I

THE ASMARA DECLARATION ON AFRICAN LANGUAGES:

A CRITICAL REAPPRAISAL

 

 

[A Keynote Address delivered at the Annual Conference of African Linguistics.

Ohio University, Athens, Ohio].

 

Alamin Mazrui

Department of African American and African Studies

The Ohio State University

Columbus, Ohio.

            Between January 11 and 17, 2000, participants from around the world met at an international conference in Asmara, Eritrea, to examine the state of African languages in relation to government policy and administration, publishing and public education, scholarship and intellectual (re)presentation, and to the question of “development” more generally. At the conclusion of this historic event, the writers and scholars present at the forum released the Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literatures.[1] It is aspects of this important document that will constitute the focus of my presentation tonight.

            The main title of the conference itself was “Against All Odds,” alluding to Africa’s struggle for linguistic survival in the face of  “serious obstacles” that continue to threaten the vitality and diversity of its languages.  It was the conference’s way of recognizing the high casualty rate in language in the course of the twentieth century. Of the thousands of languages estimated to exist in the world today as many as fifty percent are said to be in danger of extinction – the highest proportion of these being located in the southern hemisphere.[2]

            Colonialism and its Europhonic legacies are described by the Asmara Declaration as the forces of greatest danger to the survival of African languages. Implied in this position is the view that European languages, especially English, are purveyors of “linguistic genocide” in Africa and elsewhere in the world. But we know, of course, that there is a conflicting opinion to the effect that it is local trans-ethnic media, the African expansionist few – rather than the European languages inherited from the colonial era -- that are the real linguistic predators against their own. In the words of Brenzinger, Heine and Sommer:

European languages are often labeled as being the primary danger to African languages and cultural heritage. A closer look at the reality in most African nations reveals, however, that it is African linguae francae and other African languages with a national or regional status which spread to the detriment of vernaculars. Minority languages are still more likely to be replaced by those “highly valued” African languages, than by imported ones.[3]

            But to look at language endangerment purely in terms of direct displacement in the here-and-now is to adopt a rather narrow view of the problem. English, and other European languages, have continued to mesmerize African policy makers as a direct consequence of the continuing effects of the legacy of colonialism. The result has been a disturbing unwillingness to commit significant amounts of resources to the promotion and development of African languages. By fostering a psychology of linguistic neglect and even linguistic fatalism among policy makers and the general public in a rapidly changing world, the European language regime does, in fact, continue to pose a serious if long-term threat to the future of African languages.

            In the quest to re-center African languages, the Declaration highlights the need to recognize Africa’s linguistic diversity as a strength rather than a weakness and the inalienable right of African children “to learn in their mother tongues” – both as part of a wider strategy of enhancing the status of African languages. Each of these is a proposition about which books have already been written from a more global perspective.  What I intend to do here is restrict my comments to parts of other “strategic” propositions of the Declaration.

            The first is the proposition that “promoting research on African languages is vital for their development, while the advancement of African research and documentation will be best served by the use of African languages.” This proposition relates directly to a remark made by Ngugi wa Thiongo’o in the same year that the Declaration was released. “I find it contradictory in Africa today and elsewhere in the academies of the world,” says Ngugi in a lecture at Cambridge University,

…to hear of scholars of African realities but who do not know a word of the languages of the environment of which they are experts. Do they think the Cambridge here would give me a job as Professor of French Literature if I confessed that I did not know a word of French? And yet, scholars in Africa and abroad are peopled by experts – whether African or not, whether sympathetic to the African cause or not, whether progressive or not – who do not have to demonstrate any acquaintance let alone expertise of any African language.[4]

The knowledge about Africa that is generated in the academy is consequently assembled in European languages. And this assemblage, in Ngugi’s opinion, is part of the process by which Africa continues to be interpreted through a western linguistic prism. The entire Europhonic project is thus regarded as a parasitic enterprise “which knows only how to take away but never how to give anything back to the languages and peoples on whose behalf it makes its claim in the global community of scholarship in the arts, science and technology.”[5]

            Of greatest disappointment to Ngugi are the African scholars and intellectuals who are conversant with African languages but choose to write in European tongues. These he almost regards as intellectual opportunists who “often steal whatever fire there is [in Africa] to add to the abundance of fires in the West.” They steal from Africa’s heritage made accessible to them through their African languages to enrich the cultural capital of the languages of Europe.[6] This cultural “betrayal” presumably puts to risk the entire future of the people of the continent of Africa. “If some of the best and most articulate interpreters of African total being insist on interpreting in languages not understood by the subject of that interpretation,” asks Ngugi, “where lies the hope of African deliverance?”[7]

            Ngugi is not altogether right, of course, in his claim that African languages are totally ignored in the study of Africa in the Western academy. I believe most, if not all, doctoral programs in African studies the USA, for example, do require the study of at least one African language. But it is still true that many of us with an Africa study-focus feel no particular compulsion to retain and enhance our knowledge of African languages even as we continue to be active researchers in the field. And it is certainly true that many are employed to teach subjects like African literatures without any demonstrable competence in an African language.

            Part of the problem – in the prevailing attitude that one can pursue knowledge on Africa in languages other than African – lies, of course, on the degree of Africa’s linguistic dependence on the West. It has been argued elsewhere that, except in Arabic-speaking Africa and, perhaps, Somalia, Africans are yet to demonstrate a strong sense of linguistic nationalism. And because of this factor,

…they are seldom resentful of their massive dependence on the imported imperial languages. And as long as this dependence continues to be a pervasive feature of the African condition, it would not be inappropriate to use the vocabulary ‘Anglophone,’ ‘Francophone’ and ‘Lusophone’ to describe different regions of the continent.[8]

It is virtually inconceivable for an academic to undertake research in China, Russia, the Middle East, Asia or Latin America without some proficiency in the respective languages of those regions or, alternatively, without total submission to the mercy of an interpreter. In many parts of Africa, however, it is quite possible to carry out primary research in the field at some level of data collection and in some areas of study with little familiarity with local languages.

            It is to this linguistic anomaly (or “incongruity,” as described in the Declaration) that the Asmara Declaration calls attention and encourages intervention of those among us in the Western academy and elsewhere who are “studying and researching” Africa, challenging, in the process, the “do nothing” linguistic attitude of policy makers in Africa itself. Unfortunately, some of the funding for African language study in the USA, in particular, is fraught with hidden agendas of political control and domination. And one of the most serious challenges facing concerned scholars of Africa in the West today is how to build strong and vibrant African language programs in institutions of higher learning without feeding the hegemonic interests of those who finance their study.

            In looking at the relationship between language and knowledge, Ngugi has also argued in his latest book, Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams, that “there can be no real economic growth and development where a whole people are denied access to the latest developments in science, technology, health, medicine, business, finance, and other skills of survival because all these are stored in foreign languages.”[9] This statement leads us to another strategic proposition of the Asmara Declaration: That is, “the effective and rapid development in science and technology in Africa depends on the use of African languages” and the attendant prescription for the development of a scientific and technological limb in African languages to meet the demands of the modern age, to do justice to the potentialities of the African person as an innovative being.

One of the disturbing fallacies in the African experience, in fact, has been the association of European languages and the Western cultural legacy at large with modernity. Many African policy makers are wont to believe that being westernized in language and culture improves the chances of “development.”  There is a naïve assumption that European languages are a necessary force for modernization and indispensable instruments of economic transformation. Not enough attention has been paid to a range of Asian experiences where indigenous languages play a large role in economic transaction and educational policies.

Even if one accepts the IMF and World Bank terms of reference that define liberal capitalism as an economic aspect of "modernity," it is possible to argue that the system has succeeded best in those societies where the language of intellectual learning and the language of economic bargaining have not been too divergent. In Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and even Singapore and Malaysia, the language of the marketplace is much closer to the language of the classroom. In Africa, on the other hand, the language of the marketplace (usually indigenous) and the language of the classroom (usually foreign) are indeed distant. The Asian elites use indigenous languages much more than do the African elites south of the Sahara. Africa may be the only continent in the world that is attempting a capitalist take-off while having such a massive dependence on foreign languages.[10]

            The use of indigenous languages in pursuit of change in the academic, scientific, economic, legal and other important spheres of society should, in fact, be seen as part of a wider design to make the process of modernization itself more organic to the African condition.  Referring to this phenomenon as a case of “indigenized modernization,” Ali Mazrui has observed that:

…no country has ascended to a first rank technological and economic power by excessive dependence on foreign languages. Japan rose to dazzling industrial heights by scientificating the Japanese language and making it the medium of its own industrialization…Can Africa ever take-off technologically if it remains so overwhelmingly dependent on European languages for discourse on advanced learning? Can Africa look to the future if it is not adequately sensitive to the cultural past?[11]

This lingo-cultural gap, then, is seen as a serious impediment to the full maturation of Africa’s own scientific genius.

Against this backdrop, then, the need to “scientificate” African languages cannot be over-emphasized. Lessons from other civilizations provide ample evidence of the soundness of the policy. Under medieval Islam, for example, science is said to have been “practiced on a scale unprecedented in earlier or contemporary human history.” Such considerable resources were devoted to its promotion that “until the rise of modern science, no other civilization engaged as many scientists, produced as many scientific books, or provided as varied and sustained support for scientific activity” as did the Islamic civilization.[12]

            Underlying this phenomenal growth of science under the Islamic dispensation, however, was the power of language -- the rise of Arabic as a trans-ethic, trans-racial  means of communication – especially under the Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258). The scientific “movement” itself inspired a good deal of linguistic engineering, whereby Arabic bacame scientificated, especially through adaptation of terms and borrowings from other already scientificated languages. On the other hand, the currency of a rapidly scientificating Arabic served as an important stimulus to the growth of a scientific culture within the Muslim world itself.      

            Many important works were produced directly in the Arabic language. But there also arose a conscientious effort to translate scientific works from languages like Persian, Hindi and Greek – in the process fostering new levels of scientific exchange between cultures and civilizations.[13] These translations contributed not only to the growth of scientific knowledge available in Arabic, but also to the formation of a scientific limb in the language -- a terminological legacy which, of course, ultimately found its way into the languages of the West in the form of words like algebra, alchemy, alcohol and zero. The language of poetic elegance and Qur’anic revelation had now become the medium of scientific discourse.

            It is not at all surprising, then, that in this period of Islamic history efforts in science went side-by-side with developmental efforts in language. As Dallal reminds us, “in addition to religious works, the earliest scholarly contributions among Muslims were of a linguistic nature. Of particular relevance to the later development of science, were the extensive compilation efforts by Arabic philologists and lexicographers. The specialized lexicons that were produced in the eighth and ninth centuries represent a large-scale attempt at classifying Arabic knowledge.”[14]  In other words, next to the rapid expansion of Islam, the Arabic linguistic revolution was perhaps the single most important cultural transformation to have occurred within the Muslim world. And this communicative device, especially because it was not limited to the elite, became an important instrument in the stimulation of a scientific culture within the Muslim world of the time.

            I realize, of course, that there are major historical differences between the Islamic world of the Abbasids and the African realities of the twenty-first century. Nonetheless the basic idea is still defensible that linguistic engineering and scientific socialization can be mutually stimulating and mutually enriching phenomena.

            On the whole, therefore, one can say that the Asmara Declaration has put due emphasis on the linguistics of science and technology. In the process, however, it also seems to have marginalized the question of aesthetics – in spite of the fact that many of those who attended the conference were themselves creative writers and oral artists. Let us remember that, after all, even the Abbasid attempts to scientifcate Arabic built on the literary foundations of the language that had been established earlier by the Umayyad Caliph, Abd al’Malik (687-705). In as much as African languages need to be scientificated, therefore, artists in African languages need to be made more naturally productive and engaged. “The two policies of scientfication of African languages and support for African poets and writers have to be jointly pursued as part of long-term national development plan. Culture as communication and culture as identity should find a meeting point in literature. Languages rich in metaphors of poetry are languages which can also stimulate the scientific mind.”[15] The imagination that innovates in science, in other words, is related to the imagination which has vision in poetry. And it is not accidental that Kiswahili poets like Ahmad Sheikh Nabhany of Mombasa, Kenya, for example, have become very central in linguistic projects for the scientification of Kiswahili.

            The question, however, arises as to whether we are giving adequate attention to poets and imaginative writers in African languages. Last month, on February 17, 2002, the Jury of “Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20^th Century” competition, released its list of winning titles, with special emphasis on the top twelve.[16] The sub-category of the top twelve does not include a single title in an African language except, perhaps, Naguib Mahfouz’s The Cairo Trilogy, a novel originally written in the Arabic language. Yet Mahfouz’s is the only text in the list not mentioned by the title of its original language of composition: All the others are identified by their original Euro-linguistic names, in English, French and Portuguese. It is not unlikely, therefore, that the one text which comes closest to have been composed originally in an African language was, in fact, assessed for its merits on the basis of its translation in a European language, English.

When in 1998, the Modern Library Board of the USA released a list of 100 novels deemed the best in English published in the twentieth century, I had occasion to comment that the judges were probably too Anglo-Saxonic in their selection.[17] Are we now confronted with the possibility that the all-African members of the Jury for the 100 best African books were themselves too Europhonic in their terms of reference? If not – if the results indicate relatively poor African language submissions in quantity and quality -- then the mission of marrying scientific creativity and artistic vision in the development of African languages clearly requires much greater effort in promoting African poets and writers in African languages than is currently the situation. Africa must not under-estimate the extent to which the scientific imagination may need poetic vision for its ultimate maturation in language.

            An important concern of the Declaration (which I had occasion to mention earlier with regard to the development of Arabic) is that of translation. In its own words, “Dialogue among African languages is essential: African languages must use the instrument of translation to advance communication among all people, including the disabled.” Africans across national, ethnic, and social boundaries get to read each other’s works in European languages as a matter of course. But they are yet to have adequate access to each other’s ideas transmitted originally in African languages.

            In this regard, this Africa-centerdness of the Declaration is, of course, quite understandable in view of the lop-sided history of translation that has drawn so disproportionately from Western sources – from the Bible to Brecht. But to restrict translation efforts to intra-African dialogue is, in fact, to grossly under-utilize the power of translation and to deny African languages the potential enrichment that can come from more diverse stimulation. To Voltaire and Shakespeare, we must endeavor to add African translations not only of works in African languages, but also the poetry of Tagore of India, the philosophy of Confucius of China and so forth.

            We must recognize, furthermore, that the value of translation transcends the imperative of dialogue and communication, critical as this may be. Translation can also be an instrument of enriching target languages and their literatures in new ways. Referring to the impact of biblical translations in Europe, for example, Lowry Nelson has argued that,

…at every turn translators of the Bible had to make difficult choices reflecting accuracy, intelligibility, and idiomatic grace. Those choices…helped to fashion not only medieval Latin as a living language, but also a vast array of vernaculars in Slavic, Germanic, Romance and other language groups. European literature was a continuous beneficiary of this enterprise.[18]

In Africa, this role of translation was well-recognized by Mwalimu Julius Nyerere when he made the following remarks in the introduction of the first edition of his Kiswahili translation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “Kiswahili is a rich and beautiful language. But its beauty and richness can be augmented only if it put to novel uses” – like translating a work from a totally alien culture.[19]

            In short, a language cannot be developed merely by appointing a special commission with the task of coining new words. A language has to develop through facing new challenges, confronting new ideas that need to be expressed. And the wider the range of civilizations on which such translation efforts are based, the richer the potential stimulus to African linguistic and intellectual galvanization. That is why, short of establishing a specialized translation bureau, the task of translation must be treated as an integral part of linguistic development initiatives on the continent.

            The broad agenda of the provisions of the Asmara Declaration is primarily inspired by its first article that: “African languages must take on the duty, responsibility and the challenge of speaking for the continent.”  The European languages that currently define the official space in Africa are deemed incapable of fulfilling this particular mission. Thus, the Declaration notes the “profound incongruity in colonial languages speaking for the continent.”

This question (of Euro-languages serving as the voice of Africa) is, of course, an old and controversial one. And the position of the Declaration is likely to be challenged, in particular, by scholars of post-colonial-postmodernist persuasion. With special focus on English, many of these scholars have come to see “discursive practices” as essential to the understanding of the cultural politics of the language as a “global” medium. While acknowledging that English has indeed served hegemonic and imperialist functions over the decades that it has established itself in “Anglophone” Africa, members of this school see language not merely as “a means to engage in struggle” but also as itself a “site of struggle” over  meanings.[20] In the words of Weedon, “once language is understood in terms of competing discourses, competing ways of giving meaning to the world, which imply differences in the organization of social power, then language becomes an important site of political struggle.[21] Thus, if English is the language “through which the forces of neocolonial exploitation operate,” it is also seen to be the language through which counter-discourses and insurgent knowledge can be formulated.[22]

            It is against this backdrop that these postcolonial/postmodern theoreticians have advocated the transformation of the English language classroom into an arena of cultural production. And all English language teachers around the world are urged to “become political actors engaged in a critical pedagogical project to use English to oppose the dominant discourses of the West, and to help the articulation of counter-discourses in English.”[23]

            While I am essentially in agreement with the above thinkers about the "transformability" of imperial languages, it is disturbing that, in the majority of cases, the power to transform is located in individuals (especially within the ranks of the intellectual elite) with little regard to the dynamics and counter-dynamics that are actually taking place in society. It is the contention of this presentation that, historically, the anti-hegemonic transformation of imperial languages in a manner that fosters a new revolutionary consciousness and which is sufficiently enduring, has taken place under conditions of collective struggle and mass movement.

A good example of this phenomenon can be seen in the liberationist idiom in the English of many nationalist leaders, from Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria to Jomo Kenyatta of Kenyas, that had its foundations in the broader African nationalist struggles against colonialism. But it is also true that this nationalist counter-discourse turned out to have serious limitations in the context of the new politics of neocolonialism. While nationalist leaders did indeed appropriate, from the languages of their colonizers, the liberal vocabulary of rights which succeeded in mobilizing their compatriots against the colonial dispensation, this appropriation often took place within the framework of the same liberal capitalist ideology and its institutional and social structures imposed by colonialism.

In regard to this linguistic metamorphosis of the language of the colonizer, some of Frantz Fanon's views are particularly instructive. Fanon's dissatisfaction with this nationalist discourse of rights led him to assert:

The entire action of these nationalist political parties during the colonial period is action of the electoral type: a string of philosophico-political dissertations on  the themes of peoples right to self-determination, the rights of man to freedom from hunger and human dignity, and the unceasing affirmation of the principle: "One man, one vote." The national political parties never lay stress upon the necessity of a trial of armed strength, for the good reason that their objective is not the radical overthrowing of the system.[24]

Wherever one might stand on the issue of armed struggle, Fanon’s central point is that a revolutionary vocabulary that has unchained itself from the trappings of the oppressor's discourse framework can only emerge from new forms of organization, pitted in radical combat with the oppressor. As he adds, "the very forms of organization of the struggle will suggest…a different vocabulary…Brother, sister, friend -- these are words outlawed by the colonialist bourgeoisie, because for them my brother is my purse, my friend is part of my scheme for getting on.”[25] And it is this process of linguistic "liberation" within the French language that Fanon came to observe as the Algerian struggle against French rule was unfolding.  

            In his eloquent work, Words Unchained, Chris Searle makes similar observations with regard to the Caribbean island of Grenada. As in Africa, the Caribbean has experienced decades of cultural and linguistic domination, with the imperial languages being both the conveyors and mediators of colonial and, later, neocolonial ideologies and relations. But the 1979 revolution in Grenada, led by Maurice Bishop, provided conditions for the people

…to create their own political, economic and cultural destiny. It was the first sustained anti-imperialist revolution of the English-speaking world, and its impact upon the English language was proving to be transformational as its impact upon many other of the institutions that it inherited…Language was [now] in their hands to be molded according to their process and resources, to release all the history, energy and genius of their people’s lives and creativity which had been damned underground for centuries.[26]

The language that had once appeared to legitimize racism and dependency and made the people lose confidence in themselves, had now been set free to become the vehicle of a new consciousness, a new vision, and the construction of a new society. Unfortunately the US government did not allow the Grenada revolution to unfold sufficiently for us to have a fuller picture of its wider linguistic meaning and linguistic implications.

            These and other examples demonstrate that the radical transformation of English as an imperial language requires certain conditions of struggle for a radically new social order. The process cannot be the preserve of individual writers, academics and intellectuals totally isolated from the larger part of the social mill in which language is processed and (re)created.

            Furthermore, as much as the struggle over and within English has to continue, I must reiterate a point made elsewhere[27] that counter-discourses in English or other European languages in Africa is not the same thing as independent discourse.  Counter-discourses may continue to be entrapped in the terms of reference of the dominant discourse. An independent discourse, on the other hand, is one that allows Africa to set its own terms of reference. While the power to formulate independent discourses is itself a matter of global struggle, it is worth reflecting whether, at this historical juncture, the re-centering of African languages in African societies does not, in fact, offer better prospects for the construction of discourses that are more independent of the West. Once again I am inclined to agree with Ngugi here that as long as ideas “are available in African languages, even anti-African ideas, the people will start developing them in ways that may not always be in accordance with the needs of the national middle classes and their international allies.”[28] And the challenge that faces Africa is the construction of a space of liberation struggles that is founded on the democratic inclusion of the voices of those of the continent who are not Euro-glottal and Euro-literate. This, I believe, is part of the spirit of the Declaration’s claim that “Democracy is essential for the equal development of African languages and African languages are vital for the development of democracy based on equality and social justice.”

            In this search for a new linguistic order, the Declaration has shown particular sensitivity to gender bias that is inherent in language, African languages included. There also seems to be a recognition here that the interplay between language and patriarchy goes beyond linguistically inscribed gender bias: Like colonialism, patriarchy is a hegemonic order that exploits the full resources of language in virtually all domains of society to construct a world – in this case of gender and gender relations --that seeks to legitimize its perpetuation. The problem is so pervasive, in fact, that some scholars have ended up assuming an extreme position that language is a “man made” product[29] that needs to be “re-invented” by women speaking not only against its structure but, in fact, outside it.[30] The Declaration thus rightly concludes that “The role of African languages in development must overcome this gender bias and achieve gender equality” – presumably in the real world.

But by treating it as a separate category and by relating it only to the imperative of development, has the Declaration made the question of sexism in language unduly peripheral to the broader mission of linguistic struggle for social justice? In the final analysis, the gender question ought to inform the entire agenda of the Declaration; and the approach to the wider concerns of the Declaration must be androgynous (and, if I may add, multicultural). Patricia Hill Collins captures the scope of this linguistic action in terms of the process of rearticulation – Her position is relevant in spite of what one may think of Afrocentricity in its various schools of thought. Discussing the significance of rearticulation for Black women in the USA, Collins argues that:

…rearticulation does not mean reconciling Afrocentric feminist ethics and values with opposing Eurocentric masculine ones. Instead…rearticulation confronts them in the tradition of “naming as power” by revealing them very carefully. Naming daily life by putting language to everyday experience infuses it with the new meaning of an Afrocentric feminist consciousness and becomes a way of transcending the limitations of race, gender, and class subordination.[31]

This is a kind of process that compels us to make the gender question a core, integral part of the entire project of linguistic liberation in its multifarious forms. And when we talk of African languages speaking for Africa, we must be equally mindful of whose voice is included in that act of speaking, in the communicative space of who uses language when and how to achieve what ends.

            The “envoicement” of Africa also requires that local struggles on the continent become linked to those of the emerging global civil society, from Manila to Washington to Rio de Jeneiro. We are in a period, for example, in the aftermath of 9-11, in which thelanguage of rights is invoked by those in power in the USA to precisely violate the human rights and civil liberties of the citizens and residents of this country. Those who employ a counter-discourse to uphold the provisions of the constitution are now labeled unpatriotic under a new dispensation of the Patriot Act that equates patriotism with rabid nationalism. And all this locution, of course, is mediated through the English language.

            For the same reason of September 11, the Manichaean logic of the Bush administration is getting played out in African spaces, from the East to the West. Kenya is on the verge of becoming Africa’s Pakistan in relation to its neighbor, Somalia, devastated as the country may be.[32] And the words of George Bush, expressed in English, have now migrated to Moi’s Kiswahili within the East African context, with all the attendant violation of rights, freedoms and justice that such a linguistic migration implies.

            Obviously, then, even in their local articulations, hegemonic discourses sometime betray more global configurations of power. As a result, the construction of anti-hegemonic discourses would require forging international alliances in a common struggle towards a new consciousness on a global scale. I have become increasingly persuaded that as long as African initiatives for linguistic liberation are limited to Africa and its internal relationships of power, their success will be marginal. And a genuinely radical transformation may depend, in no small measure, on the extent to which African peoples become a conscious part of the anti-globalization movement that is growing in spite of the setback precipitated by the September 11 tragedy.

As the only super-power in the world today, the USA tries to be the memory of the entire world, seeking to dictate what we should remember and what we must forget in the history that we share. Thus in “Today,” NBC’s morning news program of March 11, 2002, for example, Katie Currie described September 11 as “the worst terrorist act in history” – not in American history, not in recent history, but in history. Yet, as Chomsky observes, the US bombing of Sudan’s Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in August 1998 may have been more devastating to the Sudan – in both actual and silent death toll and on the socio-economic well being of the society at large – than September 11 has been to the USA.[33] At issue here is not only the imperative of Africa speaking in its own voice, but also the question of what gets articulated in that act of speaking.

Here we are back to the popular African metaphor of the hunter and the lion. In their encounters, the hunter always emerges victorious because it is he who has the power of voice to narrate the stories. But when the lion eventually regains its own voice we will discover that it too has had its great moments of triumph. So part of the linguistic struggle over meanings is ultimately also a struggle to reclaim Africa’s history and for its appropriate inscription in the global tapestry of human diversity.             

 

NOTES