The Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literatures
We writers and scholars from all regions of Africa gathered in Asmara, Eritrea from January 11 to 17, 2000 at the conference titled Against All Odds: African Languages and Literatures into the 21st Century. This was the first conference on African languages and literatures ever to be held on African soil, with participants from East, West, North, Southern Africa and from the Diaspora and by writers and scholars from around the world. We examined the state of African languages in literature, scholarship, publishing, education and administration in Africa and throughout the world. We celebrated the vitality of African languages and literatures and affirmed their potential. We noted with pride that despite all the odds against them, African languages as vehicles of communication and knowledge survive and have a written continuity of thousands of years. Colonialism and neo-colonialism created some of the most serious obstacles against African languages and literatures. We noted with concern the fact that these obstacles still haunt Africa and continue to block the mind of the continent. We identified a profound incongruity in colonial languages speaking for the continent. At the start of a new century and millennium, Africa must firmly reject this incongruity and affirm a new beginning by returning to its languages and heritage. Therefore, the question of culture, literatures and languages cannot be separated from the economic problems of African countries created by colonial and neo-colonial forces and their local allies. De-colonisation of the African mind should go hand in hand with decolonisation of the economy and politics. At this historic conference, we writers and scholars from all regions of Africa gathered in Asmara, Eritrea declare that:
1. African languages must take on the duty, the responsibility and the challenge of speaking for the continent.
2. The vitality and equality of African languages must be recognised as a basis for the future empowerment of African peoples.
3. The diversity of African languages reflects the rich cultural heritage of Africa and must be used as an instrument of African unity.
4. Dialogue among African languages is essential: African languages must use the instrument of translation to advance communication among all people, including the disabled.
5. All African children have the inalienable right to attend school and learn in their mother tongues. Every effort should be made to develop African languages at all levels of education.
6. Promoting research on African languages is vital for their development, while the advancement of African research and documentation will be best served by the use of African languages.
7. The effective and rapid development of science and technology in Africa depends on the use of African languages and modern technology must be used for the development of African languages.
8. Democracy is essential for the equal development of African languages and African languages are vital for the development of democracy based on equality and social justice.
9. African languages like all languages contain gender bias. The role of African languages in development must overcome this gender bias and achieve gender equality.
10. African languages are essential for the decolonisation of African minds and for the African renaissance.
The initiative which has materialised in the Against All Odds conference must be continued through biennial conferences in different parts of Africa. In order to organise future conferences in different parts of Africa, create a forum of dialogue and co-operation and advance the principles of this declaration, a permanent Secretariat will be established, which will be initially based in Asmara, Eritrea.
Translated into as many African languages as possible and based on these principles, the Asmara Declaration is affirmed by all participants in Against All Odds. We call upon all African states, the AU, the UN and all international organisations that serve Africa to join this effort of recognition and support for African languages, with this declaration as a basis for new policies.
While we acknowledge with pride the retention of African languages in some parts of Africa and the Diaspora and the role of African languages in the formation of new languages, we urge all people in Africa and the Diaspora to join in the spirit of this Declaration and become part of the efforts to realise its goals.
Asmara, 17th of January 2000
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Mbulelo Mzamane
Nawal El Saadawi
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
The Asmara Declaration has significance for a variety of reasons:
(i) Language and democracy are inextricably linked. To exclude African languages from all forms of official discourse is to disempower, by excluding from meaningful participation in the affairs of state the vast majority of the people in any given country.
(ii) Language is the vehicle for the transmission of knowledge; it is the most significant tool in education. Mother-tongue instruction, especially in the early years of a child’s education, has been proven to be more effective in the educational process than the use of some other language as a medium of instruction. African countries with the highest rates of literacy have invariably been those, like Lesotho and Tanzania, where African language instruction occurs.
(iii) Language accelerates development and promotes productivity, by reaching directly to workers who understand instructions best when they are given in their own languages. Similarly, workers respond best to training in their own languages.
(iv) Language decolonises the mind, where inferiority ceases to be attached to African languages and, therefore, to the speakers of those languages. In the process of decolonisation, language reintegrates and restores the previously dominated to their culture and humanstory.
(v) Wider usage of African languages is going to be more effective in intra-African communication, beyond the limited elite in every country, to encompass people who are more conversant with their own languages.
The example of the Bible is most instructive in assessing the efficacy of indigenous language use to reach the heart and mind and soul of whole nations. It is no coincidence that the Bible is the most widely read book in Africa – and the only book Africans with an elementary education care to read. The missionaries did not wait for Africans to learn some European language first; they reached their prospective African converts in the indigenous languages Africans spoke. They reduced all such judiciously selected languages into writing, thus creating in most instances standard forms used to this day, for example in education and broadcasting, as in the case of Shona from Zimbabwe and isiXhosa from South Africa. They did not argue, as later generations of Africans were to do, that African languages were not adequately developed to carry Christian thought or sufficiently sophisticated to convey Western culture. They left such non-issues to obfuscate the minds and torture the souls of their smitten and dazed charges, many of whose descendants have yet to recover from the damage of colonialism.
The Asmara Declaration warns against downplaying, to Africa’s detriment, the theology and epistemology of language; the creation and ownership of knowledge in one’s own language; and the interface between language and processes such as democracy, education, development, decolonisation, and communication. Knowledge acquired and expressed in one’s own language assumes in the minds of those to whom such knowledge is transmitted the sacred status of revealed truth - otherwise, God might have continued to keep it obscure in Greek and Latin (or even in English and French). Those who are proselytised in their own languages buy into the new forms of knowledge as some universal ordering, perhaps divinely inspired even, for they see such knowledge which is transmitted in their own languages as meant for them, too. The Asmara Declaration thus articulates a principle of inclusion, where knowledge was previously the exclusive preserve of the limited elite educated in European languages.
The Asmara Declaration is potentially the most empowering resolution ever adopted, collectively and continentally, by the African literati. There remains, however, a great deal of unfinished business. The terms articulated in terms of literature need to be extended to other fields and practitioners in science and technology, economics, government, and in all other spheres of our endeavours. In addition, practical steps must be devised and a programme of action adopted to translate the rhetoric and the commendable sentiments expressed in The Asmara Declaration into concrete practice as well as to tease out more the practical implications of a decision that has far-reaching consequences and whose ramifications may well prove to be not unlike those generated by the Pan African Congress of 1900.
One fact is certain, though: the African renaissance is inconceivable outside of a framework and a language dispensation that accords with the African spirit. The implementation of The Asmara Declaration is an African renaissance imperative and a precondition for the attainment of African goals in promoting and consolidating democracy, education, development, decolonisation, and communication. The Asmara Declaration is Africa’s expression of Amandla!