Rethinking Literacy in Ghanaian Communities: Mobilizing Indigenous Languages Through the Afroliteracies' Educator Network

• In Event: Transnational Decolonial Praxis From Kemet to Abya Yala: Connecting Latinx, Black, Mestizo, and Indigenous Research

Abstract

Every colonized people, in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality- finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, the culture of the mother country”
Frantz Fanon “Black Skin, White Masks” (1986, p.18)

This paper echoes Fanon’s existential angst about the demise of every colonized people’s “local cultural originality” when Indigenous languages are systematically displaced through imperial domination (Fanon, 1986). In the same vein, the arguments set out in this paper provide fresh impetus to an emerging project of decolonizing education for Indigenous African populations by addressing the question of intellectualizing Indigenous languages (Wa Thiong’o, 1998; Omoniyi, 2003; Prah, 2017) through a rethinking of literacy in the Ghanaian context. In Ghana, the inconstancy of educational macrostructures based on colonial language reforms and the post-independence view of a threatening linguistic and cultural diversity has led to a privileging of English over Indigenous languages (Owu-Ewie, 2006). Additionally, in multilingual African contexts such as Ghana, the reluctance to invest in the intellectualization of Indigenous languages (Omoniyi, 2003; Prah, 2005; Opoku-Amankwah, Edu- Buandoh & Brew Hammond, 2015) has weakened states’ capacity to ensure access to basic literacy (Brock-Utne, 2015). Drawing on the idea of Literacy as a Social Practice (LSP) (Street, 2002; 2014), I argue that the problematic framing of literacy as learning to read and write in English has impeded the intellectualization of Indigenous languages in Ghana, and undermined efforts towards literacy and biliteracy.
This study examines the framing of literacy in Ghana vis a vis the intellectualization of Indigenous languages by asking: how do exclusionary narratives about literacy in educational language policy enunciated in government-related documents, policy texts, the media, and language policy research repress intellectual development in Indigenous languages; how do community members conceptualize literacy?
Methodologically, I situate this inquiry in the Ghanaian context by drawing on documentary research (Bowen, 2009), and critical participatory action research (Kemmis, McTaggart and Nixon, 2013) with the Afroliteracies’ Network, a collective of local change agents concerned with language revitalization in response to perceivable threats to literacy in Ghana. To analyze the data, I engaged narrative power analysis (Canning, Reinsborough & Smucker, 2017) as a decolonial method to deconstruct dominant narratives about what literacy means in Ghanaian language policy documents, explore counter-narratives about Indigenous languages, and identify individual and sociocultural understandings of literacy.

The topic of intellectualizing Indigenous African languages is fundamental to reawakening cultural originality and has alternatively been conceptualized in Ubuntu and Sankofa frameworks, and in the African renaissance (Ntuli, 1998; Alexander, 1999; 2004; Adjei and Dei, 2008; Kamwendo, 2010; Makalela, 2018). A runner up to this argument can be found in the idea that intellectualizing African Indigenous languages is a step towards restoring epistemic justice to exploited communities (Prah, 2009; 2017). A rethinking of literacy in educational language policymaking to reflect “local cultural originality” and community participation frameworks can promote the intellectual development of Indigenous languages.

Author

• Mama Adobea Nii Owoo, University of Toronto