A narrative approach to Ubuntu translanguaging from the elderly community: Learning and teaching in African education

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Using a narrative approach to researching literacy and language policy

Proposal

Whereas South Africa has been lauded as a multilingual country that accorded 11 languages an official status, multilingualism has always been conceived from a monolingual perspective. Monolingual ideologies, which inadvertently favoured European languages to the detriment of local languages, were passed on to the African colonies through the 1884 Berlin colonial project. It is surprising, however, that there is a paucity of research that investigates African multilingualism predating the colonial era (1848-1948) and that analyses pre-colonial narratives to offer alternative insights on African sociolinguistic and cultural realities. In this paper, I analyse storied narratives of 6 community elders to understand indigenous ways of knowing and the nature of translingual practices in the local communities as a gaze into the pre-colonial period. The results of the study show that there is still a prevalent cultural competence of Ubuntu, which is a heuristic for gaining epistemic access and for identity formation among speakers of Bantu African languages. Using a framework of ubuntu translanguaging to account for complex multilingual encounters, I contend that a preferred literacy methodology for learners should be porous and value interdependence in tandem with their ancient plural value systems and indigenous ways of knowing. Recommendations for future research on the narratives of the African elderly communities and practical applications in classroom encounters are considered at the end of the paper.

Author

• Leketi Makalela, Balang Foundation