The debate about mother tongue or home language instruction in Namibian schools is necessary, unavoidable and ongoing. This debate evokes a great deal of emotions, as language is part of a people’s identity and history, and is therefore likely to characterize our national democratic dialogue for as long as there is diversity in the country. In many parts of the world, the discussion about whether children’s mother tongues, or home languages should be used for instruction, is neither here nor there. We all know that education generally, and learning specifically, takes place through language. We also know that the art of education is an enterprise of and for human beings only. Animals can neither educate their young ones nor be educated because for meaningful education to take place, there must be a language as a medium through which ideas, thoughts, concepts and phenomena are communicated and transmitted from one person to another in manners that can be repeated, elaborated, improved upon or countered by other ideas. Animals can be trained to do tasks, but cannot be educated to think about phenomena which the tasks are about. Plants can be pruned, bent or moulded to grow in a particular fashion. Human beings who have the same experience over time will undoubtedly develop a communication system called language through which their stories of their experiences are stored and reposed for purposes of memory, food security and conflict management and resolution.
It is a given that a baby begins to learn things from the sounds of the mother, later the siblings, then relatives, then friends, as part of collective experiences in the environment. There is no doubt that learning commences in the language that is most immediate to the baby, the mother. In the absence of the mother and father, it is the caregiver. These days it can be an institution. There are instances where the infant learns the art of understanding instructions in a sign language, that is when both parents are deaf and mute but communicate to their child instructions about life. Teaching or formal instruction comes in later when the child can already speak or at least understand a language.
Our colonial experience taught us that white people assume that their home languages are the ones in which their children must be taught at school. History has been kind to them not to have to fight about this as African language speakers have to. Few white families would dream of putting their children in schools that offer education through anything but their languages, or something close to their language, in what they rather consider an international environment. Here the child still has fulltime access to his/her home language. At school they are taught in another language. This is the origin of bilingual education.
The debate about mother tongue instruction is more the headache of the former colonized; namely the Afrikans who through the process of white domination lost their language one way or the other and now have to play catch-up or pretend to bring their languages on par with the languages that have enjoyed all attention and resources to develop into the scientific languages that they are today. The Afrikan languages in the main, not to refer to those languages that were subjected to Portuguese linguistic cannibalism that swallowed up the Afrikan soul hook, line and sinker, and left the Afrikans in former Portuguese colonies empty shells when it comes to their own self-understanding and self-expression, because the Portuguese told them that they are fully human only when they are fluent in Portuguese and have no desire to re-learn an Afrikan language – so much so that even their names were removed so that they would have absolutely no memory of where they come from. They should rather dream of having been a Joao, a Dos Santos, or a De-Something, just not a Musonda or Kepembe.
The problem is here: The Afrikan child has to learn a language at school and learn everything in that language, whereas at home life is in another language altogether.
We also know that language has not been a neutral issue throughout the colonial experience during which Afrikan languages were given an inferior status compared to European languages. European languages were seen to have brought the Bible, the hymns, modern prayers and everything associated with modernity and development. In the pre-independence Namibia, Afrikaans was told to us to be the ‘ Moedertaal’ in schools and black children were required to pass it with a higher grade to exit high school. Black children were made to write essays, (opstel), abut ‘my eerste treinreis’ (my first journey on the train) when they had never seen a train in their lives. When they revealed the ignorance about the train, they would be judged to be unintelligent.
Apartheid education decreed that Afrikan children had to be taught in their home languages for six years or so (until Standard 2 now Grade 4), with a switch in the following year to Afrikaans with mother tongue as a subject. The state of affairs after independence is the pretty much the same. Here is where the contradictions start: As a country, we have English as the only official language, even though the other languages are considered equal. The Namibian Constitution recognizes all the languages in the land, yet no one uses them in official circles.
Our predicament is that deep down we all know, and do want our languages to survive, as they carry our childhood dreams and our prayers that we learned early in our lives. Our fears are mostly expressed in our mother tongues. Can we, however, afford to have them on par with the languages that are already developed and which have invaded our lives so deeply and so thoroughly? The fact of the matter is any language can be used for any function, including instruction in schools for subjects like mathematics and chemistry. The reality is that first, language is not biological or genetic – it is social, it is learned and can be lost. Second, a language stays alive when used, and dies when neglected. Third, language develops with the experiences of a given people in their context, and contexts always change. In other words, in order to keep a language alive, there must be speakers who speak it, eat in it, drink in it and experience the majority of their lives in it. Language is not kept alive by policy, but by speaking it. Fourth, the brain that caters for language development is not some container with finite space for particular distinct compartments for this or that language – knowledge and skills transfer organically from one language to another, both in oral and written forms. Even though language factors like vocabulary, grammar and syntax differ from language to language, it is known that a child has very little difficulty transferring from one language to another. Scientific research demonstrates that a child can learn to read and write successfully in two languages at the same time. It is all a matter of context, availability of resources and quality of the teaching environment. Fifth, language needs role models who are proficient in that language and teachers who are well trained to understand how to teach an additional language and who can inspire the young to speak the language. We do not have those people now.
For us in post-independent Namibia the discussion should be taken beyond romanticism that is the niceness of claiming that we need Afrikan languages for the heck of it, when we ourselves cannot speak them properly. There is more than sufficient evidence to support the argument that all things considered, children learn better and faster in their mother tongue. For purposes of sustainable development it is important that we take this conversation where it belongs, namely, that the call for some form of mother tongue instruction in the 13 plus one regions of Namibia is not an ‘either –or’ argument against English, but a logical call for a pedagogically sound approach to learning for all children, that allows both the mother tongue and English to be active in the learning of all the children in One Namibia One Nation. In fact, this bilingualism invites white parents to allow their children to learn at least one Afrikan language in addition to their own. Like the world becomes safer for the Afrikan child who learns a European language, the white child becomes less fearful of Afrika once they acquire an Afrikan language, let alone become part of the colourless Afrikan family that is growing all across the continent.
Where are we? We must understand, as a matter of necessity, that the best way forward is to introduce English as a medium of instruction as early as possible in all schools in the country, and to leave home languages to stay home languages, for the following reasons: One, since independence and the dawn of constitutional democracy, English is the only language used in government communications. In spite of this, Afrikan languages are alive and well at home. Two, we need to accept that we live in a diverse society culturally, racially, tribally, linguistically and even religiously. Three, keep tribal and other boundaries and differences increasingly blurred for purposes of building a new nation; it will help to cause young Namibians to form their relationships outside of the homes in the official language of the land. Four, it is very important to make learning as uncongested as possible by avoiding an education system wherein most learning gets lost in translation by generating a nation that thinks in one language and speaks in another when it comes to matters of national interest. Five, considering that all of our indigenous languages have not been developed to a level where they have sufficient vocabulary to cover the modern world, it is essential to expose young Namibians of all groups to intellectual and abstract thinking and conceptualization of life so that they are not held back and have to catch up later. Six, too many languages in schools with our kind of divisive history where regions have distinct language characters will slow down our pace to bring about One Namibia One Nation wherein all citizens have equal opportunity anywhere. If this phenomenon is addressed deliberately, we can end up with an unnecessary tribal or ethnic conflict in the future. Seven, introducing English as the medium of instruction will allow for faster integration of children across the country to feel at home everywhere in the country. This is so because more and more Namibians are working and living in places where their mother tongues are not spoken, and it would be unfair to treat their children as different from others because they do not speak the language of the people they found there. Eight, it will be in line with the new Namibia where we find that children of the middle and upper class Afrikan families are not inclined to speak Afrikan languages or their parents’ languages. For some reason, a growing number of Namibians from all race groups are in a space where they are convinced that even though they are from black families, their first language is English: they speak back to their parents in English, speak English with their friends and see themselves more and more as world citizens, so much so even their parents adapt to their children. Interestingly, this is even in households where one of or both parents do not speak good English at all. Strangely, we are now going in the direction away from mother tongue to child tongue where children determine the language to be spoken in the homes. Nine, the push for mother instruction would hold more value if the children of the elite also go to schools where they are taught in their mother tongue. The reality is the opposite. Children of the elite go to English medium schools. Therefore the elite have no right to condemn other people’s children to an education that they themselves consider inadequate for their own. Like the Olufuko issue. As long as the leaders would not allow their own daughters and granddaughters to be paraded semi-naked, they have no right to push it down on others as their culture. What is good for the goose is good for the gander! Ten, we do not have the resources , both financial and human to create enough material ready for use, including materials to cover scientific terminologies in the languages we wish to develop – coupled with the reality that there will not be enough students who want to specialize in Afrikan languages, as we have seen with Unam’s attempts to teach Afrikan languages. Eleven, we can learn from trends in other countries, including former Portuguese colonies and Asian countries where the youth are more interested in learning the English language as the language of their future so that they can function better in the bigger global village. The case of Tanzania is a good example for us. There the political leadership had the political will and funding to develop Kiswahilli into a viable scientific language. While it was seen as good by many of us, the majority of young Tanzanians are angry when they realize that their Kiswahili prepares them to function well in Tanzania, Kenya and maybe Congo, but when they go outside they are dysfunctional, as they cannot participate in international conversations in Kiswahili.
There is more: One can hazard a guess that if we were to ask the youth of Namibia, black and white, they are likely to prefer English as a medium of instruction from Grade 1. Our future success lies in working together towards a Mother Tongue Based Bilingual Education System. In this context all children will speak their languages at home but at school they will all learn English from a very early as part of their developmental educational career. After all, education is about preparing a better future for those to whom it belongs.
By joseph diescho