The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. Carol A. Chapelle
is a myth. As McArthur (1983, p. 21) explains, “all languages are equally capable of expressing whatever their users need them to express, and have equal potential, although historical events may significantly benefit or impede a particular language.”
In retaining former colonial languages as official languages, language policy makers expected that the adopted European language would develop into a viable medium of national communication, that it would be adopted by the African population, that it would spread as a lingua franca, and perhaps eventually also as a first language by replacing the local languages, as was the case in large parts of Latin America (Weinstein, 1990). However, as the next section explains, those expectations have not as yet been met.
The African Union and Africa's Past Language Policies
The African Union (AU) is an intergovernmental organization consisting of 53 African states. It was established on July 9, 2002 and became the successor of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). The AU's objectives are to accelerate the political and socioeconomic integration of the continent; to promote and defend African common positions on issues of interest to the continent and its peoples; to achieve peace and security in Africa; and to promote democratic institutions, good governance, and human rights. With respect to language, the constitution of the AU stipulates that the organization recognizes six official languages: Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swahili. In practice, however, the AU uses mostly English and French for the conduct of its business.
This section discusses the AU's efforts to promote the use of the indigenous African languages in the higher domains, with a focus on the educational system. These efforts are made against the failure of excolonial languages to meet the goals for which they were retained when colonialism ended, whether in terms of bringing about national unity, national economic development, or literacy. Instead, it has become increasingly clear that excolonial languages do not equalize opportunities but rather reproduce socioeconomic inequalities. The essentialist sanction of European languages as the only appropriate languages of schooling has marginalized and precluded the development of African vernaculars. As Spencer (1985, p. 395) remarks, the introduction of the colonial languages into African societies, and their use as media of education and as communicative instruments for the modernizing process, froze not only competition between languages for access to new domains, but also the opportunities for functional development of almost all the African languages. It is this state of affairs that the OAU, the precursor to the AU, tried to change by championing the ideology of decolonization of African education, with the specific goal of promoting the use of the indigenous African languages as the medium of instruction in African schools. OAU (1986) articulated the need for the decolonization of education in what the organization called the “Language Plan of Action for Africa,” among whose goals were
to liberate the African peoples from undue reliance on utilization of nonindigenous languages as dominant, official languages of the state in favor of the gradual takeover of appropriate and carefully selected indigenous languages in this domain;
to ensure that African languages by appropriate legal provision and practical promotions assume their rightful role as the means of official communication in public affairs of each member state in replacement of European languages which have hitherto played this role. (OAU, 1986)
Recent recommendations to promote African languages in education and other higher domains appear in the Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literatures of January 2000, which reads as follows:
1 All African children have the unalienable right to attend school and learn their mother tongues at all levels of education.
2 The effective and rapid development of science and technology in Africa depends on the use of African languages.
3 African languages are vital for the development of democracy based on equality and social justice.
4 African languages are essential for the decolonization of African minds and for the African Renaissance. (Cultural Survival, 2001)
Subsequent efforts to promote the indigenous languages in the higher domains have resulted in the creation of the African Academy of Languages (ACALAN). This is a Pan‐African organization founded in 2001 by Mali's then president Alpha Oumar Konaré, under the auspices of the OAU (now the AU), to promote the usage and perpetuation of African languages among African people and to serve as a specialized scientific institution of the AU. Bamgbose (2006) highlights the goals of ACALAN as follows:
1 To foster the development of all African languages and empower some of the more dominant vehicular languages in Africa to the extent that they can serve as working languages in the African Union and its institutions.
2 To increase the use of African languages in a variety of domains so that the languages become empowered and revalorized.
3 To promote the adoption of African languages as languages of learning and teaching in the formal and nonformal school system.
4 To promote the use of African languages for information dissemination and for political participation to ensure grassroots involvement in the political process and demystification of the elite.
Unlike previous language policies, the AU's policies do not call for African languages to replace excolonial languages in education or other domains. Rather, it is expected that excolonial languages will assume a new role as partners to African languages, but not in an unequal relationship, as is currently the case. To aid in the efforts to achieve its goals, in 2014 ACALAN, the official language agency of the AU, launched Kuwala, an international multilingual peer‐refereed journal. Kuwala means “light” in Chichewa, a vehicular cross‐border Bantu language spoken in Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia. It is intended to be a forum where African scholars in Africa and in the diaspora share experiences on language policies in Africa and investigate the factors impeding their implementation. The first issue of Kuwala appeared in January 2014 and comprises 11 articles, all of them written in English. It remains to be seen whether subsequent issues of the journal will carry articles written in the official African language, Swahili, or in any of the other official languages of the AU—French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Arabic.
In sum, the policy statements presented previously, namely, the Language Plan of Action for Africa, the Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literatures, the African Academy of Languages, and related subsequent policies, such as the African Cultural Renaissance Charter and the Statutes of the African Academy of Languages have one goal in common: They all require every member state of the Union to take urgent measures to ensure that local African languages are used as the medium of instruction in education and ultimately as languages of administration along with excolonial languages, which henceforth become “partnership languages” to African languages in the enterprise of national development. One notes, however, that not all of these policy statements are matched with practical steps to use the indigenous languages in education. The failure to promote the indigenous languages in education has its roots mainly in the negative attitudes that the policy makers themselves have toward the indigenous languages.
The African Union and Attitudes Toward African Languages
Generally, the attitude of the member states of the AU and the African masses toward the use of the indigenous languages in higher domains such as education and the government and administration is negative. This stems from not only the members' deep‐seated perceptions about the status of the indigenous languages vis‐à‐vis excolonial languages in society, but also the policies that govern language use in the higher domains, for they favor excolonial languages over the indigenous languages (Mfum‐Mensah, 2005). To ensure that the indigenous languages do not compete with excolonial languages, policy makers formulate language policies that are either ambiguous or that embed escape clauses.
The language clause in the constitution of the AU itself is a case in point. According to the Constitutive Act of the AU, the working languages (now renamed official languages) of the Union are “if possible, African languages, Arabic, English, French and Portuguese” [italics