I was privileged to receive an African Studies Presidential Fellowship for 2011, which entailed visits to Rutgers University and the Kluge Centre at the Library of Congress and attendance of the 50th African Studies Association Annual Meeting in Washington DC. Throughout the tenure of the fellowship I refined my academic mantra: linguistic and literacy interface. The concept of interface blends different modes (multimodality), different languages (multilingualism) and skills (multiliteracy) and interrogates fluidity of their meeting points. There are three basic questions defining my agenda: What happens when African children juggle between two systems to develop reading and/or multimodal literacy? What happens when they are taught in languages they do not understand? What happens when African languages take an agentive role in localizing English?
I carried with myself these defining questions as I visited classes at Rutgers University to do guest lectures. The first class focused on language politics, allowing me space to relate the story of South Africa’s bold language policy that recognized 11 official languages and how this policy should be interpreted with a series of larger socio-political processes that gave birth to it: Dutchification (1652), Anglicization (1795), Afrikanerization (1948), Soweto student uprising (1976) and democratisation (1994). My lecture showed that there are historically ordained ideological issues that limit utilization of indigenous African languages such as negative attitudes and mythical economic reasons about costs. Constitutional emphasis on the need to utilize previously marginalized languages, however, remains a positive story so far in the modern history of African languages.
In next topic on children’s literacies, I argued that visual mode and other neglected modes of communication have proliferated children’s lives, but the schools and parents seem to be “old” in keeping up with the trends and therefore failing the children who are otherwise intelligent. Using reading images as a theoretical construct, I presented on the grammar of the visual design, which needs to be interpreted with verbal grammar as we read multimodal texts. I further presented results of an empirical study I conducted in South Africa, showing a commonsense, but deep reality: the need to rethink literacy and prepare our 21st century children.
The Library of the Congress offered a unique opportunity to research language development over time, especially language cognition, language-in education, and the missionary “misinventions” and “disinventions” of African language orthographies and their Tower of the Babel misconceptions that exaggerated multilingualism in Africa. My public lecture on Challenges and Prospects of 11 Official Language policy in South Africa was well received by the audience at the Library and the questions raised deepened my drive to do further research on the historical accounts of language policy development.
The fellowship ended with a special session on New English in South Africa at the ASA Annual Meeting. I debunked the myth that African languages are passive recipients of English’s bully blows. Instead, they are catalysts of change in taming the shrew in the new African sociolinguistic milieu.
Overall, a fruitful fellowship tenure!
