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The start and progress of a Language of Instruction research Project in Africa – the Spirit of Bagamoyo
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- 182 THE START AND PROGRESS OF A LANGUAGE OF INSTRUCTION RESEARCH PROJECT IN AFRICA – THE SPIRIT OF BAGAMOYO60 Harold D. Herman The journey towards knowledge is through its language. Language is vital in the study of endogenous knowledge and the teaching thereof. Unless endogenous languages are central to research and teaching, public speech and broadcasting, much of what is supposed to be developed will be lost before it is captured. Ntsoane (2005:1) An introductory Tribute In 1999 Prof. Birgit Brock-Utne and I met during a Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) Conference in the U.S.A. to consider the possibility of a North-South cooperation on language of instruction policies in Africa. In our years of dialogue and presentations at international conferences, it was clear to me that Birgit, although Norwegian, was an African scholar at heart, a person with a flair and commitment to confront the multiple dilemmas facing the African continent. She was passionate about Tanzania, where she had taught and soon mastered Kiswahili. She had discussed the possibility of launching a research project on the language of instruction in Tanzania with colleagues at the University of Dar es Salaam, especially with Prof. Suleman Sumra. Together Birgit and I now conceptualised a language in education project between the University of Dar es Salaam, the University of Oslo and the University of the Western Cape. Later the same year Birgit gave a key-note address on Education for All – in Whose Language? at the Oxford Conference (Brock-Utne, 2001) and there met Zubeida Desai, now the Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Western Cape, who also presented a paper on the language issue in Africa – exemplified by the situation in the Western Cape. The two of them continued the discussion Birgit and I had started about a research cooperation around the language of instruction in Tanzania and South Africa. 60 This article is an abridged version of a paper with the same name presented at the LOITASA Workshop in Oslo on the 1st May 2008 preceding the IMPLAN Conference and will be published as a chapter in: Qorro, Martha, Zubeida Desai and Birgit BrockUtne (ed) 2009. LOITASA reflecting on Phase I and entering Phase II. Dar es Salaam: E & D Vision Publishing Ltd. - 183 The Success of LOITASA I would, in this article, first like to expand on my chosen topic “The Spirit of Bagamoyo and the significance of African research projects such as LOITASA”. To me LOITASA has been a great success in Phase I, and we hope that it will be an even greater success in Phase II. I have participated in many funded projects in my long academic career in education. However, many of them have had limited success, because they have failed to lead to significant improvement of education at its most basic levels. I wish to mention two reasons why I think that LOITASA has been a success. Firstly, international funders tend to often set conditionalities for the projects they fund, which are not necessarily related to the needs of the recipient countries. I wish to express our gratitude to NORAD and NUFU, our Norwegian funders, for their generosity and genuine concern for Africa. They have been loyal supporters of African development as far back as the Nyerere era of Education for Self-Reliance. They showed their true commitment to the empowerment of African academics by making LOITASA a South-South-North project, where African scholars could play the leading role in the development of educational policy research in their own countries, in our case Tanzania and South Africa. If one reads the four LOITASA books (Brock-Utne et al 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006) analytically, one realises that they reflect the true, authentic voices of Africa and the language needs of its peoples. Secondly, our gratitude to our funders, not just for funding the LOITASA project for a second phase, but for allowing real Africanists to direct and own the project. International donors often insist on Ivy League and Oxbridge types of scholars to lead projects without considering whether they are at heart part of the struggle for African scholarship. We have been privileged to have Birgit and her team, as passionate African researchers, participating in the LOITASA project. I want to pay a special tribute to Birgit, a remarkable woman of unlimited academic energy in our world of comparativists in education. As a seasoned international traveller and conference attendee, I admire her...