Academic Literacy in the Mother Tongue: A Pre-requisite for Epistemological Access

Abstract

Freedom from apartheid oppression in South Africa offered opportunities for the reconsideration and eventual recognition and adoption of the languages that, during the colonial and apartheid eras, were seen as backward and irrelevant to the needs of the modern world. The granting of official status to these languages and providing learners an option to be taught in them within formal education after the demise of apartheid oppression is part of the decolonization and liberation processes. It is against this background that this paper argues that local languages could be enriched to convey the international body of knowledge and enable their speakers to be taught and learn in their first languages, something the English and Afrikaans speaking communities started enjoying since the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. The paper uses isiZulu within the context of a Faculty of Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and Northern Sotho within the context of a Faculty of Humanities at the University of Limpopo, two of the indigenous languages in South Africa, to advance the argument. The paper suggests ways in which an environment can be created where indigenous language teaching moves from mundane, structure-focused tuition to becoming more relevant and more engaged with the reality of the language as experienced by people on day-to-day basis, both within and outside the academy.

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