Researching language and culture in Africa using an autoethnographic approach

Abstract

This article has its basis in the author’s own growing annoyance at so-called “sandwich” programmes, where young academics from developing countries study and learn theories at universities in the Global North, then go to their own countries for fieldwork – only to return to the host country to fit their data into the theories of the Global North. The purpose of this article is twofold. The author’s first aim is to demonstrate that the thinking and concepts of some African educational thinkers such as, for example, Julius Nyerere, fit the educational reality in Africa better than those of Western thinkers, and that these concepts should therefore be used. Second, she argues that when it comes to building theories from the ground, the life experiences of Africans (in terms of everyday reality, indigenous knowledge, cultural transmission, community engagement etc.) should be taken into account. She explains why, through her own teaching at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, she became interested in the qualitative research method called autoethnography. She also draws on her experience of teaching qualitative research methods at a number of historically black universities in South Africa. She notes a recent positive development in the availability of a promising postgraduate programme with an authoethnographic approach. Entitled “The Narrative Study of Lives” and launched by the South African University of the Free State (UFS) Department of Sociology in 2012, this Master’s and PhD programme builds entirely on African experiences. In the last part of her article, the author applies an autoethnographic approach to the study of languages in Africa. She explains that some of her Tanzanian students grew up with several Tanzanian languages simultaneously, so that Western linguists’ terms like “mother tongue”, first and second language do not make sense to them. She also introduces the concept of ubuntu translanguaging, an effective practice of purposeful juxtaposition of languages observed in African empirical research.