LANGUAGE POLICIES IN AFRICA INTERGOVERNMENTAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE POLICIES IN AFRICA Harare, Zimbabwe 17-21 March 1997 FINAL REPORT (revised) by Herbert Chimhundu (Rapporteur General / University of Zimbabwe) Unesco Web version edited by Karsten Legère INTERGOVERNMENTAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE POLICIES IN AFRICA Harare, Zimbabwe, 17-21 March 1998 FINAL REPORT by Herbert Chimhundu (Rapporteur General / University of Zimbabwe) ©UNESCO 2002 Preliminary remarks The material enclosed in this web version of the forthcoming publication “Language Policies in Africa” was originally compiled by Herbert Chimhundu after the Harare conference in March 1997. At that time, Prof. Chimhundu was commissioned by UNESCO to write a report on the meeting and to compile the speeches and other documents. The manuscript that he subsequently submitted to UNESCO was left unattended until Director Noriko Aikawa (Intangible Heritage Unit of UNESCO) approached me in a letter dated February 6, 2001, where she expressed UNESCO’s wish to have the manuscript published as soon as possible. She suggested that both a publisher and funds for subsidising the publication be found. The latter was a rather difficult issue, since a number of potential donors who were contacted while I was in Namibia were not able to support the publication. Finally, some Norwegian colleagues from Oslo University responded positively. They were prepared to fund publication of the document in Namibia within the framework of the trilateral cooperation between Universities of Oslo, Zimbabwe and Gothenburg. In the meantime, the manuscript returned by UNESCO was thoroughly checked to make sure that the version to be submitted to potential donors and publishers was in a proper shape. As instructed by Director Aikawa, the speeches given at the conference were shortened and clearly focused on the message, while some redundancies (such as long introductions, words of thanks etc.) were dropped. A number of inconsistencies were found and, where possible, corrected. The text was completely revised for typos and formatted to the extent that a publisher’s house style would be easy to apply. Finally, Dr. Carol Benson (Centre for Bilingualism, Stockholm University) went through the manuscript again for a final comprehensive language check. However, the official documents as well as the speech extracts remained untouched, the reason being that it does not seem appropriate to change anything in this type of official text. Prof. Chimhundu was contacted for a final edit in March 2002. Although his feedback could not be obtained until July 2002, all of the remaining questions could be answered meanwhile. Hence the revision of the manuscript of the Harare conference of 1997 was completed in June 2002 and subsequently handed over to Director Aikawa at UNESCO headquarters in Paris during a meeting on June 26, 2002, where benchmarks of the work on the manuscript as well as the strategy for its immediate publication were discussed. Even though we were waiting for a promised update from UNESCO, it was felt that the material was already at a stage that made a web version possible. In fact, the documents of the Harare conference need to be made available to a wider audience, since otherwise the fundamental decisions of March 1997 made to improve the situation of African languages will be completely forgotten. Already more than five years have elapsed since the Harare conference, and if we look at what has been done so far to implement the recommendations, it will be difficult to detect any progress made in this respect. On the contrary, the position of African languages, which was the major focus of the Harare meeting, appears to have been undermined even more than it was five years ago. Some documents included in the Chimhundu manuscript were dropped in consultation with UNESCO Paris. Excluded in this web version are the following: - Report on the Pan African Seminar on the Problems and Prospects of the Use of African National Languages, Accra, 26-30 August 1996 (which is a mixture of English and French texts), - Report on the Experts’ Meeting on the Strategies for the Promotion of African Languages in Education, Conakry, 21-25 September 1991 (the meeting was in 1981 - UNESCO published the proceedings and documents of the Conakry meeting shortly thereafter), - Action Plan on Cultural Policies from the Stockholm Conference of 1998 (found unnecessary by Dir. Aikawa-- to be replaced by a document on linguistic policies [forthcoming]), and - Zimbabwe Report on the Intergovernmental Conference on Culture and Development, Stockholm, 30 March - 2 April 1998 (similar to the Action Plan, but too country-specific). The editor of this web version thanks all who have helped him to complete the manuscript, namely Carol Benson, Herbert Chimhundu, Oddrun Grønvik, Karl Gadellii and Jouni Maho. The financial support of SAREC (via the project “African languages at Gothenburg University”), which enabled the editor to make a visit to UNESCO in June 2002, is gratefully acknowledged. Karsten Legère Göteborg, 2002-12-15 TABLE OF CONTENTS PART IGENERAL REPORT . 2 PART IITHE EXPERTS’ MEETING . 16 PART IIIMINISTERS’ CONFERENCE . 37 PART IV THE HARARE DECLARATION . 49 PART VOTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS ONLANGUAGE POLICY IN AFRICA . 57 PART VIEXPERTS’ CONTRIBUTIONS . 69 PART VIIEXTRACTS FROM SELECTED SPEECHES . 76 PART VIII PARTICIPATION . 95 PART IX PROGRAMME . 119 1 PART I GENERAL REPORT A INTRODUCTION 1. The Intergovernmental Conference on Language Policies in Africa, which was held in Harare (Zimbabwe) from 17 - 21 March 1997, was the first meeting of its kind involving language specialists attending as governmental experts and doing the preparatory work for and advising relevant government ministers from their countries who were also attending the same conference. This conference has had far greater impact than any of the previous ones on language issues in Africa, partly because of this combination within official delegations at such a high level of representation from almost all the countries on the continent, and partly because the whole conference was well focussed on coming up with something concrete at the end of the day. 2. All African Member States of UNESCO were invited to the conference and altogether 51 out of 54 African countries attended as follows: Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Saõ Tomé and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zaire, Zambia and Zimbabwe. 3. At the special invitation of UNESCO, India and Switzerland also sent delegates to the conference, while France, Germany and the United Kingdom sent official observers, as did five intergovernmental or international organisations (OAU, ACCT, AVA, British Council and UNESCO itself.). 4. The general aim of the Intergovernmental Conference on Language Policies in Africa (ICLPA) was to draw up strategies and define prospects for the political and technical management of the African linguistic context, with the main outcome expected being a mutually agreed reference framework to be used by each African state to set out a clear and comprehensive national language policy indicating precisely the statuses and functions of the languages in use and the measures proposed to implement that policy. 5. Since such policy at the national level would have to be specific, coherent and realistic, its formulation would have to be preceded by research, much of which had been done across the continent over the years, to determine: • which languages are the dominant local languages, inter-community languages or languages used more widely; • which languages are used for what and at which levels; • what budget is required for further research, for production of materials (especially for teaching), and for the equipment, personnel and structures to be set up to manage this policy. The language policy itself must: • define short, medium and long term goals; 2 • take stock of the problems to be resolved; • determine the methods and resources to be used, and, in particular, the mechanisms to be set up. The basis for the strategies laid down must • be the linguistic landscape of the country and the region and • among the functions to be specified for each of the languages in the particular context must be its use in the exercise of state functions and in relations between the state and its citizens. 6. Implicit in all this is a new openness to, and acceptance of, multilingualism in the nation states themselves, something that has not always been the case in post-colonial Africa. After African countries gained political independence, impassioned controversy arose in both intellectual and political circles as to the status of the different indigenous languages among themselves and vis-à- vis that of the language of the former colonial power. The debate became highly complex when a whole mosaic of languages was involved and, basically, two opposing views emerged. On the one hand, there were those who saw multilingualism as a conflict situation upon which you could not build a united modern nation state, while on the other hand some emphasised the complimentarity of the different languages as