Language, liberation and development
Africa: Language, Liberation And Development
AllAfrica.com - Washington,USA
Is there a connection between language and the enslavement or liberty of a people and their capacity for development? What have been the experiences of African countries between political independence and 2006, the year of African languages? In this article, Prince Kum'a Ndumbe III elucidates these questions. He also describes the approaches of the AfricAvenir Foundation to raise consciousness about language and development ... The language we use enables us to articulate our ideas, feelings, faith, dreams and vision of the world. Language allows us to recount our everyday, to interrogate our past and plan our future. It enables us to articulate constructed thought. And thought is a vehicle of development - or regression ... The coloniser's language was imposed as the only officially recognised language. African languages were condemned to the domain of folklore as 'vernacular languages' or 'patois'. Thought, that continued to be articulated by individuals in their 'patois', was not recognised ... Thought expressed in indigenous African languages became marginalised. It was labelled primitive, barbarous, backward, incapable of intellect, incapable of communicating progress or development. Knowledge communicated in African languages was thus characterised as non-knowledge ... Africans themselves had passed through the filter of the colonial administration, schools or church seminaries. Indeed, they had no other sources of information other than the media, articulated in the language of the coloniser ... These same Africans would assume power in African countries after the independence movements of the 1960s and 1970s. They continued the application of the colonial project by imposing the former coloniser's language on the African people ...
AllAfrica.com - Washington,USA
Is there a connection between language and the enslavement or liberty of a people and their capacity for development? What have been the experiences of African countries between political independence and 2006, the year of African languages? In this article, Prince Kum'a Ndumbe III elucidates these questions. He also describes the approaches of the AfricAvenir Foundation to raise consciousness about language and development ... The language we use enables us to articulate our ideas, feelings, faith, dreams and vision of the world. Language allows us to recount our everyday, to interrogate our past and plan our future. It enables us to articulate constructed thought. And thought is a vehicle of development - or regression ... The coloniser's language was imposed as the only officially recognised language. African languages were condemned to the domain of folklore as 'vernacular languages' or 'patois'. Thought, that continued to be articulated by individuals in their 'patois', was not recognised ... Thought expressed in indigenous African languages became marginalised. It was labelled primitive, barbarous, backward, incapable of intellect, incapable of communicating progress or development. Knowledge communicated in African languages was thus characterised as non-knowledge ... Africans themselves had passed through the filter of the colonial administration, schools or church seminaries. Indeed, they had no other sources of information other than the media, articulated in the language of the coloniser ... These same Africans would assume power in African countries after the independence movements of the 1960s and 1970s. They continued the application of the colonial project by imposing the former coloniser's language on the African people ...