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Politics of Language Choice in African Education: The Case of Kenya and Malawi



Author(s)

Sam Mchombo

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DOI:10.17265/2328-2134/2017.04.001

In August 2015 the government of South Africa issued Circular S10 of 2015, to inform education authorities that Mandarin would be taught in the schools beginning January 2016. Immediately, the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) expressed stiff opposition to it, rejecting it as constituting a “new form of colonization”. The notification informed national and provincial education authorities that Mandarin would be incrementally implemented in schools such that “Grades 4-9 and 10 will be implemented in January 2016, followed by grade 11 in 2017 and grade 12 in 2018” (Nkosi, 2015). Part of the justification for the introduction of Mandarin is that China is South Africa’s biggest trading partner; as such, it is important for the children of South Africa to “become proficient in the Confucius language and develop a good understanding of Chinese culture” (Nkosi, 2015). There was nothing said about China’s reciprocation through changes to the language curriculum of China’s educational system. Sadtu’s reaction conforms to the interrogation of the use of language and education as the arena of power politics, exemplified here by the asymmetric power relations between the two countries. This feeds into the realities of African education that, largely, remains shackled through its content and languages of instruction to foreign knowledge systems, reinforced through globalization, science and technology. For instance, with regard to language of instruction the Malawi Government issued the Education Act of 2012 that decreed that English would be studied and used as medium of instruction from grade 1. Language-in-education policies of other African countries differ minimally from that of Malawi. With focus on Kenya and Malawi the paper will examine the politics of language and curricula in African education. 

colonialism, African education, national language, language in education, conceptual and linguistic incarceration, decolonization, multilingualism