Anti-Colonial and Post-Independence Language Politics: From Emancipatory Aspirations to Limits

Abstract

‘[T]he majority of children start school using a foreign language’, a 2010 education report on African education observes (Ouane and Glanz, 2010, p. 4). The UN designated 2006 the Year of African Languages, and the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) agreed a new Plan of Action for African Languages to address the continent’s language situation, in which ‘Most African countries continue to use the former colonial language as the primary language of instruction and governance’ (Ouane and Glanz, 2010, p. 4). Twenty years earlier the OAU had drafted a similar Plan of Action, seeking to overcome the continent’s reliance on former colonial languages. The same year, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o published Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), which condemned Africa’s failure to embrace its own languages and free itself from linguistic depend-ency (Ngũgĩ, 1986, p. 4).