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The Brazilian government has introduced the compulsory study of African History and Yoruba Language into the primary and secondary schools curriculum; should this be a welcome development for Africa?
It is no news that there is an age-long relationship between Brazil and the Yoruba Language. Yoruba is a language spoken across West Africa, it is the main language of the people from the Oyo Empire, and was exported to communities along the West African coast as far as Liberia, through trade and military expansion. According to ‘Metzler Lexikon Sprache,’ written by Helmut Gluck, Yoruba is the native language of about 30 Million Africans.
Although the relationship between the language and Brazilian heritage dates as far back as the Pre-colonial era, adopting it as an official language was indeed a bold step by the Brazilian authorities.
The Brazilian Minister of Culture, Dr Sérgio Sá leitão, while speaking at the Institute of African Studies, University of Sao Paulo, in Brazil paraded important dignitaries including Nigerian artists and historians, as well as professors of arts and African studies at a lecture on the importance of Yoruba language in the Brazilian culture and tradition.
According to him, the inclusion of African History and Yoruba Language in the curriculum would help bring the African Brazilian people close to their roots, and thus encourage the understandings of the language among other important languages in Brazil apart from Portuguese which is the official language.
The Minister highlighted the role played by Brazil during the festival of arts and culture, ‘FESTAC 77’, held in Lagos, Nigeria in 1977; the constant intercultural programmes between Nigeria and Brazil; the annual carnival of arts, music and cultural displays featuring prominent African artists and Yoruba writers such as Yinka Shonibare, Adeyinka Olaiya, El Anatsui among many others, including the highly respected Yoruba writer, Professor Wande Abimbola.
Brazilian Minister of Culture flanked by 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature Winner, Professor Wole Soyinka | Photo Credit: Konbini.com
Also speaking at the event, Peruvian Nobel Laureate, Prof. Mário Vargas Llosa made mention of the African community in Peru where the African Peruvians are settled till date. Vargas Llosa, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, is known as one of Latin America’s most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading writers of his generation.
According to Vargas Llosa, Yoruba people and their culture have helped the universe. He said the Yoruba language should no longer be approached as an ethnic language, but a universal language that is alive in the culture and tradition of African and her roots around the universe.
Speaking in Yoruba and Portuguese, Prof Katiuscia Ribeiro of the Institute of African Studies drew attention to the African philosophical practices introducing the constant representation of the Yoruba culture and religion in the Brazilian traditional beliefs.
A Nigerian carnival artist, painter and illustrator, Adeyinka Olaiya, also expressed the benefits the Yoruba language would bring to the Brazilian culture if fully integrated into the Brazilian educational curriculum.
According to Olaiya, living in Salvador, Brazil, is like living in any of the western states of Nigeria where the Yoruba are predominantly located.
He said:
“Most of the cultures and traditions in evidence in Brazil are all of the heritages brought along to the Latin American country by the majority Yoruba families, victims of the BARCO NEGREIROS, the NEGRO BOAT that forcefully brought the enslaved West Africans to Brazil in the 13th century.
“The Yoruba heritage that represents the majority of the African cultural practices in Brazil today is having several words in Yoruba roots. Akara, Dendê, Iyalode, Babalawo, Iyalawo and lots more are all derived from the Yoruba roots.”
Many Africans, both those living in the continent and in the diaspora have welcomed the news saying it will give the ‘lost sons’ of Africa in Brazil a sense of belonging.
Ethiopia must end its political, economic and social exclusion and marginalization of Afaan Oromo speakers from federal institutions and the Addis Ababa city administration claiming non-existing language laws and language policies as the basis of these exclusions.
Ethiopia never had formal language laws and language policy in its history to exclude the use of Afaan Oromo. The so-called language related provision in the federal constitution is not self-executing law. It needs language policy and language law for it to be legally enforced in the court of law or followed by any government institutions.
Alternatively, even if one claims that there is constitutional self-executing law, it does not bar the use of Afaan Oromo by federal institutions and Addis Ababa City Administration.
More importantly, Addis Ababa city administration does not need any federal authorization to adopt right away Afaan Oromo as its working language on equal footing with Amharic.
There are many Ethiopia’s own language use practices that will enable the federal government to adopt Afaan Oromo as its working language without needing any law or policy.
For instance, there is no law or language policy that says Ethiopia will use English in its international communication. Yet, the country is using English in its international communication in spite of the absence of language law or language policy.
Similarly, if we look at Ethiopia’s medium of instruction both at secondary and university levels, there is no language law or language policy issued to mandate Ethiopian academic institutions to teach in English.
If we look at the past practices of the Ministry of Education, there is no law that mandated the inclusion of Geez, a language used in church liturgy with zero living speakers, on Ethiopian School Leaving Certificate Exam(ESLCE) while willfully excluding Afaan Oromo or other languages with tens of millions of speakers from ESLCE.
If there is any legal basis for all these unregulated language uses, the only document one may find is the educational curriculum prepared by the Ethiopian Ministry of Education. That means, all these messes were done at the free will of unelected and unauthorized experts at the Ministry of Education whom the Ethiopian people have zero knowledge even about their existence.
Similarly, there is no clearly drawn language use policy that regulates the Ethiopian federal media outlets to broadcast in any given languages including in Afaan Oromo. It is pretty much the discretionary decision of these entities.
If unelected, unauthorized and obscure curriculum developing experts at the Ministry of Education or media companies were given so much power in deciding on what languages our educational system or media uses or not uses; we expect our elected, legally authorized and publically known officials including the Ethiopian federal parliament, the federal judicial and executive organs to use Afaan Oromo in conducting their business.
Afaan Oromo speakers who constitute more than 50% of the Ethiopian population cannot wait until the constitution is amended or language use laws or policies are issued to get services from the federal government and Addis Ababa city administration.
The degree of exclusion and marginalization of the Oromo people in Ethiopia is unbearable. The Oromo people cannot remain excluded from their own country. All cities, religious institutions, media outlets and federal government entities in Oromia, including in Addis Ababa, must serve the Oromo people in Afaan Oromo.
Furthermore, since both the federal government institutions and Addis Ababa City Administration are exclusively located in the Oromia National Regional Government where the working language is legally Afaan Oromo, there is no federal law or policy that prohibits the federal government and the Addis Ababa City Administration from conducting their Business in Afaan Oromo.
In fact, both the federal institutions and the Addis Ababa City Administration must use Afaan Oromo, the official working language in Oromia, to conduct their business in Oromia Region according to the Ethiopian federal constitution which recognizes the rights of regional governments to use the language of their choosing as their working language.
Brief and informative speech about the history of Qubee Afaan Oromoo by the renowned scholar Dr. Gemechu Megersa on the third international conference of Oromo language,culture,arts and customs organized by Wollega university, 13 April 2018.
‘Across the world, African languages are slowly taking the center stage and are being recognized for their importance. For instance, you can now learn Zulu on an app, read a growing list of articles in African languages on Wikipedia, and receive thousands of dollars in awards for your fictional Swahili piece or poem. And many universities from Ethiopia to South Africa are making African languages like Afan Oromo and isiXhosa a compulsory subject. But Africa still has some of the world’s highest concentration of at-risk languages. And that can be reversed by first understanding and studying the past history, present evolution, and future use of these languages.’ Click here to read the full article QZ.
Authorities in Oromia changed the order of the Roman alphabet used for the Afan Oromo language on the grounds that the old alphabet order is allegedly an obstacle to the reading skills of Oromo school children. According to Oromo intellectuals, however, this change is aiming at diminishing the cultural rights of the Oromo people who have been subject to a marginalisation process for years. This issue is occupying the center of Ethiopia’s political news cycle, even though this regulation had been silently carried out in 2016. Therefore, there are doubts as to whether the regime uses this debate to divert public attention from large-scale Oromo protests. In the past months, the Ethiopian government has been in the world’s spotlight due to massive human rights violations in the country.
Authorities in Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest state, have infuriated language experts and Oromo nationalists with their decision to re-arrange the order of the alphabet of the region’s language, Afan Oromo.
In multilingual and multiethnic Ethiopia, orthographic choices are complex linguistic and political decisions that have great socio-political consequences.
Among Ethiopia’s written languages, most write their language in either the Ge’ez or Ethiopic alphabet, known as “Fidel,” or the Roman alphabet. Afan Oromo officially adopted the Roman alphabet — in its usual order of ABCD and so on — after the current government come to power in 1991.
However, more than a quarter century later, the regional educational authorities of Oromia announced they were reshuffling the “Qubee Afan Oromo” (as the alphabet is called). The first seven letters are:
L A G I M Aa S
Justifying the change, authorities blamed the old alphabet order as the reason why reading skills among primary school children in Oromia remain poor. They even cited a research to back up their claim.
There is, however, a problem with their argument. It was based on a misrepresentation of the findings of the research. In fact, the research, which was funded by US Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2010, revealed a broader problem of reading skills not only among Afan Oromo-speaking primary school students, but also students whose mother tongue was Amharic, Hararigna, Sidaamu Afoo, Somali and Tigrinya.
In the study, pedagogic and logistical difficulties were identified as factors for poor reading skills in Ethiopia’s six major regions. However, the order of alphabet was not cited as a factor for the dismal reality. In a post on the citizen journalism site OPride.com, one blogger agreed with the findings of the research but questioned the connection it had to the alphabet order, writing:
There is little disagreement on the core problem here: The education quality crisis in Ethiopia needs fixing. The disagreement here though is on the proposed solutions. This is underscored by a key question that everyone is asking: JUST HOW DOES REORDERING THE AFAAN OROMO ALPHABET IMPROVE READING AND LEARNING OUTCOMES?
‘Yet another fraud perpetrated on the Oromo people’
The change actually took effect in 2016 and school textbooks already reflect the reshuffling, but it was done so quietly. So much so that the news of the letter order change only made it into Ethiopia’s political news cycle after government affiliate Oromia Broadcasting Service reported about it. Over last two years, a series of political events with far-reaching repercussions such as protests and internet outages has dominated the country’s news cycle.
As soon as the change was reported, concerned Oromo intellectuals started raising questions.
For them, this is the latest attempt in a series of steps intended to diminish the cultural rights of the Oromo people, who have historically been marginalized in Ethiopia. On Facebook Awol Kassim Allo, wrote:
“The casual change/disfiguring of the Alphabet of a language spoken by more than 40 million people without any debate and discussion is appalling. The excuse given to justify it – improving the ability of children to read at early stages of instruction – is lame and cannot stuck up to scrutiny. …This is yet another fraud perpetrated on the Oromo people and it must be rejected.”
The circumstance of the change also stoked another fear: that the decision to alter the order of the letters might be a plot by people who were disgruntled when the Oromos opted to adopt the Roman alphabet over the Ge’ez alphabet in 1991.
Prior to 1991, Afan Oromo was written in different alphabets. The first Oromo Bible was printed in Ge’ez letters in the 19th century. During the reign of emperor Haile Selassie (1930-1974), Afan Oromo was not a written language.
When Ethiopia’s military regime came to power in 1974, it decreed that all Ethiopian languages must be written exclusively in Ge’ez alphabet— a draconian policy intended to promote unity among Ethiopia’s diverse ethnic groups.
Parallel to the Ge’ez letters, however, Oromo language experts and Oromo nationalists were also using the Roman alphabet. Paul Baxter, a social anthropologist, wrote that the Roman alphabet was used to transcribe the Afan Oromo language among Kenyan Oromos in the 1940s.
Proponents of the Ge’ez alphabet believe that Ge’ez signifies the rich liturgic and literary tradition of Ethiopia. For them, preserving Ge’ez in the age of the Roman alphabet’s domination is a sign of resistance to cultural globalization and a symbol of identity. Responding to Awol Kassim Allo’s post on Facebook, Abeba Teshale wrote:
“Simple, structured, logical, Ethiopian, African, Amharic/Tigregna alphabet is there for any one interested to adopt. 26 vs 338 syllables! There is an alphabet for each sound and for the ones that don’t have one, we could crate a symbole. Just a thought”
For many Oromos, though, adopting the Roman alphabet is a matter of selecting an alphabet that best fits the Afan Oromo sound system.
According to academic Teferi Degeneh Bijiga, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the topic of Afan Oromo writing system, complex historical, cultural and linguistic forces were at play when Oromo intellectuals decided to adopt the Roman alphabet in 1991.
Over the next few weeks, this issue will be front and center in Ethiopian politics, where the Ethiopian government is operating under a state of emergency because of the protests that began over land use as well as political and economic marginalization in Oromia in November 2015.
Dr. Wolassa L. Kumo, a Sidama scholar, has proposed that Afan Oromo be the language of the cultural integration of Cushites in Ethiopia (by teaching it in schools throughout the regions and zones where Cushites live); he has also expressed his support for making Afan Oromo, the largest Cushitic language in the world, the Federal Language in Ethiopia. Dr. Wolassa L. Kumo wrote about the topic in September 2015 in an article entitled “Deepening Cultural Integration among the Cushitic Peoples in Ethiopia.” To quote from the article:
Introducing Afaan Oromoo as an additional language course in primary and secondary schools in Cushitic language speaking regions would not only ensure deeper cultural integration among the Cushites but also the entire country. It is an affront to our conscious that the language spoken by over 40% of the population in Ethiopia is not recognized as official and national language in the country. Adopting Afaan Oromo as a second official and national language would not only benefit the Oromo and other Cushitic peoples but the entire country. The Amhara and Tigray people would benefit by learning Afaan Oromoo and the undistorted history and culture of the Cushites. Regardless of the manner in which the Cushites learned the Amharic language, the knowledge of the Amharic language and the Amhara culture is beneficial to the Cushitic peoples.
History of human societies has shown that it is impossible to unite a country by a barrel of gun forever. That is why empires crumbled throughout human history. Nonetheless, it is possible to unite a country through the will of the people who live in it. That will can only be there when there is a level playing field for everyone to take part in the building of a particular territory. Today, in Africa, we have dozens of countries where more than two official and national languages have been adopted. In South Africa, all eleven languages in the country are official languages. Did South Africa disintegrate because it adopted eleven official languages? Far from it. One of the most celebrated achievements of South Africa’s democracy is the adoption of all the languages in the country as official languages. A country of eighty ethnic groups can learn a lesson or two from South Africa and many other African countries.
The views expressed in this post (blog) are those of the author/authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of OromianEconomist. Posting/publication does not imply endorsement of views by the author/ authors.
