Professor Kwesi Kwa Praah is not a man to beat about the bush. The director of the Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS) believes African languages will have to be used in education and development, or else an explosive situation might develop. Global Knowledge met the professor in the CASAS coordination centre in Cape Town.

Emancipation through language

“The whole problem of African development is a problem of language. Language for the production of knowledge and the reproduction of knowledge. If we want Africans to develop, we have to use African languages, not languages spoken by ten per cent of the population. No country on earth is developing on the basis of a borrowed minority language,” says Professor Kwesi Kwa Praah. He adds problems of identity, destruction of self-confidence, permanent inferiority and linguistic inferiority to the list of negative effects of being prevented from using one’s own language.

Kwesi Kwaa Prah is from Ghana, but lives and works in South Africa. He is an anthropologist with a PhD from the Netherlands, and has worked in nine different countries in Africa. It was on the basis of his academic background and his experience of many African countries that he came to identify what he believes is Africa’s main problem. “The longer we delay, the more there will be conflicts, poverty and underdevelopment, and the more the situation will become explosive. You can never stop the emancipation of people. Sooner or later the wisdom of using our own languages will be clear. Sooner or later. And it is better to do it peacefully than to have an explosive situation emerging, in which the masses demand those rights.”

The first book

The Bible was the first book to be translated into many of the African languages. But because missionaries of various nationalities and therefore different orthographies translated it, even languages that are most similar to each other appear to be different. This was the background for the establishment of CASAS in 1997.

"Instead of publishing a book for one million people, we can publish it for 15-20 million people."

“The question you have to ask is: Do you want to use African languages? If you answer in the affirmative, then you must realise that you cannot use them if the same language is written in four different ways. It is not economically feasible. It is self-defeating to say you want to use African languages and at the same time to keep dividing them,” says the professor, and continues: “We have to remove the artificial differences that have emerged in the written forms. To make them more usable, we need to harmonize the spelling system for the languages that are 85 per cent mutually intelligible or more.”

CASAS is a coordination centre that networks with linguists and mother-tongue experts all over the continent. The group has selected 15 major languages that are spoken in a variety of forms as first, second or third languages by 80 per cent of Africans. The goal is to harmonize these languages to prepare them for use as languages of education, science and technology. “If we do that, then instead of publishing a book for one million people, we can publish it for 15-20 million people.”

African rebirth

According to Kwesi Kwa Praah, the work of the group is at the scientific cutting edge of knowledge, because nobody else is doing anything similar. Linguists elsewhere in the world are mainly concerned with terminology and matters of standardization. The professor is particularly impressed with the work the Icelandic language council is doing. “I was in Scandinavia last year. I was pleasantly surprised, particularly in Iceland, to find a small language spoken by only 270 000 people, with a language council and dedicated people working on terminology. They are doing similar work to ours, but they are at a much more advanced stage.”

One day the African continent will emerge into self-confidence. Professor Prah has no doubts: “Africa will eventually emerge. There is no part of the world which is condemned in perpetuity to be underdeveloped. If you look at the history of the world, you see that all societies sooner or later move forward. So the renaissance, rebirth and regeneration of Africa are all bound to come. But it will not happen automatically, without agency. Certain things have to be done, including principally the use of African languages.”

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