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Although students generally communicate in their home languages at home, they do not consider these languages appropriate for academic spaces. This highlighted to us a dilemma that many African students face: While they struggle to express themselves in English, since it is not their home language, they also cannot articulate themselves in their home languages as these are not media of instruction. This places students at a greater disadvantage because their comprehension of philosophical material is then limited.
These disturbing insights inspired us to embark on a project that facilitates students’ engagement with philosophy and undermines attitudes of inferiority to African languages, which are one of the many hideous legacies of colonialism. The natural place to start was at the beginning – with the philosophical concepts that challenged students.
The project’s aim is to compile a comprehensive dictionary of philosophical concepts in several African languages. The first and current stage of the project (2020–2021) is a pilot, with a few dictionary and encyclopaedia entries translated into isiZulu and selected for inclusion in the current Philosophy curriculum.
Once we have proof of concept, we will extend along three axes: start translating in other languages; solicit entries from African philosophers around the continent; and start working with translation software to build a philosophy language glossary and corpus.
The thinking behind the project
The rationale for the project is that decolonising the university and making it an intellectual home for African students requires linguistic decolonisation. Apart from being inspired by our students in the way just mentioned, this thinking is informed by both empirical and conceptual considerations.
On the empirical side, there is compelling evidence that learning in one’s mother tongue significantly enhances intellectual performance.3 First, the more one identifies with the learning material, the more intellectually engaged one is.4 Arguably, engagement in one’s own language ensures greater identification with the learning material. Second, the safer the environment in which one learns is, the better one performs.5 Clearly, if a student is instructed in a colonial language, he is not only always on his back foot (because this isn’t his most fluent language), but the history of conquest and violence that is inseparable from that language acts to undermine the safety of the learning environment. Finally, language plays a vital role in memory retention, an essential part of the learning process.6
On the conceptual side, there are at least two sets of considerations that show that linguistic decolonisation is a necessary component of intellectual decolonisation. First, there are well established connections between language and cultural identity. One’s language partly determines who that person is, who her people
and gods are.7 Second, as decolonial theorists teach us, language also fixes one’s conceptual repertoire and hence the kinds of intellectual problems one finds
3 For an example, specifically in the decolonial context, see Agbedo et al. (2012).
4 See Nishanthi (2020) for this and other benefits of mother-tongue learning.
5 Research on stereotype threat is a great dramatisation of this point (eg, Steele 2010).
6 For a good overview, see Wigdorowitz (MS).
7 However, in this instance, African students’ linguistic and cultural identity is complicated by what Elliot Mncwango (2009) refers to as ‘subtractive multilingualism’, which happens when a second language is learnt and gradually replaces one’s first language.
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