Table Of ContentDecolonising
Multilingualism
in Africa
CRITICAL LANGUAGE AND LITERACY STUDIES
Series Editors: Professor Alastair Pennycook (University of Technology, Sydney, Australia) and
Professor Brian Morgan (Glendon College/York University, Toronto, Canada) and Professor Ryuko
Kubota (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada)
Critical Language and Literacy Studies is an international series that encourages monographs directly
addressing issues of power (its fows, inequities, distributions, trajectories) in a variety of language- and
literacy-related realms. The aim with this series is twofold: (1) to cultivate scholarship that openly
engages with social, political, and historical dimensions in language and literacy studies, and (2) to
widen disciplinary horizons by encouraging new work on topics that have received little focus (see
below for partial list of subject areas) and that use innovative theoretical frameworks.
All books in this series are externally peer-reviewed.
Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://
www .multilingual -matters .com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31-34
High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.
Other books in the series
Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls: Being 'Half' in Japan
Laurel D. Kamada
Decolonizing Literacy: Mexican Lives in the Era of Global Capitalism
Gregorio Hernandez-Zamora
Contending with Globalization in World Englishes
Mukul Saxena and Tope Omoniyi (eds)
ELT, Gender and International Development: Myths of Progress in a Neocolonial World
Roslyn Appleby
Examining Education, Media, and Dialogue under Occupation: The Case of Palestine and Israel
Ilham Nasser, Lawrence N. Berlin and Shelley Wong (eds)
The Struggle for Legitimacy: Indigenized Englishes in Settler Schools
Andrea Sterzuk
Style, Identity and Literacy: English in Singapore
Christopher Stroud and Lionel Wee
Language and Mobility: Unexpected Places
Alastair Pennycook
Talk, Text and Technology: Literacy and Social Practice in a Remote Indigenous Community
Inge Kral
Language Learning, Gender and Desire: Japanese Women on the Move
Kimie Takahashi
English and Development: Policy, Pedagogy and Globalization
Elizabeth J. Erling and Philip Seargeant (eds)
Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity
Jan Blommaert
Power and Meaning Making in an EAP Classroom: Engaging with the Everyday
Christian W. Chun
Local Languaging, Literacy and Multilingualism in a West African Society
Kasper Juffermans
English Teaching and Evangelical Mission: The Case of Lighthouse School
Bill Johnston
Race and Ethnicity in English Language Teaching
Christopher Joseph Jenks
Language, Education and Neoliberalism: Critical Studies in Sociolinguistics
Mi-Cha Flubacher and Alfonso Del Percio (eds)
CRITICAL LANGUAGE AND LITERACY STUDIES: 26
Decolonising
Multilingualism
in Africa
Recentering Silenced Voices
from the Global South
Finex Ndhlovu and
Leketi Makalela
MULTILINGUAL MATTERS
Bristol • Blue Ridge Summit
DOI https://doi.org/10.21832/NDHLOV3354
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Names: Ndhlovu, Finex, author. | Makalela, Leketi, author.
Title: Decolonising Multilingualism in Africa: Recentering Silenced Voices from the
Global South/Finex Ndhlovu and Leketi Makalela.
Description: Bristol, UK; Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Multilingual Matters, 2021. | Series:
Critical Language and Literacy Studies: 26 | Includes bibliographical references and
index. | Summary: “This book interrogates and problematises African multilingualism
as it is currently understood in language education and research. It challenges the
enduring colonial matrices of power hidden within mainstream conceptions of
multilingualism that have been propagated in the Global North and then exported to
the Global South”— Provided by publisher.
Identifers: LCCN 2021011127 (print) | LCCN 2021011128 (ebook) | ISBN 9781788923347
(paperback) | ISBN 9781788923354 (hardback) | ISBN 9781788923361 (pdf) |
ISBN 9781788923378 (epub) | ISBN 9781788923385 (kindle edition)
Subjects: LCSH: Multilingualism—Africa. | Language policy—Africa. |
Decolonization—Africa.
Classifcation: LCC P115.5.A35 N37 2021 (print) | LCC P115.5.A35 (ebook) |
DDC 306.446096—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011127
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011128
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-335-4 (hbk)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-334-7 (pbk)
Multilingual Matters
UK: St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.
USA: NBN, Blue Ridge Summit, PA, USA.
Website: www.multilingual-matters.com
Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat
Facebook: https://www .facebook .com /multilingualmatters
Blog: www .cha nnel view publ ications .wordpress .com
Copyright © 2021 Finex Ndhlovu and Leketi Makalela.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any
means without permission in writing from the publisher.
The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that
are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable
forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy,
preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certifcation.
The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certifcation has been
granted to the printer concerned.
Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in the UK by the CPI Books Group Ltd.
Printed and bound in the US by NBN.
Finex – To the memory of my son, Sindiso, for closing all the gaps at
home while I was away on project trips that culminated in this book.
Leketi – To my two beloved daughters, Leleti and
Koketso, and to all students of multilingualism.
Contents
Series Editors’ Preface viii
Preface xvi
1 Myths We Live By: Multilingualism, Colonial Inventions 1
2 Unsettling Colonial Roots of Multilingualism 26
3 Unsettling Multilingualism in Language and
Literacy Education 37
4 Decolonising Multilingualism in Higher Education 55
5 Decolonising Multilingualism in National
Language Policies 75
6 African Vehicular Cross-Border Languages,
Multilingualism Discourse 94
7 African Multilingualism, Immigrants, Diasporas 108
8 Multilingualism from Below: Languaging with
a Seven Year Old 131
9 Recentring Silenced Lingualisms and Voices 155
Index 177
vii
Series Editors’ Preface
Applied linguistics is often subject to various ‘turns’ as they sweep across
the social sciences: we’ve seen social, somatic, sensory, ecological, per-
formative, discursive, spatial, material, ontological, practice-based and
other turns come and go. Some have a more lasting effect, while others
engender a brief period of excitement and then dissipate. Two contem-
porary turns of particular importance to the feld that intersect in this
book are the multilingual and the decolonial. Both are of real signif-
cance for socio- and applied linguists, the one urging us to understand
multilingualism not just as common, but as the norm, the starting point
from which any studies of language use, language education, or language
learning should fow; the other urging us to change the ways in which
knowledge in the feld is tied to coloniality, to ways of thinking embedded
in inequitable historical and contemporary global relations. The impor-
tant question raised by this book, however, is how these two emphases
work together: what needs to be done from a decolonial perspective to
change the ways that multilingualism is understood, particularly in con-
texts of the Global South?
Unlike some of the other turns from cultural studies, geography, or
anthropology, the multilingual turn (May 2014) seems central to applied
linguistics, and one we perhaps like to ‘own’ since it is so obviously close
to our core concerns. Indeed, this book is published by Multilingual
Matters, who have always considered multilingualism as the necessary
starting point. This emphasis emerged in part as a reaction to perceived
increases in multilingualism in cities in the Global North, as studies or
migration, mobility and community language use revealed the scale of
urban linguistic complexity. This newfound interest has been critiqued
for a lack of historicity (diversity has been around a long time), a fascina-
tion with linguistic diversity at the expense of other signifcant factors in
migrant lives (sociolinguists may fnd language diversity intriguing, but
viii
Series Editors’ Preface ix
migrants have more pressing concerns in their lives to do with housing,
employment, education, discrimination and so on), an obsession with
urban contexts (while cities may intensify the contiguity of difference,
non-urban contexts may be equally diverse), an emphasis on fuidity
over fxity (fexible language use may indeed be common, but people
are nonetheless confronted by the static and rigid norms of institutional
language regulations) and a lack of geopolitical awareness (what has
been seen as remarkable diversity in the Global North is the norm in the
Global South).
Whatever misgivings there may be about some of this recent refram-
ing of multilingualism, it nonetheless puts ‘multilingualism from below’
– the use of varied linguistic resources by people going about their daily
lives, rather than the elite multilingualism of those from privileged
linguistic-educational backgrounds – centre stage in a new era of linguis-
tic-ethnographically-informed research. In conjunction with this move,
studies of language learning and use more generally have started to turn
a critical eye on the ways that monolingualism (and the strange idea that
such a state is really possible) has been assumed to be the starting point
for analysis. We need instead to start our sociolinguistic and psycholin-
guistic analyses with multilingualism rather than monolingualism as the
norm. This shifting focus, which has been slow to gain ground in the
narrowly normative domains of second language acquisition (SLA) stud-
ies, has also started to raise questions about other common and taken-
for-granted ideas in the feld, such as frst and second languages, native
speakers, code-switching, and so on. Attention has been drawn to the
monolingual bias in SLA, which tends to assume that people speak one
identifable language, after which they learned another. Reacting to the
ways SLA has ‘erased bilingualism and multilingualism from the object
of inquiry’, Ortega (2019: 24) calls for an understanding of ‘multilingual-
ism as the central object of inquiry’. Despite some concerns about how
multilingualism has been framed within this new focus, it has become,
according to May (2014: 1), ‘the topic du jour, at least in critical applied
linguistics’.
Looking more broadly at the social sciences, meanwhile,
Maldonado-Torres (2007) suggests that a decolonial turn is under way,
a ‘shift in knowledge production of similar nature and magnitude to the
linguistic and pragmatic turns’ (2007: 261). This decolonial turn ‘involves
interventions at the level of power, knowledge, and being through varied
actions of decolonization’ (2007: 262). Across a wide range of academic
felds – economics, philosophy, anthropology, international relations,
religious studies, psychology, among others – there has been a call to
x Series Editors’ Preface
decolonise knowledge. In the feld of ecology, Ferdinand (2019) shows
how environmentalism hides behind a universalist narrative that over-
looks the colonial, patriarchal and slavery foundations of modernity that
have to be addressed if environmental equality is to become a reality.
Connell (2018: 405) argues for the importance of decolonising sociology,
a project that ‘requires rethinking the composition of sociology’s work-
force and changing the conditions in which it produces and circulates
knowledge’. This is, she reminds us, a process of redistribution of both
knowledge and resources.
As these remarks make clear, this is not just an epistemological ques-
tion, but also both an ontological one, and a project to address institu-
tional structures, racism, curricula, social interactions, forms of funding
and more. These are broad challenges that necessitate understanding
Eurocentrism as a structural problem, perpetuated by people, institu-
tions, texts, conferences, and many aspects of our academic disciplines
(Richardson, 2018). The solution to these exclusionary frameworks of
knowledge is not through ‘rhetorics of inclusion’ (Furo, 2018: 282) –
moves to include ideas from the Global South, people of colour, Indig-
enous knowledges into the curriculum (though these are of course part of
the picture) – but a much deeper questioning of the procedures of knowl-
edge production. We should also be cautious, as Zeleza (2017) warns,
not to limit a decolonial project to the undoing of colonial frameworks
of knowledge, lest we overlook the many other forms of knowledge and
ways of being that have always existed beyond the grasp of colonialism.
And as Kubota (2019) cautions, a project to decolonise applied linguistics
can only be successful to the extent that it makes questions of race and
gender central. Mignolo and Walsh (2018: 17) emphasise the need for
decolonial insurgency that would align with other forms of praxis and
pedagogy ‘against the colonial matrix of power in all of its dimensions,
and for the possibilities of an otherwise’.
So what happens when the multilingual and decolonial turns come
together? While in some ways they may appear to sit comfortably along-
side each other – the multilingual turn perhaps suggests a decolonising
of the monolingual bias in applied linguistics – their relationship, as the
authors of this book suggest, is a far more complex one. As Mufwene
(2020: 290) comments, the idea of decolonial linguistics ‘entails reducing
the Western bias and hegemony in how languages of the global South
and the (socio)linguistic behaviours of their speakers and writers are
analysed’. It is not enough, therefore, just to emphasise multilingualism
over monolingualism: what is at stake here is a far more extensive ques-
tioning of how we think about languages. Can we bring perspectives on
