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100 signatures reached
To: President Cyril Ramaphosa
Tell the President to stop excluding Black academics from literacy and African language development
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Dear President Cyril Ramaphosa
We, the undersigned, demand:
1. An audit of research about African language research asking the question, where are the black researchers in these projects who are mother-tongue speakers of the languages under research?
2. A larger audit across universities of the teacher education sector and who are the teacher educators and what are their ideologies and sources they use in their courses.
3. Consider a long-term strategy for addressing the death of support for African language development as promised in the constitution of South Africa.
4. Fast-track the development of existing researchers who work in the African language sector, particularly linked to primary school teaching and teacher education
5. A meeting with the President and the Ministers of Basic Education and Higher Education to address creating an unapologetically Black agenda to solving the education crisis in South Africa
Why is this important?
People like Clement Doke, a professor at Wits University in the 1950s, have set up a very dangerous colonial legacy which continues centring white researchers and academics in the African language space. Government has also allowed them to arrogantly position themselves as experts and authorities in languages they do not speak and then proceed to tell us who speak, read, write, dream, pray in those languages how to teach our own languages.
Many attempts have been made by black academics, researchers, teacher trainers and activists to address the literacy crisis in this country. The Home Language-Based Bilingual Education plan, the Vulindlela Reading Clubs, the Nal’ibali National Reading for Enjoyment Initiative and the Language Transformation Plan are just a few of the many ways Black educators have been at the forefront of finding solutions to our literacy crisis.
The Early Grade Literacy Programme, and the Primary Teacher Standards, as well as the Assessments and other well-funded programmes, are led by white academics to the exclusion of Black academics who have been working in the field for more than 20 years. This gives the impression that black academics are merely props and are not capable of leading research projects.
We must interrogate the historic role of white people in creating the education crisis and maintaining it, but they are not so blatant. They invite Black academics to give their opinions and their inputs and put their names on documents as though proper consultation was done, but the real decisions are already made.
Though they have always been the ones making decisions about how black African language speaking children learn, training teachers at universities and in NGOs and developing materials, when their efforts fail, they refuse to apply any reflexivity in their work and always point their fingers at teachers for failing to implement their agenda.
The education crisis did not occur in the past 25 years alone, it is a historic crisis built on the foundation of a system that did not prioritise the Black child. This needs a systematic and ideological positioning that does not exclude black people who have carved a space for themselves in spite of the cabal of white researchers.
[1] See the full letter to the President here: https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/amandla/pages/2272/attachments/original/1563792411/Letter_to_uMongameli_18July2019_%281%29.pdf?1563792411