23426 tt') Sahelian Languages, _ ) Indigenous Knowledge and Self-Management .iliiiii.ui) A frica is a continent of many lan- community members to resuscitate a guages - over 2,000, in fact, by generally unsuccessful state-supported recent count - though many are literacy campaign, has created a net- 0 s related and a number are inter-compre- work of literacy centers devoted to in- hensible to a greater or lesser degree. struction in the Gulmancema lan- It is also a continent of multilinguism, guage, a minority language in Burkina where a relatively high proportion of Faso, but one spoken nonetheless by the population speaks or understands over 500,000 people. The centers cover _ more than one language. In addition, 31 villages of the region, all of which the distribution of languages is far (with the exception of the district capi- from uniform. West Africa is a case in tal) lacked primary schools at the in- point. Coastal areas are for the most ception of the program. It now serves part characterized by a large number of about 15,000 adolescent and adult native languages, many not widely dis- learners annually, of whom 41 percent tributed. Interior regions, and the are women. Tin Tua has also launched a Sahel in particular, on the other hand, monthly Gulmancema newspaper, are characterized by a smaller number "Labaali," which has 3,000 subscribers of languages of broad diffusion. and employs journalists equipped with motor bikes and tape recorders in all of The reasons are both topographical thvilgscerd and political. Dense forests, numerous rivers and the ever-present tsetse fly On the strength of the results of made lateral communications and these literacy programs, the associa- horse-born transport very difficult in tion began, several years ago, creating coastal regions and gave rise to a multi- community primary schools where the tude of ethnic groups and small lan- initial grades of instruction are given in guage communities. However, in the in- Gulmancema and French is gradually land areas of savanna and desert-edge introduced. Two years ago, the first co- No. 13 plains, travel was easier over long dis- hort of students trained in these com- October 1999 tances. Empires arose to regulate and munity schools reached the watershed tax the flourishing trans-Sahara trade and at the same time spread vehicular African languages like Bambara, Wolof enots reports iodiayeo in ' ~~enous Knowledge (1K) initiatives in and Moore over wide spaces. It is there- Sub-Saharan Africa. It is published by fore said that one can go from Dakar to the Africa Region's Knowledge and Lake Chad overland using only three Learning Center as part of an evolving African languages - Wolof, Bambara IK partnership between the World and Husa wheeas tri of qual Bank, communities, NGOs, develop- and Hausa - whereas a trip of equal ment institutions and multilateral orga- ,zi,NAC4 INONIdistance down the coast to Nigeria nizations. The views expressed in this would require more than 300. article are those of the authors and 711 s Ml should not be attributed to the World -:i t In the Gulmu region of Burkina Faso, Bank Group or its partners in this ini- located in little-developed areas of the tiative. A webpage on IK is available at extreme east bordering Benin, Tin Tua, http://wwwworldbank.org/aftdr/ik/ a local NGO established in 1985 by default.htm 2 of the primary education completion exams, which must be they have done it in large part by mastering accounting and taken in French and govern admission to secondary school- administrative systems developed directly in the Bambara ing. The children who had started education in their mother language. The story is much the same further north in the tongue performed, on average, significantly better than the inland Niger delta, where rice is the commercial crop. In the graduates of standard primary schools. The curriculum de- village of Niono Coloni, local leaders organize examinations signer from Tin Tua tries to explain their success: "When you to ensure that candidates to the democratically-elected posi- consider the environment in which all this is happening and tions of responsibility in the farm cooperative all have the the fact that there is only one instructor per school who requisite basic level in written Bambara, though the account- speaks French, what is surprising is the speed of learning. Is ing forms used are in fact bilingual and include French label- it because the mother tongue serves as a springboard for per- ing as well. Koranic students and primary school dropouts formance in French, or is it the motivation of these students, interested in applying for the positions generally enroll in the the active instructional method used or the devotion of the local adult literacy center to develop proficiency in the pho- instructor?" netic transcription of Bambara. These are not isolated examples. Throughout much of African languages as an accounting tool Sahelian West Africa (countries bordering the southern edge of the Sahara Desert), the written form of African language is Now move west several hundred kilometers into southern being used to an increasing extent as a vehicle of local, if not Mali, a cotton-growing region where rates of schooling are nation-wide, communication and a means of expressing in- still little over 20 percent.. In the last two decades, a string of digenous culture. village associations centered around Koutiala and Bougouni The change is most pronounced in the Francophone coun- has progressively taken over full responsibility for the market- The where is litt reognition was Franc to can tries , where relatively little recognition was given to African ing of agricultural crops, the management of farm credit, and the reinvestment of proceeds from these operations. And languages, considered "dialects" and potentially disruptive of national unity and international communication. I K Notes Stow but sure change would be of interest to: Several factors have contributed to this change, including the advent of more representative governments and ones Name more tolerant of civil society, the spread of African languages brought about by internal migration and interethnic contact, Institution and a gradual shift towards recognizing the value of indig- enous knowledge and of African culture. At the same time, Adtdress experience and research have increasingly demonstrated that children starting school instruction in their mother tongue or a language already well known to them stand a better chance of success- including success at mastering a second language of written communication like French or English- than those who are forced to assimilate a totally foreign lan- guage from the outset. Adults, too, seem to acquire second language facility most easily through a written knowledge of their own language. Change has been slow in coming, particularly at the central level, where more has been said than done. The introduction of African languages into primary school education, for ex- ample, has remained for years at the "experimental" level in -3i - _ 3* ' 3ixi _ countries like Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Senegal and there has been little commerce between agencies of non-for- 3 mal education, which used national languages, and those of the middle school matriculants, were girls. Nine out of ten of formal education, which did not. the newly literate women, according to the National Institute Over the 1990s, however, momentum has been building at of Literacy, were active members of local women's associa- Over the 1990s, however, momentutionssandecooperatives. the local level. It has been fueled in large part by the develop- P ment of new income-generating enterprises - the coopera- tives, businesses, non-governmental associations and local Articulating indigenous knowledge community governments that have taken root in an era of demographic pressure and relative economic liberalization. Twenty-five years ago, when the first wave of national literacy To manage these enterprises themselves, local people need at campaigns was dying out in Sahelian countries and the first least a core of literate staff; to ensure some degree of demo- hints of locally-supported literacy were appearing, a wide- cratic accountability in the effort, they need a means to en- ranging evaluation was conducted of literacy's consequences sure larger numbers of members at least a modicum of lit- in western Mali. Research was carried out by case study, and eracy and numeracy. African languages - most of which are the team of Malian evaluators happened to spend several days now written in Romanized or Arabic script- provide a much in a village named Sirakoro, south of Kita. Though govern- more accessible means of attaining this goal than instruction ment support of the program had been irregular, they found in English, French, Arabic or Portuguese. there some remarkable results. The first group of young people made literate in the village, who then occupied positions monitoring transactions in the local peanut market, themselves trained a second cohort. Examples are numerous in Burkina Faso, a country whose Shortly thereafter, the majority of adults in the village had name itself is an amalgam of two prominent African lan- learned to read and write in Bambara/Malinke, and the vil- guages. "Burkina" is Moore for "honest person" and "Faso" is lage authorities decided that attention should be given to Jula and Fulfulde for "nation"-a nation of honest people. In children's education. They resolved that no child should Bouloulou, a small village in the northern tier of the country henceforth reach the age of twenty without knowing how to not far from Ouahigouya, women are flocking to a literacy read and write in his or her own language. Because there was center opened for them at the demand of their own economic no formal primary school within walking distance, the village development association. In the capital itself, Ouagadougou, created its own independently and proceeded to build cur- a group of newly literate women of the Goughin district have ricula for its program. Among other things, the literate banded together to create "Song Taaba," a cooperative de- young people took it upon themselves to write down the his- voted to the manufacture and sale of soap and peanut butter. tory of the village and its region and teach it to their pupils. After an initial failed attempt at entrusting management re- This pattern has been increasingly repeated over the inter- sponsibility in the few members with the rudiments of pri- marynschooling, theyfew mendedru devhthelop accnting and pr vening years in different parts of the Sahel. African languages are acquiring written form and being used as a means both of management systems in the Moore language and have since managing local enterprise and recording indigenous knowl- created a nationwide network of local women's businesses. edge. Af ter prise ad ordig varigenouccess edge. After two or three decades of highly variable success In fact, across the country, the numbers completing lit- when directed top-down in "national campaigns', literacy eracy courses have begun to rival those completing primary classes began in the 1980s to aquire momentum even as they schooling, a form of education still restricted by lack of were taken over by local associations and non-governmental French-language trained teachers and outside funding. By associations for their own uses. And they have led in a variety 1996, there were, in round figures, 4,000 literacy centers of ways to the better articulation of local culture. compared to 3,000 primary schools. In that same year, 46,000 out of 72,000 literacy students tested were declared "literate" in one of the national languages of the country, Functional trilingualism whereas only 11,000 of the 86,000 entrants in sixth grade One difference between the first wave of literacy action and moved on to middle school. Interestingly, 52 percent of the this more recent history is local ownership. Another impor- successful literacy students were women, whereas only 40 tant one derives from the fact that African language literacy percent of the sixth grade enrollees, and only 8.5 percent of is now not generally presented as an alternative to compe- 4 tence in international languages like English and French, as a Since 1986 the organization "ARED" (Association for form of "rural education" or "Bantu schooling" for those not Research on Education) has dedicated itself to the publica- entitled to the "real thing" - but rather as both a cultural tion of reading materials in the Pulaar language for learners and political asset by itself and a springboard into second lan- in the departments of Senegal bordering the sea between guage learning. Dakar and St. Louis. Pulaar is a regionally-specific version of the Fulani, Peulh or Fulfulde language, found throughout In addition, a new complementarity among different lan- thFuaiPehorufldlngg,furdhogot guanes di agnewu compemerg tarityne aomongmes cdir "fanc- Sahelian countries but nowhere a majority culture outside guages Is gradually emerging, one sometimes called "func- tional trilinguism -tieredschemetargetsevery- of sections of northern Cameroon and the Futa Djalon tional trilinguism." This three-tiered scheme targets every- mutiso una RDspormi culyol n one becoming literate in their own mother tongue, then mas- of a series of efforts, including another coordinated by tering an African language of wider communication (like AES(soito el or'dcto tI cec)i Mooro,~~ Woo or Babr) an.ialcuiigalnug APESS (Association Peulh pour l'Education et la Science) in Moore, W\olof or Beambara), and finally acquiring a language of international communication like English, French or Ara- Burkina Faso, that have been devoted in recent years to bic. The approach seems counter-intuitive for monolingual promoting the use of different regional variants of Fulfuld6. speakers of northern countries but is not difficult to conceive The activities of ARED have been energetically supported - or witness- on a continent where over 50 percent of the by associations of Pulaar speakers who have emigrated to population already speaks at least two languages. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Maghreb and Europe. This support has enabled ARED to produce a whole series of books and newspapers in Pulaar and to give a new impetus to literacy Giving voice to minority culture courses for adults. ARED has at the same time published Burkina Faso again provides a case in point. Situated on the manuals on a variety of local development, agricultural and boundary between the Sahelian and coastal regions, the action research topics in Pulaar. Achieving literacy in Pulaar country counts no fewer than 71 languages, though fully 75 has become a symbol of honor in village society in this part percent of the population speaks one or another of the three of Senegal, and literacy campaigns launched on this basis most widely-spread (Moor, , Jula and Fulani) as a second Ian- have greatly contributed to a cultural renewal throughout guage of communication if not mother tongue. All but a few the region. of the "Burkinabe' languages (adjectival form of the This is precisely the sort of "indigenous" effort at knowl- country's name) are now transcribed and used in written edge construction that is now cropping up more frequently form. Increasingly, therefore, a speaker of Gourmancema is across the region. What form it will take in the future is un- likely to learn Moore or Fulani plus French in the course of clear. But it does seem more likely to survive than the cul- his or her education, whether that training follows formal tural and literacy campaigns of the early decades of indepen- schooling or non-formal education in literacy classes. dence, precisely because it is "owned" by local actors and For this reason, the locally-rising tide of Sahelian lan- founded on local economic and social necessity. guage use has also been a rallying point for minority cultures in West Africa that wish to affirm their own identity as part and parcel of the nation and preserve traditions while opening bridges to wider society. The Tin Tua associa- tion illustrates the point. So, too, does a remarkable experience in the Podor region of northwestern Senegal. This article is based on research conducted by local researchers with the support and technical supervision of Peter Easton, Associate Professor Graduate Studies in Adult Education, Florida State University, with the active collaboration of the concerned African communities. The research was carried out under thejoint aegis of the Club du Sahel/OECD, the Interstate Committee for Combating Drought in the Sahel/Comite Inter-etat de Lutte Contre la Secheresse (CILSS) and the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA).