Politics of Language Choice in African Education: The Case of Kenya and Malawi

Sam Mchombo

31 citations0/0 files storedInternational Relations and Diplomacy

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Multilingual Education and Policy Second Language Learning and Teaching African Education and Politics

Abstract

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.

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References

2023Black Skin, White Masks 1994Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s 1989Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.1988Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use.1993Linguistic Imperialism 2014The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language 2017The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language 2006Exploring Sociocultural Perspectives on Race, Culture, and Learning

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2022Language policy in Ghana and Malawi: differing approaches to multilingualism in education 2020The Transformative Power of Language 2020Decolonising Our Minds, Decolonising Our Languages 2020Transformative Power of Language Policies in Higher Education 2025Policy in name only: explaining the failure to generate political priority for L1-based multilingual education in Kenya

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