Safaliba community language awareness: ‘Safaleba—a dageya ka o bebee!*’ * ‘Safaliba—it is important for it to exist!’

Abstract

Safaliba is an Indigenous Ghanaian language spoken by 7–9,000 Ghanaians in a nation-state of 29 million people with 73 indigenous languages, none of which are spoken by a majority of Ghanaians. Government schools in Safaliba towns and villages are mandated to utilize Gonja and English instructional reading materials from the Ghana Education Service and the Ministry of Education. Gonja is nothing like Safaliba from a morphosyntactic and semantic point of view, making it difficult for most young Safaliba to learn to read. Recent indigenous activist endeavors have disrupted mandates in two Safaliba primary schools in the largest Safaliba town, Mandari, and have begun teaching children to read in Safaliba. The purpose of this paper is to explore Safaliba community awareness of the grassroots moves to school children in Safaliba reading and writing. The study includes ethnographic data from field notes, photographs and 75 interviews with Safaliba subsistence farming families. Findings present a view of community language awareness for Safaliba literacy in the schools as a positive move. Moreover, the study presents a strong, inspiring snapshot of situated community activism in a language struggling for recognition in Ghana’s postcolonial educational language policy.

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