Acculturation is one of the impacts of colonization in Africa. Over time, beyond colonization, most of African cultures and traditions have been assimilated and overridden by those of the colonialists. Language, one of the key components of African culture, has suffered greatly the implications of acculturation. The foreign languages, also recognized as international languages like English, French, German amongst others, have taken precedence over the indigenous languages as a result of colonial imposition and a response to globalization. Yet, according to most African education policies, the child’s first language is their native language which is founded on the narrative of preservation of cultures, traditions and the language itself. However, the campaigns on preservation of the African languages, championed by a host of Africans including the renowned literary scholar Professor Ngugi wa Thiong’o, continues to gain momentum as many Africans begin to wake up to the realization of cultural identities through language preservation. This article, acting as a clarion call, begins a series of articles dedicated to highlighting key points on preserving and promoting African languages as shared by Sylvain Agbolo, an African language activist, linguist and translator in Accra, Ghana, recently hosted by Nat King Taylor on Africa’s LSP Podcast . A podcast from Bolingo Consult. You could listen to the podcast here. In this first part we discuss key stakeholders and the role they play in the promotion and preservation of African languages.
Defining stakeholders and custodians
The basic definition of a stakeholder, is a person with an interest or concern in something, especially a business. However in the context of this article, it will be a person with an interest in and impact on a phenomenon, in this sense language preservation. While a custodian is a person who has a responsibility of taking care of or protecting something. Custodian, as used in this article refers to someone with a culturally, socially, or legally mandated responsibility to protect and enforce a value, virtue, or valuable property. While we apply these terms to different contexts in everyday life, when used in reference to the preservation of African languages evokes the sense that stakeholders are generally anyone with interest in ensuring the continued relevance of culture, while custodian would define more specifically people who are not only stakeholders but also carry the additional responsibility to protect African languages and culture in general. The main focus in this article is on the stakeholder.
This therefore allows us to define stakeholders and custodians, within the context of African language preservation, as informed people tasked socially and culturally with the mandate to safeguard the preservation and use of language, customs, traditions, and mores of their societies from cultural appropriation and decimation. For example traditional leaders such as chiefs, kings, earth priests, family heads, culturally occupy a central place as core custodians of culture including language of their societies.. Closely associated with traditional authorities in their cultural and traditional roles are linguists, messengers, and other supporting people who are repositories of these cultural traditions and practices.
Globalization, but also localisation, decolonization, and reAfricanisation of society dictates that we begin to use African languages beyond the goals of cultural preservation and continuity to promote self development of Africans. To this end, it is imperative to harness the wealth of expertise, experiences, and services of stakeholders like translators, interpreters, language professionals, policy makers, governments, publishers, writers amongst others who could act as gatekeepers in support of traditional custodians, to ensure that in adopting African languages in the global space, the original structures and meanings of our languages are not corrupted and deformed in the midst of globalization.
The Language Service Providers
As globalization intensifies, Africa has continued to gain economic and geopolitical relevance in this space yet culturally it has been impacted negatively, which continues to define its ability to exert its cultures in the space. Nonetheless, there is an awakening to cultural identification, not only amongst Africans living in the global North but within Africa itself. The extension of this awareness has been the call for the need for Africans to understand and define global issues within the African context and languages in order to fully participate in realizing world development goals on their own terms and contexts. The interest in Africa by multinational and multilateral investors and African elites is rising. This makes it very essential and critical for the provision of African language services to these investors within Africa to be able to produce goods and services compatible with African values and virtues. African language service providers are therefore core stakeholders as their key role could pass very significant influence towards business, where they ensure that in engaging in the indigenous languages of the people, business interests not only adopt African languages in their everyday activities, but also in doing so do not conflict with nor demean, devalue, and distort the real meanings and values of African languages and cultures To this end, it is crucial to pose and respond to the question: in what way can African language service providers promote the preservation of African languages?
In response to this question, it is important to suggest that translators and interpreters could keep their indigenous languages, beside foreign languages, as part of their working language or languages in their businesses, using such languages, among others, in the construction of their websites, workplace communication, in their development of articles and books.. The unhealthy observation can be made of most African translators and interpreters giving a preference to foreign languages they have acquired and paying little to no attention to investing in their indigenous languages. This is often excused in the guise of the unavailability of a data pool on standardized translations of complex concepts into the indigenous languages.
It is undeniable that African languages need a considerable amount of research to promote African language that could ensure globalization is contextualized to preserve African values. This is the call for African language service providers to invest more in collaborations with the custodians of the indigenous cultures to ensure that African languages are used by businesses while maintaining their original meanings and values. It is commendable that Kiswahili has been recognized by the African Union and is being fully adopted across several African countries, contributing to African cultural renaissance and African unity.
The Publishers, Authors and the Literary world
‘If you want to hide something from a black man, put it in a book’. This is one of the greatest rhetoric quotations of our times made by Malcolm X. This quote has received a lot of backlash over the years because of the misunderstanding of the context in which it was made. According to the former first lady of Ghana, Matilda Amisa-Arthur, in an article by Ghana web titled ‘You can’t put things in a book and say you are hiding it from Africans’, Malcolm X was referring to the time when slave masters would hide things from the slaves and because the slaves were illiterates and had not been to school, they did not find the book important to find anything in it. . This quote would eventually be used to describe Africans as a people who do not read. However, really it is arguable also that Africans read less, but this could be largely attributed to the foreign languages used for most materials that do not effectively capture African contexts or cultures. How then could the literary world capture this and ensure African languages are promoted and preserved. This has remained an important challenge for all stakeholders like language service providers to contribute to addressing.
Chinua Achebe, the renowned Nigerian literary scholar and author of the book Things Fall Apart, suggested the use of an ‘African English’ by writers, arguing that the English language on its own would not be able to carry the weight of his African experience. He goes on to describe that this ‘African English’ will be in full communion with its ancestral context but also could be adapted to contemporary African circumstances. In Achebe’s ‘African English’ concept, the indigenous words and phrases, proverbs, folktales and other elements of communal storytelling are integrated into the narrative to record and preserve African oral traditions. More on Achebe’s concept can be read here.
Sylvain Agbolo, in his interview with Bolingo Consult, suggests the need for African writers to explore writing in their mother tongue. This, to him, is probably one of the surest ways to preserve both language and culture. This may appear far fetched to many. But we would not know the extent of its impact on use and preservation of African languages until his advice is put into practice. It is refreshing that there are still African authors that have stuck to writing in African languages despite the resistance to it. In some of the pieces to be written by Bolingo in completing this series on promoting and preserving African languages, we would highlight African authors who write entirely in the indigenous African languages and why they do so..
In Conclusion
Stakeholders, as discussed above, play an important role in preserving and promoting the African languages. For African language service providers as crucial stakeholders, it is even more imperative to step up their use of and working with African languages in their own workplaces and communications. It is also quite necessary that African language service providers work together to speak in one voice and propel the African languages to the deserved international level. As a reader of this text, we encourage you to continue to follow these series. In the subsequent parts, we share the role of custodians in the preservation and promotion of African languages.
