n 1976, a French anthropologist called Pathé Diagne made a scientific experiment in Burundi, the objective of which was to establish whether there would be a difference in rates of uptake when a foreign language is favoured over a mother tongue in the learning process. The subjects of the experiment were Burundi children. One group received instruction in their mother tongue, while the other was taught in French. At the end of the experiment the children were given an examination. 65% of the children using their mother tongue as a medium of instruction passed the exam, while only 5% of the group taught in French did.

These results proved beyond a shadow of doubt that children who'd recently been introduced to a foreign language, who are then expected to utilise it to sufficiently learn new things, find coping difficult. They perform far much better when they use their mother tongue. The reason this is so is actually simple, and can be laid out using plain terms. Also, when the factors involved in determining this outcome are carefully analysed, some other ugly realities about this situation are brought to the fore. It becomes plain it is not just the capacity to comprehend that is negatively affected, but the mental apparatus is stunted in growth, the child is uprooted from its cultural roots, etc. As simple as the case proven here is, it has a whole range of negative individual, culture and community wide ramifications.

I currently reside in Europe and know from the numerous debates that rage about the education system; legislation and policy making, administration, facility maintenance, curriculum planning, and teacher preparation and selection, etc., how importantly the leaders of the "Developed World" regard the role education plays in the maintenance of their way of life. If there ever was to be a sign that the education system is as flawed as the results of the Burundi experiment suggests about the institution there, then efforts to rectify the situation would have been launched in earnest, as though it were a matter of having a meal on one's table or starvation, affluence or poverty; lest the function of education be undermined and society suffer the consequences. There would definitely have been a public outcry. In some countries, such as Germany, Japan or even China, heads would have rolled, figuratively speaking.

To be fair, Africans also understand the importance of education to the upkeep and development of nations, but it would appear from the lack of reaction to the Burundi experiment that a wholesome comprehension of the institution is lacking, that our people strive to provide education to the masses in the hope of changing their prospects but have not grasped the finer points of the process and how they affect the entirety of the nation, meaning the efforts to educate the masses are misguided. It would be correct to state the ideological poverty that plagued the very first leaders, who are also referred to as freedom fighters, who were of the "let independence come and solutions will follow" mentality is still with us, in this case our leaders believe the solution to development lies in merely importing text books from the west then packing classrooms full to the brim with African children and all else will follow, eventually.

The purpose of education is to transmit knowledge and cultural heritage as well as influence the social and intellectual growth of the individual. A more philosophical way of looking at it is provided by PD. Maroon Tiger. According to him, "...education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture. Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the legitimate goals of his life. Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one's self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda...

... The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living."

Extrapolating from the results of the Burundi experiment, the education process in Africa settles for second best where the aims and objectives are concerned. When we fully comprehend the implications of this, we can see how it can affect a country's very prosperity, its capacity to hold its own in an antagonistic world. Education, then, can form part of the cause for a country's under-performance in encounters with other, better organised nations. For leaders and economists struggling to keep the ship sailing, looking every which way for impetus and flaws, the result of this experiment should be welcome news, an opportunity to reduce the number of impediments to development. The inactivity regarding the results of the experiment make it plain African leaders do not know what is going on. They have completely lost the plot, and the answer to the question of just why African countries are failing to do the right thing becomes clear.

The Buck Doesn't Stop With Leaders : Unfortunately, in view of the results of this experiment and what this suggests about the products of such a flawed education system, it is not just our leaders who are suffering from a backwardness peculiar to the circumstances, but all of us Africans are affected. The problem, then, is not so much that our leaders are inept, but what becomes of all of us after we have been through an education system that basically lobotomises our minds, leaving our continent barren of intellectual clout, among many other things. This is to state, in no uncertain terms, that most of us Africans are suffering from a mental backwardness the defiling processing in these plants we call schools tinctures our minds with, and our propensity to blame our leaders for all of the continent's problems epitomises the resulting mind-set. In other words, it is the pot calling the kettle black, if only the implied hypocrisy is replaced with ignorance and desperate finger pointing.

Now, this conclusion is not in league with the one reached in the book "IQ and the wealth of nations", that is basically a fallacious argument born not so much out of evil intentions, but as much hypocrisy and a desire to cover up the ugly truth of apartheid in international economic policy, and provide the cloak by which the robbery of a people can continue. The authors of this book were obviously at pains to underplay the role former colonial thieves still play in Africa's underdevelopment that includes the frustration of progressive Africans, something that is unnecessary if their argument held some grain of truth. I, on the other hand, am basing the cause of this problem on the education system rather than genetic factors that, unlike those waiting for the "Flynn effect" to take effect, actually reveals the true potential of an African's mind that towers well above the best, and makes of this issue a wicked ploy by over-greedy, rogue regime Europeans to get more of what has always been around for ages. It is also fortunately a problem that can be solved in a mere generation's time, if not much, much less, as long as we Africans can ensure an untainted generation takes over the reigns of control, and remember to keep a safe distance from capitalist Europeans while we go about this, otherwise they will find a way to throw a spanner in the works.

Arrested Development : To see where we are all missing the point, to understand and come to terms with just how the minds that will walk out of a faulty education system will be mentally backward, we must first of all understand that the learning of a second or other language is an activity that is superimposed on the prior mastery of one's first language, and is a different process intellectually. The first language we all learn is the mother tongue. At the age of approximately five or six, we are introduced to formal education where our acquired linguistic skills are put to use. At this point in our lives, we already have a good understanding of the grammar of our language and possess a basic vocabulary. Rather than building upon this foundation, African schools, designed to look down upon African culture, teach us a completely new language from scratch, proceeding to introduce us to other subjects that we have to master on the newly attained linguistic skills in the foreign language. The realisation is not made that as the children build their command of English, French or Portuguese, the foundation upon which they are learning the new language (the mother tongue) is developing in the non-official realm, the consequence of which is that linguistic skills in this primary language more or less stagnate. This means our children are forced to build a tower on a foundation of shifting sands, a foolish thing to do when the importance of linguistic skills in the education process is considered, and if understood would make the need to reinforce all aspects of the learning process clear. This means if the children have to be taught in English, then the foundation upon which this learning is superimposed has also got to be worked upon and strengthened, otherwise our children will suffer from arrested mental development or mental backwardness.
Our education system has a way of forcing things, and eventually, the African's grasp of the foreign tongue overtakes that of the mother tongue, becoming the primary language in the process. We Africans brought up in this education system actually find it easier to express ourselves in a foreign language, even when the proficiency levels are well below those of native English speakers, a good indicator of how rudimentary our linguistic skills in our mother tongue are. The products of institutions of learning that pass through a process whose real effect can only be compared to a lobotomy become the future leaders we have to depend on for the resolution of issues like the one raised by this experiment, who are incapable of interpreting results of this nature, let alone be able to find a solution. What we are dealing with here is a poignant reminder of a lost generation scenario of which all Africans who have been through the education system are victims.

This statement may seem harsh, but it is a logically deductible truth that Africans cannot afford not to internalise any more.

I, for one, cannot get plainer than this. For starters, we know from the inaction that followed the Burundi experiment that as much our leaders as the bureaucrats in the education system cannot comprehend the implications of such results, that they do not know what this would amount to where the socio-economic well being of their individual nations is concerned in this nationalistic, capitalist system. If these implications were clear, our leaders would not have hesitated to do away with foreign languages and invested in a project to rewrite all text books into a select African tongue in their respective country, sparing no cost as they go about the venture, knowing the returns in terms of contribution from a better educated population will more than make up for the expense incurred in the process. They would have known that an Africa where the pass rate is 60% better than it currently is translates into an Africa where for example the average menial labourer is as conceptually dextrous as a witty and successful writer belonging to a society where only 5% make the cut off mark.

The difference between the two groups in the experiment when drawn in ratios is stunning and should impinge upon any critical minded person's imagination. There was only 1 for every 13 African children taught in their mother tongue who passed this exam when a foreign language was the medium of instruction. 13 to 1 is a ridiculously large margin that makes the point very clear indeed, pointing out that if it is education that Africans want to give to their children, if we understand what the purpose of schooling really is, that the point is how well turned out the final product is, then we are doing something wrong considering children taught in a local language can be 13 times better than those of us who were educated using foreign languages, this improvement itself coming without actual reforms to the education system, without any improvements to the teaching method so that it is more effective.

There can be no other explanation for why only in Africa such results do not prompt research into how such a negative situation could have escaped attention for so long, as such allowing us to learn that much more about our state. Only in Africa where, even though the corporate well being of the nation is pursued in economic activity, such a counterproductive flaw in the system is overlooked.

Language and Identity : Tradition, another word for a group's accumulated wisdom, is gained around, and with the help of language. As such, tradition is dependent for its expression on the group's particular language. There can be no substitute language for this. A tradition is an aspect of a people’s culture, meaning language is interacting with culture itself. If we do the math properly, we discover that a people’s worldview is connected to language, which in turn means their very identity, their knowledge of who they are is dependent on language. Basically, Language interacts with every other aspect of human life in society, and cannot be understood unless considered in this context. Each language is both a working system of communication in the period and in the community in which it is used, and also a product of its past history and the source of its future development. Any account of language must consider it from both these points of view.

A simplified dictionary definition of what is stated before is that a language is "a system of terms used by a people sharing a history and a culture". Terms in a language develop within the context of how a group interprets the world and reacts to it. Every group of people on this planet has its own worldview, which in short is an identity that is a product of their experience of the world around them. The linguistic relativity hypothesis of Benjamin Lee Whorf describes how the syntactic-semantic structure of a language becomes an underlying structure for the worldview of a people through the organisation of the causal perception of the world and the linguistic categorisation of entities. As linguistic categorisation emerges as a representation of worldview and causality, it further modifies social perception and thereby leads to a continual interaction between language and perception.

This process cannot be the same for different cultural entities therefore different languages will have different syntactic-semantic structures, and though the denotation of the real and abstract that each group has created will be similar, if not the same, allowing for such things as translation from one language to another, the connotations will most definitely be different. A term like "tribe" in the English language has its own peculiar denotation and connotation that can be traced through its etymology and later interpretations. Africans on the continent have a similar word whose denotation and connotation is rooted in their experience of tribe through their history, which cannot be the same as the English experience. The closest word for tribe in my language is "tundu", that was previously hardly similar in meaning, but has now got this original meaning replaced by the English one due to an imbalance that makes of indigenous languages that are defined by the new, primary one. This here forms the basis of just why translation is nothing more than interpretation.

We see how this process of variation in syntactic-semantic structure starts in dialects, which essentially are languages undergoing the process of change due to the fact two groups are growing apart in culture and identity. If we came back to this particular case a thousand years later, provided the two concerned groups stayed sufficiently apart from each other for change to be complete, we will find that what was previously the same has developed into completely different languages where "tribe" may very well have developed into a different term altogether. The connection between language, worldview, culture and identity is such that to forcibly replace one tribe's language with another is to rob them of their worldview and identity by making them incapable of properly understanding, expressing or perpetuating the whole of their culture.

By forcing English on our people, we isolate them from their own culture, creating a void that cannot sufficiently be filled with an alternative, least of all one whose roots lie across the oceans. Africans who can communicate better in English than they can in their own language are basically culture-less, if we understand that language functions as both the key to and sustenance for culture. This means teaching our children foreign languages, especially at a point in their lives when they are their most impressionable and, considering that children are born culture-less, before they have been fully initiated into their culture, is casting them out of the safety of their worldview into an identity-less, no man's land. On an individual basis, a person without an identity cannot function as the boundary that separates self from other is non-existent. An individual without an identity has no real track of themselves, knows not the difference between friend or foe, and would under normal circumstances be considered a fool, unless the affliction is understood. The same can be applied to a community or nation. In an antagonistic world, a nation without an identity, that nonetheless believes they have one, is no match for other nations that do have a solid identity.

There Is No Such Thing As A Superior Language : One feature that distinguishes human languages from all known modes of animal communication is its infinite productivity and creativity. Humans are unrestricted in what they can talk about. No area of experience is accepted as necessarily incommunicable, though it may be necessary to adapt a language to cope with new discoveries or modes of thought.

such changes to language, when they occur, are unique for each culture.

When different languages meet, unless a conscious effort is made by the users of one language to prevent interlarding and eventual fusion, the languages will form a new, richer language, each language bringing to the mix its own particular experiences that the respective group has been through. In time, this mixing too will get its signature signed and preserved in the new language, and will go with the group wherever they go. For example two thousand years ago the English language was quite different from what it is today. The vocabulary was basic, comprising words used for everyday, simple activities. Contact with foreign cultures (Roman, French, etc) exposed the English to new terminology, new concepts, new technology, new institutions, new modes of thought and expression. Slowly but surely, a new language was born which today is known as modern English, which is not that different from the original language whose basic structure it has preserved, but which tells a lot about where the English have been. The foreign additions to English can be traced right back to their origin, and this can tell a lot about the culture of the time, and that of today, and also of the people using the language then, and now.

This capacity for different languages to take on terms and phrases from other languages, and also to fuse, is the reason many Africans today accept the argument what Africa is going through is a natural process that will prove beneficial in the long run. English, Portuguese, or French have become part of our heritage, our culture, and it should be accepted they are here to stay.

The problem with taking this position is revealed in the experiment done in Burundi, which exposes flaws within, pointing out an abnormal situation. In this case, it is the inevitable mental backwardness that results when individuals in a society are divorced, at an early age, from the language they first learnt after birth, and instead of a permanent divorce from one language to another, are thrown into the middle where essential linguistic skills on either side are not done justice, and also of the lack of identity the early divorce from one's indigenous culture that makes of how Africa came to speak foreign, European languages a completely different issue from how English came to have French words. Africa got stuck with western languages that left Africans mired in a cultural existence that is not good for their mental well-being. It is not only that our people cannot be and give their best mentally as a result of this unnatural process, but also that, even though there is a lot of culture adoption, we Africans become neither ourselves nor complete Englishmen, French men, or Portuguese, either of which would be better than what we become… which is mere identity-less carriers of a foreign language who can never boast of being experts of English without knowledge of the culture, traditions and customs of native speakers of English..

I read a letter on the Internet where a writer expressed how he was at once fascinated by the number of things he can express in the English language as opposed to his local language and criticised those who wish for the reinstatement of indigenous languages that he considers not up to the standards of modern times.

This writer didn't give recognition to the fact that his poor grasp of his own language is obviously a result of lack of practice. If a vital part of our school years are spent learning how to express ourselves in our own tongues, then surely the many complex ways we can express ourselves in European languages can be equalled and even surpassed given that we take a conscious effort to adapt our languages to this civilisation (culture). The adage "practice makes perfect" is apt for this case. To repeat, the ease with which I can read and understand English is a result of constant practice. The difficulty I experience understanding my own language is simply because of lack of practice.

One good example that shows how wrong the position adopted by a lot of Africans in defence of the present state of affairs is China. The number of characters contained in the standard Chinese dictionary is 47,035, and though only a requirement of from 3,000 to 4,000 characters is necessary for full literacy, it is still a large amount of symbols to master. The fact the Chinese government has promoted standard simplified sets of Chinese characters that are based partly on phonetic simplifications of the traditional writing form in an attempt to increase literacy is proof of how much harder mastering their own symbols is compared to other systems, yet the Chinese are making economic, technological and social gains without major help from the use of a western language, meaning the language's full functions are in optimum effect. Without the use of simplification, the country has achieved a literacy rate of 85% as estimated by UNESCO in its 2000 figures, which is impressive considering the odds. The Chinese economy is doing better than African or western economies. If the Chinese neglected to learn their language using traditional symbols and adopted English as their language of instruction, then they would have an even tougher time than we do switching back from the foreign language to their own language, written in traditional Chinese characters when practice in one is less than in the other.

Conclusion : My point in writing this piece is to use the research I have done on the flawed education process in Africa, taking advantage of the experiment done in Burundi that makes it easier to portray the flaw, to enlighten about precisely the issue of schools churning out individuals whose minds are so tampered with they are of limited use to the future of the nation, about what we are doing to the minds of our children, and by connection to the intellects of those tasked to lead us into a better tomorrow, when we send them on the education journey that is peculiarly African. I have shown in this essay the connection between this and the loss of our culture, our identity, and our very minds. Keep in mind that there is much more being sacrificed as a result of this issue.

It is the hope that it is not too late to remedy the situation, that somewhere, soon, a leader will emerge who will help us take the steps we need to make the appropriate changes to our culture and reinvigorate and reinstate our ways, but I fear that, as time is passing, as more and more generations are robbed of their cultural heritage, and less and less of the people who were born before the madness began survive, the chances of reinstating our culture get slimmer and slimmer, and we will become a people who have forgotten who they are. Thankfully, the skeletal structures of our languages are still there, but it will not take long before even this is gone. Then, we will have lost the civilisation inherent in them, and possibly the capacity to survive itself, for a people who forget who they are die. This article first appeared on www.panafricanonline.com...
Mukazo is a writer/author. He is university educated and has a degree in Industrial Management (economics) and psychology. He can be reached on chibinda@yahoo.com...