Note on Theoretical Marginalization and Language

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Earlier today, I had a Zoom session with the Music Study Group of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), Nigeria. Thanks to

Peter Sylvanus

, the HOD of Music at UNN, for organizing it.

One of the questions put to me during the session is how the marginalized theoretical and scholarly perspectives of Nigeria/Africa can receive serious reception and respect in a global (read Western-dominated) academic culture that devalues Global South thinkers and thinking by default and values Euro-American ones also by default.

There are several strategies, some of which I shared with the group, but one aspect of the answer that I didn’t get to cover adequately is that of language. In my experience the cheapest, easiest excuse that the Western academy uses to exclude and disenfranchise African scholars and their perspectives is to say that their writing is poor—that they can’t write.

There are of course all kinds of racist and othering underpinnings to this tactic, but sometimes the excuse is based on an actually existing writing deficit. And I would argue, following our late friend, Pius Adesanmi, that to be taken seriously and be reckoned with in the Western academy, we have to write back to Western theorists as insurgents bypassing and crashing the gates and gatekeepers but we have to do so in a language that is intelligible to the gatekeepers, in their own academic lexicon. That way, you take that go-to alibi off the table and compel them to examine and engage with your work on its merit.

You can have, as Africa-based scholars often do, radical, iconoclastic, novel, and revisionist perspectives, theories, and approaches, but if you do not deprive your Western interlocutors of the poor writing excuse, they’ll always use it to exclude you.

That is why I emphasize linguistic mastery and writing excellence, and lament the decline of writing in Nigerian universities. If the writing is bad no one is going to grasp or have the patience to comprehend the radically new theory and argument you’re advancing. And this contention applies to all disciplines, including the hard sciences.

Which is why I have no sympathy for the pseudo-Afrocentric nonsense that English (or other European languages) is not our mother tongue so proficiency, fluency, and mastery are not important. Whether we like it or not, English is the scholarly Lingua Franca of the world we live in and your access to global scholarly conversations and intellectual capital is directly proportional to your written and oral fluency in it. Ask the South Asian scholars of the subaltern collective how they broke through and forced their theories on the Western academy after going through a similar complaining phase as us.

More importantly, if we’re asking for a hearing at the theoretical table, it is not compromise or self-betrayal to adopt the prevailing paradigmatic linguistic medium. After all, we’re the ones seeking to alter the global epistemological dynamic, force a reckoning with African and Africa-derived theories, and teach Western scholars our ways of knowing and seeing the world.

[Toyin Falola]

Moses:

Do they really say that “so proficiency, fluency, and mastery are not important?”

Or

That we should use our mother tongues at the primary level, at the very list, and promote African languages? Ngugi recently won the prize in Swahili, and his recent novel is written in English.

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Oga,

Yes, the default stock response of some of our people to linguistic critique and to efforts to improve language proficiency in English is "grammar no be our language,"  "colonial mentality," and "grammar is no be intelligence" etc. They wear their poor writing skills as a badge of Afrocentric honor. There are many variations of this common, hackneyed Nigerian justification of bad writing and poor linguistic skills. Of course, it's all a defensive mechanism to avoid having to do the hard work of improving their writing.

Well, Ngugi is exhibit A of the duplicity and impracticality of the "write and theorize in your mother tongue" canard. It doesn't work. He returned to English after his initial experiment writing in Gikuyu. 

The insistence on "mother tongue" intellection and the hostility to English (or French) mastery undermines our effort to break through and to have our theories and modes of thought understood, valued, and engaged in the Euro-American academy. 

We cannot be complaining about being shut out and not being taken seriously and then say English (or French) mastery is not an important objective or is a colonial hangover or a surrender to linguistic imperialism. Why give the hostile Western interlocutor an excuse to ignore your perspectives by writing badly?

One Facebook respondent says we can theorize in our mother tongue. Of course we can, but we cannot then turn around and complain that Western scholars are not according our theories and ideas the seriousness they deserve or that they're not engaging these ideas.  We can't have it both ways.

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[Biko Agozino]

'Which is why I have no sympathy for the pseudo-Afrocentric nonsense that English (or other European languages) is not our mother tongue so proficiency, fluency, and mastery are not important.'

Only a pseudo-Afrocentric scholar would say that rigorous theorizing in English is not important. Almost all Afrocentric writers develop their thoughts in English, French, Portuguese or Espanol. There is no existing Afrocenrtic theorist who is rejected by Eurocentric scholars because he/she writes bad English. Name one.

By coincidence, I also Zoomed with the UNN Faculty of Social Science during their Virtual International Conference on Crucial Issues in African Development and the Sustainable Development Goals on Wednesday 10/28/20. My guest lecture on Linguistic Industrial Complex Economy (LICE) offered a head-scratching theory of industrialization based on the empirical observation that almost all countries that have industrialized did so by relying on their indigenous languages. No country has ever industrialized by relying on a language imposed by colonizers. Name ne. That may be part of the reasons why Africa struggles with industrialization.

Moses may be right that English is the dominant language in world commerce today and the top universities in the world rankings are English language universities. Yet, Japan, Russia, Germany, France, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, NorwaY, China, and Korea remain competitive because they realized that language is a neglected factor of production as important as land, labor, and capital. Correct grammar is important even when we write in indigenous languages but to abandon our mother tongues would be to abandon a vital source of creativity in the arts but also in the sciences. Ngugi is right.

Fea Kuti broke through when he abandoned Oyibo grammatical songs and embraced Naija pidgin. Ebenezer Obey, King Sunnu Ade, Osita Osadebe, Oriental Brothers, Oliver de Coque, Mike Ejeagha, Rex Lawson, Bob Marley, Makeba, Bright Chimezie, Mighty Sparrow, gospel singers, Hip Hop and Calypso artists, to mention but a few, all developed new musical genres by abandoning Queen's English. Those of us who were trained to be signifying monkeys mimicking Englishness have managed to develop or innovate zero musical styles and very few theories for some reason.

The question is, what are the new musical theories developed by African universities that Europeans have failed to accept? African scholars are versed in the descriptive tradition of empiricism but fail in advancing original theories in most cases. That was why I answered a question from the audience during my Zoom by encouraging the

scholars to take up the challenge of developing their own original theories in order to be noticed internationally because the leading lights in every discipline are theorists. I encouraged them to establish a journal of Nigerian Languages where original research in any discipline written in indigenous languages would be published and I asked them to endow a prize for the best dissertation in any discipline written entirely in indigenous languages. This is something that we can do without waiting for the government.

The idea that Africans do not write well is a racist idea that goes back to Hegel in his Philosophy of History. He did not say that others do not write, he only claimed that Europeans write better history. Derrida pointed this out in Of Grammatology by stating that even according to Hegel, every culture writes, in the general sense of grammatology as the use of signs to represent speech. To claim that Africans do not write well when we write in our indigenous languages while discussing musical theory about work that is written predominantly in African indigenous languages is an attempt at conceptual colonization or epistemicide. Africans practically invented writing. Na lie?

Even if your grammar spills verbs the way that Amos Tutuola and Chief Zebrudaya did, even if your subjects did not agree with your verbs, Martin Luther King Jr said that you can still serve your community. Mazrui was dead wrong when he identified himself and his children as Afro Saxons and said that a bad idea expressed in good English was better than a good idea expressed in bad English. Na lie o.

Biko

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

i keep saying this: english has been spoken in west africa LONGER than in the united states. pidgin englishes are real languages, and were formed, like american english or canadian english, by the intersection of local languages and british english; the literature in pidgin, all along the coast, is as important a body as any; the use of pidgin in film is important; the songs, the poetry. what more could you want? british english now is only one variant, and no longer the dominant one (american english is) of a global body of languages.

i once asked ngugi when he came to msu about pidgin, which had as much cachee as the swahili he knew, and disregarded in his writings. and what is swahili if not a creolized language.

i am sure farooq can confirm, go back far enough, all languages are creolized versions of some earlier language. none are pure, except for the one instantaneous moment when it is uttered. a second later it has changed. like us

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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Sent: Friday, October 30, 2020 6:35 PM
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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Note on Theoretical Marginalization and Language

 

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[Toyin Falola]

Moses:

Your position needs considerable revision along the lines offered by Ken and Biko.

But more significantly, the greatest disaster may be the untapped knowledge and theories in all indigenous languages. Yoruba, for instance, is so rich not only on ontologies but also on epistemologies. The tragedy is that they are untapped.

I was taken aback the first time I read Foucault—I kept wondering what he was talking about that I did not already know.

Four of us interviewed Kelani last Sunday. The first question that Ken asked him was about power. The ontology of his answer, based on Yoruba, was not far different from Gramsci’s Prison Notebook.

Thus, the Nsukka people have Igbo, which Westerners don’t have. They need to milk it. When I collaborated to create the Ogbu Kalu Center, in honor of one of my best friends in the world who died young, I began to plead to convert the extensive ideas in Igboness into large-scale theories. Afigbo, the preeminent historian—in my opinion the country’s best historian of his era—was so well grounded that he was able to use the rich resources of the Igbo to complicate the archives.

TF

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[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

Biko:

I absolutely agree with your position here.  English has its place but so must African languages in primary pedagogy in African nations.

Narrative disciplines like History must take the lead by teaching all courses in indigenous languages from elementary classes to doctorate level.

OAA.

Mr. President you took an oath to rule according to the Constitution.

Where are the schools to promote the teaching of the country's lingua francas?

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

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Date: 31/10/2020 02:40 (GMT+00:00)

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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Note on Theoretical Marginalizationand  Language

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'Which is why I have no sympathy for the pseudo-Afrocentric nonsense that English (or other European languages) is not our mother tongue so proficiency, fluency, and mastery are not important.'

Only a pseudo-Afrocentric scholar would say that rigorous theorizing in English is not important. Almost all Afrocentric writers develop their thoughts in English, French, Portuguese or Espanol. There is no existing Afrocenrtic theorist who is rejected by Eurocentric scholars because he/she writes bad English. Name one.

By coincidence, I also Zoomed with the UNN Faculty of Social Science during their Virtual International Conference on Crucial Issues in African Development and the Sustainable Development Goals on Wednesday 10/28/20. My guest lecture on Linguistic Industrial Complex Economy (LICE) offered a head-scratching theory of industrialization based on the empirical observation that almost all countries that have industrialized did so by relying on their indigenous languages. No country has ever industrialized by relying on a language imposed by colonizers. Name ne. That may be part of the reasons why Africa struggles with industrialization.

Moses may be right that English is the dominant language in world commerce today and the top universities in the world rankings are English language universities. Yet, Japan, Russia, Germany, France, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, NorwaY, China, and Korea remain competitive because they realized that language is a neglected factor of production as important as land, labor, and capital. Correct grammar is important even when we write in indigenous languages but to abandon our mother tongues would be to abandon a vital source of creativity in the arts but also in the sciences. Ngugi is right.

Fea Kuti broke through when he abandoned Oyibo grammatical songs and embraced Naija pidgin. Ebenezer Obey, King Sunnu Ade, Osita Osadebe, Oriental Brothers, Oliver de Coque, Mike Ejeagha, Rex Lawson, Bob Marley, Makeba, Bright Chimezie, Mighty Sparrow, gospel singers, Hip Hop and Calypso artists, to mention but a few, all developed new musical genres by abandoning Queen's English. Those of us who were trained to be signifying monkeys mimicking Englishness have managed to develop or innovate zero musical styles and very few theories for some reason.

The question is, what are the new musical theories developed by African universities that Europeans have failed to accept? African scholars are versed in the descriptive tradition of empiricism but fail in advancing original theories in most cases. That was why I answered a question from the audience during my Zoom by encouraging the

scholars to take up the challenge of developing their own original theories in order to be noticed internationally because the leading lights in every discipline are theorists. I encouraged them to establish a journal of Nigerian Languages where original research in any discipline written in indigenous languages would be published and I asked them to endow a prize for the best dissertation in any discipline written entirely in indigenous languages. This is something that we can do without waiting for the government.

The idea that Africans do not write well is a racist idea that goes back to Hegel in his Philosophy of History. He did not say that others do not write, he only claimed that Europeans write better history. Derrida pointed this out in Of Grammatology by stating that even according to Hegel, every culture writes, in the general sense of grammatology as the use of signs to represent speech. To claim that Africans do not write well when we write in our indigenous languages while discussing musical theory about work that is written predominantly in African indigenous languages is an attempt at conceptual colonization or epistemicide. Africans practically invented writing. Na lie?

Even if your grammar spills verbs the way that Amos Tutuola and Chief Zebrudaya did, even if your subjects did not agree with your verbs, Martin Luther King Jr said that you can still serve your community. Mazrui was dead wrong when he identified himself and his children as Afro Saxons and said that a bad idea expressed in good English was better than a good idea expressed in bad English. Na lie o.

Biko

On Friday, 30 October 2020, 18:35:29 GMT-4, Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Writing well in any language is vital.

Writing well in English has particular strategic value.

But...why should an academic working in Africa make being taken seriously by Western academics and scholars  one of his or her aspirations?

Did Western academia and scholarship develop by aspiring to be taken seriously by anyone else?

They created a self referential system, in which they developed their tradition by focusing on studying and referencing each other, and making the intrinsic structure of the tradition thus created over the centuries their points of reference in engaging with other traditions.

I will answer why it is thought we need what Paulin Hountondji rightly described in a series of essays as epistemic extraversion in African discourse.

African academia may be described as still cast in a colonialist mold, in which scholarship is oriented by the epistemic, economic, political and geographical centre represented by the West. 

Publishing in Western based journals and by Western based publishers remains the acme of academic success.

Understandably so, because the West created the currently dominant global academic and economic system and running for centuries, they have the best of this system.

But must this always remain so?

Why can globally central journals not also be based in African universities the way that Research in African Literatures and African Arts, two of the most important journals in the field, are based in Western universities?

Nka, one of the leading journals in modern African art, was founded by three African immigrants in the US, Okwui Enenwezor, Chika Oke-Agulu and Saleh Hsaan, if I got the last name right.

Another such immigrant, Sylvester Ogbechie, founded Critical Interventions, another fine journal, later subsumed by a big academic publishing company, Taylor and Francis, leading to questions  central to the continuing relevance of publishing models in academic journal publishing.

When Ogbechie was in sole control of the journal, paying for it was affordable for the general reader, each article costing $5.

Now that it has become part of the Taylor and Francis group, pricing has been subsumed into the traditional high prices of closed access Western academic journals, so that each issue of the journal, even as far back as its first issue, costs $169.

This model of journal pricing is unsustainable and the backlash from Western scholars and institutions, even the richest such as Harvard, suggests, in my view,  that only open access journals will survive beyond the next 50 years

So, groups of people, individuals, are also in the journal creation and publishing business.

Enwezor's ascension to becoming a powerful voice in global art owed a great deal to his relentless writing and publication, to which Nka was central.

The question should be- not how to be taken seriously by Western scholars, but how to develop your own scholarly ecosystem that is both organic to you and globally impactful.

African academic promotion criteria also need to look critically at the weighting given to journal and book publication from different parts of the world.

The University of Benin, for example,  at one time and perhaps till now, used to have as their criteria for professorship a certain number of external publications, which in my view, is a euphemism for publication by Western publishers, as a means of assuring the global validity of the scholarly achievement of the academic.

This is understandable, in the light of the sad history of academic journal publication in Nigeria, a mix of idealism, with some journals and opportunism, as with others.

But Albert Einstein's three epochal 1905 papers that reshaped physics and got him the Nobel Prize were published in one journal in Germany, Annal Der Physik, Annals of Physics, a journal that became powerful through the efforts of its individual founder and editors who not only published first rate work but kept their readers  abreast of developments in Europe by publishing works in translation from other European countries, as described by Jungnickel and McCommach in Intellectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein Vol. 1(1990:34-9)

For scholars outside Germany to read Einstein's work, they had to have translations in other languages though the bulk of the work was in the universal language of mathematics. The journal is now published in English.

Central point- academic systems and their organs, such as journals, are often the creation of individuals and groups, agents serving particular agendas.

Why must scholarship about Africa and even more so by Africans outside the West be oriented towards  Western scholarly systems?

Abiola Irele, in his painfully poignant ''The African Scholar'' writing from the vantage point of his exile in US academia after degrees in Africa and the West and a career built in African universities, , describes Africa as marginal in Western scholarship.

Why should you struggle to define yourself in terms of someone else to whom your own concerns are not central?

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[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

Anyone can learn any language well.

For me its not an either/ or situation.

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

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Oga,

Yes, the default stock response of some of our people to linguistic critique and to efforts to improve language proficiency in English is "grammar no be our language,"  "colonial mentality," and "grammar is no be intelligence" etc. They wear their poor writing skills as a badge of Afrocentric honor. There are many variations of this common, hackneyed Nigerian justification of bad writing and poor linguistic skills. Of course, it's all a defensive mechanism to avoid having to do the hard work of improving their writing.

Well, Ngugi is exhibit A of the duplicity and impracticality of the "write and theorize in your mother tongue" canard. It doesn't work. He returned to English after his initial experiment writing in Gikuyu. 

The insistence on "mother tongue" intellection and the hostility to English (or French) mastery undermines our effort to break through and to have our theories and modes of thought understood, valued, and engaged in the Euro-American academy. 

We cannot be complaining about being shut out and not being taken seriously and then say English (or French) mastery is not an important objective or is a colonial hangover or a surrender to linguistic imperialism. Why give the hostile Western interlocutor an excuse to ignore your perspectives by writing badly?

One Facebook respondent says we can theorize in our mother tongue. Of course we can, but we cannot then turn around and complain that Western scholars are not according our theories and ideas the seriousness they deserve or that they're not engaging these ideas.  We can't have it both ways.

On Fri, Oct 30, 2020 at 5:35 PM Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

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[Farooq A. Kperogi]

"No country has ever industrialized by relying on a language imposed by colonizers. Name ne. That may be part of the reasons why Africa struggles with industrialization."--Biko Agozino

That's demonstrably inaccurate. I confronted this misconception in many previous columns such as my April 9, 2017 column titled, "English, Indigenous Language Instruction and National Development" and my April 23, 2017 column titled "English in Nigeria: India Not an Exemplary Model."

Singapore, Ireland, etc. have developed with a colonial language and Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc. are still developing even though they deploy indigenous languages for instructions at all levels of education. India's development isn't powered by Hindi; it is powered by English. Read the articles.

Farooq

 

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

Nigeria's Digital Diaspora: Citizen Media, Democracy, and Participation

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Apologies for so much posting on this subject but I would like to look more carefully at this point I made-

''Even the work done by Abiodun and Lawal at the foundation of their careers at the then University of Ife in Nigeria, work arising from research funded by that university and delivered at seminars in that university, were often published in Western journals, in the days well before the advent of open access.''

Akinsola Akiwowo's work in developing a theory of sociation, the Asuwada theory,  from Yoruba origin Ifa literature, was cultivated, first delivered and possibly its first essays published in the context of the then University of Ife where he was at the time.

But his essays that are best known everywhere variants of sociological theory are discussed was published in sociology journals in the West where they generated a high level of attention, with feedback from scholars within and beyond Africa.

Such attention is very significant for scholarship, raising the question of how the West has successfully globalized its own locality, an example others could learn from, navigating the local/global matrix created by the West while developing their own versions of the same dynamic.

toyin 

On Sat, 31 Oct 2020 at 07:10, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com> wrote:

Questions Arising

''But more significantly, the greatest disaster may be the untapped knowledge and theories in all indigenous languages. Yoruba, for instance, is so rich not only on ontologies but also on epistemologies. The tragedy is that they are untapped.

... I began to plead to convert the extensive ideas in Igboness into large-scale theories. Afigbo, the preeminent historian—in my opinion the country’s best historian of his era—was so well grounded that he was able to use the rich resources of the Igbo to complicate the archives.''

Toyin Falola

Even when this work is done, and by Africans, a good degree of it is not published in contexts readily accessible to Africans.

The most powerful works in Yoruba aesthetics known to me, the work of Rowland Abiodun, Babatunde Lawal, Wole Soyinka and Henry John Drewal and Margaret Thompson Drewal, are published solely by Western presses, often academic presses, often expensive even in the West.

Even the work done by Abiodun and Lawal at the foundation of their careers at the then University of Ife in Nigeria, work arising from research funded by that university and delivered at seminars in that university, were often published in Western journals, in the days well before the advent of open access.

Toyin Falola, whom I quote above, can be examined in terms of the same paradox, although his publication strategies need to be better understood in their scope and complexity.

Two of his contributions to theory known to me are ''Ritual Archives'' and In Praise of Greatness.

But what are the chances of Africans, generally, reading these texts?

You will need to bring out some good money to purchase his book on African philosophy co-edited with Adeshina Afolayan or The Toyin Falola Reader and the monumentally sized In Praise of Greatness. 

Implications-Falola, for one, is phenomenal in generating publishing opportunities about Africa and for Africans, but, having established and continuing to sustain that level of scholarly production, what are we going to do about broad based accessibility of these texts?

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

We must achieve mastery of English for the international access it provides.

But we must also move beyond orientating our understanding of the world and our self valuation in terms of the epistemic and institutional indices represented by English as the linguistic core of the Western academy.

One approach to this is the development of our own lenses for looking at the world. 

The central lens for exploring the world is theory, a structure of ideas about the nature of the universe or an aspect of it and how it may be understood.

Western theory is fundamental to academia, in its current, globally dominant  form as a creation of the West.

Is that the only kind available or the only kind that can be created?

No.

In creating your own theories, whose interest in those theories should be most important to you?

Note that academic scholarship is international only to a degree.

The scholar in the Western system does not need to know anything about scholarship on Africa, theoretical or empirical, as long  its not directly relevant to that scholar's  work. 

 Why is the situation about scholarship on Africa, including that written by Africans in Africa different?

Breadth of knowledge and scope of appreciation of one's work are vital.

But not bcs someone whose own interests, not yours,  are central to their own focus needs to value your work.

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Training in Developing Theory

''But more significantly, the greatest disaster may be the untapped knowledge and theories in all indigenous languages. Yoruba, for instance, is so rich not only on ontologies but also on epistemologies. The tragedy is that they are untapped.

... I began to plead to convert the extensive ideas in Igboness into large-scale theories. Afigbo, the preeminent historian—in my opinion the country’s best historian of his era—was so well grounded that he was able to use the rich resources of the Igbo to complicate the archives.'

Toyin Falola

For this approach to be adequately developed and for the cultivation of theoretical approaches not necessarily inspired by classical African thought to be developed at the required scale, there is a need for a revision in our educational system.

This needs to move  from a focus on the assimilation of knowledge, or even the interpretation and application of knowledge, all valid in cognitive development, to the construction of knowledge.

This is a more dynamic, transformative approach to learning, operating in terms of the understanding of knowledge as a construct which undergoes change to the degree that one relates with it as both an instrument of the human being and a component of the human mind.

People should be trained in constructing theories, understanding them as techniques of thinking, lenses of vision.

This needs to be the centre of the study of theory, complemented by the current emphasis on  understanding, critiquing and applying theories.

Theory interpretation, application and construction should be taught at least from the first year of a university education, in the spirit of the revolution achieved in arts education by the Zaria Art Society led by its central ideologue Uche Okeke, in his development of Natural Synthesis as a philosophy integrating Western and African artistic techniques in developing art inspired by one's environment.

Such training, in terms of the fundamentals of critical thinking in developing a view of the world, should also be taught from the earliest stages of education, in light of the fact that our lives are often shaped by the theories we live by.

thanks

toyin

 

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Questions Arising

''But more significantly, the greatest disaster may be the untapped knowledge and theories in all indigenous languages. Yoruba, for instance, is so rich not only on ontologies but also on epistemologies. The tragedy is that they are untapped.

... I began to plead to convert the extensive ideas in Igboness into large-scale theories. Afigbo, the preeminent historian—in my opinion the country’s best historian of his era—was so well grounded that he was able to use the rich resources of the Igbo to complicate the archives.''

Toyin Falola

Even when this work is done, and by Africans, a good degree of it is not published in contexts readily accessible to Africans.

The most powerful works in Yoruba aesthetics known to me, the work of Rowland Abiodun, Babatunde Lawal, Wole Soyinka and Henry John Drewal and Margaret Thompson Drewal, are published solely by Western presses, often academic presses, often expensive even in the West.

Even the work done by Abiodun and Lawal at the foundation of their careers at the then University of Ife in Nigeria, work arising from research funded by that university and delivered at seminars in that university, were often published in Western journals, in the days well before the advent of open access.

Toyin Falola, whom I quote above, can be examined in terms of the same paradox, although his publication strategies need to be better understood in their scope and complexity.

Two of his contributions to theory known to me are ''Ritual Archives'' and In Praise of Greatness.

But what are the chances of Africans, generally, reading these texts?

You will need to bring out some good money to purchase his book on African philosophy co-edited with Adeshina Afolayan or The Toyin Falola Reader and the monumentally sized In Praise of Greatness. 

Implications-Falola, for one, is phenomenal in generating publishing opportunities about Africa and for Africans, but, having established and continuing to sustain that level of scholarly production, what are we going to do about broad based accessibility of these texts?

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[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

“Why should you struggle to define yourself

in terms of someone else.....” Adepoju

That is the million dollar question.

Thank you for asking it and carrying the discussion forward.  I also take umbrage at the 

nonsensical statement about “Afrocentric nonsense.”  Achonu seems to be stuck in a time warp, and the bad old days when it was

fashionable to insult Africa centered theorizing. Happily those days are gone. Most serious academics have stopped doing that.

The views of Biko, Falola, and Adepoju have 

elevated this discourse.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, October 31, 2020 12:09 AM
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Note on Theoretical Marginalization and Language

 

Please be cautious: **External Email**

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[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

“Four of us interviewed Tunde Kelani last Sunday......,.”

I look forward to reading the work of the  four interviewers.

Thanks

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association

---

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Sent: Friday, October 30, 2020 10:39 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Note on Theoretical Marginalization and Language

 

Please be cautious: **External Email**

Moses:

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[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

Toyin Adepoju.

You have made a very powerful argument here and I cannot but concur.

African intellectuals have contributed to undercutting their own intellectual traditions by insisting they are incapable of breathing without upholding the  linguistic dominance of the West.

You and Baba Kadiri now seem to be inclining toward the same intellectual alignment at last. How times change!

OAA

Mr President you took an oath to rule according to the Constitution.

Where are the schools to promote the teaching of the country's lingua francas?

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

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Date: 31/10/2020 08:44 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Note on Theoretical Marginalizationand  Language

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[Biko Agozino]

Bro Farooq,

I go read your dogo nturenchi later but I agree with you that every rule has exceptions. Singapore has a dual language policy that emphasizes English in addition to one other national language as a requirement for every student. India only started implementing indigenous languages of instruction this year perhaps to catch up with China. Afghans are often more fluent in Urdu than in Pashwa as a result of large-scale refugee problems. On the exceptional case of Pakistan which remains a poor country toying with nuclear weapons, here is an author who has studied it in detail in indirect support of my lice theory: Pakistan ruined by language myth

Pakistan ruined by language myth The pursuit of English as a key to prosperity is failing a nation

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

There is a reason why in China and to a lesser extent Japan, English is the most valued social asset and English language instruction has spawned a lucrative industry. Parents spend thousands of dollars to enable their children learn the language. They know that fluency and facility in the language will confer access, cachet, and opportunities on their children beyond the borders of China or Japan. Chinese researchers in all disciplines are desperate for their papers to appear in English language journals and publications. It is what it is. They say scholars do not analyze the world as they wish it to be but as it is. The pragmatics of language choice contrast with wished-for linguistic ideals.

At any rate, my overarching argument is that once you make a choice to ignore the prerequisite of linguistic mastery (whether the prerequisite is underwritten by racism or founded on actual deficits or both) you cannot then legitimately complain that Western scholars, for whom English (or French) is their medium of thought and theorizing, are not taking you seriously. You have given them a ready alibi/excuse to ignore your theories. You cannot have it both ways. If you want to stand a chance of combatting and overcoming this marginalization, you must come into the fray through the medium of the global Lingua Franca(s). If you want to theorize and think in Swahili  or Yoruba and do not see the need to translate such thought into English or French, why would you complain that the white man scholar refuses to accord your theories the attention you think they deserve?

Meanwhile, here, below, is a parallel debate on the topic/update raging on Facebook.

• Lawan Umar

  It is very true, I still find it very difficult to published in certain journals. At times you have to look for English editor.

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• Adeleke Adeeko

  Language is not something added to thought. Language is not a mere vehicle--as if a vehicle could ever be mere--of thought. Language is thought.

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  • Moses Ochonu

    

    Agreed Egbon. But is language not also a strategic medium that could be strategically deployed, independent of thought content, to challenge an epistemological behemoth or to break into certain paradigmatic circles? In other words, don't we elect to speak or write (or even think) as the occasion demands depending on what we hope to accomplish, who we want to reach, etc? Isn't language, to certain extent, a choice?

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  • Adeleke Adeeko

    Moses Ochonu

     Of course, the writer or speaker's rhetorical selections ought to match the occasion--which includes the effect sought. Even so, the theories of language use that I favor argue that there is no outside to the text. The writer's wish can get to the audience only as, and in, the uttered or written text. You may call it the àfọ̀ṣẹ (uttered-to-pass) view of language. (And, contrary to what some Yorùbá speaking readers might want to think, no magic or mystery is implied.)

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  • Abdul Mahmud

    Moses

     & Adeeko, Profs, my sense is that you have both addressed the same subject of linguistic determinism from the same standpoint. The essential of Moses' update is how thought - whether as "language is thought" or as "language of thought" - can be expressed, deployed, written or spoken to give clarity to thought. I appreciate the specific concern of Moses and how his specific concern interrogates writings in my profession as well - legal writings, particularly briefs of argument and courts' judgments. There's an emergent legal-linguistic poverty, compared to the era gone-by, that makes one puke. I think your calls are about fine writings and fine thoughts! Regards. 

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  • Peter Sylvanus

    Adeleke

    , interesting Prof. So, what in your opinion would be the solution to this dilemma?

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  • Aghogho Akpome

    Peter Sylvanus

     My understanding of 

    Adeleke Adeeko

    's intervention is that we can not truly express our thoughts in the language of another. Our scholarly and theoretical perspectives will remain devalued and in the margins if we continue to exert oursel… 

    See More

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  • Peter Sylvanus

    Aghogho

    , understood. My question is about the action(s) to take. So, what should we do to play as “equals”? Bear in mind that Prof. Biodun Jeyifo has argued that “English is an African language” (see Jeyifo [2018]). If so, shouldn’t we “exert ourselves… 

    See More

    

    TANDFONLINE.COM

    English is an African language – Ka Dupe! [for and against Ngũgĩ]

    English is an African language – Ka Dupe! [for and against Ngũgĩ]

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    •  · 6h
  • Aghogho Akpome

    Peter Sylvanus

     Yeah, this is a very good question. And although I have not read this Jeyifo article (which I will read promptly), I can remember Achebe's argument that we can domesticate English. Along those lines therefore, we can use our 'African' English to make our voices heard. I am very wary of exerting ourselves in the attempt to master 'Western English' (for want of a better way to put it). I'd rather we focus on speaking to ourselves much more than seeking the attention of the West by trying to master their language - which I think we will never be able to achieve. (And by saying we will never be able to achieve that mastery, I actually mean that the West will never concede the mastery to us).

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  • Adeleke Adeeko

    Peter Sylvanus

     My solution, if it could be so called, is simple: get a good grip of the languages (technical, theoretical, philosophical, grammatical) of the field or journal in whose knowledge fabrication exchanges you are trying to participate. It does not matter whether you are African, German, or Nepalese. 

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  • Adeleke Adeeko

    Peter Sylvanus

     I agree with Biodun Jeyifo on this: English, like French, is an African language. Christianity and Islam are also African religions. Very, very few of us can write intelligibly in those languages we call "ours." 

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  • Adeleke Adeeko

    Aghogho Akpome

     Yes, if by "another" you mean a language that one has to LEARN to use. In order for me to write literary criticism in Yorùbá, my first language, and participate in the life of the scholarly community of Yorùbá language literary criticism, I must assume the responsibility of learning its idioms. By the way, I am not quite competent in writing literary criticism in Yorùbá language. I am still learning to do it. My aim here is to urge us to complicate the "language" question. 

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  Write a reply...

  
  
• Peter J Okafor

  Thanks for sharing this insight as one in the balancing position with two legs in-between in the two worlds. The over-excitement and misuse of the social media, slangs, lazy unexplainable abbreviations, colloquial expressions, influence of mother tongue, local mannerisms and apparent fallen educational standards, have all added to complicate this. Not many people can begin and finish write ups more than two to four paragraphs, more when the language is not their usual, and not many want to write down their thoughts in clear terms for fear of being wrong or criticized. Language is expressive of thought, the vehicle of effective communication and a mastery of it is the password to the heart of key audience. Once again thanks for sharing - it reminds me of your similar interventions in the past on theoretical framework and literature review

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• Aghogho Akpome

  I see your point but it has huge contradiction. The very process of acquiring this mastery in Western linguistic forms is one of the major ways of perpetrating the theoretical hegemony we seek to upend. To follow that process is to be immersed so deeply and to continue to validate/legitimize Western thought to the point that it becomes almost impossible to return to one's original modes of expression. And that is precisely how hegemony and domination works. Without rejecting your suggestion, my preferred method is that we stop seeking validation of our ways of thinking from the West. We need to stop being so desperate to get their attention. If we pay attention to ourselves, we will go a long long way. If we de-emphasize the teaching of Kant and Russel and blah blah and teach Mundimbe and Achebe and Mbembe and actually USE these ideas in our own works, we will surely get the others to pay attention. If we keep writing for THEM, I doubt we will ever be free. 

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  • Peter Sylvanus

    Aghogho

    , nice suggestion. Are you implying that we erect, for instance, our own journal indexing bodies to strengthen our local journals and contents? If so, and considering that there are types of English, whose would be the benchmark? 

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  • Aghogho Akpome

    Peter Sylvanus

     Nobody would argue against strengthening our scholarly publishing capabilities. We can definitely develop international quality assurance and benchmarking protocols without being slavishly dependent on neo-colonial 'masters'. There are significant numbers of academics and institutions outside Africa that do not subscribe to neo-colonial relations of dependence. 

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• Ama Uche Chukwu

  You really have no sympathy for the nonsense

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• Ama Uche Chukwu

  So how do some of us who are already aware of our linguistic shortcomings make up for it and be able to join the drive to advance our own theories

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Even more responses/debates on Facebook:

• Dave Okorafor

  Beautiful!

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• Mitterand Okorie

  Hah. Prof. Isn't this some sort of walking back on the arguments you put forth in your 2017 book chapter: Diaspora Intellectuals in Euro-American Academy? Seems African intellectuals have to consistently grapple with this anxiety of how to write and speak to a glocal audience, oscillating permanently between two or multiple intellectual sensibilities.

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  • Moses Ochonu

    Mitterand

    , great poser. I don’t think it is, but maybe I am evolving, as they say. That chapter was stuck in the complaining, lamenting, and diagnosing phase as it were. I’m trying to get us to think our way out of the morass in response to the question posed to me during the session. If my recollection is correct, I similarly gesture in the chapter towards the crafty strategy of the subaltern group who used, apologies to Pius, “the language of discourse” to gatecrash the Western theoretical citadel.

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  Write a reply...

  
  
• Emakoji Ayikoye

  Masterfully argued. What role has modern mobile technology which allows texting play in this decline?

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• Paul Obi

  Prof. 

  Moses Ochonu

   I agree with you to a large extent. After some experiences with academic writing and research in the West, it became clear to me that, we are still lagging behind in bounds. My area of interest is Journalism, Media & Communication - Political Communication. I found out that our academic research and publications were too theoretical, lacking field research, data and empirical evidence. More so, while the Nigerian curriculum in Media & Communication Studies is still dwelling on Lasswel's Theory of Who say what, when, where and how; in the West, Journalism, Media and Comm Studies are focusing on Interpretative Journalism, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Post-Truth. Thus, I'm learning the ropes from the Western context... 

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• Omar Muktah

  We can only do that through our indigenous languages.

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  • Omar Muktah

    Xman Ola

     Okay. Keep mastering.

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  Write a reply...

  
  
• Marius Kothor

  Thanks for this post, Professor 

  Ochonu

  . The Zoom conversation sounds very generative. I've read this a few times now and I am trying to understand why I find all of this to be true and yet so unsettling. Maybe the part that I find dispiriting is how we are always trying to convince the Western world that what we have to say is worth reading, worth knowing. I guess it's one manifestation of our larger predicament, our position as 'subalterns.' Of course, we should always be conscious of that. But in a global knowledge economy where Blackness, especially African Blackness, is seen as the negation of knowledge itself, I wonder if the quality of our writing can save us from the fact that we are not meant to be seen as people who know anything that is worth serious consideration. We should absolutely strive to be better writers but what if we orient our intentions for our writing elsewhere; towards ourselves, towards other African communities instead of the West? What if people in Nigeria aspire to become better writers so that they can be better understood by Ghanaians, or what if Togolese people strive to write more eloquent French so that they can be better understood by the Senegalese? Or what if we just strive to be better writers for the simple pleasure of writing well in of itself?

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  • Moses Ochonu

    Thanks Marius. As I indicated, there are several strategies for overcoming/combatting the challenge, some of which I shared with the group. I just felt that I didn't do justice to the language aspect. It is unfortunate but true that the levers of global academic thought are located in the West and insurgents must try to gain entry into the paradigmatic knowledge precincts. As I stated, the "poor writing" excuse is just that: an excuse. However, to the extent that it is a reality, it must be addressed. In smart warfare, you want to take away your opponent's excuse/alibi, especially if they're in a dominant position and you have no viable alternative to going through them. Yes, it is possible for Africans to imagine a different, local, and contiguous audience but unfortunately that's not what they often do or want. It is what it is (bigger discussion for another day). In fact my Nigerian audience posed the question to me in the context of their often failing attempts to break into Western intellectual/theoretical debates and were asking me specifically for strategies for overcoming the marginalization, devaluation, and refusal to take Africa-produced theories/perspectives seriously. Regardless of what I think of the larger problem, we live in a world in which for many people, especially many of our people, breaking through to the West is the ultimate goal. I no longer judge it as I understand the pragmatics of it. Instead I try to help them do it, especially since I believe that if done properly, as the subaltern group did, it can disrupt the Western academy and its assumptions and "globalize" African modes of thought.

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  • Marius Kothor

    Thanks, Professor 

    Moses Ochonu

    . As always, you offer us so much to think about/think with.

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  • Oyeronke Oyewumi

    Prof Ochonu, Marius took the words right out of my mouth: I do not know why we must be appealing (begging) our oppressors for acknowledgement & recognition. Like Marius, I found your response absolutely dispiriting!As "successful" in the US academy as you and I are supposed to be, what does this "success" amount to in transforming the world for Black people, Africans, Nigerians, and our children? (Have you heard that increasingly in the US, quite a number of the so called high-achieving children of African immigrants are coming down with devastating mental illnesses)!What has our erudition & mastery of the Queen's English contributed in easing Africa's painful predicament? Whatever we have been doing ( which you promoted) and we are still doing, is a failed strategy!

    I am more interesed in learning how & what the Chinese are doing to actualize themselves & their own sovereignty! The last time I checked, they did not do this at some "theory table!"

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  • Moses Ochonu

    Egbon, permit me to disagree a little even if our premise is the same. Our colleagues in Nigeria don't buy our position at all and are eager for validation in the West. It is unfortunately what pays their bill and builds their career. I have changed my tack now to acknowledge that uncomfortable reality. I don't want to be the arrogant America-based scholar who knows more than them and wants to show them a different, better way. In any case, I'm implicated in it since I'm in the Euro-American academy and would be a hypocrite were I to try to condemn or critique their quest for a seat at the epistemological table of the Global North. That's one. Secondly, they cannot be lamenting how no one in the Euro-American academy takes their ideas and theories seriously but then refuse to take the craft of writing (in English) seriously. Writing is the medium of expression that will get their foot in the door for them to be heard. Thirdly, if as you and I know very well, the most common excuse they use to exclude African and Africa-derived theories and perspectives from the citadel of consequential scholarly conversations is that the writing is poor (I have many stories to tell in this regard but privacy and confidentiality prevent me from telling them), then it seems wise to take that excuse off the table, especially if the desire is to break through and be taken seriously.

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  • Oyeronke Oyewumi

    I hear you, and I share the dilemma. Nevertheless, I am not sure that the solution is to encourage their belief in a non-existent Santa Claus

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  • Adeleke Adeeko

    My posiition is much closer to that of Moses on this matter. Many, many, well regarded, Africa trained, Africa based, and whose work is Africa derived, do exist. Bluntness is my preference on this issue: we all have to find our ways into, and within, the dominant because the dominant is us all. Scholars should not seek to appear in outlets they consider inimical to their own interests, narrow or wide. We all know that "poor writing," a good part of which is the control of grounds of discovery and exposition, whether from Kontagora or Ijebu-Ode or Boulder, Colorado, will not get a scholar very far. 

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    •  · 9h
  • Oyeronke Oyewumi

    No one disputes the need for excellence in the command of language or whatever else one chooses to do. The problem is to think that language incompetence is what is holding Africans back. This is false. There would be no systemic racism in the USA towards Black Americans if language were the issue. A counterpart of this unfounded argument is how Africans change their names in order to be "accepted" by white supremacist gatekeepers & all. The last time I checked Black people murdered by Police in US: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner (say their names) had English/European names not African! If the statement "the dominant is us all" were believable or the point, we would not need Black Lives Matter, #EndSARS, resistance movements or the need for change!

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• Wa Wanjiku

  Well in!!

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  •  · 12h
• Alex Amaechi Ugwuja

  This part of your recommendations to the challenge framed in that question seems to be quite disquieting, Prof; yet the truth of it gnaws at the intestines. It would be just fine to sketch here some other time, the other recommendations which you covered better in the Zoom presentation. As our people say, things do not stand all alone by themselves.

  My one kobo contribution.

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  •  · 9h
• Charles Ugo Agwam

  I have argued elsewhere that proficiency in English in our world today means more than using a language of communication, it is the gate-pass to everything intellectual. Thanks dear Prof. for sharing your thoughts.

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[Farooq A. Kperogi]

Oga Biko,

You are engaging in what book people dey call vulgar linguistic determinism. The idea that societies develop only when their citizens are educated in their native languages is anchored on the unscientific notion that the human brain is inescapably wired to think transformative thoughts only in the language of its natal environment. Both the history and sociology of human civilization have shown this to be entirely false. 

Ethiopians (and Eritreans) weren't colonized like the rest of Africa (except for the brief Italian occupation of the region), have educated their people mostly in Amharic, which is native to the region but which isn't everyone's native language, but I won't call them "developed." 

You lived considerably in the Caribbean. Black people there speak English as a native language even though they are Africans. Would you regard them as speaking a "colonizer's" language? Many educated Africans think more clearly in the colonial languages with which they are educated than in their own native languages. Do you consider them handicapped--and, perhaps, worthless-- because their thoughts and scientific contributions aren't in their native languages?

In other words, is the output less important than the language of the output? If education in native languages is the only guarantee of development, are you suggesting that for the world to develop we must have more than 6,000 education systems in the world since there are more than 6,000 living languages in the world?

Or do you consider a language "native" just because it's native to a country even if non-native speakers in the country have to learn it like they learn a colonial language? If yes, why should an Ogoni woman learn Ijaw and deploy it as her language of instruction at school? What advantage would the Ijaw-educated Ogoni woman have over a Kanuri man who was educated in a colonizer's language?

You singled out Singapore as an exception even though you had claimed definitively that no country on earth has ever developed using a foreign language. Well, Singapore isn't an exception. I also mentioned Ireland, but you seem to have ignored it. 

Western Europe, too, used Latin for education for a long time even though most West Europeans didn't speak Latin natively. I didn't hurt their development one bit. The Muslim world used Arabic for education for centuries even though only a fraction of Muslims speak Arabic natively. Most of the Muslim scholars who made enduring contributions to science, medicine, mathematics, etc. were educated in Arabic even though they were not Arabs and didn't speak Arabic natively.

Language of education has no bearing on development.

Here's a portion of the column you said you don't have the time to read:

Nations that developed using foreign languages

It’s a well-worn cliché among dewy-eyed linguistic nationalists that indigenous language instruction is the only key to national development. There are several iterations of this sentiment. 

For instance, in a 2016 edited book titled Studies in Nigerian Linguistics, Philip Anagbogu and Gideon Omachonu contributed a chapter in which they claim that, “No nation has ever made appreciable progress in development as well as science and technology education relying on a foreign language(s).”

One Professor Birgit Brock-Utne, a Norwegian who taught and lived in Tanzania for a long time, also claimed that, "No country has ever developed on the basis of a foreign language." But these essentialist claims have no basis in linguistic or historical evidence.

 Evidence from linguistic research (and, I might add, common sense) shows that no one is infrangibly wired to cogitate rarefied thoughts only in their native language. Societies don't develop because they use their primordial languages for education, nor do they stagnate because they deploy a foreign language for education. That’s vulgar linguistic determinism. Development isn't solely a function of language of instruction at schools; it's a consequence of a multiplicity of factors.

There are 6,909 living languages in the world. The linguistic deterministic thesis of development that holds that societies can only develop if they use their indigenous languages for instruction at schools would suggest that speakers of all the 6,909 living languages in the world should have their separate instructional policies based on their languages. What a babel that would be!

History is littered with examples of countries that developed on the basis of a foreign language.

Let’s start with Europe. Scholarship in Latin, that is, Classical Latin, is the foundation of the development of Western Europe. Latin wasn't native to vast swathes of people in Europe. It was an exclusive elite language, a reason all other European languages at the time were called “vernacular languages.” Latin was the language of education in Europe (including in North Africa where it was studied in schools until the Roman Empire waned) until about the second half of the 18^th century.

 European development wasn't stalled because people learned and used Latin for scholarship; on the contrary, scholarship in Latin is the foundation for Western Europe’s development. It isn't because there is something intrinsically superior or magical about Latin; it's simply because, for historical reasons, it was the vault of knowledge at the time—the way English is today.

In the Muslim world, particularly from the 8th century to the 13th century, during the so-called Golden Age of Islam when science, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, economic development, etc. grew and flowered luxuriantly, the language of scholarship was Arabic, but several of the key personages associated with this golden age spoke Arabic as a second language.

For example, Muhammad Ibn Musa al-Kwarizmi, the father of algorithm, spoke Farsi as his first language, but his language of education was Arabic. That didn't stop him from making profound contributions to knowledge and to development. Note that Farsi (Persian) and Arabic are not only mutually unintelligible languages, they also belong to two different language families. Persian is an Indo-European language (in common with English!) while Arabic is an Afro-Asiatic language (in common with Hausa!)

Ibn Sina, through whose efforts the West recovered Aristotle and whose work in medical science is foundational, was also a Persian who learned and wrote in Arabic. Arabic was a second language to him. I can go on, but the point I want to make is that several of the central figures in Islam's golden age weren't native Arabic speakers. In fact, most people in the Muslim Ummah at the time weren’t Arabs. But Arabic was the language of education. It was the epistemic storehouse of the time, and the fact of Arabic’s foreignness didn't cause it to halt the development of the societies in which it was used.

For modern examples of countries that developed using a foreign language, Singapore is one. Although most Singaporeans are ethnically Chinese, they use English as the language of instruction at all levels of education in their country. Singapore, not long ago, transitioned from “third world to first,” to borrow from the title of late Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s book. Use of English as the language of education hasn’t stalled Singapore’s development.

Ireland is another example. For long, it was Europe’s fastest growing economy because of its advances in information and communication technology. Ireland’s language of instruction at all levels of education is English even though English isn’t “native” to the country. The country’s “native” tongue is Gaelic, which is mutually unintelligible with English. Like Nigeria and Singapore, Ireland was colonized by England.

In addition, several universities in Asia and Europe are now switching to English as their language of instruction. They aren't stupid.

On the other hand, North Koreans, Vietnamese, Pakistanis, Mongolians, etc., use their native languages as their countries' official languages and as the languages of instruction at all levels of education. That hasn't guaranteed their development. So it is simplistic to assert that simply being educated in a native language is all that is needed to be developed, and that use of a foreign language forecloses development.

As I pointed out earlier, although evidence suggests that mother-tongue instruction enhances learning, no human being is intrinsically and inexorably wired to conceptualize high-minded thoughts in just one language, or only in the language of the culture they grew up in. Nigeria isn't stuck in prolonged infancy because English is its official language; it is because it has had no purposeful, forward-looking, transaction-oriented leadership since independence.

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

Nigeria's Digital Diaspora: Citizen Media, Democracy, and Participation

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/1408169358.1379305.1604153618113%40mail.yahoo.com.

[Harrow, Kenneth]

(small name correction. the editor of Nka is salah m. hassan, a brilliant scholar in art)

k

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, October 31, 2020 9:21 AM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Note on Theoretical Marginalizationand Language

 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DB6PR04MB2982914FC01DCA131B11692EA6120%40DB6PR04MB2982.eurprd04.prod.outlook.com.

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

great thanks ken.

thanks

toyin

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DM5PR12MB24565B718429ED81B6F60C58DA120%40DM5PR12MB2456.namprd12.prod.outlook.com.

[Moses Ochonu]

Biko,

I was asked to answer the question of how Nigerian scholars with theoretical contributions to make can overcome the challenge of their submissions being rejected by Western publications. At least one questioner prefaced the question with a narrative of their experience. I offered several suggestions, the writing one being one of them.

The poor writing excuse is both a racist excuse and a fact. 

I have had experiences of reviewing or intervening in reviews of work from Nigerian scholars in which the scholars have compelling theoretical contributions to make but the writing leaves much to be desired, thus undermining or obscuring the contribution. Several members of this list have had similar experiences, including the Oga himself. This is a common problem. I don’t do concealment and escapism.

Many of us have stories to tell in this regard and only privacy and confidentiality concerns prevent us from telling them.

Whether it’s factual or an alibi or both, the problem of poor writing needs to be addressed since a refusal to improve the writing will confirm and affirm the excuse often invoked to exclude and dismiss theoretical contributions from Africa.

If you want to imagine and write for a different audience and ignore Western journals and gatekeepers as is your right to do then you can ignore good writing (and thinking) in the European languages.

 But if, like my UNN interlocutors, you desire to be taken seriously by and for your scholarship to break through the epistemological citadels of the Global North then you have to be intelligible to them. 

If you’re not and you do not take steps to address that deficit then you have no right to keep complaining. After all it is you who want a seat at the epistemological table, not the scholars and theorists of the Global North.

Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 31, 2020, at 2:13 PM, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooq...@gmail.com> wrote:



To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAPq-FWuVWyC_6HpETKX2OkDeokS2pqOyjJbu%2BWj-F9e3wD21Yw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

These two dont necessarily go together-

''If you want to imagine and write for a different audience and ignore Western journals and gatekeepers as is your right to do''

 ''then you can ignore good writing (and thinking) in the European languages.''

  thanks

  toyin  

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/FC76B353-1846-41EF-AB56-813279323A29%40gmail.com.

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

is it not possible to renegotiate  how one relates with western journals and gatekeepers without ignoring them?

toyin

[Toyin Falola]

Moses:

To refresh the memories of those who went to Universities in the 60s and 70s, we must praise the visionaries of the time for recognizing this problem. They made the teaching of English a mandatory course on some campuses to correct the lapses identified with the secondary schools. Over time, as in compulsory General Studies, many students and a smaller number of grades made a mess of those courses.

My contribution here is not connected with the arguments on the relevance of languages in development, with opinions that will remain divided. Baba Kwesi Prah, who should be 78 this year, I think, has made a career of this for more than four decades, and (Oh God, we thank you!), his son, now a professor, is also pushing some of the arguments.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CEa7kxd9dE

 

As an aside, all societies need to communicate to function, and it can be in their language. Now to put food on your table, you have to follow established protocols in your chosen careers.

TF

 

PS: We are having fun with this small debate before someone truncates it with an abusive word or phrase. I turn off with any abusive word.

 

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Date: Saturday, October 31, 2020 at 2:43 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/FC76B353-1846-41EF-AB56-813279323A29%40gmail.com.

[Moses Ochonu]

Another point: it’s quite arrogant, not to mention hypocritical, of us as scholars practicing our craft in the Global North and publishing in Northern venues superintended by Western gatekeepers and governed by Western rubrics to question why our colleagues back in Nigeria/Africa desire the validation and acceptance of their theories and scholarly contributions in the dominant knowledge-mediating  institutions of the West. 

I no longer practice this judgemental, self-righteous denunciation, not only because it would be hypocritical but also because I recognize that this is what pays the bills and makes careers for our colleagues in Africa. More importantly I have no philosophical objection to their trying to play in the epistemologically dominant precincts of the North as insurgents on their own terms with the ultimate aim of critically changing the Western epistemic formation and globalizing African epistemologies.

Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 31, 2020, at 2:13 PM, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooq...@gmail.com> wrote:



To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAPq-FWuVWyC_6HpETKX2OkDeokS2pqOyjJbu%2BWj-F9e3wD21Yw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Moses Ochonu]

Well, Toyin Adepoju, have you not read the oft-repeated quip of “who English epp”? It is often invoked as an instinctive response to critiques of poor writing. Poor writing of course leads to or betrays poor thinking or at least obscures good thinking. The literary folks will tell you that language is thought, that thought is language, and that language is not merely a conduit. My point is that you can recalibrate your scholarship to a vernacular audience and then you don’t have to worry about good writing in the European languages or gaining entry into global (read Euro-American) scholarly/theoretical conversations. Until you do that however, good writing (in English or French or Portuguese etc) is critical to your getting heard and taken seriously.

Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 31, 2020, at 2:59 PM, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com> wrote:



To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CALUsqTRVwWK7T2394DnFiVxDKtXB2YChXcCbb7Fb-70hWnZj0A%40mail.gmail.com.

[Biko Agozino]

Farooq,

Fa-fa-fa foul. As a scholar, you must know that the claim in my LICE theory is grounded in observable evidence and so, it is not vulgar determinism. What I claim is that language is a neglected factor of production of equal importance with land, capital, labor, and public policy. The neglect of any factor of production will most likely cripple or slow development efforts. Therefore, I am not a lingo determinist, I indicated that there are other relevant factors and that language is one of them. LICE is neither vulgar nor deterministic, it only claims that language is important. You disagree? Why now?

The good news is that even if we have no control over the other factors of production, we can exercise relative agency and autonomy over our languages if we are well-educated in indigenous tongues. 

Your claim that some individuals mastered foreign languages does not test the null hypothesis that there is no relationship between language agency and development at a national level, not the micro level of individualism.

You are right that Europe started developing by relying on the colonial language of Latin and later that of Napoleonic French but do you know what they call that period of their history? They call it the Dark Ages. Why? Na you sabi. 

Russia also used French as the official language until an African, Alexander Pushkin, defied the orthodoxy and started writing everything in Russian. They laughed at him but today he is known as the Father of Russian literature.

Lee Kwan Yew adopted the dual language policy to avoid ethnocentrism in Singapore. The Chinese majority could have imposed their language by law but that could lead to resentment from the Malay and the Hindi sections of the population. So every student is required to choose one indigenous language to master along with English. You think that Africans are smarter than those who promote literacy in their indigenous tongues? Africans are proud to call themselves Francophone, Anglophone, Lusophone, Arabicphone, anything but Afrophone? 

Remember that the Africans who built the pyramids and obelisks, embalmed their dead for thjousands of years, sculpted the roped pot of Igbo Ukwu, the bronze horsemen of Benin, and Ori Olokun, and cured the fine leather of the Hausa that the Europeans craved as Moroccan leather, all relied on their indigenous tongues as factors of production. Today we import everything from chalks to tooth picks. 

In the Caribbean where I lived for three years and wanted to kiss every inch of that land of giants, they speak English enough as a mother tongue after centuries of chopping off of the African tongues but they have also developed their original creole or patois as the language of creativity just like the less educated in Africa who continue to amaze us with their inventiveness. 

You may be right that what made those Caribbean countries more attractive to African medical doctors and professors who migrated there in droves is the fact that they are all placed on the HDI table as medium or high human development countries mainly because they have attained almost 100% literacy among men and women whereas Africans hug the bottom of the tables due to mass illiteracy even in the mother tongues. To neglect the language of the people is the same as neglecting land, funding, labor, and pubic policy. 

You seem to think that all that counts is pubic policy but I am convinced that the people have relative autonomy in the area of language. Big up our mothers for teaching us our Mother Tongues without any wages from the government. We are now among the leaders that we like to criticize from a distance. Nothing stops Farroq and Moses from showing leadership by writing at least one miserly paper in their mother tongues. Do not be afraid that just because today is Halloween, the white witches will cut out your tongues if you dare write anything in Birom, Tiv, Igbo, Yoruba, Nupe, Efik, Ijaw, Hausa or Fulfube. No shaking. Even pidgin no go hurt, wallahi. Eziokwu. You hear?:

The Irish suffered British colonization that resulted in a man-made famine resulting from their loss of control over all the factors of production, including language. Surely, they produced fine writers in English but they remained exploited until their successful restoration of independence. Today, Gaelic is a national language and road signs, writing and learning are officially promoted in Gaelic. Their industrialization has actually advanced faster in the 100 years of independence compared to the centuries of British rule under imposed Englishness. The Welsh are restoring teaching and learning for similar reasons. The Scots will probably do the same.

Ethiopia was an empire and so the imposition of Amharic on everyone would also stifle creativity. The imposition of Arabic would similarly slow down creativity in non-Arabic areas. North Korea, Vietnam, India, and Pakistan are developing countries but I am sure that many Africans envy their levels of advancement in science and technology for we hear that less wealthy Nigerians seek medical treatment over there.

Your defense of English as the sole lingua franca of the world is what you should call 'crude linguistic determinism' because it lacks significant empirical evidence. US universities require competence in any other modern language, by which they mean any other European language. As a linguist, have you ever recommended that African languages be taught on your campus since they remain modern languages too?

Walter Rodney recognized this problem in HEUA by observing that Bemba children in Zambia used to know the names of up to 60 different plants by age six until they were colonized and the colonial school started teaching them only the names of roses and daffodils that are not relevant to the slash and burn agriculture which required knowledge of the plants to decide which to cut and which to spare during farming.

Six thousand languages shared among seven billion people is not even one apiece. Yes, let us develop learning in the 2000 languages in Africa. The world will be a very oppressive place if all other languages are bulldozed to make room for imperial English. The Tower of Babel forbade such monolingualism. Let those who are comfortable writing in the colonial languages carry on but those who are literate in indigenous languages should not be shamed or deterred by the fear of lack of recognition from the Queen of England. There will be translations into dozens of other languages. 

Ngugi is right that we need to decolonize our minds by showing some more respect to the tongues of our mothers. It will not hurt your productivity if you can arrange for some of your books to be translated into African languages. You are right that what is said is more important than the tongue used but why should Africans who fist developed human language and passed it on to al of humanity, according to Chomsky, allow our own modern languages to die in return for more recognition to be shown to our Eurocentric scholars? The world forbids such lingocide.

Biko

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAPq-FWuVWyC_6HpETKX2OkDeokS2pqOyjJbu%2BWj-F9e3wD21Yw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Farooq A. Kperogi]

Oga Prof.

You're mixing up issues and veering off on tangents now, my esteemed ogo. I am myself an advocate for native languages. For instance, I don't speak English to my children here in the United States; I speak only my native Baatonu language with them. Moses knows this. He marvels at my kids seamlessly transition from my native Baatonu language to "accentless" American English.  

Even your sister has been able to pick up the language from hearing me speak it with the kids. My kids are, in fact, more proficient in my native language than most Baatonu children who are growing up in urban centers like Ilorin. We found that out when we visited Nigeria 4 years ago.

This conversation isn't about the desirability of native languages--or the merit of multilingualism. I was specifically responding to this claim of yours: "No country has ever industrialized by relying on a language imposed by colonizers. Name [one]. That may be part of the reasons why Africa struggles with industrialization."

Thankfully, you have now admitted that your claim has no basis in evidence. The language of instruction at all levels of education in Singapore is English, and it is developed. The language of instruction at all levels of education in Ireland is English, and it is developed. The basic literacy level in Irish Gaelic in Ireland is below 20 percent. I visited Ireland in 2004 and observed the ubiquitousness of signs in Irish Gaeli even though most Irish people don't understand the language and have to rely on the English translation of their "native" language to get by.

India is also rapidly industrializing with English, not Hindi. 

You asked for one example to dispute your claim. You got several. And you've admitted that your claim is rested on a very slender thread of empirical evidence. That does it for me. 

It bears repeating that there is no intrinsic nexus between language and development or "industrialization." Any society can develop-- or stall-- in any language. Foreignness or nativity of language is entirely irrelevant to development or "industrialization."

 In any case, Standard English, which powers the scholarship that drives development in the Anglophone West, isn't even native to anyone. It's learned, not acquired, although I concede that being a native English speaker (which isn't delimited by race) can give a headstart in the acquisition of Standard English. An educated Igbo man from Okija can have better proficiency and greater agency in Standard English than a modestly or barely educated man who was born and raised in Maine in the United States.

 Plus, more than 80 percent of the vocabulary of science is foreign to English. Native English speakers also face hurdles learning Standard English and the English dialect that powers science, technology and even humanistic and social science scholarship.

Let's curb our linguistic nativist enthusiasm and not ascribe to language, native or foreign, a role it doesn't have in development. That's my whole point. I am not against anyone choosing to be educated in their native language.

Farooq

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

Nigeria's Digital Diaspora: Citizen Media, Democracy, and Participation

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/2071063723.1516899.1604179132999%40mail.yahoo.com.

[Toyin Falola]

Farooq:

We are generating a good debate here, and I will like that we formalize it for others to share.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAPq-FWuVxxp18gy6Q5Xt%3DMukKp_YrMf2ZgVSDqPvQdtLM_80jQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Biko Agozino]

Big Ogo,

You done come again o. It is called Mother tongue and not Baba tongue. About turn, quick march; those children of my sister must be fluent in their mother tongue before they learn your yeye minority language that nobody understands even in Ilorin, you hear? Otherwise we go fine you one cow. But you try sha to teach them an African language.

I think that we are more in agreement on this thread than opposed. We are all writing in English here. But the way Moses posed correct English as an exclusive tool for theory construction deserves a response. I happen to believe that robust theorizing can be done in indigenous ;languages. I have done so in several academic papers and many others have done so excellently around the world.

Singapore and Hong Kong are among the exceptions to my LICE theorem but they are both mercantilist cities instead of being industrial in the real sense of the term. Yet, even Singapore is not monolingual in schooling and Hong Kong people are literate in Cantonese too. They emphasize competency in at least one other indigenous language. Ireland increased the pace of industrialization once they started rediscovering Gaelic. India just announced this year that instruction in indigenous languages will be enforced at all levels from this year. Their problem may be that hundreds of millions remain illiterate in any language. Chinese parents value English as a second language but they also understand the importance of fluency in indigenous Chinese languages.

In a Calaloo interview, Achebe tells the story of his workshop in Japan. One of the Japanese participants reported that his grandfather took all his university notes in English in the 1870s. His own father took half his university notes in English and half in Japanese. Then he went to university himself after WWII and took all his notes in Japanese. Is there a lesson there for Africa? I think so but you are welcome to disagree.

Biko

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAPq-FWuVxxp18gy6Q5Xt%3DMukKp_YrMf2ZgVSDqPvQdtLM_80jQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

"I happen to believe that robust theorizing can be done in indigenous ;languages. I have done so in several academic papers and many others have done so excellently around the world."

Biko,

You can of course theorize in indigenous languages but you publish in English and your work will be engaged in English, so your theories enter the global academic marketplace via English. Therefore, if you neglect the imperative of good written English and the esoteric English language lexicon of your field, your theory will not travel or be published or engaged.

 Like many Africans, I used to think in my native Idoma, until about 15 years ago when it became cumbersome for me to do so since I have to translate the thought into English, the medium I write in. I have nothing against folks thinking or theorizing in their mother tongues, but if their desire is for these theories to be read, understood, and accorded the attention it deserves by "discourse communities" that use English, these theories cannot be published in the mother tongue and if they are they cannot remain in that medium.

My interlocutors at UNN may or may not think in Igbo or Yoruba--not sure. No matter; they can theorize in those languages. However, since their primary complaint is that their theories are not being granted favorable reception, and since their expressed aspiration is to break into the consequential theoretical conversations of the Euro-American academy, they would be shooting themselves in the foot if they do not translate their thoughts and theories into English (or French or Portuguese as the case may be). Doing such translation work, or theorizing and thinking in English in the first order, requires a mastery of English as an expressive form and as a tool of writing into and disrupting the dominant epistemologies of the global North

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/1424092452.1541677.1604193964019%40mail.yahoo.com.

[Biko Agozino]

Moses, the Egyptian,

You could have told the Nsukka School to go ahead and theorize in any language they are comfortable with and if they d so very well, translators will arrive to translate their work for the benefit of other communities of interpretation.

If your view of Anglocentric theorizing was imposed on ancient Kemet, they may have failed to produce al those technical papyri that Europeans are still studying and translating today. They even have a discipline called Egyptology that specializes on studying written ancient African texts in the language of Africans.

Do you think that there might be a relationship between the loss of agency in indigenous African languages in addition to the loss of land, funding, labor and policy autonomy, and the arrested development of African cultures since the contact with invaders and enslavers? I do and I also believe that the recovery of language agency may be relatively feasible compared to the other factors of production.

I am not against English with which I publish a lot but I also have plans to narrate, theorize and publish more in Igbo and allow translations back and forth.

Do you dream in English or do you dream in Idoma like Bongos Ikwue? Akpangelumo lumo akpagengelumo akpa eeeghi?

Otachikpokpo -- Bongos Ikwue & The Groovies

Biko

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

so, a few reflections on my part:

to begin, i have a very long experience in this issue, having served on editorial boards for major african lit and cinema journals, and having reviewed god knows how many articles or book proposals.--

the mastery of english is less important than the mastery of thought--of two things: 1. constructing a strong argument; 2.mastering the material.

people whose articles are rejected blame this and that, but rarely themselves. but mostly they are wrong. it isn't prejudice against africans , not in the journals i know. the idea becomes increasingly ridiculous inasmuch as the editors and readers are increasingly african or african american, or long standing scholars in african studies with a major commitment to enhancing the field with african scholars. i've never seen a journal without this being true.

i have seen lots of continent based scholars' work that failed to demonstrate mastery of the field, usually  indicating a lack of resources.

i know, i know, the word "western" is often used to defend or attack, theoretical approaches, or to defend decisions to reject a piece. but western is mostly inseparable from african in the major scholarship nowadays. mamdani and mbembe are two instances of major theorists whom one sees quoted over and over. earlier it was mudimbe; or fanon. later gikandi, and of course the scholarship of our own falola and ochonu is cited over and again. i don't see this geographical wall as the basis for acceptance of articles, not as much as an educational formation with material available to scholars in the west much more than in africa. i can;t underline that enough.

we work in fields, the fields shift enormously; the day of high theory has long since passed; new materialist approaches are dominant in place of language or discourse based theory. you have to work to keep up with these changes or no one will be interested in your work.

and of course you have to work in a language accessible to scholars in the field, which is still predominantly english and secondarily french. i agree scholarship in african languages ought to be developed, by all means. that's been true forever, and institutional commitments wouldn't hurt to advance that goal. we have films in one language, subtitled in another; translations are common to our field, and both could take place. even sembene's Money Order appeared in both wolof and french. eventually more and more filmmakers found that they could not be true to the drama in question without turning to african languages, and then relying on subtitles. the same is true of Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, or many many other works of african literature written in african languages, and often translated and published in another.

the same could apply to african scholarship, so that the authors could write their works, and hopefully publish them, in both their own native languages and in that of the journal or press. that is a goal worth supporting.

lastly. the infirmities of the linguistic expression in english are often fixed by a good copyeditor. we all could stand a rigorous reading of our work for its coherence, if that is the goal. but it is really the ideas, how well they are shaped into an argument, and the substance of the scholarship that really matters.

(the editors will read a piece, says it's great but needs cleaning up; suggest to the author that this or that needs fixing, and perhaps that the language needs work. but ultimately they would say, let's publish it but have a copyeditor help fix the language)

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, October 31, 2020 10:18 PM
To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Note on Theoretical Marginalization and Language

 

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

How can this be done-

'' their trying to play in the epistemologically dominant precincts of the North as insurgents on their own terms with the ultimate aim of critically changing the Western epistemic formation and globalizing African epistemologies.''

Moses Ochonu

If you want to communicate with someone whose language is English, particularly if the English speaker is a person whose appreciation you seek, you need to master English.

English is also the language of many people outside the Euro-American context, being the unifying language of Nigeria where this discussion emanates from. 

Moses has done well to guide those who aspire to have their ''theories...granted favorable reception [within] the consequential theoretical conversations of the Euro-American academy,'' but is the larger question of the rationale for and the ultimate implications of this aspiration going to go away?

So, one might need to separate the various aspects of this subject.

What is the best language for learning at various levels and for scholarship? Keeping in mind that learning generally and scholarship, as a particular kind of learning, are not necessarily identical.

Are these imperatives  defined by one's local environment or the global environment dominated by English?

The second issue is that of the reason for and the implications of the desire for acceptance of one's ideas and theories within the Euro-American academy.

Perhaps some of those who are physically situated in the heartland of this academy have thereby gained perspectives that differ from those outside it, making it imperative one examine their rationale for critiquing a position that is the aspiration of many.

I would like to better understand this aspiration and its methods-

'' trying to play in the epistemologically dominant precincts of the North as insurgents on their own terms with the ultimate aim of critically changing the Western epistemic formation and globalizing African epistemologies.''

thanks 

toyin

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[Farooq A. Kperogi]

Great. But, for some reason, I can no longer find the post where Biko claimed that Ireland's industrialization owes debts to its embrace of its native Gaelic linguistic heritage. That's simply untrue. As I said before, Gaelic literacy is abysmally low in Ireland and most Irish people are monolingual English speakers. 

Gaelic couldn't possibly have been responsible for Ireland's industrialization because, first, it isn't the language of instruction in Irish schools; English is. Gaelic is only a subject. Second, most Irish students don't take it seriously; they actually disdain it. Third, in spite of the high Gaelic linguistic nationalism in Ireland, it isn't the language of quotidian communicative encounters in the country. In fact, as my 2004 travelogue notes, the Irish take pride in their proficiency in the English language, often bragging that they speak better English than the English. A lot of my Irish friends also confessed to me that they usually didn't bother to read signs in their "native" Gaelic language, saying it was a mental strain.

Chief Biko, for your claim to have even the wispiest chance at admissibility, you have to show that it is overwhelmingly the case that societies that have jettisoned colonial languages and embraced their native languages for education have industrialized. The evidence certainly doesn't support such a claim, which strengthens my argument that language in and of itself is immaterial to industrialization.  

Farooq

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

Nigeria's Digital Diaspora: Citizen Media, Democracy, and Participation

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Thanks, Biko.

I'm wary, though, of this idea of-

''You could have told the Nsukka School to go ahead and theorize in any language they are comfortable with and if they do so very well, translators will arrive to translate their work for the benefit of other communities of interpretation.''

How realistic is that assumption? How long will that take even if it does occur?

Even beyond the question of probability-how likely is it to happen- and temporality-how long will it take to occur, if at all- there is the question of immediacy, which Moses and Falola have pointed out.

Moses was addressing people who are building academic careers that imply immediate pecuniary values as well as immediate issues of appreciation beyond their national and even continental  localities.

Moses responded in a pragmatic manner by suggesting approaches to achieving their goals.

He also suggested that this pragmatic orientation may be employed for goals beyond immediate needs, such as '' trying to play in the epistemologically dominant precincts of the North as insurgents on their own terms with the ultimate aim of critically changing the Western epistemic formation and globalizing African epistemologies.''

That goal also impacts on how scholarship is done outside the West, on account of the influence of Western scholarship on the rest of the world, being the globally dominant template.

If the Nsukka scholars do what you suggest, they are not likely to be published, even in Nigeria and Africa, with all the implications of that for their careers.

Is it not more realistic to think of both writing and publishing in indigenous  languages as a publishing venture in partnership between publishers and scholars instead of leaving it to the academic alone, with all the attendant risks?

The publisher makes sure translators are available and ensures the publication and dissemination of both the original text and the translation.

Even then, the language of scholarship at Nsukka and Nigeria generally is English, not Igbo.

That means most people, even at Nsukka, will be reading the English translations rather than the Igbo text. Even Achebe describes himself as a better writer in English than in Igbo.

In your case, your central scholarly language is English.

You are thinking of expanding your writing in Igbo, not as a new scholar seeking recognition, but as an accomplished scholar who has achieved what Moses' Nsukka interlocutors are seeking, thereby placing your anticipated initiative in a very different context.

Yes, the decentring of African languages and their epistemic values has been part of the colonizing process, at both cultural and political levels, but is is realistic to simply try to return to the pre-colonial status quo?

How realistic is that?

thanks

toyin

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

If I might respond to my own question while hoping to learn more on it from others-

''How can this be done-

'their trying to play in the epistemologically dominant precincts of the North as insurgents on their own terms with the ultimate aim of critically changing the Western epistemic formation and globalizing African epistemologies.'

Moses Ochonu''

I recall this is the burden of Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, where he argues for the centring of African aesthetics in the study of African art, a goal that Abiọdun and his colleagues and collaborators in the West  and Nigeria have gone a very long way in achieving over the decades.

They are all superb writers in English, even as, with those in Yoruba Studies,  they engage their often marvelous mastery of Yoruba, a centrality of English in framing Yoruba discourse which enabled them to publish in the largely Western journals and book publishers through  which their work came out.

A critical examination of the relative impact of this work in Africa and the West , however, needs to be undertaken.

Abiodun, Babatunde Lawal, Olabiyi Yai, Barry Hallen, Pierre Verger, among others at the then University of Ife, had a profound impact on their immediate scholarly environment and reached beyond that to impact the Western academy in its homelands, as demonstrated by the character of scholarly life in the university between the 70s and 80s and their publications abroad, and as with Lawal, teaching stints in the US-he taught at Harvard for a year-  even while still at Ife.

Eventually, however, a good no of this pioneering crop of scholars left for the US, while their writer/scholar colleague Wole Soyinka left the university system, becoming itinerant between Africa and the West.

What has happened to their legacy in their natal university, where they reached scholarly maturity?

The subsequent generations of scholars in Yoruba Studies from that university are represented by such figures as Karen Barber, Teresa Washington and Toyin Falola, all luminaries, but to what degree has the agenda of the Abiọdun, Lawal, Yai, Soyinka generation, the same agenda they took to the US and which Abiodun has concretized in his book, continued to impact their university and others in their own country and in Africa, the same agenda described in a different context by Moses- 'their trying to play in the epistemologically dominant precincts of the North as insurgents on their own terms with the ultimate aim of critically changing the Western epistemic formation and globalizing African epistemologies.'

 What publishing platforms are most suited to advancing this agenda?

What is the best location for advancing that agenda, from within Africa or outside it or both?

Publication in journals readily available  to Africans or those accessible to the West in the hope of shaping the Western agenda and affecting the African one too?

In the era of online publications, to what degree does the question of the geographical location of a journal or academic publisher have relevance?

Are the issues not more about ideological orientation than of physical location, even though location shapes ideology?

What is the role of open vs closed access journals in this dynamic?

How do these issues play out where books are concerned?

As it is, the Abiodun, Lawal, Yai and Soyinka generation have done great work but how accessible is their work to their very people about whom it was done?

Soyinka's great essay collection, his most trenchant exposition of Yoruba thought known to alongside his  seven stanza poem in A Credo of Being and Nothingness is published  by Cambridge UP. Soyinka's books were largely published abroad when importation was easier. Now, Nigerian publishers are also publishing them. 

All Abiodun's essays except one, are published by Western publishers, although his university has versions of some of the essays on their website. His book is published by Cambridge UP. Lawal's work is in the same situation, some ease of access being enabled by some sites online.

What are the implications of the location of publication in the West with the attendant challenge emerging over time of economic differentials, escalating since SAP of the 90s (?),  that made the work not readily accessible to the very communities the work was about?

thanks

toyin

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Toyin Adepoju,

A million thanks for your response to Brother Biko. You said everything I would have said in the way that I would have said it. Absolutely nothing to add--except perhaps to buy you a drink someday since you seem to be one of the people who completely grasp both the context and content of my intervention. You have to know your audience and respect their aspirations, especially if you yourself wittingly or unwittingly embody that aspiration and if you do not (or no longer) need to pursue the goals being sought by your interlocutors.

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[Biko Agozino]

Ken is right that we need better copyeditors to support African scholars. The difficulty is that African publishers do not have the resources to hire good copyeditors and so authors are expected to deliver camera-ready copies. Prof Wariboko acknowledged in The Split Economy that there are good copyeditors in Africa and so whenever we have a choice, we should patronize them to help build capacity in the publishing industry. 

However, no matter how perfect the grammar or thoughts, journal articles can still be rejected if the articles make no significant contribution to knowledge or are better suited to a different journal. Very few writers can claim that they have never received a rejection slip from editors and publishers. J.K. Randle keeps a heap of the rejections she got for Harry Porter and Elizabethan England used to laugh at Baba Shake for writing his plays in bad English and for being a serial plagiarist. 

Being published is also no proof of perfection because there might still be errors to be fixed in future editions. Some of the top journals like Lancet have huge records of retraction of published articles due to errors, ethical concerns, safety, or fraud. The solution is to keep writing and to write more and more, the way that Falola does, in order to increase published productivity. The film makers and song writers have shown that even when the language of origination is an African language, translation services and subtitles will be there to attract a wider audience. Even if your work is not cited because you are an African originating a new paradigm, Ken this is still a problem as #CiteaSistah movement shows, keep writing because the work may grow on intellectual communities with time.

Farooq is also right that Gaelic, as a part of the heritage of Ireland, is not solely responsible for the industrialization of the country, but neither is land alone, capital alone, labor alone, nor policy alone. My claim is not that language is the sole factor responsible, I said that it is a contributory factor as part of their factors of production. Farooq thinks that the linguistic heritage of a people is 'immaterial' just because his friends told him so on one tourist trip he took to a country where the roads are paved with poetry. That hearsay would not stand any serious examination as evidence especially when he reported that road signs are everywhere in the language and Gaelic is taught in the schools while English is the language of instruction. George Herbert Shaw said it before, the Irish have produced better writers than the Engilsh. Soyinka, Achebe, Ngugi, Rodney, James, Nkrumah, Azikiwe, Armah, Nwapa, Brutus, Aidoo, Emecheta, Adichie, and Chinweizu, have written better English than many English writers but there is no reason why we should not develop scholarship in African languages too as part of our factors of production. 

I disagree with Farooq and Moses on the deterministic role they ascribe to the English language as the sole tool of industrialization given that that the participation of Ireland in the enslavement of Africans would be a better explanation of Irish industrialization than English language as the sole language of science for colonized people. The English are known to have retarded the industrialization of Ireland with policies like the seizure of farmland for sheep farming, the navigation act, criminal law and transportation as punishment, and double taxation. The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Spain and Portugal all benefited from the enslavement and exploitation of Africans for hundreds of years and that helped them to industrialize while relying on their own indigenous languages. Anglophone Africans have been using English with little to show for it in science, technology and industrialization partly because we have not realized the wisdom that we must tap into our heritage in order to advance our cultures. Language is not the sole factor of production but it is not 'immaterial', it is only relatively neglected.

Biko

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

"I disagree with Farooq and Moses on the deterministic role they ascribe to the English language as the sole tool of industrialization given that that the participation of Ireland in the enslavement of Africans would be a better explanation of Irish industrialization than English language as the sole language of science for colonized people."

Biko,

I have not made even a suggestion, let alone an argument, about the English language being "the sole tool of industrialization" or even being a tool of industrialization. I have not read anything from Farooq to remotely suggest that either. My narrow argument has to do with the social cachet of English in our world, its paradigmatic role as a medium of global knowledge dissemination, theoretical and conceptual conversation, and scholarly communication. In a world of many languages, for good or ill, English has emerged lately as a global language of scholarly and socioeconomic transactions (other languages have more or less played a similar role throughout history). Thus, as a pragmatic, practical matter, a mastery of English, its idioms, as well as the specialized English language lexicons and communicative conventions of specialized academic fields is imperative if your goal is to enter and influence the most consequential global academic debates in an increasingly Anglophone world. 

Most Africans outside the native Arabic-speaking zones can neither write fluently nor theorize in their native languages and do scholarly work in a European language. Therefore, to the extent that they have designs on being taken seriously and on ultimately influencing the academic/theoretical debates in the Global North, they have to be intelligible in both the basic linguistic sense of the writing being legible and sound and in the bigger sense of having a facility with the esoteric discursive gestures of particular disciplines and fields of analysis.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/1210027293.1713153.1604242190093%40mail.yahoo.com.

[Harrow, Kenneth]

i have a question about this aspect of moses's response. he writes,

Most Africans outside the native Arabic-speaking zones can neither write fluently nor theorize in their native languages and do scholarly work in a European language. Therefore, to the extent that they have designs on being taken seriously and on ultimately influencing the academic/theoretical debates in the Global North, they have to be intelligible in both the basic linguistic sense of the writing being legible and sound and in the bigger sense of having a facility with the esoteric discursive gestures of particular disciplines and fields of analysis.

my question has to do with newspapers or presses publishing in african languages. surely they exist;  i know swahili print pubs existed for perhaps 200 years? are there not others? as i said before, the popular media of film includes at times more in native languages than in foreign. nollywood has fluctuated actively between anglophone and yoruba, igbo, and hausophone films, and now i have read about the vertiginous rise of wolof tv series in senegal. if tv series appear in african media, in afr langs, surely the print pubs will follow?

a last quick reflection: american english differs a fair amount from british english, and indian english even more. eventually from one language many languages should devolve, just as happened with romance languages. or is that process held back by the dominance of global media in one dominant dialect?

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>

Sent: Sunday, November 1, 2020 10:54 AM
To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Note on Theoretical Marginalization and Language

 

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[Farooq A. Kperogi]

Biko,

My knowledge of the language policy in Ireland isn't merely derived from my visit to the country. Lots of papers have been written about this. I merely used an anecdote to humanize publicly available data about the disconnect between Ireland's Gaelic linguistic nationalist policies and the lived Anglophone realities of everyday folks in the country.

You conceded that Gaelic isn't the "sole" reason for Ireland's industrialization. Well, Gaelic actually has exactly zero contribution to the country's industrialization. It was never the language of instruction at schools and isn't even the demotic medium for quotidian communication. How could it possibly even be a reason for the country's industrialization? Your claim sounds more like superstition than even the smidgiest pretence to science. 

You attributed to Moses and me a point we never made and then went ahead to disagree with it. Isn't that what is called a strawman fallacy? At no point did I ever make the point that English is the only medium for industrialization. What I actually said, which you paradoxically cited in the same breath that you misrepresented my position, is that language in and of itself is immaterial to any country's development. Countries can develop or stall in either a foreign language or a native language. That's my whole point. And that's what actually existing empirical data says.

Farooq

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

Nigeria's Digital Diaspora: Citizen Media, Democracy, and Participation

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/1210027293.1713153.1604242190093%40mail.yahoo.com.

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Ken,

I love what you wrote earlier about the historicity/antiquity and even indigeneity of English in Africa. Thanks for making that point. It should serve as a counterpoint to the overwrought binary of English/mother tongue. For all practical purposes, English is a mother tongue in many corners of Africa. No need to belabor the point here.

That said, I'm going to disagree with you slightly on two of your points:

1. Rejection of work coming out of Africa by metropolitan journals

2. That copyediting can fix the problem the writing deficit 

The complaints that I hear repeatedly when I give seminars in Nigerian universities suggest that the rejection is not just the normal editorial oversight that inevitably excludes some articles based on fairly standard, well-understood criteria. We have all experienced rejections of this kind. Instead, what keeps coming up is a more tendentious reluctance to give theories, conceptual formulations, and submissions from Africa-based scholars a fair hearing. I'm not going to argue one way or the other about the veracity of the claim but since it keeps coming up and is often repeated by Africa-based colleagues my inclination is to take it seriously. Not only that, among African scholars in the North American academy, this issue has been discussed widely because we have often been called upon to mediate between our colleagues in Africa and publications on this side. In some cases, we have to get our hands dirty to fix the problem. 

So, the problem is real, and many journals (I serve on the editorial boards of three journals) have no mechanism for looking past bad writing to recognize a potentially iconoclastic or radical epistemological/theoretical contribution. The most frustrating experience I've had reading and reviewing submissions from our colleagues in Africa is when the work is choke full of compelling theoretical insights that are either buried or are not properly highlighted, signalled, or developed. Other times, it is a problem of the author not knowing how to advance, express, or construct the contribution in the proper lingo or expressive protocols of the field or debate. There is only so much one can do in this context short of rewriting the entire piece.

Which brings me to the copyediting issue. Copyediting can fix some writing issues, and at least one journal that I'm involved with has taken a more generous position regarding badly written papers. Yet the problem remains even with copyediting because even an excellent copyeditor cannot fix analytical problems, crude empiricism, the inability to construct and/or sustain arguments, the inability to rigorously interpret and interrogate data, and bad writing habits acquired over many years.

Again, what is often frustrating is that in most cases the author has something quite important and sometimes even radically revisionist to say and yet only an unusually patient interlocutor and reviewer on this side would wade through the miasma of bad writing to make sense of the work and elevate its original theoretical/scholarly contributions.

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[Toyin Falola]

Moses:

My one cent as someone who has been editing journals, in one way or the other, without a break, since 1981, editors hardly reject an essay that is heavily grounded in fieldwork. If the data is rich, experienced editors usually do not want to throw away the piece. Here, I am not talking about desk research.

A more significant crisis is not even that of language but the absence of data-rich essays. Let me speak for Yoruba Studies Review that I edit at the moment. There is no essay with rich data that one does not spend a lot of time reworking instead of rejecting it. The problem now is that there are limited resources to support fieldwork. If someone were to send me a piece on songs—all collected initially, what I did when I was editing the preeminent journal of the Yoruba, called Odu, was to convert it to “Fieldnotes on Songs” as I knew the damage that I would cause if I were to reject that essay.

TF

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[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

Ken.

I am already writing translation theories in  both English and Yoruba to debunk this assumption by Moses. I will shortly upload my theorising in Yoruba on translation.

Anyone who does not like it in the West can take a short run and straight into the Hudson.

OAA.

Mr  President you took an oath to rule according to the Constitution.

Where are the schools to promote the teaching of the country's lingua francas?

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Note on Theoretical Marginalizationand  Language

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i have a question about this aspect of moses's response. he writes,

Most Africans outside the native Arabic-speaking zones can neither write fluently nor theorize in their native languages and do scholarly work in a European language. Therefore, to the extent that they have designs on being taken seriously and on ultimately influencing the academic/theoretical debates in the Global North, they have to be intelligible in both the basic linguistic sense of the writing being legible and sound and in the bigger sense of having a facility with the esoteric discursive gestures of particular disciplines and fields of analysis.

my question has to do with newspapers or presses publishing in african languages. surely they exist;  i know swahili print pubs existed for perhaps 200 years? are there not others? as i said before, the popular media of film includes at times more in native languages than in foreign. nollywood has fluctuated actively between anglophone and yoruba, igbo, and hausophone films, and now i have read about the vertiginous rise of wolof tv series in senegal. if tv series appear in african media, in afr langs, surely the print pubs will follow?

a last quick reflection: american english differs a fair amount from british english, and indian english even more. eventually from one language many languages should devolve, just as happened with romance languages. or is that process held back by the dominance of global media in one dominant dialect?

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>

Sent: Sunday, November 1, 2020 10:54 AM

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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Note on Theoretical Marginalization and Language

 

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[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

80% of vocabulary of science is Foreign to English.  The Welsh who are part of the British tetrarchy learn and govern in Welsh alongside English. India learns and governs in native  lingua francas alongside English

England formerly learned in Latin and French but they now learn only in English ( I have not read from anyone on this forum accusing the English of 'nativism" on this decision.)

African intellectuals must learn they are doing neither Britain nor America nor the international community any favours by privileging English over native languages.

Oga Biko Im still with you on this.

'Shi kena!

OAA

Mr. President, as you can see you are dividing the intellectual class you are supposed to lead.  You took an oath to rule according to the Constitution.

Where are the schools to promote the teaching of the coubtry's lingua francas?

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: "Farooq A. Kperogi" <farooq...@gmail.com>

Date: 01/11/2020 00:57 (GMT+00:00)

To: USAAfrica Dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Note on Theoretical Marginalizationand  Language

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Oga Prof.

You're mixing up issues and veering off on tangents now, my esteemed ogo. I am myself an advocate for native languages. For instance, I don't speak English to my children here in the United States; I speak only my native Baatonu language with them. Moses knows this. He marvels at my kids seamlessly transition from my native Baatonu language to "accentless" American English.  

Even your sister has been able to pick up the language from hearing me speak it with the kids. My kids are, in fact, more proficient in my native language than most Baatonu children who are growing up in urban centers like Ilorin. We found that out when we visited Nigeria 4 years ago.

This conversation isn't about the desirability of native languages--or the merit of multilingualism. I was specifically responding to this claim of yours: "No country has ever industrialized by relying on a language imposed by colonizers. Name [one]. That may be part of the reasons why Africa struggles with industrialization."

Thankfully, you have now admitted that your claim has no basis in evidence. The language of instruction at all levels of education in Singapore is English, and it is developed. The language of instruction at all levels of education in Ireland is English, and it is developed. The basic literacy level in Irish Gaelic in Ireland is below 20 percent. I visited Ireland in 2004 and observed the ubiquitousness of signs in Irish Gaeli even though most Irish people don't understand the language and have to rely on the English translation of their "native" language to get by.

India is also rapidly industrializing with English, not Hindi. 

You asked for one example to dispute your claim. You got several. And you've admitted that your claim is rested on a very slender thread of empirical evidence. That does it for me. 

It bears repeating that there is no intrinsic nexus between language and development or "industrialization." Any society can develop-- or stall-- in any language. Foreignness or nativity of language is entirely irrelevant to development or "industrialization."

 In any case, Standard English, which powers the scholarship that drives development in the Anglophone West, isn't even native to anyone. It's learned, not acquired, although I concede that being a native English speaker (which isn't delimited by race) can give a headstart in the acquisition of Standard English. An educated Igbo man from Okija can have better proficiency and greater agency in Standard English than a modestly or barely educated man who was born and raised in Maine in the United States.

 Plus, more than 80 percent of the vocabulary of science is foreign to English. Native English speakers also face hurdles learning Standard English and the English dialect that powers science, technology and even humanistic and social science scholarship.

Let's curb our linguistic nativist enthusiasm and not ascribe to language, native or foreign, a role it doesn't have in development. That's my whole point. I am not against anyone choosing to be educated in their native language.

Farooq

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

Nigeria's Digital Diaspora: Citizen Media, Democracy, and Participation

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

i'm glad biko picked up on the issue of copyediting. it is very very fraught. someone who is perfect in the language can be a terrible copyeditor if s/he quibbles to the point of driving the author to distraction. i know whereof i speak. someone who does not know the field, but only the language, will not understand the text and mis-identify as errors usages that are part of the discourse of the field. and AFRICA messes up copyeditors who don't understand any of it, just the english language, and seek to impose changes that destroy the whole point.

it is very hard to get someone who is capable of correcting someone else's english, understands the text, and yet wants an editing job instead of a teaching or research job.

only the editors who are supposed to manage the copyeditors' work can oversee that. and you can take what i said and multiply it over and over when it comes to an entire book. i've virtually rewritten books that copyeditors wrecked, destroyed, not knowing the language. add translations to these issues.

believe me, knowing correct english is really the smallest part of these issues.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
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To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Note on Theoretical Marginalization and Language

 

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

good points moses. there is so much between the issues raised in publication vs research and writing. on your key point of disagreement, that research and writing in africa is not properly understood or appreciated in western/metropolitan journals, i can speak only to the fields i know, literature and film, though i edited many in history and poly sci for african studies review. your point re the paradigms i understood better only in my field; the insistence from those in other fields, say concerning fieldwork, didn't apply very much to text based analyses.

we can't speak of a journal doing this or that, only of its editors. i am willing to believe that there is, or might be, a real issue involved in the failure of the editors to properly appreciated african based scholarship, but only if i was given really convincing examples. part of what drives my saying this is that so many on the editorial boards, or those asked to evaluate text, were either scholars with broad experience in the field, or african scholars. perhaps that's enough, i don't know. perhaps we need to address this more directly, but where would you begin? i understand the impact of paucity of resources; but if the problem is deeper, touching on paradigms, we'd need to be able to point specifically to what and where and when. frankly, sounds like a good topic for a conference or symposium. i'd love to see that in my field.

[a good topic for a falola conf!!]

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>

Sent: Sunday, November 1, 2020 11:43 AM

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[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

You are right on the money!

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: "Harrow, Kenneth" <har...@msu.edu>

Date: 01/11/2020 20:57 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Note on Theoretical Marginalizationand  Language

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i'm glad biko picked up on the issue of copyediting. it is very very fraught. someone who is perfect in the language can be a terrible copyeditor if s/he quibbles to the point of driving the author to distraction. i know whereof i speak. someone who does not know the field, but only the language, will not understand the text and mis-identify as errors usages that are part of the discourse of the field. and AFRICA messes up copyeditors who don't understand any of it, just the english language, and seek to impose changes that destroy the whole point.

it is very hard to get someone who is capable of correcting someone else's english, understands the text, and yet wants an editing job instead of a teaching or research job.

only the editors who are supposed to manage the copyeditors' work can oversee that. and you can take what i said and multiply it over and over when it comes to an entire book. i've virtually rewritten books that copyeditors wrecked, destroyed, not knowing the language. add translations to these issues.

believe me, knowing correct english is really the smallest part of these issues.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, November 1, 2020 9:49 AM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Note on Theoretical Marginalization and Language

 

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[Oyeronke Oyewumi]

Biko, my broda, thank you!

E go good o.

'Ronke

On Fri, Oct 30, 2020 at 6:27 PM Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com> wrote:

Earlier today, I had a Zoom session with the Music Study Group of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), Nigeria. Thanks to

Peter Sylvanus

, the HOD of Music at UNN, for organizing it.

One of the questions put to me during the session is how the marginalized theoretical and scholarly perspectives of Nigeria/Africa can receive serious reception and respect in a global (read Western-dominated) academic culture that devalues Global South thinkers and thinking by default and values Euro-American ones also by default.

There are several strategies, some of which I shared with the group, but one aspect of the answer that I didn’t get to cover adequately is that of language. In my experience the cheapest, easiest excuse that the Western academy uses to exclude and disenfranchise African scholars and their perspectives is to say that their writing is poor—that they can’t write.

There are of course all kinds of racist and othering underpinnings to this tactic, but sometimes the excuse is based on an actually existing writing deficit. And I would argue, following our late friend, Pius Adesanmi, that to be taken seriously and be reckoned with in the Western academy, we have to write back to Western theorists as insurgents bypassing and crashing the gates and gatekeepers but we have to do so in a language that is intelligible to the gatekeepers, in their own academic lexicon. That way, you take that go-to alibi off the table and compel them to examine and engage with your work on its merit.

You can have, as Africa-based scholars often do, radical, iconoclastic, novel, and revisionist perspectives, theories, and approaches, but if you do not deprive your Western interlocutors of the poor writing excuse, they’ll always use it to exclude you.

That is why I emphasize linguistic mastery and writing excellence, and lament the decline of writing in Nigerian universities. If the writing is bad no one is going to grasp or have the patience to comprehend the radically new theory and argument you’re advancing. And this contention applies to all disciplines, including the hard sciences.

Which is why I have no sympathy for the pseudo-Afrocentric nonsense that English (or other European languages) is not our mother tongue so proficiency, fluency, and mastery are not important. Whether we like it or not, English is the scholarly Lingua Franca of the world we live in and your access to global scholarly conversations and intellectual capital is directly proportional to your written and oral fluency in it. Ask the South Asian scholars of the subaltern collective how they broke through and forced their theories on the Western academy after going through a similar complaining phase as us.

More importantly, if we’re asking for a hearing at the theoretical table, it is not compromise or self-betrayal to adopt the prevailing paradigmatic linguistic medium. After all, we’re the ones seeking to alter the global epistemological dynamic, force a reckoning with African and Africa-derived theories, and teach Western scholars our ways of knowing and seeing the world.

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

I take the necessity of mastery of English and of disciplinary discourse for granted.

The language of communication and its specialized application to a particular disciplines in relation to their styles of thought,  conceptual contexts and theories must be mastered.

That last sentence provokes the question, what is the provenance and applicability in different contexts of these styles of thought, conceptual contexts and theories?

A scholar has mastered how to write well, in general terms, as well as in  advancing an argument in terms of the specialized language  and theoretical systems of a discipline.

To what end?

The scholar's work, adapting Moses, is ''choke full of compelling theoretical insights'' adequately] highlighted, signalled, or developed,  ideas compellingly advanced and  expressed,   ''in the proper lingo or expressive protocols of the field or debate. ''

Again, adapting Moses, the scholarship demonstrates  analytical acuity, a striking balance of empiricism, of inductive and deductive reasoning,  of relationship between data and theory, sustaining arguments through rigorous interpretation and interrogation of  data, enabling the  important and radically revisionist perspective to shine through in its  original theoretical contributions.

To what end?

So as to ''enter and influence the most consequential global academic debates in an increasingly Anglophone world [ and] ultimately influencing the academic/theoretical debates in the Global North''? as Moses sums up.

I see with Moses in his determination to meet on their own terms any academic  determined to locate themself within debates arising from and often centrally conducted within universities and organs of scholarship based in Europe and North  America.

But is it enough to address that base line?

Is this aspiration evidence of progress or retrogression?

Does developing a scholarly culture centred on being taken seriously by scholars outside your geo-discursive frame of inspiration and reference progress?

Did African scholarship not move beyond  this stage as of the 70s and 80s?

What does  what seems to be a  reversion to this model suggest about the  intrinsically creative and globally impactful capacity and potential of African academia?

The study of African literature, the study of African history as history of Africa driven by Africans, the development of modern African art and theory as creativities arising from African experience in Africa, the study of classical African medical systems, all these are foundational innovations that created the field of African studies and which were pioneered in such universities as those of Ibadan, Dar Es Salam, Zaria, Ife, etc and spread to other parts of the world.

How can scholars in Africa achieve a balance between intra-institutional dialogue-scholars in the same institution dialoguing with each other, extra-institutional dialogue-scholars in an institution dialoguing with those in other institutions, intra-continental dialogue-scholars dialoguing with each other within the continent and extra-continental dialogue-scholars dialoguing with each other across continents?

The current orientation seems to accord greater prestige to scholarship  in Africa being taken seriously by scholars in Europe and North America.

Is this development or underdevelopment?

It is imperative scholars in Africa master the use of English, but to what end?

It is critical that scholars in Africa master the thought systems and theories of their disciplines, but to what end?

Primarily to be able to  be respected by scholars in Europe and North America?

To be fluent in disciplinary paradigms emanating from Europe and America?

At what degree of critical relationship with those concepts and paradigms?

In developing one's own concepts and paradigms what should be one's relationship to the various potential audiences of these ideas?

Is it not vital to both assist in discursive extraversion, being the demand of the moment, along with suggesting how to move beyond an approach based upon the limiting needs of the moment, and thereby move  towards endogenous empowerment  in relation to external impact, the creation  of multiple centres of discursive prominence?

Moses' long sustained campaign for ethical integrity in interpersonal relations in Nigerian universities, particularly between teachers and students, and for a strong research culture where creativity and humane order are central, is part of this struggle.

You cannot develop a robust research culture without emphasizing those values.

Beyond these fundamentals  of institutional structure as composed of the attitudes, behavior and systems of institutions, are the questions of the orientation of the creativity  generated by these institutions. 

The art school of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, is the originator of one of the most impactful schools of African aesthetics, emerging from the study of classical Igbo Uli art in relation to classical Igbo cosmology, in the context of various strategies of engaging one's immediate physical and cultural environment as inspirations for artistic practice.

The quality of their training in art criticism and theory is evident in the achievements of their teachers and students, from Uche Okeke to Olu Oguibe, complementing the prominence of their artists, from Uche Okeke to El Anatsui.

Their ongoing virtual seminar series, the latest of which Moses was the central speaker, is another demonstration of the forward looking orientation of Nsukka.

El Anatsui has become the best known African artist from his Nsukka base, but Anatsui's achievement arises from decades long seeding of the intellectual, imaginative and creative climate at the Nsukka art school initiated by Uche Okeke when he arrived from ABU Zaria with his theory of Natural Synthesis, central to the Zaria Art Society that initiated modern Nigerian art as represented by university trained artists.

The Nsukka Zoom series represents a means of dialoguing with the world and with themselves.

What should be the goal of this dialogue?

Freeborn Odiboh, professor of art at the University of Benin, was the central speaker at a previous Nsukka Zoom session and his talk was on improving  art history curricula in African universities.

Freeborn described the central role played in his research in this field by the support of Western institutions through the provision of fellowships and research grants.

Western institutions are vital to the development of the younger version of themselves represented by African academic institutions. 

In what direction should this relationship be developed?

One-sided dependence or co-dependence?

thanks

toyin

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Edited

I take the necessity of mastery of English and of disciplinary discourse for granted.

The language of communication and its specialized application to  particular disciplines in relation to their styles of thought,  conceptual contexts and theories must be mastered.

That last sentence provokes the question, what is the provenance and applicability in different contexts of these styles of thought, conceptual contexts and theories?

A scholar has mastered how to write well, in general terms, as well as in  advancing an argument in terms of the specialized language  and theoretical systems of a discipline.

To what end?

The scholar's work, adapting Moses, is ''choke full of compelling theoretical insights'' adequately highlighted, signalled, or developed,  ideas compellingly advanced and  expressed,   ''in the proper lingo or expressive protocols of the field or debate. ''

Again, adapting Moses, the scholarship demonstrates  analytical acuity, a striking balance of empiricism, of inductive and deductive reasoning,  of relationship between data and theory, sustaining arguments through rigorous interpretation and interrogation of  data, enabling the  important and radically revisionist perspective to shine through in its  original theoretical contributions.

To what end?

So as to ''enter and influence the most consequential global academic debates in an increasingly Anglophone world [ and] ultimately influencing the academic/theoretical debates in the Global North''? as Moses sums up.

I see with Moses in his determination to meet on their own terms any academic  determined to locate themself within debates arising from and often centrally conducted within universities and organs of scholarship based in Europe and North  America.

But is it enough to address that base line?

The  aspiration to ''enter and influence the most consequential global academic debates in an increasingly Anglophone world'' is  fundamental for scholarship.

What is the value of the further goal of  ''moving to influencing the academic/theoretical debates in the Global North''?

What is the significance of this aspiration in terms of immediate professional recognition and its economic implications in relation to the engagement in scholarship as a global enterprise? 

Does it suggest developing a scholarly culture centred on being taken seriously by scholars outside your geo-discursive frame of inspiration or of developing mutuality of authority between your own location and other locations ?

Did African scholarship not achieve such mutuality of authority in the 70s and 80s?

In needing to ask these questions now, what does that suggest about the  intrinsically creative and globally impactful capacity and potential of African academia?