AFRICA this week hosts the biennial conference of the International Association of Colonial and Post-colonial Linguistics (IACPL) for the first time.
The conference is taking place at the University of the Western Cape and runs from today until Wednesday.
Eminent speakers from across the globe have committed to the conference, which is running under the theme: “Coloniality as Knowledge and Being: Experiences of and Responses to Power.”
The event is of particular interest not only because it is the first time that the continent is hosting the conference.
It has generated excitement over what Professor Ngugi wa Thiong’o has described as the “home-coming” of African languages.
The conference coincides with the launch of the ChiShona translation of Wa Thiong’o intellectual classic, “Decolonising the Mind”, by Dr John Mambambo, a Zimbabwean at Rhodes University, South Africa, where he is part of a project that is spearheading the mass translation of the work into indigenous languages in that country, Zimbabwe and Kenya.
The project at Rhodes University heralds a co-ordinated mass translation of fiction and non-fiction seminal works by great African intellectuals of which Professor Wa Thiong’o is one.
He identifies the Rhodes restoration project as a “great initiative”.
The endeavour is to develop literature that can be accessed easily by Africans in African languages in order to facilitate their use in education and other powerful domains of life.
Commenting on the project and the book launch, Dr Mambambo says African languages have metaphorically traversed “abroad” for far too long, abandoning their “home” to enrich other languages and homes.
“It saddens that African languages have for far too long been taught in English and that this has remained broadly unchallenged and ‘normal’.
“This created and continues to create an unquestionable hegemony of English over African languages in terms of their domains of usage and the associated status that emerges from such,” he said.
He argues that in practical terms, English enjoys its current status because of the functions that are ascribed to it.
The Chishona translation of “Decolonising the Mind” seeks not to take anything from English but is bringing back the “prodigal African languages”, he explains.
Translation of “Decolonising the Mind”, Dr Mambambo suggests “reaffirms and reasserts the position of African languages through pragmatically rather than theoretically advocating for their elevation for broader usage as the medium of instruction.
“Our next challenge is to accept, embrace and ensure broad circulation of such texts and to partner in such efforts to add more African languages texts to the list through writing new texts or the translation of the existing ones,” he said.
The theme of this week’s International De/coloniality conference at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), is aligned to the main theme of the book, “Decolonising the Mind”.
During an interview ahead of the conference and referencing the book launch, Professor Felix Banda, the Chairperson of the Linguistics Department at the UWC, said about six years ago, Dr Mambambo approached the Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society
(CASAS) based in Cape Town, with the idea of translating Professor Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s “Decolonising the Mind” into ChiShona.
CASAS conducts research and publishes books on African languages and linguistics and African society.
Professor Kwesi Prah, the then Director of CASAS acceded to the idea and work on obtaining permission from the copyright holder to translate the book started.
In 2018, Professor Kwesi Prah donated CASAS to the University of the Western Cape, Linguistics Department.
Explains Professor Banda: “Thus, the publication of the book has been an ongoing concern and its final publication in June coincides with the conference on De/coloniality.
“Considering that CASAS the publisher of the book is now based in the Linguistics Department, who are also the host of the conference on De/coloniality made sense to launch the book at the conference.
“In addition, Ngugi wa Thiong’o is one of the originators of decolonial theory in Africa.”
UWC’s decolonial credentials can be traced to the1970s and 1980s, as it played a crucial role in the campaigns to release political prisoners in South Africa.
It openly resisted the apartheid university policies by declaring itself as “an intellectual home for the democratic left” and thus directly sided with the oppressed and exploited people.
UWC students, workers and academics have therefore established a history of originating and being at the centre of the transformation debate in South Africa and the world at large, and at efforts to defeat repression and the struggles to overturn tyranny in its many forms and disguises including the coloniality of power and knowledge, the theme of the conference.
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
Elaborates Professor Banda: “UWC has continued to fight against oppression, discrimination and disadvantage in its quest to build an equitable and dynamic society. It is thus fitting that the first conference on the African continent of the International Association of Colonial and Postcolonial Linguistics (IACPL) is being held at the University of the Western Cape.”
Among some of the keynote speakers headlining the conference are: Professor Kwesi Prah, Founding Director of CASAS; Professor Ryuko Kubota, Professor, Department of Language and Literacy Education, The University of British Columbia, Canada, and Professor Sinfree Makoni, Penn State University, the USA.
The speakers are expected to bring to light the effects of coloniality, not merely as a topic of academic debate, but more so as lived and as experienced by people.
The expectation is also that the conference papers will address how coloniality, as experienced in power structures inherited from the colonial era; continued projections of colonial definitions of knowledge and ways of knowing and the imposition of Western culture and traditional identities on African or colonised people, can be disrupted and counteracted.
