GIFT OF TONGUES
Mike Nicol

Fair Lady Magazine
October 2005

In August this year, the MEC for Education in the Western Cape said the Department was moving towards making Xhosa a compulsory subject in the province's schools. Opponents of such a policy have valid concerns, but it's becoming apparent that mother-tongue education cannot be ignored any longer.

Sitting opposite me in the coffee shop is Bernice Mpamonyne, straight out of a matric prelim exam, her tie loosely knotted, occasionally covering her face in a black scarf. For the last eight years she has lived in Fish Hoek and attended the schools in the valley.

Bernice's mother works at my local petrol station. Because she likes greeting me in Xhosa, I'd assumed she was Xhosa. I thought the views of her daughter would give an interesting take on the debate about Xhosa as a compulsory language for pupils.

But things turned out to be more complex than I could have imagined. For starters, Bernice was born in Gauteng and her mother is Shangaan. And, because Bernice was largely raised by the white couple her mother worked for, her mother tongue is English. Bernice has no more Shangaan culture than her white friends.

She can understand Shangaan and she took Xhosa as a subject in her early high school years, so she can follow a Xhosa conversation, but she can see no point in making the language a compulsory subject.

'English is what we need,' she says. 'English is the language that will get us around the world. If they make Xhosa a compulsory language it is going to cause a lot of problems. Most of my friends would agree with me. And what about the Zulu speakers in the school? How are they going to feel when they can't have mother-tongue education and they're forced to learn Xhosa?'

In 10 minutes Bernice revealed a social complexity that, though it might be exceptional, hints at the increasing mobility within the country, and at future difficulties that schools will face in providing language courses. But then policies have to be made for the majority, and in the Western Cape the third language is Xhosa.

Until recently, 'compulsory' has become a dirty word for most language educationalists. After all, compulsory Afrikaans policies triggered the Soweto uprisings in 1976 and, at the beginning of the 20th century, British attempts to enforce English fired the Afrikaans language movements.

Post-1994, when it came to language, 'individual choice' were the words that guided policy. It was a cherished ideal that Government would not make learning a particular language compulsory.

Then, in August, Cameron Dugmore, the MEC for Education in the Western Cape, said all this was about to change. His Department was moving towards making Xhosa compulsory in the provinceÕs schools.

The 'anti' lobby was as predictable as it was immediate. Radio talk shows were jammed with calls from people (mostly white) complaining that science and mathematics should take priority over language. In a resource-strapped education system, that was where the money should be going. Besides, the country needed development and it needed expertise that could shift it into a competitive position in the world market. What good is Xhosa - or, for that matter, Zulu or Sotho or Shangaan - in the globalised economy?

But underneath this bluster is another argument. An argument that has to do with mother-tongue education, which in turn leads to a better comprehension of science and mathematics. And an argument that social cohesion, a shared idea of who we are, is a first step towards that catchphrase 'a winning nation'.

Last year, I spoke to an educationalist with the Western Cape provincial Department of Education whose teenage daughter attended extra Xhosa lessons twice a week. Sounds mundane, except the educationalist was a mother-tongue Xhosa speaker.

In the words of the teenage daughter, 'Like, why do I need this? If it wasn't for my mom, I wouldn't bother.' Echoes of Bernice.

Her mother, who must remain nameless because she was not sanctioned to speak on the record, had other views. 'My own children can speak English well. But I would question their competence in the language. Their comprehension of mathematical, scientific, philosophical, and literary concepts is dubious. For someone who has learnt English without a mother-tongue foundation, the ability to think conceptually is impaired. Their primary focus is on understanding the language. When you first have to overcome that barrier, how can you expect to grasp a subtle concept?'

There is nothing new in the mother-tongue theory. It has long been the conventional wisdom, and it underpins education policy in this country. But, unfortunately, the gap between policy and implementation has widened over the past 14 years. For example, in the past two years no graduates from the University of Cape Town were qualified to teach Xhosa.

And Tessa Dowling of African Voices - an organisation that promotes multilingualism - points out that although there is a suitable textbook and some teaching material, these are published in low quantities and are available only in specialised bookshops.

'It is absolutely imperative that we change this situation for the indigenous languages,' says Dowling. 'If we don't, the appalling matric results will continue and get worse. Obviously, getting a compulsory system up and running is going to take time. And initially it is going to be imperfect. But it has to start.'

A further indication of the deterioration in Xhosa learning is evident in statistics Dowling has extrapolated from the Department of Education's findings. Although 126 574 pupils in Grades 10 to 12 enrolled for English second language in 2004, only 572 enrolled for Xhosa second language and 1 004 for Xhosa third language. In the Western Cape, according to her information, '503 secondary schools offer Afrikaans as a second language, but only 81 have Xhosa at that level. The figures for Gauteng are no better: Zulu 37, Sotho five and Afrikaans 247.'

The trend is away from the indigenous languages, and educationalists such as Dowling and Dr Neville Alexander, director of the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa at the University of Cape Town, link this to the parlous state of the matric pass rate. Alexander cites the failure to value and modernise the indigenous languages during colonial and apartheid eras as responsible for our current problems. As a consequence, they have lost status, even among their native speakers. Post-1994, the black elite has been willing and quick to adopt English as their lingua franca, and the pressure to develop the other languages has lessened. The consequence of this is a matric pass rate of 50 percent. And of the successful candidates, 50 percent have an imperfect knowledge of English. In the end, it is the commercial sector that pays when employees have to be enrolled in English-language courses. Because, as every human resources manager knows, the better the language proficiency the greater the productivity.

Alexander points to a growing conviction among African academics that the failure of many countries on the continent to pursue mother-tongue education and thorough training in English, French or Portuguese by highly competent teachers has led to Africa's predicament as a pop concert charity case. To further support this contention, he argues that in Asia and Japan the focus over the last 50 years has been on mother-tongue education and good second-language training.

'I am a recent convert to the compulsory lobby,' says Alexander, 'but if we want to build a nation - and one that is economically sound - then for a certain period, learning an indigenous language must be compulsory.'

That 'certain period' will be until the social and economic imperatives become obvious. Of course, the economic imperative is obvious already. Alexander estimates that the cost of our 50 percent matric failure rate is in the order of R3 billion. Any business faced with an annual loss of that size would revise its strategy.

Also, the commercial sector reports a steady agitation for some knowledge of an indigenous language from employees in customer-service positions. The insurance industry tends to match client to advisor on a language basis. Elsewhere, companies, such as Absa, are arranging ad hoc language classes at their employees' request. Discovery Health, for instance, has run Zulu sessions in Johannesburg and KwaZulu-Natal, and a Xhosa class in Cape Town for staff. The response, I am told, was 'overwhelming'.

Similarly, at the state-owned Forensic Chemistry Laboratory in Cape Town, Deidre Adams, a forensic analyst, coaxed four of her colleagues - 'two white guys, an Indian, and a Tswana speaker' - into taking Xhosa lessons at African Voices. Their work involves responding to police reports, many of which come from the Eastern Cape and are written in Xhosa. 'We needed to have some understanding of the language to do our job,' says Adams.

The group started lessons and after three years they were able to follow a conversation and 'piece together' the gist of the reports they received. 'But equally importantly,' says Adams, 'learning a language is not only about learning words but also about understanding the culture and the background of, in our case, Xhosa people. That was very helpful and opened my eyes to a whole group of my fellow citizens. I learnt things about them that are socially valuable.'

Clearly, compulsory indigenous language training is going to be expensive. At the moment teachers are scarce and the teaching materials are hard to come by, even when they exist. It is also going to be unpopular: There is resistance to the idea among the middle class. Yet, if you accept the theory behind mother-tongue education, if you acknowledge the value and place of the indigenous languages, if you are appalled by the mediocre quality of our means of communication (English), is there another option?