11 into 1 won't go
IF YOU SOMETIMES feel depressed about
the future of South Africa, a prescription far more effective than
Prozac is to visit a Grade 8 class at Barnato Park High School, in
Berea, a district of high-rise flats in inner-city Johannesburg. Sited
on what was once the ostentatious home of the randlord Barney Barnato,
it contains an excellent senior school, run by skilled and dedicated
teachers and filled with happy and enthusiastic teenagers.
Your mood is guaranteed to improve as you enter the school and notice
the rows of trophies and commendations displayed in the entrance hall.
It will continue to rise as you go into a classroom containing thirty
13 and 14-year-olds, standing politely at their desks, neatly dressed
in their school uniforms and grinning from ear to the ear with
excitement at the prospect of being interviewed about South Africa’s
languages.
The classroom itself deserves a mention: it is sunny and brightly
decorated. The pupils’ desks are arranged not in the rows facing the
teacher’s larger desk in the way familiar from childhood memory, but in
the style associated with Outcomes Based Education (OBE), in groups of
six or eight, for all the world like mini-boardroom tables. The
children sit when their teacher says they may and it is down to
business.
First things first. How many home languages are represented in this
class? Almost every hand goes up — Zulu! (No one is pedantic enough to
say isiZulu) Setswana! Afrikaans! Sepedi! Sesotho! One boy shouts out
Shangaan! He means Xitsonga. Anyone else? Yes, a boy from Zimbabwe who
speaks the Shona language and a girl who answers French, but probably
also has some proficiency in one of the indigenous languages of
francophone Africa. Does anyone in the class speak English at home? Not
the teacher, although Lulama Pohlwana’s English is perfect, her home
language is Zulu. No one at all, then? No, though perhaps one girl does
look a little uncomfortable when the question is asked.
So, how does the class feel about being taught in English? A unanimous
roar of approval greets the question. “It’s great! We love it!” Why?
The answers range from the aesthetic and vague — “because English is
the best language” to the pragmatic and precise — “because you can’t do
anything without English. English is the language of the world. You
need English for a good job.” This last point is frequently repeated.
But what about having to learn subjects like maths and science in a
second language? Isn’t that hard? Several pupils deny this firmly. They
have been taught in English from Grade 1 and now feel completely
confident in it. Others admit that the transition from primary schools
where little or no English was heard to Barnato Park was difficult at
first — but that was 10 months ago, a long time in a 13-year-old’s life
— and they now feel that they are getting on well. Only one girl admits
to finding things difficult, but she does so in competent
conversational English and the teacher is quick to remind her how much
she has improved since the start of the year.
A class of confident and proficient anglophones, then. But how do they
feel about African languages? Should white children be required to
learn an African language? Most certainly — it is only fair and it will
help them to understand us. Would they like to study an African
language’s structure and literature formally, as a school subject? No.
That would be boring and there is no need — we speak them well already.
The ability to speak one or more indigenous languages is a matter of
pride with these children. Several of them claim proficiency in four or
five. What they perceive as their multilingualism, naturally enough,
seems to make them feel accomplished and confident. This linguistic
Eden, though, is not without a snake or two.
The girl who looked uncomfortable earlier explains, in startlingly
precise English, what is troubling her. Her family has moved about a
lot. Her parents were originally Setswana speakers but they have lived
in a number of countries. The family has fallen into the habit of
speaking English almost all the time and so she really only knows a few
words of Setswana. When she first arrived at Barnato Park, she was
worried that the other children would take her dependence on English as
snobbery. The impression remains that, for the majority of these
children, English is like one’s smartest clothes — capable of creating
an excellent impression, to be used for best — but not completely
comfortable or homely.
Real comfort is epitomised by the language of their unanimously
favourite radio station — Yfm. With over a million listeners it is the
largest and fastest-growing radio station in Gauteng and one of the
largest radio stations in the country as a whole. Yfm targets South
Africa’s largest and fastest-growing “demographic” — as the media
jargon has it — with repetitive, loud and lively music: hip-hop, house
and its local equivalent, kwaito. Hip-hop and house songs are sung (if
that is the word) in African-American slang and are at least as often
witty and linguistically inventive as they are violent and obscene. The
locally produced kwaito music is analogous, but its base language is
township slang. The young black presenters command an English that is
clear, contemporary and, like the songs, often very witty. Importantly,
though, they break into township slang fairly often, particularly when
speaking to callers.
This township slang, often called tsotsitaal, is a patois on a Zulu
base, though it contains very many loan-words from other African
languages, from English and Afrikaans, highly topical references and
pure invention. It is, teachers agree, this slang which facilitates
communication in multilingual schools and which, it is fair to
speculate, contributes largely to pupils’ sense that they command a
very large number of languages. Of course, some do, but the use of
township slang enables people to communicate whatever their home
language may be. One pupil, asked about his languages, was more precise
than the rest. He said that he spoke English at school, isiZulu when he
went to visit relations near Estcourt and tsotsi at home. His teacher
was sceptical: was he sure he spoke real, “deep” isiZulu in
KwaZulu-Natal? He insisted that he did. If he is right, he may be a
little unusual.
The impression of formally educated adults seems to be that many urban
people, particularly young children and teenagers, do not command
versions of indigenous languages acceptable to rural people and
formally educated speakers of these languages. Of course, in the case
of Barnato Park pupils, the inability to use indigenous languages in a
formal way is compensated for (socially if not linguistically) by their
excellent English. Barnato Park pupils’ command of English is
supported, refreshed and enlarged by their teachers, many of whom are
native English-speakers, by their linguistically anglophile parents and
by their families’ middle-class incomes or willingness to make large
sacrifices. This money supports their children’s attendance at a highly
stimulating school and tends to gives them plenty of exposure to the
treats and temptations of anglophone global consumer culture. These are
not, of course, everyone’s circumstances.
For these reasons, although a visit to Barnato Park High School to
investigate language use is guaranteed to cheer one up, it does not
leave a completely unclouded impression. Is Barnato Park really an
ideal or best practicable model for South Africa’s language
development? Even if it is, can it, in the dreary idiom of development
studies, be “reliably replicated” and “scaled up”? Should a thousand
Barnato Parks bloom? Can they?
Most of the current generation of South Africans are, sadly, hostile
to indigenous languages, whether they realise it or not. A successful
political approach, therefore, will need to have its roots not in the
heady enthusiasm of nationalism but in a detailed understanding of the
linguistic composition and linguistic preferences of South African
society. Our society does not value its multilingualism, its 11
official languages. Many English-speaking people, including myself,
when first told that South Africa would have 11 — 11, for heaven’s sake
— official languages, thought it rather an amusing excess of political
correctness, which would do no more than lightly disguise the dominance
of English. Others, less unthinking, may have mildly regretted the
decline of other languages, but accept that the rise of English and the
destruction of indigenous languages are an inevitable consequence of
globalisation. The majority view, however, is perhaps the most sadly
misguided of all, combining an over-valuation of English with a
dangerous complacency about African languages. As the Barnato Park
pupils say, “You can’t do anything without English. You need English
for a good job.” True, but if you are to communicate effectively with
most of the population, you need at least one other language too.
The Grade 8s at Barnato Park are also almost certainly over-confident
about the future of African languages, suggesting as they do that there
is no need to worry about the indigenous languages, because “we can
speak them anyway”. This is a widely held view. The Sunday Independent
reported last year the case of a Cape Town Xhosa-speaking mother,
Patricia Njamalo, insisting that her four-year-old daughter be
prevented from speaking any language but English at pre-school. She
argued that “All you should be teaching them is how to be successful in
a white man’s world” because “they already know how to be black.”
But if “being black” means the ability to use indigenous languages
confidently and in a wide range of contexts, there is real doubt as to
whether that Xhosa-speaking mother is correct. Some of South Africa’s
smallest and most neglected languages — Tshivenda, Xitsonga, the
varieties of Ndebele, are at real risk of following most of the
Khoi-San languages into extinction. Even the larger, more apparently
robust indigenous languages risk drifting out of focus for many urban
South Africans. If current trends continue, “deep” or “heavy” Zulu, a
language of considerable grammatical complexity with a rich oral and
written literature, will become as inaccessible as Latin is now to most
speakers of French or Italian.
As things stand at the moment, Yfm or, rather, the social forces that
have rocketed it to success — rapid and sustained urbanisation,
globalisation, South Africa’s youth-heavy population structure, the
increasing power and influence of youth culture — will fundamentally
alter South Africa’s indigenous languages.
The process will take significantly longer outside Gauteng, but is
likely eventually to leave many South Africans unable to access the
cultural wealth carried by the traditional forms of indigenous culture.
The roughly 90 per cent of the school population who have not been to
schools such as Barnato Park (or, in ascending order of exclusivity,
though not necessarily quality, a Catholic school, an ex-model C
school, a private “Saint”, ethnic or profit-making school) will not be
able to understand formal English either. This 90 per cent will
certainly not be left inarticulate. Township slang can be used to say
anything, but people who depend on it exclusively will not be able to
communicate effectively with rural people, gain the skills needed to
get a good job, or understand the simplest government or corporate
communication, even one issued in all 11 official languages. For the
vast majority of rural African people, and those living in less
linguistically diverse cities, such as Durban or Bloemfontein, change
will come more slowly, not that their current linguistic situation
offers them any material advantages. The ability to speak elegant
traditional isiXhosa and a few words of English will, equally with
township slang, get you nowhere in modern South Africa. To put it
bluntly, South Africa is rapidly developing a linguistically adrift
urban population to add to its linguistically isolated rural one.
As the National Education Policy Investigation of 1992 pointed out in
its report on language issues, this is a recipe for continued and
worsened class division. As race eventually becomes a less important
divide, command of English will become ever more important as a marker
of status and of access to all the desirable trappings that come with
being middle class. Perhaps the Grade 8 pupil at Barnato Park who was
worried about being taking for a snob is on to something. Most of the
solution, of course, lies in education.
But what sort of education? The obvious — and incorrect — answer is
one of the few things that unites black and white English-speaking
South Africans almost completely: English, English and more English.
The head of Barnato Park, Agnes Nugent, tells the following story.
Quite frequently, the school holds meetings to keep parents informed.
Barnato Park parents have usually taken considerable trouble to get
their children into the school and care deeply about it. Parent-teacher
meetings are therefore very well attended. At these meetings, Mrs
Nugent says, “One parent will stand up and say ‘Why are you not
teaching the vernaculars?’ and then six or seven will jump up and say,
‘We’ve had this discussion. If you want your children to study the
vernacular or learn their subjects in the vernacular, go somewhere
else.’ And everyone will shout this parent down.”
A similar story comes from Jeppe Preparatory. This is an excellent and
educationally progressive primary school in Johannesburg’s inner
eastern suburbs. It teaches the children of recently arrived Eastern
European and Chinese immigrants, an increasing number of the moderately
affluent black middle class and a significant remnant of the Portuguese
community that used to dominate the area. A typical class may contain
10 home languages, from siSwati to Hungarian by way of Cantonese. This
year, the Grade 1 class put on a show based on a Zulu folktale
involving the singing of songs in Zulu. The white parents disliked the
sight of their little angels singing in a black language. The black
parents complained that they had not sent their children to this school
in order to have their culture respected. Both demanded the extirpation
of all African influences at once.
These parental attitudes are not likely to lead to the best possible
educational outcomes for their children. There is remarkable unanimity
among language-in-education experts about the best approach to
education in multilingual environments. This approach is called
“additive bilingualism”. It involves the gradual replacement of the
home language as the medium of instruction by the target language —
English, in the South African case. This replacement, though, is never
complete. Ideally, children entering school would be taught entirely in
their home language for four to six years, while learning the target
language as a subject. Then, slowly, more and more subjects would come
to be taught in the target language. In the final years of school, the
only subject to be taught in the home language would probably be that
language’s grammar and literature. If one put this suggestion to a
group of Barnato Park pupils, they would immediately retort that a
scheme so gradual and so complex is unnecessary: they learned English
quickly and easily, so why should they be subjected to this tedious
drip-feeding? The answer is that children who are fortunate enough to
go to schools like Barnato Park are immersed in the target language.
Almost everything at the school happens in English, from cheering on
the sports teams to buying chips in the tuckshop. Mrs Nugent reports
that as they progress up the school, they tend also to use English for
their private conversations. In such circumstances young people learn
to speak English very quickly. If this conversational competence is
reinforced by high-quality formal teaching, Barnato Park-style children
are indeed produced — happy, confident, well-equipped.
Even here, though, there are difficulties. Children who are not
linguistically competent in their home language struggle even more in
English. Except for the most linguistically gifted, English remains
slightly uncomfortable, for “best”. This is unlikely ever to amount to
more than a very slight disadvantage in the job market. After all, most
home language English speakers do not do very well with formal English
either. It does, though, place otherwise creative and sensitive people
at a greater distance than necessary from the pleasures and resources
of literature, especially since people in this situation are unlikely
to be able to enjoy literary art or entertainment in an indigenous
language.
Much more seriously, there is a considerable amount of evidence to
suggest that these children’s competence in conversational English is
not necessarily accompanied by comprehension of abstract or formally
stated ideas. In the jargon of the field, BICS — or basic interpersonal
communication skills do not imply CALP — or cognitive academic language
proficiency. Teachers report that their own experience supports the
findings of researchers. Belinda Williams, head of English teaching at
Jeppe Preparatory and a qualified multilingual teacher, recalls that
the concept of a “cold front” eluded her non home-language grade 7
pupils longer than it did pupils who spoke English at home, even though
almost everyone in the class chatters away in English perfectly well.
She solved the problem by asking a pupil with good English and good
Zulu to explain the idea in Zulu to her struggling classmates. And so
on, for each of the languages spoken in her class. But these cognitive
difficulties are easy to overlook when everyone is speaking English
quite happily. It takes a highly trained and experienced teacher to
detect them and a teacher willing to use some of the techniques of
Outcomes Based Education to correct them.
OBE was adopted by the education ministry under Sibusiso Bengu. It has
worked very well in New Zealand, but then so many policies do in those
sparsely populated and exceptionally well-regulated islands. The new
minister, Kader Asmal, is said to be looking at the policy with a
somewhat more jaundiced eye than his predecessor, as well he might. OBE
requires, among other things, teachers who are themselves good at
formulating and assessing abstract “outcomes” and who are willing to
arrange their classrooms in the style adopted at Barnato Park and other
educationally progressive schools.
This re-arrangement is very far from trivial. It reduces teachers’
authority, transforming them from absolute monarchs, pacing the rows of
desks, book or stick in hand, to something more like convenors of
discussions — a much more difficult and subtle job. In the South
African context, these discussions should be permitted, where
necessary, to take place in any language or slang that will aid
comprehension of ideas like “cold front”. Only the report back need
take place in English. As Williams points out, this requires a
confident and culturally liberal teacher, preferably one who has both
BICS and CALP in more than one language.
To suppose that there is a large supply of such teachers in South
Africa is pure fantasy. There are precious few teachers who can teach
effectively in English and Asmal has recently wondered aloud whether
some teachers are earning their pay. Williams, in addition to teaching
at Jeppe, also trains teachers in Orange Farm. There, she says, it is
more a matter of enabling teachers to construct a basic spelling lesson
than training them in the art of multilingual OBE.
Remarks such as these cannot be swept under the carpet as ministerial
tactlessness or white racist stereotyping. The reports of all the
large-scale research projects undertaken by no less an authority than
the President’s Education Initiative, set up by Nelson Mandela, have
been published this year in a volume entitled Getting Learning Right
and they each support this view. The evil legacy of Verwoerd’s Bantu
education lives on. Most township schools are still dominated by
teachers who rely on rote, on pointless class recitations from English
textbooks which nobody in the room, including the teacher, understands.
In these situations, people leave school speaking township slang,
rudimentary English and barely able to read an Omo advert, let alone a
newspaper in any language.
Given this reality, and universal parental pressure, it is not
surprising that there has been a discernible drift in education policy
thinking away from the goal of additive bilingualism to a rueful
acceptance that “the more realistic option is a straight-for-English
approach”. This is supported by attempts to discover the “minimum
requirements for successful training in English in South African
schools”, as Getting Learning Right puts it. A blunter way of making
the same point would be to say that most South African teachers need
retraining so that they can at least speak, read and write English
competently.
The sad truth is that this is a country where a black township teacher
says that she “will not be pushed like a wheelbarrow” into improving
her approach, and where a white teacher writes that he gets annoyed
when black pupils “back chat and click in their languages” in his
classroom. The Gauteng education department will not pay teachers to
attend the multilingualism courses offered by non-governmental
organisations. Parents continue to demand English only from Grade 1 in
schools where no one speaks it properly.
Thami Mazwai, chairman of the (non-governmental) African Renaissance
Commission and one of the most prominent Africanist public
intellectuals, and Mongane Wally Serote, poet and MP, have recently
argued for much wider use of African languages. As Mazwai puts it, “It
is only in Africa where black parents say to their children ‘talk
English’. Our children have to be taught maths and science in English
but for as long as you teach those subjects in English, you are
teaching that child that his language, his culture is not good
enough.”
But our June 16 commemoration of the 1976 Soweto uprising reminds us
each year what can happen when a language is forced onto unwilling
people. What South Africa needs, therefore, is to find an educational
approach which supports the widest possible use of indigenous languages
in ways that pupils, parents and teachers will accept. If attitudes do
not change, our very limited national capacity to communicate across
race and class divides will decline even further.