Hope and Doom 3

(excerpted from travel blog to South Africa, March 2004, http://sbmhome.typepad.com/south_africa)

As the conversation worked its way around the table, a woman lecturer from Vista, the historically black university that has recently merged with UPE, addressed Mthunzi’s comments by saying “It is already lost. The languages and cultures are lost.” She added that when she passes children from the township at 5:30 a.m., standing on the corner dressed and ready for school, waiting to be bussed to the integrated schools in the city where they learn in English, bypassing the local schools, she knows that there is no hope. Everyone knows that English is the language of schooling, and success, and money. Why would they hang on to their traditional cultures?

I spoke to her after the discussion had come to a close, wanting to know if she really did not see anyway to balance the language of instruction and the maintenance of home cultures, or if she was using her cynicism to make a point about the looming language and culture crisis. She said, “Well, I am a prophetess of doom. There is no hope. We will see; there is no hope.”

Again this is one of those many places where the strong parallels with issues in US society and education take a twist; a twist that I actually see as hopeful possibility. I am pretty firmly in Mthunzi’s camp, but I think that much like immigrant experiences in US schools, it will take the second and third generations of post-apartheid life to decide to reclaim their language and culture heritages. There is a shared narrative with the immigrant experience in our schools, but here, no one has left home. What I see as the power here in South Africa is that everyone, everyone, has a heritage language and culture to maintain and everyone is bilingual or multilingual. So it’s a matter of seizing that power and seeing the value in it. The sociopolitical scenario has the potential to be dramatically different from something like the mess of bilingual education for "language minority" students we have made in the States, where we equate heritage language with language deficit. There is also the interesting complextity that English here is not yet completely, and I mean yet, the language of oppression. That status is clearly given to Afrikaans by the majority of the population. And then you have to add to the mix the fact that Afrikaans is one of the heritage languages that stands to be lost in the face of schooling in English.

If the heritage language majority here can push to socially and politically value what they have and shape educational reform or revolution with educators like Mthunzi, the prophet of hope, then the prophetess of doom just might be proven wrong. I think she hopes it will happen this way.