Yesterday I served as a discussant for a panel on Re-envisioning African Studies in U.S. Universities, part of UW-Madison’s African Studies Program’s workshop on Decolonizing African Studies.

My colleague Neil Kodesh, former director of our African Studies Program, spoke on the panel about African languages as potentially helping to decolonize African studies but mentioned that there are also strings attached because of Title 6 funding. I used my time as discussant to pull at some of those strings, arguing that our African language programs and, more broadly, our scholarly attitudes toward African languages, are actually as much in need of decolonizing as are the other aspects of African Studies. Speaking from my perspective as the director of UW-Madison’s African language program (and former director of UCLA’s), I asked, “Within African Studies, what is the role of African languages in decolonizing our endeavors?” Below I summarize what I said there, which I’ve also posted on Twitter.

An earlier keynote speaker, Professor Akosua Adamako Ampofu, offered us a to-do and not-to-do list. The first item was paying tribute to our forebears. In doing so, most of what we cite is in English, and to a lesser extent other colonial languages.

Relatedly, Professor Adamako Ampofu also encouraged us to increase access to our work beyond academic forums, such as writing for blogs (advice I’m trying to follow by posting this here); we need to disseminate our work in languages other than English as well.

Some might justify not citing African language scholarship with the argument that there just isn’t much of it. In other words, African languages are mostly for oral use. But if that’s the case, why are we teaching students mostly standard varieties of African languages? Standard varieties are mostly used in writing, while the messiness of nonstandard dialects, colloquial varieties, slang, and codeswitching better represent how African languages are actually used, and perhaps should be taught. The reasons they are not are related to the issues of epistemology and the devaluing of indigenous knowledge that were raised by our other keynote speaker, Professor Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni.

Because we rely on Title 6, we are at the whims of a government that seems to care very little about Africa. Congress has been less supportive of Title 6 & Fulbright-Hays in recent years, & Trump’s budget request last year actually called for elimination of these programs.

As these funds are lessened, students and programs are becoming more reliant on Dept of Defense funding, such as the Boren fellowship, the University of Florida’s summer African language institute, or the Arabic and Swahili Flagships. Needless to say, Defense Department funding seems extremely problematic from the perspective of decolonizing what we do.

On the plus side, strong African language programs allow universities to admit and fund more graduate students with expertise in these languages, which means more African students in our programs (another to-do on Adamako Ampofu‘s list). This has been a real boon to my own department.

But as both a form and medium of indigenous knowledge, African languages are not as valued in the academy as other epistemologies, nor is pedagogical knowledge as valued as content knowledge, which translates into fewer and fewer academic positions in African languages for PhDs. The state of the job market thus disincentivizes our graduate students from gaining expertise in African languages and language pedagogy.

We also need to decolonize the language choices in our curricula. Even in programs that teach African languages, there is very little crossover into content courses. We need to teach material produced in African languages, even if we have to do so in translation.

I end with two final questions:

Is our use of African languages to gain Title 6 funding, fund our grad students, & enable our own research a form of extraction of African knowledge?
How might African language programs and scholarly engagement with African languages change if we decolonize?