The Very Lost Tribesman

24th February 2010

Text with 1 note

On Swahili, Schools and Politics

For all the problems and poverty Tanzania, this has probably been one of the better places in Africa to live over the last 40 years, not so much in a positive sense but because of a relative absence of sheer political horror. It’s a backhanded compliment, to be sure, but not an unimportant one.

I’ve been reading Martin Meredith’s 2006 book “The Fate of Africa,” which tracks the continent’s political history in the post-colonial era. It is truly one of the most chilling pieces of writing I have ever come across, fiction or non-fiction. As a onetime history major, I’m embarrassed how little of this story I knew and appreciated, how almost universally malicious were the first two generations of African leadership after independence, how ignobly the rest of the world generally behaved in response, and the sheer magnitude of the suffering caused by that combination.

Meredith’s workmanlike catalogue of rapaciousness, cruelty and suffering inflicted on nearly every country in the continent from the early 1960s until a few rays of hope broke through in recent years just blew me away. In country after country, a parade of tyrants rose to the top and terrorized their own countries while the West either turned a blind eye or failed to act decisively when it could have (reading Meredith’s account of the French government’s behavior during the Rwandan genocide nearly made me sick to my stomach). It’s hard to say which country suffered most. Somalia, Congo, Algeria, Ethiopia, and Liberia were all almost completely destroyed by testosterone-fuelled civil wars. Promising countries like Ghana and Nigeria were plundered for want of any remotely honorable leadership. Rhodesia and South Africa were more stable but at the price of often brutal white supremacist governments. The vast majority of Africans were forced to live in countries where perverse power structures somehow rewarded murderous psychopaths who stole literally billions from their own people, from Charles Taylor in Liberia to Mobutu in Zaire to Ethiopia’s Mengitsu, who fiddled while millions starved. After 20 chapters and the realization I still hadn’t gotten to the interwoven genocides of Congo and Rwanda during the 1990s I truly almost could not bring myself to finish the book.

Tanzania, however, managed to avoid the worst of these horrors. Its history is spotted by a less-than-entirely-admirable record on political prisoners and forced resettlements. Corruption is of course rampant, political competition anemic and civil society weak in many respects. Still, Julius Nyerere, the much-loved founder, spared his people a violent klepto-dictatorship that waged war against its own people, as well as the tribal violence that has beset every one of its neighbors. And that is no small feat.

And here at last I get to the subject of the day: language. One of the main explanations commonly given for Tanzania’s relatively peaceful post-colonial history is the push by Nyerere (a former school teacher) to expand Swahili and use it as a tool of national identify formation. Most Tanzanians, especially rural ones, speak some sort of tribal dialect at home but Swahili emerged as the national second language and is commonly spoken. There is widespread belief that this process contributed to a sense of nationhood that helped united the country and channel most disputes into the political realm instead of violence.

Swahili is also a truly beautiful language, full of vibrant words and and colorful expressions. But the problem now is that it is at the very heart of a fundamental problem with the deeply troubled education system. The history of the language here has left Tanzanians understandably torn by, on the one hand a desire to preserve their language and its benefits for national identity, and on the other the stark economic reality that there is little prospect of economic advancement without learning English. What has evolved is a dual system that seems to be the worst of both worlds.

The education system was built on the foundations thinly laid by the two colonial masters, first the Germans and then the British. The Germans, apparently, didn’t want anyone speaking German for fear of suggesting equality, so made all instruction in Swahili. The British wanted wide primary education in Swahili and then a tiny cadre (about 4 percent) to advance and receive secondary school training in English to serve as a recruiting pool for future colonial administrators.

That system, essentially, persists. Elementary education is conducted in Swahili, though in practice often in mixture with local dialects (I’ve gotten much of this story from my friend Josiah Mchome in several conversations we’ve had, and I hope to see more visiting some schools during the coming weeks). The Tanzanian government, of course, wants more than 4 percent of people to advance to secondary school, though remarkably, the figure now is still only around 10 percent, and the average “school life expectancy” (I.e. total years of enrollment) for TZ students is 5.3 years (due largely to the aforementioned “fees” that make attendance far from free).

For those who do advance, the language of instruction and entire curriculum suddenly switches to English once they hit secondary school (approximately 6^th grade). All the national exams to advance at every stage beyond are in English. That might work if the children had received instruction in English in primary school, but of course they have gotten very little; the teachers are products of the same system. Truthfully, very few people here speak English very well.

In the 1970s, Tanzania considered switching its curriculum entirely to Swahili but then backtracked, for fear of consigning the country to economic backwardness forever. Even Nyerere, whose obsession was self-reliance, admitted English was a key to development. (Mchome largely agrees, though mentions the example of Japan as a prosperous country that hasn’t given in on English yet).  Now the focus seems to be on improving English instruction in primary schools so students are prepared for the curriculum switch. But of course it‘s hard to make that happen when there is a huge shortage of teachers, especially who speak English well.

I’ve tried to do a little research and gather there isn’t much public opinion data on the question, but it doesn’t seem to be the case Tanzanians are desperate to use their schools to preserve Swahili. They see around them what I see — people who know English do much better economically. Here in Moshi, the best jobs are in tourism, medicine and business, all of which require English. We ex-pats regularly call the taxi drivers who can speak English and go to restaurants where the waitresses speak English. One testament to the demand is the apparently well-attended small private “tourism colleges” around Moshi that promise to train people for the field, including teaching English. There seems to be some resentment, at the hospital at the large number of Kenyans who have been brought into top positions. It’s no surprise, however, since in general Kenyans speak better English (I believe most are taught it from elementary school).

The problem, of course, is that simply decreeing English instruction comes with a cost, too — and it is severe. In the secondary schools virtually none of the students (or teachers) can actually keep up with the curriculum. One older study I came across found secondary students were getting only about 50 percent of the information conveyed to them and only 10 percent were at a level where they could be successfully taught in English. At the event we attended Saturday, Mchome spoke at some length about how the inability of students to understand and communicate was the biggest problem with Tanzania’s education system — not a lack of teachers or textbooks.

As long as this is the case, it would seem better to continue instruction in Swahili and teach English as best one can as a second language. Then at least students might master the concepts in other subjects, like math and chemistry, that are eluding them now for language reasons. (Alas this would seem better in hospitals, too, where charts are written in English but many of the nurses can’t understand them). But alas this isn’t simple either: There are virtually no curricular materials — textbooks, lesson plans, etc. — published in Swahili, at least at the secondary level. Any teacher who wanted to use Swahili to teach, say, physics, would be on his or her own. So they are stuck and — by all accounts — generally teach in a kind of alternating or in-between language that results in most students mastering neither the language nor the material. It’s an unfortunate and undeserved fate for one of a handful of African countries that have actually tried to preserve a non-colonial language.

Such debates about language and the balance between the realities of the modern economy and national identity are, of course, not unique to Tanzania — you find them even in prosperous places like Quebec and Los Angeles. But for all their problems, neither of those places is struggling with simply trying to keep more than one in 10 sixth graders into school.