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Critical perspectives on language planning and policy in Africa: Accounting for

the notion of multilingualism

Article in Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus · December 2009

DOI: 10.5842/38-0-50

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Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics PLUS, Vol. 38, 2009, 1-11

Critical perspectives on language planning and policy in Africa:

Accounting for the notion of multilingualism

Felix Banda
Linguistics Department, University of the Western Cape, Private Bag X17, Bellville 7535, South Africa
E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract
This paper draws on the notion of multilingualism as social practice (Heller 2007) to critique
postcolonial language planning and policies in Africa. Drawing on illustrations from Ethnologue's
(2009) languages of Africa, studies on language planning and policy in Africa, and recent
developments in harmonisation of cross-border language research (Prah 1998; Banda 2008), the paper
argues that there are distortions in the conceptualisation of multilingualism and what it entails in
Africa's socio-cultural contexts. In turn, the paper faults monolingual biases in the notions and models
used to describe and promote multilingualism in Africa, which mirror descriptions of the language
situation in Western socio-cultural contexts. The paper argues for cross-linguistic and cross-border
status and corpus planning to take advantage of multilingualism as a linguistic resource for socio-
economic development in Africa. The paper concludes by highlighting the prospects for linguistic
repertoire-based multilingual models for language planning and policy in Africa.

Keywords: multilingualism, language policy, linguistic repertoire, urbanization, postcolonial

1. Introduction

The aim of the paper is to critique the monolingual characterisation that has informed
language planning and policy in Africa. This entails an exploration of the utility of certain
language planning and policy pronouncements, as well as models arising out of these. In this
regard, the efficacy of notions such as 'additive multilingualism' as well as the categorisation
of some languages as "official" and others as "non-official" are discussed in relation to
multilingualism in late modern contexts. The paper contends that one of the main drawbacks
of current policy is that it is still based on Western and colonial notions of multilingualism,
which basically involves multiple monolingualisms. On this view, for instance, promotion of
multilingualism in South Africa is erroneously seen as a case of promoting 11 monolingual
streams of distinctive languages in their equally homogenous speech communities, and
bilingualism is paradoxically said to arise through education using a singular language (albeit
the mother tongue). Given the monolingual orientation in language planning and policy in
Africa, it is not surprising that in the majority of cases colonial languages have retained their
official status and are the main languages of education, state functions and business in general
(Heugh 2006; Rassool 2006).
2 Felix Banda

Peirce and Ridge (1997) lament the dearth of material in language planning research in
Africa, except for South Africa. However, even in South Africa there has been a pre-
occupation with the mother tongue debate, rather than with establishing how African
languages can be harnessed into an integrated multilingual teaching programme. As regards
the former (i.e. speakers' mother tongues), an African child is often said to have a singular
"mother tongue", which is seen as in opposition to other African tongues spoken in the region
or nation. The danger here is that African languages which have existed side by side for
significant periods of time, complementing and supplementing each other in multilingual
symbiosis, are suddenly cast as competing for spaces. Additionally, multilingual African
communities are then erroneous characterised as made up of distinctive monolingual
enclaves.

Motivated by the language rights paradigm and linguistic human rights activists, the mother
tongue debate has further been fuelled by some linguistic imperialist arguments (Phillipson
1992) pertaining specifically to the global dominance of English. As stated by Phillipson
(1992: 1), in essence "the British Empire has given way to the empire of English." One major
component of the notion of linguistic imperialism is cultural domination of Africans through
education in English. The problem is that the argument about how to improve and integrate
African languages into education is then overshadowed by arguments about the detrimental
effects on African languages and cultures as result of using English as medium of instruction
and in other domains of socio-economic development in Africa. Both the mother tongue
debate and linguistic imperialist arguments find focus in the perceived "sanctity" of
monolingualism and monoculturalism. In other words, contact with English necessarily leads
to English monolingualism. Multilingualism and multiculturalism are thus inadvertently
discounted as viable options. Resources and donor-funded projects on the detrimental effects
of colonial languages in the education of Africans abound, while very little attention is given
to developing indigenous African languages as languages of education and modernity, not
merely as languages of "culture" and "tradition". In fact, in African countries, funding is often
poured into ceremonies celebrating African "culture" and "tradition" at the expense of
establishing research facilities for the development of African languages (i) as viable
alternatives to English and other colonial languages and (ii) as languages of education, the
economy and modernity. In this paper, I will argue that, currently, the basic philosophy and
ideology regarding language education policy in Africa is informed by monolingualism and is
not so different from the policy promoted by colonialists. Furthermore, I will argue that there
is a need to explore models in which two or more languages are used as media of instruction.
Current models focus on one language, while the other languages are seen as optional
"additional" languages.

2. Multilingualism and the colonial legacy and ideology in Africa

2.1 African languages for tradition and culture

Despite the fact that, after independence, most African countries recognised several languages
as official languages, classroom practice and official government functions remain the domain
of colonial languages. For instance, in Zambia, seven regional languages and in South Africa
11 regional languages have national or official status, but English has retained its position as
the main language of education, government and business. The linguistic influence of the
official African languages is mostly confined to the same regions to which the colonial
governments had assigned them, mostly for administrative convenience. In the case of former
British colonies such as Zambia and Kenya, the "regional" linguistic borders served the
 Critical perspectives on language planning and policy in Africa 3

colonial government's divide-and-rule policy well, as they were further divided into "tribal" or
"ethnic" villages. Even though Zambia is one of the most urbanised countries in Africa, the
National Registration Card (which is what a Zambian identity document is called) has the
name of the chief and village on it. In essence, every person should be under the jurisdiction
of a chief and should be domiciled in a village, so that their stay in urban areas, or wherever
they reside, is supposed to be temporary. This state of affairs was created by colonialists to
keep Africans out of the developed urban areas, where non-Europeans would only venture for
work purposes. In fact, one of the most enduring legacies of colonialism is the image of a
happy African who has his roots in a tribe and traditional village, practising his own culture
and traditional rituals, and using his own language. Furthering the notion of the Tower of
Babel, the language he speaks is perceived to be incomprehensible to neighbouring
communities who have their own tongues. For unexplained reasons, phenomena related to
language contact, where speakers of different languages tend to congregate in "areas of
linguistic confluence" (Gough 1994: 11), are portrayed by some to be non-existent in Africa.
My argument is that this notion of a cultured traditional Africa is no longer tenable, since the
idea that Africa is made up of a myriad of unrelated languages has been shown to be a farce
(see Prah 1998; Banda 2008). For instance, most of the languages in Southern Africa belong
to the Bantu language group, which can further be divided into sub-groups or clusters with
more or less similar morphological and phonological features, and hence with varying degrees
of mutual intelligibility. Consider the case of South Africa, for example: Even though the
country has 11 official languages, the majority of Africans speak either Nguni or Tswana-
Sotho dialects. In terms of language planning and terminological development and
orthographic design, there is no linguistic reason why, say, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Ndebele and
Seswati should be developed as unrelated linguistic systems (cf. Jokweni 2003). Careful
language planning and cross-linguistic referencing would enable these languages to share a
large amount of teaching and reading material, as well as readership.

The argument is that African language policy and planning is not only constructed in the
image of Western countries (Anchimbe 2007), but also retains the colonial heritage which
directly associates African languages to (ethnic) tradition and culture, rather than socio-
economic development and mobility.

Therefore, three observations can be made. Firstly, African languages are promoted as
autonomous and bounded systems linked to equally autonomous homogenous communities,
regions and, in some cases, far flung villages. Secondly, even though there is evidence of
multilingual speech patterns all over Africa, the official doctrine is to promote singular
languages to the exclusion of other African languages spoken in the communities or regions.
Thirdly, even though English and other colonial languages are part of the multilingual
landscape and have become critical components of the linguistic repertoires of Africans (due,
in part, to the advent of information technology), the policies favoured by language education
researchers are those that restrict instruction in English to later stages of a child's education
(see Banda 2000; Williams 2008; Heugh 2005, 2006). In practice, this would mean replacing
mother-tongue based monolingual education with English-based monolingual education, both
of which are incompatible with the multilingual discourse practices that characterise the late
modern multilingual spaces of Africa (cf. Banda 2009a).

2.2 Resisting Westernisation of African knowledge systems

Shi-xu (2007), Asante (2006) and others have warned against wholesale Westernisation of
knowledge, particularly when it is to the detriment of local knowledge systems. The need for
4 Felix Banda

hybridity and for individuals able to communicate across ethnic boundaries and speech
communities, and in different social networks and modalities in late modern times means
appropriating and adapting Western knowledge to local conditions. In essence, this means that
there is a place for both African languages and English in the repertoires of late modern
Africans. After all, most Western knowledge is currently stored in English. This point has not
been lost on African parents who demand education in English for their children from day one
at school, or as soon as possible thereafter (Banda 2000, 2003, Heugh 2006). Parental
aspirations are thus in direct opposition to those of language education researchers, who
advocate for education in the mother tongue, or at least in an African language, in the early
years of a child's education.

However, the very notion of 'mother tongue' is problematic in late modern times where
urbanisation, hybridization and multilingualism are the rule rather than the exception, even in
Europe (Appadurai 1996). I would like to argue that, in late modern multilingual African
societies, rather than "a mother tongue", there are "mother tongues" that constitute speakers'
linguistic repertoires. In essence, my argument is that there are individual, community,
regional or national and, increasingly, transnational linguistic repertoires that should guide the
design of multilingual education models (Banda 2009a). Monolingualism, even mother
tongue-based monolingualism, is not ideal. In other words, a monolingual model which
champions the mother tongue in multilingual contexts of Africa is wasteful, as not all
knowledge embedded in the repertoire of speakers is utilized. Thus, rather than developing,
for instance, Zulu, Sotho and English as linguistic repertoires of people in Johannesburg,
Pretoria and other regions/provinces, the trend in South Africa is to develop these languages
as autonomous language systems belonging to different monolingual speech communities,
each with its own language. I return to my conceptualisation of 'linguistic repertoires' later.

Anchimbe (2007) laments the fact that in spite of gaining independence, postcolonial
linguistics studies, as well as language education policy in Africa, have been designed on the
basis of theories, platforms, templates and frameworks constructed in and for the West, with
design features for a monolingual speaker living in a more or less homogenous society.
(However, as noted earlier, even in the West such an individual is becoming a rarity.) In this
regard, Banda (2008) argues that despite their noble intentions, missionaries and other
Europeans who worked on writing systems for African languages often caused imperfections
in the written form of these languages because they have based such writing systems on the
characteristics of the writing systems of European languages. For instance, native speakers of
Nyanja (mostly spoken in Zambia and Malawi) only have the [l] sound, but missionaries
introduced both l and r in the written form (Banda 2008), thus necessitating the
morphological rule, in the written form only, that r should be used before the high vowels [i,
e]. But this is not applied consistently, as there is a counter rule which states that l should be
used before letters i and e if it is the initial letter of the stem of a word. In reading, native
speakers pronounce r as [l], since pronouncing the [r] sound is associated with a European
missionary or a child who is still in the process of learning to speak the language (Banda
2008). Thus, the rules are illogical and difficult to teach to mother tongue speakers (Banda
2008).

On the other hand, Anchimbe (2007) points out that what constitutes language and
community has also been distorted by the imposition of European templates. Anchimbe
(2007) further argues that the distorting impact of foreign models has kept researchers from
investigating peculiar characteristics of African societies as outcomes of their socio-historical
 Critical perspectives on language planning and policy in Africa 5

totality. For instance, describing Africa's multilingualism as being equivalent to European

multilingualism is theoretically misleading and has often led to the adoption of policies and
models which are impractical in African contexts (Makoni 1998a, 1998b; Banda 2000). In
South Africa, the promotion of multilingualism is in practice (mis)taken to involve the
promotion of 11 autonomous monolingual programmes/systems, that is, as a case of multiple
monolingualisms (Banda 2009a).

Myers-Scotton (1993), after extensive research in Africa, concludes that speaking more than
one language in one conversation in one day is the rule rather than the exception in Africa. In
fact, Schmied (1991) shows that the English code is an important component of Africa's
multilingual landscapes. In other words, any model that champions a single language as
language of instruction would not be in sync with the linguistic situation and the frame of
social networks of language usage in Africa. The following are some of the characteristic
differences between multilingualism in Africa and multilingualism in the West:

(i) In the West, one can survive with one language; in Africa, this is virtually impossible.
(ii) In spite of the European Union, there are still distinctive borders, more or less
geographically aligned with linguistic borders (e.g. France, Russia, England, Belgium
[Flemish Flanders and French Walloon], etc.). Most African languages tend to cross
geographical borders (Prah 1998).
(iii) Knowing and speaking more than one language in one conversation in one day is the
rule rather than the exception in Africa (Myers-Scotton 1993) but not necessarily in
the West.
(iv) In the West, research and planning for multilingualism often refer to the assimilation
of immigrant/migrant families (Makoni 1998a, b; Anchimbe 2007).
(v) In Africa, multilingualism refers to related (Bantu) dialects, e.g. isiZulu, isiXhosa,
Setswana, Sesotho, Nyanja, Nsenga, Bemba, etc.; in the West, multilingualism often
involves unrelated languages such as English, Portuguese, French, German, Russian
(particularly in relation to the languages of immigrants, such as Arabic, Hindi,
Chinese, etc.).
(vi) In the West, monolingual communities live side by side; in Africa, bi-/multilingual
(polyglot) communities live side by side (Schmied 1991; Myers-Scotton 1993).
(vii) In the West, bilingualism is the result of being taught a second language at school; in
Africa, bilingualism is the norm, the way of life, and second languages are acquired
naturalistically (Schmied 1991; Myers-Scotton 1993).
(viii) European multilingualism involves several written languages; the African context
involves only one or two written languages existing alongside oral languages
embedded in oral cultures and transmitted orally (Anchimbe 2007).
(ix) In the West, the language used in the home is often the one used in the school and in
workplaces, whereas this is often not the case in Africa (Anchimbe 2007).

The argument here is that models and language development strategies, suitable for Western
countries with the monolingual speaker at their centre, are inadvertently applied to African
contexts with the multilingual speaker at their centre. For instance, the notion of 'additive
bilingualism/multilingualism' makes sense when a language is "added" to a monolingual
speaker's repertoire, but not when it is added to the linguistic repertoire of a person who is
already bi-/multilingual. Additive bilingualism is sometimes understood to mean 6 to 7 years
of mother tongue education before a switch to English medium of instruction for African
learners. The assumption is that 6 to 7 years of mother tongue education will enable learners
6 Felix Banda

to have acquired the cognitive competence required to handle the teaching/learning of content
in their second language English (see Williams 2008 for an extended critique of this practice).
Makoni (1998a) has been critical of the uncritical manner in which the notion of additive
bilingualism has been applied in African multilingual contexts:

Notions of additive bilingualism when applied to Africans learning English reinforce

the position of English as a dominant language. The subtext of the additive model in
Africa is that when Africans have reached a 'threshold level' they can acquire English.
(Makoni 1998a: 161)

Consolidation of proficiency in an African language first in order to enable successful

acquisition of English is clearly counterproductive, particularly when the aim is to promote
the status of African languages as viable alternatives to English in education.

2.3 Linguistic repertoires and models of education

Based on the monolingual perception of a direct relationship between language and identity,
the failure of imported models of education is crystallised in the language planning and
policies in African education, which are pursuing a monolingual agenda. The language
policies and the models that they spawn are designed for a monolingual child and his
vernacular/mother tongue, or a child and his second language English. The models take an
"either/or" approach when, in fact, the two languages are both important, and thus both need
to be developed as part of the child's linguistic repertoire. I use the term "linguistic repertoire"
in the same sense as "code repertoire" (Kachru 1990: 58), "verbal repertoire" and
"communicative repertoire" (Hymes 1974; Gumperz and Hymes 1972) with reference to a
bilingual speaker. I use "linguistic repertoires" to refer to the total range of codes available to
the bilingual speaker which enable him to perform different roles across ethnic, community,
regional and national boundaries, and across modalities, styles and registers. Thus, I perceive
linguistic repertoires as operating not merely within, but also across social networks; not only
within the context of the speech community, but also across heterogeneous and
multidimensional localities, communities, regions and nations. In other words, the notion of
linguistic repertoire involves more than a monolingual's language knowledge and more than
monolingual competence in each of the codes in a multilingual's repertoire. In essence,
comprehensive models of bilingualism in African countries, for example, need to account for
the range of African languages and English and/or French, Portuguese, etc. spoken by African
speakers. Rather than the pedagogy of a singular mother tongue, I argue for models that
account for linguistic repertoires such as those referred to above.

2.4 Distortions in official, regional and national language designations

After independence, the emergent African states followed the "Western" tradition of labelling
certain languages as "official" and others as "regional" or "national". The distinction between
official and national languages is not always clear, as these are described differently by
different countries. In practice, some of the languages designated as national languages are
best described as "regional" languages, as they are restricted to regional use. This seems to be
the case with the seven national languages of Zambia (Bemba, Nyanja, Lozi, Tonga, Luvale,
Lunda and Kaonde), which are region-based and mostly used for cultural functions and
occasionally in local governance, while English is used nationally in all official functions. In
South Africa, official government functions are almost exclusively performed in English,
even though on paper 11 languages have been given "official" language status. It is with this
in mind that one should consider the following Ethnologue (2009) list of languages of Africa:
 Critical perspectives on language planning and policy in Africa 7

• Angola: One official language (Portuguese); seven national languages; 42 listed

languages (41 living, one extinct).
• Botswana: Two national/official languages (English and Tswana); 28 listed languages.
• Cameroon: Two official languages (French and English); 230 or 286 listed
languages/dialects.
• Congo Democratic Republic: Five national/official languages (Koongo, Lingala,
Luba-Kasai, Congo Swahili, French); 254 listed languages.
• Kenya: Two official languages (English and Kiswahili); 61 listed languages.
• Malawi: One official language (English); two national languages (Chichewa and
Tumbuka); 14 listed languages.
• Mozambique: One official language (Portuguese); 43 listed languages.
• Namibia: One official language (English); 13 indigenous national languages; 28 listed
languages.
• Nigeria: 10 national/official languages (English plus nine African languages); 521
listed languages (510 living, nine extinct; the status of the other two languages is not
stated possibly because Ethnologue could not verify whether the languages are extinct
or not).
• South Africa: 11 official languages (English plus 10 African languages – or, if one
does not regard Afrikaans as an African language, then English, Afrikaans and nine
African languages); 31 listed languages (24 living, four extinct; the status of the other
three languages is not stated, perhaps for the reason given above).
• Tanzania: Two national/official languages (Kiswahili and English); 128 listed
languages (127 living, one extinct).
• Zambia: One official language (English); seven national languages; 72 listed
languages/dialects.

In almost all cases, the colonial languages became the official languages and, ironically, what
should be regional indigenous languages are proclaimed national languages. The proclamation
of languages as official, national and non-official imposes a power and status hierarchy not
only among the languages, but also among the speakers of these languages. Material resources
for the development and use of the languages depend on official designations, meaning that
the colonial languages retain the monopoly in terms of national exposure in the media (private
and parastatal) as well as in government communication. This has led to distortions in the
multilingual landscapes of Africa as it becomes desirable, and even fashionable, for
individuals to acquire colonial languages at the expense of local ones.

Moreover, if we ignore the designations of the languages and dialects above, we see the range
of linguistic repertoires available to Africans. The fact that very few languages are listed as
extinct, despite policies that appear designed for monolingualism, suggests that speakers use
the official, national or regional languages but have also not abandoned indigenous languages
which do not fall into these three categories. In other words, the multilingual repertoires of
speakers contain codes of both officially recognised and unrecognised languages. This
multilingual reality is unlikely to be captured by current models of language education.

There are also distortions arising from monolingual biases in census data. For instance, it is
not always possible to determine the number of first, second, third, etc. language speakers of a
particular language based on census data. The census data impose another restriction on the
analysis of particular languages, as the collection of these data is often restricted to colonial
8 Felix Banda

geographical borders. It does not take into consideration speakers of the same language that
reside across national borders. Consider the following list of the number of (first language)
speakers of selected languages, as sourced from Ethnologue (2009):

• Luchazi: 155,000 in Angola; 54,400 in Zambia; total number of speakers: 209,400.

• Mbunda: 135,000 in Angola; 126,000 in Zambia; total number of speakers: 261, 000.
• Chokwe: 455,800 in Angola; 44,200 in Zambia; 504, 000 in Democratic Republic of
the Congo; total number of speakers: 1,004,000.
• Luvale: 464,000 in Angola (not official/national language); 205,000 in Zambia
(national language); total number of speakers: 669,000.
• Tumbuka: 392,000 in Zambia (not official/national language); 940,000 in Malawi
(national language); total number of speakers: 1,332,000.
• Nyanja: 7,000,000 in Malawi; 599,000 in Mozambique; 803,000 in Zambia; 252,000
in Zimbabwe; total number of speakers 8, 654, 000.

It is worth noting that the total number of speakers of each of these languages in all countries,
including those countries not listed here, is much higher. For instance, Chokwe is also spoken
in Namibia and Nyanja is spoken in Botswana, South Africa and Swaziland, but these figures
are not available (Ethnologue 2009). This serves to illustrate that the colonial geographical
borders distort the magnitude of the number of speakers of these languages. The borders also
appear to reduce the chances of official and national significance of some of the languages
being considered major languages. For instance, Luchazi has 209,400 speakers scattered
across Angola and Zambia but is not considered a national language in either of these
countries. The same is true of Chokwe, which is spoken by more than half a million people in
the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia, but is not categorised as a major national
language in either of the two countries. The case of Luvale is interesting, as it is spoken by
more people in Angola (466, 000), where it is not a national language, than in Zambia (205,
000), where it is a designated national language. Tumbuka is spoken by more than 1 million
people in Zambia and Malawi, and was only recently designated as a national language in
Malawi; in Zambia, it remains an unrecognized language in terms of official status. Clearly,
there are politics involved in awarding official or national status to languages, as the data
suggest that such status is not awarded on the basis of the number of speakers and that other
considerations come into play here.

Assuming that the above figures relate to first language speakers only, it is not clear how
many people speak these languages as second, third, etc. languages. In most cases, census
data report on how many people speak a language as their first language or as a "tribal" or
"ethnic" language. The problem is that in multilingual contexts, defining a person's linguistic
repertoire based on ethnic or home language is rather inadequate because of the translocations
and diasporic nature of late modern African lifestyles. Moreover, it is not always possible to
speak an ethnic or home language in all situations, as people tend to spend more time in their
workplaces than at home. This leads to another distortion. Makoni, Brutt-Griffler and Mashiri
(2007) argue that in urbanized multilingual contexts of Africa, people draw their identities not
only from mother tongue ownership or pandering to rural "ethnic" identities, but more from
their repertoires as diasporic multilingual urbanites. Similarly, Bemba and Nyanja are spoken
by more people in Zambia than only those who call it their ethnic language (Banda 2008). In
essence, the relationship between language use and ethnicity is not always a straightforward
one, contrary to how it is depicted in literature on language policy and education. The
argument is as follows: To take advantage of the large pool of first, second, third, etc.
 Critical perspectives on language planning and policy in Africa 9

language speakers of these African tongues, language planning and policy needs to cross
ethnic, regional and national borders. This would unlock a large market for books and other
teaching material. In turn, this would attract publishers and investments in African languages,
which are currently lacking. For instance, the large number of speakers of each of the
languages listed above is first reduced by colonial borders and is further trimmed by national
(effectively, regional) language planning which is premised on a monolingual and ethnic
mother tongue speaker. All of these considerations call for a different conceptualization of
multilingualism in Africa and the models which are meant to engender this.

3. Concluding remarks: Towards alternative notions of multilingualism in Africa

It is necessary to recognize that geographic, linguistic, ethnic, etc. borders are social
constructs and not impermeable structures. Indeed, Appadurai (1996) notes that the structures
that we perceive as constituting communities, localities, nations, etc. are in fact tools to
stabilize objects that are in a state of flux. In this regard, it needs to be recognised that the
colonial governments' motivation for erecting particular borders was to exercise power and
control over people (Harries 2007).

There is also a need for the democratization of multilingual community spaces so as to enable
hybridity and temporal and spatial identities to be exhibited through multiple
languages/dialects. This entails weaning African multilingualism from distortions resulting
from the colonial legacy and the pervasive monolingual descriptions that underlie models of
language education.

Therefore, language planning and policy in Africa and comprehensive multilingual models
arising from them need to account for:

(i) localized multilingual practices that are innovative enough to allow for cross-border
language practices;
(ii) hybridity and urbanized, mobile, diasporic populations; and
(iii) the semiotically constituted spatial identities exhibited through multiple languages
(Stroud 2008).

There is a need for multilingual models of education and language policies which are based
on natural linguistic repertoires of the speakers concerned and for the cross-border
configuration of such models and policies that account for border-crossing multilingual
landscapes (Banda 2008, 2009a, 2009b). As demonstrated above, Africa is constituted of
multilingual landscapes that cross national, ethnic, etc. borders. Multilingualism and
multiculturalism being the norm means that Africans do not shy away from "crossing" ethnic,
cultural and linguistic borders in their quest for voice and agency. Thus, language planning
for multilingualism needs to take into account that languages spoken in a specific country are
also spoken outside this country's borders, and that ethnic, cultural, linguistic, etc. borders are,
in reality, social constructs. The idea is to build and extend multilingual democratic spaces for
speakers as a way of enhancing and taking advantage of multilingualism as a voice for
experience and identity performance, and hence as a linguistic resource. This would enable
material production of multilingualism through local agency and voices across borders, be
they ethnic, community-based or national. In this way, multiple languages would become
tools for the social, political, cultural and economic transformation of Africa, as
10 Felix Banda

multilingualism becomes the means for increased socio-economic, political, etc. participation
across broad African populations.

These considerations lead to the notion of 'linguistic repertoire-based multilingual models' (cf.
Banda 2009a). Lastly, for status and corpus planning to be successful, regional organisations
such as the African Union or Southern African Development Community – the latter a
grouping of 15 southern African states which unite to address their shared challenges
pertaining to education, socio-economics, health, security, etc. – need to become involved in
language policy and planning in Africa, across borders (Banda 2008).

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Biographical note
Felix Banda (PhD) is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of the Western
Cape, South Africa. His research interests include multilingualism in society and education, as well as
Bantu morphology and syntax and language planning across geographical borders. His recent
publications include 'The dilemma of the mother tongue: Prospects for bilingual education in South
Africa'. Language, Culture and Curriculum 13(1): 51-66, 'What can we say when the English used has
gone so high-tech?': Institutionalised discourse and interaction in development projects in a rural
community in Kenya. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 4 (2) 165-181 [with Omondi Oketch], and a
book Language Across Borders (Casas: Cape Town).

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