British Council Regional Director, Hugh Moffatt (Chair),
British Council Chief Executive, Martin Davidson,
Honourable Ministers and colleagues,
Conference partners,
Delegates and distinguished guests,
Ladies and gentlemen.
It is a special honour for South Africa’s Department of Basic Education, our government and our people to welcome all delegates and leaders to the 10th international language conference.
It is quite crucial to interrogate language and development particularly given the current socio-economic situation facing individual states and the world. It has become more critical in light of the recent global financial and economic crisis to work even much closer further to develop and sustain our countries.
Even though it offers no immediate panacea to all the problems of the world, we believe education has a major role to play in development and in changing the world we live in into a better place for all of humanity.
Similarly, language as a tool by which we adapt to our environment, assume a culture and communicate with those around us has an important role to play in our development and in humanity’s endeavour to shape and transform lives using scarce resources at our disposal.
According to Antonio Gramsci (1971:325) “every language contains elements of conception of the world and of a culture.” Frantz Fanon has also posited in 1952 that “there is an extraordinary power in the possession of language” (2008:2).
The realisation of linguistic equity should assist in promoting diverse cultural identities and broadening opportunities and equity beyond 2015 as we aptly say in our theme. The 10th Language Conference has a crucial role to play in this regard.
We trust that out of this process we can best influence the international community to do more to advance the attainment of Millennium Development Goals ahead of the 2015 review.
It is against this background that we thank you for bringing this conference to South Africa, making it the second time it has come to our continent. We therefore have good reason as Africans to feel honoured to receive you again following the successful conference in Juba, South Sudan.
By coming to Africa now indeed you have enriched the continent’s celebrations of 50 years of the African Union whose theme is that of “Pan-Africanism and African Renaissance.” It is a theme that may easily be associated with the question of language and culture and their role in society and development.
It is in language that we can say and be understood to be saying that we will drive Africa’s development and renaissance to the extent that we reverse the legacy of centuries of inequality, illiteracy, marginalisation and underdevelopment.
This calls for conscious and practical steps to expand the frontiers of opportunity, broaden equity, roll-back the dark tide of poverty and conflict and indeed define ourselves anew in the post-colonial era to the benefit of all hitherto alienated nations.
It is precisely for reasons of global citizenship and cultural diversity that language remains an important issue. In our context, I speak of both indigenous and assimilated languages. For us in Africa, developing and speaking the languages of the land and the languages that we had acquired as part of the colonial enterprise will bring to speed the realisation of the vision of our forebears that is to unite and integrate Africa.
I believe South Africa’s experience will assist conference deeply to appreciate the importance of language in society and how it is critical to liberating the mind, promoting equity and quality in education and enhancing development.
Even beyond apartheid and its discourses of difference, language still impacts on our relations and opportunities in life. The world did unite in support of our people in the face of the reckless imposition of one of our languages to the detriment of educational opportunities of others – a development that led to the Soweto Uprisings.
Next year South Africa will celebrate twenty years of democracy. Necessarily, this requires that we review progress we have made in advancing social cohesion, nation-building and reversing the inequitable and alienating legacy of the past. We will be doing this also ahead of the review of our performance on the Millennium Development Goals.
This conference is of importance as it gets us already thinking and reflecting on this important review of the MDGs.
Esteemed delegates,
For us the 10th Language Conference is epoch-making as it promises to provide a useful lens through which all of us can interrogate critically the extent to which countries have performed in pursuance of the Millennium Development Goals.
I believe at the heart of the MDGs also rests the whole matter of language and its role in articulating and influencing the kind of development we all desire.
This conference is very timely. It takes place when many countries across the globe are grappling still with formidable challenges around equity, identity formation and the creation of value-adding opportunities for communities.
This is even more pressing for historically marginalised communities whose voices are often denied spaces to be heard and justly affirmed. I want to believe that this conference possesses immense possibilities for participating states closely to examine these complex issues of language and development.
We look forward to clear pointers on how this interaction will translate into practical programmes and actions with a potential to impact positively on the lives of the people, especially of school-children we all are required to humanise.
Ladies and gentlemen,
We can agree that language has always played a fundamental role in various societies especially with regard to extracting meaning and making sense of “elements of conception of the world defining people as subjects, groups and communities.”
With this understanding, South Africa’s Department of Basic Education that is responsible for schooling in the country, has always viewed language, with its development, as a tool for empowering communities to attain higher levels of cultural, political and economic consciousness.
Alive to current challenges and conscious of the fact that the option of returning to some idyllic past is not open to us, we have adopted a multilingual approach for our schools.
Learning from our history of racial and cultural injustice, we believe multilingualism and multiculturalism will enrich our efforts nationally to cultivate unity and nation-building while promoting our interconnectedness with Africa and the world.
During the first four years of schooling that include the reception year, learners take home language as the language of teaching and learning and English from Grade 1.
Research shows that children are likely to achieve higher levels of literacy when using a home language in school, in our case, African languages like IsiZulu, IsiXhosa, Setswana and others. (We have 11 official languages in the country including English.)
Public discourse in South Africa on the imperative to improve learning outcomes has suggested that the challenges of the education system include the fact that learners are taught and examined in languages that are not home languages.
It is with this understanding as well as the imperative to unite our people that schools in South Africa will be required as policy to teach all children African languages, incrementally from 2014, so that they all can learn languages of the land for better cultural understanding, unity and new relations.
But to reach this point in the development of our language policies has not been smooth sailing at all, probably given our past history of social division and segregation. We were taken to court to defend what we believe to be in the best interest of building a better country for a better continent and a better world.
Some sought to oppose the idea of children being taught IsiZulu at higher level as in Nkosi v Durban High School. Some Afrikaans medium schools were refusing to enrol children who had to be taught in English as in Hoerskool Ermelo v HOD of the Mpumalanga Department of Education.
The point one is making is that the adoption of an inclusive, unifying and emancipatory language policy does not only promise equality of opportunity while broadening access and promoting equity. It also increases efficiency and quality in education, particularly in societies hitherto torn apart by divisive and disempowering discourses of difference and inequity.
It’s important I believe to let all languages and cultures flourish. It’s in this way that we can strengthen the foundation for peace, sound governance, cooperation and sustainable development. That’s why we’re here!
This intellectual encounter will help our countries to strengthen their policies and processes in respect of language and how it can be leveraged to advance development.
What we do here will indeed show our commitment to tackle development challenges facing regions like ours hitherto subjected to alienating socio-cultural and economic phenomena. We thank and congratulate the British Council and all partners for making possible this meeting of great minds.
South Africa commends you for this historic landmark, the 10th international conference on language, in a journey that began in Thailand in 1993 with the first conference.
Chairperson, allow me once more to welcome all delegates.
Lastly, I invite all participants after Fanon (1952:206) to work with us in building “a new relation” between former “coloniser and colonised”. We all can and “must move away from the inhuman voices of [our] respective ancestors so that a genuine communication can be born. Before embarking on a positive voice, freedom needs to make an effort at disalienation.”
I thank you!
