Language and Education in Africa: A fresh approach to the debates on language, education, and cultural identity

Abstract

Language and Education in Africa is a 244-page monograph comprehensively dealing with the topic. It comes at a critical juncture of the debates on African languages in education. Over this decade, the theme has become topical and the book reinforces earlier appeals to develop African education in the medium of languages of Africa and to thus reclaim African cultural identity. A continuing burden of Africa is the diglossic system, characterized by the dominance of former colonial languages in all formal domains. The book starts with a short discussion of Adichie’s novel Americanah. The novel has been translated into many languages but is unavailable in Igbo, the mother tongue of the author. This is identified as a specific ‘African absurdity’. Adichie’s views on the issue are discussed; they all point to the complicated relationship between cultural identity, language and education. This leads to the book’s three central questions: Why African languages are not used in education?, what are the possibilities for rational language and education policies? and how can large-scale cultural differences and similarities in Africa be described?