc., from “others” (Omi & Winant, 1994, p. 61) This was not merely confined to “the new world” or Africa. In Asia, the British had a similar approach. Commenting on the impact of British presence on the culture of the people of Nagaland on the Indian subcontinent, Nienu (2015) states that “The newly arrived British had the sole intention of subjugation with a totally different religious tradition and culture—the heritages of deeply embedded western civilization and different cultural, social, political, and economic systems” (p. 93). The civilizing mission would, conceivably, contribute towards the restoration of a modicum of humanity to the “native” who lacked knowledge, culture, values, or language. This is in keeping with the standard approach of dominant societies in that they normally deny “… the authenticity of other people’s systems of POLITICS OF LANGUAGE CHOICE IN AFRICAN EDUCATION 183 knowledge” (Elliott, 2009, p. 285). With regard to language, Robert July (1992) points out that the descriptions of Africa by outsiders “… tended on the exotic and mysterious, often uninformed and not infrequently with pejorative connotations. Africa was the “dark continent”, remote, inscrutable, primitive. Africans were said to have no language; they squeaked and jibbered” (p. 144). This had profound effect on the practice of formal education in Africa, both in terms of content and language of instruction. Content and Language in African Education Independence came to African states with the institutions of the colonialists firmly established. Chief among those was the educational system in the form of formal schooling. This is distinct from the general conception of education conceived of as “… imparting knowledge about the world…” (Babaci-Wilhite, 2016, p. 3). This education comprises training of the young to become knowledgeable and responsible citizens. It includes the transmission of cultural values, morals, kinship systems, inheritance procedures, specialized skills needed for survival, religious beliefs, legends and history of the community, customs and traditions pertaining to various aspects of life and living (including dying), rites of passages as one makes transition in life, duties and responsibilities associated with age as well as sex and gender etc. In this regard it embraces much more than is covered in formal schooling. Language facilitates the learning process, the transmission of the said traditional knowledge, and contributes to cultural identity. Language is the vehicle of expression of the knowledge of the society. This is indigenous or traditional knowledge. Every society engages in some educational practice of this kind, an educational program that is embedded in the cultural context (Nasir & Hand, 2006; Shizha, 2012). The expression of language in the medium of oral speech has influenced the representation and transmission of knowledge in oral form. Such transmission imposes certain requirements such as situating the performance within the cultural context, individuals’ direct participation, and a focus on local issues and local development. Oral performance was central to citizenship training, the cultivation of moral values, training the young in practical skills, socialization into the cultural practices and religious beliefs, cognitive development, etc. In other words, the oral tradition has served as the main vehicle of education and of knowledge representation in many societies. African indigenous knowledge systems, as in many other societies, have been in the form of oral performance and participation in overall cultural life. Further, traditional or indigenous knowledge tends to be largely holistic rather than compartmentalized into discrete and disparate disciplines. The education that such a tradition embodies is ‘total’ in that it is for survival rather than for specialization in some arcane scholarly field, despite not negating that. Consequently, such knowledge persistently lacked acknowledged individual authorship or intellectual property rights. Innovations got integrated into the knowledge repository and, as circumstances altered, those aspects that became antiquated got modified or discarded. A major shortcoming of oral transmission of knowledge is the lack of permanence in knowledge preservation. The oral tradition tends to deal with the current, deriving inevitably from the past. However, there are no records of the past to be accessed independently of those who carry the knowledge in their memory banks. In other words, the nature of the knowledge that prevailed in the past, or what aspects of that got altered with generational shifts, migration, as well as the influence of prevailing social/political currents on the interpretation of history, is not readily available. The formal schools that colonialism instituted brought two major changes to the conception or practice of education: Firstly, the content comprised knowledge systems, 184 POLITICS OF LANGUAGE CHOICE IN AFRICAN EDUCATION beliefs, cultural values, history, geography, political institutions, etc. of the colonialists; Secondly, the knowledge had been preserved and could be accessed in written form, with the guidance of a teacher. In brief, colonialist education involved “literacy”, the ability to read and write. The invention of writing systems, facilitating the representation of language in a medium other than that of speech, profoundly affected aspects of culture and communication. This included modes of knowledge representation, preservation, transmission and, diffusion. Knowledge preservation no longer had to depend upon the memory capacities of individuals. Florian Coulmans, quoted in Connor-Linton (2006), noted of writing that it was probably “the single most consequential technology ever invented… Writing not only offers ways of reclaiming the past, but is a critical skill for shaping the future” (p. 403). The written medium even got credited with constituting the primary driving force behind western civilization. Emevwo Biakolo (2003) explicitly claims of western civilization that, It owes its origin to writing. With the Greek invention of the alphabet, the organization of knowledge was radically transformed. In oral cultures, the poets, sages, and thinkers depend on poetic rhythm and narrative structure to ensure the remembrance of past utterances. With the introduction of writing, this mnemonic function is most effectively served by the medium itself, making the storage and retrieval of knowledge so much easier. (p. 14) The content, comprising western knowledge systems, demanded the guidance of western or “appropriately” trained teachers. The requirement of literacy, not available in most African languages1, inevitably led to the transmission of the knowledge in European languages. While this appears to arise from pragmatism, it became the tool of colonial domination and control. Colonial education in Africa was not committed to transmitting the values and knowledge of African society from one generation to the next. Rather, it strove to change those values and to replace traditional knowledge with the values and knowledge systems of a different society (Babaci-Wilhite, 2016). Western knowledge systems and beliefs came to get identified with education, intelligence and civilization, bolstering “the premise of a superior race and the premise of a superior culture” that undergirded “European arrogance” (A. A. Mazrui & A. M. Mazrui, 1998, p. 14), further serving to enhance and maintain power relations, and becoming the most powerful weapon for suppressing African values. Gary Urton, cited in Greer, Mukhopadhay and Roth (2012), claims that “European colonizers did not impose political and economic systems—and, most generally, worldviews—on blank slates, but rather strove to suppress and replace existing systems” (p. 12)2. Education is, thus, non-distinct from politics in relevant respects (Freire, 1970; Freire, 1998). French colonialism, with its mission of assimilating the Africans to French civilization, was more spirited in the use of education for the dominance and spread of the French language. Of a French education, Senegalese Governor General Chaudié had this to say in 1897: The school is the surest means of action by which a civilizing nation can transmit its ideas to people who are still primitive and by which it can raise them gradually to its own standards. In a word the school is the supreme element of progress. It is also the most effective tool of propaganda for the French language that the Government can use. (Crowder, 1962) 1 See Fallou Ngom (2010) for discussion of notable exceptions with the use of Ajami script in Senegal. John Mugane (2015) provides more relevant discussion of Ajami in his account of Swahili. 2 Monica Kahumburu, commenting on an earlier version of the paper, remarked that this reminded her of her secondary school history class in Kenya. Discussing colonization she learned that in Gikuyu society a sect called “Akorino” emerged as a result of discontent with the impositions placed on the Gikuyu religion, culture, etc. especially with Christianity proscribing, inter alia, polygamy, female circumcision, etc. (http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/ferguson-centre/memorialisation/events/addis-workshop/tim-gachanga-paper-shtml) POLITICS OF LANGUAGE CHOICE IN AFRICAN EDUCATION 185 The French spared no efforts in the attainment of that goal. French colonial education contained an “explicit ideology of cultural assimilation (the policy was named ‘association’ in 1905), which reached its symbolic apotheosis with young African school children being taught songs about ‘our ancestors the Gauls’” (Wiseman, 1990, p. 19). British colonialism differed from that of the French largely in tactical arrangements in that it used indirect rule viz. using local leaders as agents of the administration3. However, in the education system that former British colonies inherited, the details were not radically different. While the British allowed the use of “… local languages in the early grades as part of their strategy of control”, the French proscribed African languages in favor of French from the outset. In the upper grades, they both used their languages since “both French and British administrators sought to educate a small class of civil servants in the respective metropolitan languages” (Albaugh, 2014, p. 216). This was because with “… superior firepower, secure borders, and limited plans for industrialization, colonial rulers only needed a few administrative intermediaries and soldiers” (Albaugh, 2014, p. 216). Moreover, when the Germans ruled Tanganyika (now Tanzania), they promoted the use of Swahili for government and education largely because they pursued a policy that “…denied the colonial subject any access to the language of the colonial master” (A. A. Mazrui & A. M. Mazrui, 1998, p. 55). Thus, while for the French “… no African was good enough unless he or she spoke French… ”, for the Germans the belief was that “… no African was good enough to speak the German language” (A. M. Mazrui & A. A. Mazrui, 1996, p. 273). French arrogance denied legitimation of native culture while Germans acknowledged it but maintained linguistic and cultural distance between the African ‘natives” and their rulers, between African culture and German culture. This contributed to the consolidation of Swahili in the territory. British policy vacillated between the two approaches, sometimes regarding the teaching of English to African “natives” as potentially subversive, except where or when it proved suitable for domination and control. With emphasis on western knowledge systems, and under the guidance of European teachers or “appropriately” trained Africans, African education became elitist, training those who would eventually assume the reins of power in independent Africa (Bunyi, 2008b). It was Eurocentric in content and language. With regard to the content and ideology or educational policy it was, mutatis mutandis, similar to the education of African Americans, who got forced to “… adopt the European cultural heritage that dominates the educational milieu and thereby abandon their own cultural ties. Inevitably, as African Americans began to separate from their cultural tradition and assimilate into the dominant culture, they lost a degree of cultural identity and unity” (Hill, 1993, p. 682). In fact, a persistent view of public education in the United States is that it embodies the dominant systems that, … have overwhelmingly supported the ideals and goals of white supremacy and are not arbitrary; they have been strategically crafted and executed. Schooling systems have functioned as channels through which members of the African Diaspora could be inundated with ideology that would stunt their political, economic, and social progress; thus, supporting the goals of white supremacy. (Givens, 2015, p. 1288) This constituted the crux of what Wade Nobles (1986) labeled “conceptual incarceration” of the African, a term used to designate “the state of intellectual imprisonment in European value and belief systems occasioned by ignorance of African and Native American philosophical, cultural and historical truths” (Hotep, 2003, p. 6). 3 Michael Crowder (1964) examines the colonial systems of the French and the British, noting that the direct rule of the French and the indirect of the British did actually share significant similarities. 186 POLITICS OF LANGUAGE CHOICE IN AFRICAN EDUCATION The elites coming out of African education were victims of conceptual incarceration, having got assimilated to European values and western knowledge, with corresponding alienation to their culture and knowledge systems. This explains the paradox of colonial domination and oppression—it was often not the poorest and most exploited but the more educated and relatively more privileged, those having closer contact with the agents of colonial domination, who felt most keenly the psychological and cultural impact of their subjugation (Fanon, 1967; Lee, 2015). Choice of Languages of Instruction The choice of language of instruction in African schools is not independent of the formulation of national language policies. African nation states, created by the colonial powers without Africans’ participation or involvement, have the most artificial borders that have, … fostered ethnic struggles, patronage politics, violence, and conflict, primarily by splitting groups across the newly-minted African states. Ethnic partitioning led to irredentism and helped create an ideology of secession and nationalism... African borders did not only split tribal homelands across countries, they also produced some of the largest and most heterogeneous countries in the world. (Michalopoulos & Papaioannou, 2013, p. 1) The creation and subsequent retention of highly arbitrarily drawn political boundaries placed different ethnicities within the same countries while simultaneously spreading some ethnic groups across different countries (Ungar, 1986). This resulted in multilingualism as a regular feature of African states, a situation decidedly different from that obtaining in the countries of the colonists. When the Europeans came to Africa, they had already managed to settle on the nationhood of their presumably homogeneous states. They had enjoyed a period of relative stability and equality, a time of citizenship in a political sense. In the formation of those states “…a single language and a uniform way of speaking and writing that language were necessary conditions for the formation of a nation-state in a ‘civilized’ European fashion. Multiple dialects were discouraged in favor of single, uniform national languages” (Mugane, 2015, p. 208). Biblical remarks in the Book of Genesis reinforced the conception of the nation as “…a people linked by birth, language and culture and belonging to a particular place” (Joseph, 2006, p. 22)4. However the concept of “a language” inevitably “… demands denial of the primal diversity of variation… And here is where the politics clearly enter—for whatever is identified as the good or correct form of the language empowers those who have it as part of their linguistic repertoire, and disempowers those who don’t” (Joseph, 2006, p. 44). Noam Chomsky (1986) adds to the political aspects of “language” with the observation that the notion involves “crucial socio-political dimensions” (p. 15). African leaders largely embraced such a conception of nationhood, believing that political cohesion required a standard national language. To achieve political unity, nationalist leaders initially opted for one-party states. However, the prevalence of multilingualism posed apparent problems in the selection of a national language or language of wider communication. While historically, rulers and their bureaucrats preferred a single, standard language in order to approach citizens directly, without the mediation of regional elites, the new leaders had vested interests in retention of power. Their elitist western education, obtained in European languages, proved instrumental to that end. Since the European languages had already served as official languages, pragmatism demanded their retention in that capacity, entrenching their position of power within the independent states. Further, the lack of published material in African languages provided additional argument 4 The Biblical reference alluded to here is The Book of Genesis Chapter 10 verse 5 POLITICS OF LANGUAGE CHOICE IN AFRICAN EDUCATION 187 for the use of European languages in education. This reinforced the prejudice that African languages, lacking any written tradition, could not be regarded, even by their own speakers, as “languages” (Joseph, 2006). Besides, the European languages had also been instrumental in the progress of science and technology, and were deemed crucial to economic development. The situation has virtually remained unchanged in the majority of African countries even as they celebrate golden anniversary of independence. Bokamba (2011) has noted that From a decolonization or liberation perspective, one of the surprising outcomes of the continent is that the language policies in 34 out of the 54 African states, excluding the newest state, South Sudan, remain to-date characteristically static in the sense that they have maintained the legacies of the former colonial powers. Typically in these cases the languages of the colonial masters, viz., English, French, and Portuguese, are utilized as the exclusive media of governance, education, mass media, and international communication. (p. 147) This has resulted in the relegation of African languages to an inferior status, viewed as not fit or adequate for representation or delivery of knowledge. For instance, in Zimbabwe, English gets esteemed above the local languages. To speak English is identified with intelligence, whereas to speak Ndebele, Shona, Tonga, etc. gets equated with ignorance. In Zimbabwean primary schools, especially in the urban areas, children detest the Shona language5. Education in Africa has yet to discard the image of elitist training where foreign knowledge systems are taught in foreign languages, detached from the local epistemological, linguistic or “cultural context”. It is de-contextualized education (Mchombo, 2014, 2016). The role of language of instruction in education is of serious gravity in that the choice of language of instruction directly impacts the degree of comprehension of the material learned. The sad commentary is that in African education “there are pronounced incongruities between the language the child understands, the language of the parent, and the language of schooling. Often the language of the child is also different from that of the teacher and both do not have command of the language of instruction” (Mugane, 2006, p. 14). The reality is that the choice of language of instruction is far from irrelevant to the degree of mastery of the material learned. The proscription of the child’s first language in favor of an unfamiliar language reduces learning to rote memorization, with minimal comprehension. Mugane has referred to the non-use of the child’s first language as “linguistic incarceration”, an echo to “conceptual incarceration” of Wade Nobles. Mugane (2006) observes that, The first language of the child is incarcerated, reducing education to the pursuit of fluency in English mediated by markedly non-proficient instructors. Whenever the switch is made from the child’s first language to the language of the school there is always an instructional blackout. For the vast majority of children, the blackout is total and final. Learning is then reduced to verbatim memorization (and in numerous cases good hand writing)! To arrest the use of indigenous languages where they are most needed begins the process of necrolinguistics, the erasure or non-mastery of the vernacular. (p. 14) This view is echoed in various studies (Bunyi, 1999, 2008a; Gacheche, 2010; Kamunyu, 2013; Muthwii, 2002, 2004, 2007). Cultural Links and International Aid Independence in Africa did not sever economic or cultural links with the colonialist regimes. Confronting 5 I am grateful to Sibusisiwe Mukwakwami (personal communication) for this observation about the use of language in education in Zimbabwe. 188 POLITICS OF LANGUAGE CHOICE IN AFRICAN EDUCATION intolerable levels of poverty, illiteracy, disease, and the scarcity of human and material resources, African countries have been compelled to seek international aid from international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, or the former colonial regimes and more industrialized nations, the core countries, placing them on the periphery. The dependency has impacted the policies in language in education. Considering that the IMF and the World Bank are the principal organizations through which the capitalist West seeks to control the destiny of the rest of the world, “… the establishment and reconstruction of structural inequalities (in institutional set-ups and financial allocations) and cultural inequalities (including attitudes, pedagogic principles, etc.) between the imperial European languages and other languages become indispensable strategies towards that attempted control” (Mazrui, 1997, p. 43). The dependency relation of the periphery on the core centers has ensured continued western domination of African politics, economic performance, and educational practice. Imperialism is, thus, not dead. Robert Phillipson (1992), who views the use of English as “linguistic imperialism”, characterizes imperialism as a relationship by which one society can dominate another, through four mechanisms: exploitation, penetration, fragmentation and marginalization. According to Phillipson (1992), “there are centers of power in the center and in the periphery. The peripheries in both the center and the periphery are exploited by their respective Centers (p. 52). The cultural imperialism that facilitates the mechanisms indicated above includes the constant requirement that European languages remain the media of instruction in African education (Babaci-Wilhite, 2015). Arguments supporting offering education in the children’s languages, acknowledged as a fundamental human right (UNESCO, 1953), get short shrift. The need to appease the “expatriate advisors from the donor countries and agencies” strengthens the view that “the colonial mind in African education has been perpetuated under the guise of international development”, so that, through the intervention of international aid from donor countries, African education has reduced to “an export commodity from the center and is accepted in Africa as a result of Western-based ideas of what it means to be developed” (Babaci-Wilhite, 2015, p. 18). The economic dependency of the “periphery” countries on the countries of the “center” has translated into the English media from the developed countries (the center), penetrating the media of the developing nations (the periphery). This penetration, comprising the content of globalization, has eroded the national sovereignty, cultural identity, and political independence of developing nations (Pennycook, 1994; Zeleza, 1997). Dependency theorists argue that the global economic system keeps weaker “peripheral” states, largely former colonies, in permanent economic dependence on the more powerful states of the “center”, including the former colonial powers. Then there is the prevalence of negative attitudes towards African languages. These are not merely widespread but “surprisingly, shared by many African people and expatriate government advisors” (Wolff, 2006, p. 32). According to Obanya (1999), the negative attitudes towards African languages are deeply rooted in the fear of social change among members of the post-colonial elites as well as on the part of their expatriate advisors from donor countries and agencies. The latter balked at the potential for marginalized sections of the population, illiterates, women, and even children to become empowered through official recognition of their languages, a fact that would detrimentally affect the balance of power and threaten the privileges of the dominant elite. It is against this background that the politics of choice of language in African education can be understood. We will proceed to comment on the countries that comprise the case studies. Kenya Postcolonial Language in Education Policy In February 2014, the Ministry of Education in Kenya decided to “enforce” the language policy that had POLITICS OF LANGUAGE CHOICE IN AFRICAN EDUCATION 189 been in place for three decades. The policy required that children in lower primary schools should be taught in a mother tongue6. Despite the policy being in place for a very long time, people did not seem to be aware of it. During the colonial period the missionaries, with the cooperation of the colonial government, were the chief providers of western-type education. While some of the missionaries developed orthographies in some of the indigenous languages and emphasized the teaching and use of these languages, education remained heavily dependent on the use of English. The use of local languages suited the missionaries’ agenda of proselytization. They believed that spiritual communication with Africans could best be achieved within the tribal context. The evangelicals “… regarded the preservation of African languages as an essential component of their attempt to capture the African soul” (A. A. Mazrui & A. M. Mazrui, 1998, p. 55). Following the attainment of independence from Britain, Kenya set up the Ominde Commission to review, inter alia, language in education. With regard to language in education, the Ominde Commission came up with the following policy recommendations: (a) English should be the medium of instruction from Standard 1; (b) Indigenous languages were characterized as “essential languages of verbal communication”; (c) There was no reason to assign them a role for which they are ill adapted, viz., the role of educational medium in critical years of schooling (Republic of Kenya, 1964, p. 60). The Ominde Commission’s report clearly reflects the colonial origin of formal education, forcing the retention of English as the medium of instruction and of, effectively, Eurocentric curricula. The indigenous languages, while good for verbal communication, were deemed ill adapted to representation and delivery of knowledge. According to the Ominde Commission report, they recognized “… no difficulty in including a daily period for story telling [in the indigenous languages] in the curriculum of primary one, two and three”7. In other words, the local languages were to remain confined to oral presentations of traditional stories but excluded from the culture of literacy. Admittedly, the linguistic-cum-ethnic diversity of Kenya constituted a relevant factor. That, taken in tandem with the lack of trained teachers or educational material in any of the local languages, as well as the fabled unsuitability of the local languages for education, easily “forced” the retention of English for an education that would prepare the youth to contribute to national development. According to Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, the first President of the Republic of Kenya, national development would crucially involve tackling ignorance, disease, and poverty (Bunyi, 2008a)8. The policy got revised with the Gachathi Commission report of 1976 (Republic of Kenya, 1976). The Gachathi report recommended the use of local languages for the first three years of instruction. In other words, indigenous languages should have a “bridging” role for the first theee years, as children made transition from the languages of home. It is this policy that the Ministry of Education of Kenya wanted to enforce (Gacheche, 2010). The policy had not really received much attention because, for rural parents, education comprised the place where children went to learn English not indigenous languages which they already knew and where, for urban parents, English was the medium of instruction (Muthwii, 2002). Further, colonial education was based on racial segregation with separate schools for the whites, Asians, and the Africans. Since the examinations for 6 Retrieved from http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/blogs/dot9/great-need-for-children-to-be-taught-in-mother-tongue/1959700-217 0334-9vu24v/index.html 7 Ominde Report of 1964 on Education in Kenya. Retrieved from https://softkenya.com/education/ominde-commission/ 8 Grace Bunyi (2008a) provides an excellent account of the evolution of Kenya’s education policies. It would be beneficial to read it. 190 POLITICS OF LANGUAGE CHOICE IN AFRICAN EDUCATION matriculation were set in English, the association of English with power, elitism, success and, especially, intelligence, became inevitable9. This latter is nontrivial. Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986) noted that during colonial times African children learnt to associate their mother tongues with stupidity, humiliation and low status, and the language of the colonizers, English, with intelligence and success, as noted above with regard to the attitudes towards Shona in education in Zimbabwe. Further, because in Apartheid South Africa, Bantu Education that promoted the use of African languages had the political motivation of entrenching unequal power and continued denial of economic opportunities to, and general oppression of, the African people, there was negative reception of use of African languages in education. The political ideology reinforced the perception of inferiority associated with the use of African languages in education. This legacy of undermining local languages and placing foreign ones on a pedestal still prevails in several developing countries (Bamgbose, 2011; Kamwendo, 2015; Kishindo, 2015; Moto, 2009; Mtenje, 2013; Ngonyani, 1997; Simango, 2015). Thus, the conception of education as comprising the transmission of foreign (western) knowledge systems, learning English, and using English as the language of instruction, remains standard in many African countries, certainly those that had been under British colonial rule. The British Council, whose overall aim lies in the field of cultural relations, has contributed to the maintenance of English in educational institutions and in the cultural fabric of the former colonies. After all, its “…more specific objective has always been to develop a wider knowledge of English in the world. This objective is most often fulfilled through facilitating the teaching and learning of English in public education systems” (Knagg, 2013, p. 70). In fact, the British Council remit as expressed by the British Crown is for the expansion and consolidation of British culture and the English language across the globe. The Royal Charter of 1940 that formally promulgated its establishment points to “promoting a wider knowledge of the [United Kingdom] and the English language abroad and developing cultural relations between [the UK] and other countries”10. This is amply demonstrated in the British Council Annual Report 2009-2010: English Next India. The Report states that: “From education to the economy, from employability to social mobility, the prospects for India and its people will be greatly enhanced by bringing English into every classroom, every office and every home” (Phillipson, 2014, p. 8). Other cultural agencies of the former colonial regimes must have comparable objectives. On Implementation of Mother Tongue-Based Education Facing chronic disappointing students’ performance in Kenyan education, the question of revisiting the language policy became legitimate. Thus it was that in 2014 the then Cabinet Secretary for Education in Kenya, Prof. Jacob Kaimenyi, expressed his support for the implementation of mother-tongue education in lower primary grades. He appealed to the standard view that “the use of local languages in the formative stages of child development was critical and had scientifically been proven to be productive”11. One advocate of the policy, John Othieno (2014), pointed out the difficulties of teaching four-year-old children in a language whose structure, format and grammar they do not understand12. The issue is that it is distressful for children to learn the language and at the same time grasp scientific, mathematical and linguistic concepts in the “unlearned” 9 Grace Bunyi (2008a) remarks on the racial segregation that prevailed in Kenya’s education in footnote 1. 10 Retrieved from https://www.britishcouncil.org/organisation/history 11 Retrieved from http://www.nation.co.ke/news/Use-local-languages-insists-minister/1056-2229690-jek7ez/index.html 12 Retrieved from http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/Our-vernacular-languages-are-the-best-method-to-teach/ 440808-2199116-7c0kfyz/index.html