Last June, I spent 4 weeks volunteering in the rural region of Kwahu East, in Ghana. I went there with Atlas Volunteers, to whom I’m extremely grateful for this invaluable experience. My experience was mostly with their education project in rural areas of Kwahu East, where I helped children with reading and talking in English. What I write about is the result of my own experience, the conversations I had with the people there, and some additional research.
If someone asks me about my experience in Ghana, I usually summarize it something like this: Ghana is a beautiful, rich land with beautiful, kind people, pulsating with the potential to become something great. Unfortunately, it also faces many challenges. Especially in the more rural areas, it severely lacks infrastructure and ways of making money.
So progress happens slowly, and the obstacles are many.
Like with the rest of the continent, one can hardly avoid tracing the root cause of a lot of these obstacles to colonialism, to how western powers took it and eventually dropped it when it was no longer affordable, leaving behind imposed systems and doctrines on top of erased identities, and no other choice but to replicate and uphold structures both alien and outdated, all the while without the tools or the space to review and question them.
During my time in Ghana, I was very much in touch with precisely one of those colonial residues: the fact that, to this day, English is the country’s only official language. Among other things, this means school, classes, books and exams are almost entirely in English. My main assignment was to go to one of the schools in the region and help out children who struggled with it. Turns out, a lot of them do. And as I sat down with one student after another, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the system has been rigged against them from the start.
“What do you think of the fact that school in Ghana is taught in English?” I asked a young Ghanaian farmer.
He looked at me.
“Is school in Spain taught in Twi?”
And that was that.
There are over 70 indigenous languages in Ghana, spoken by a rich variety of ethnic groups. 11 of those languages (or 9, depending on how some dialects are grouped together) are used widely enough for them to be sponsored by the state, which essentially means that a variety of materials are printed and published in these languages. Some of the most widely used are the Akan dialects, such as Akan Twi, which was the one I experienced the most during my experience in Kwahu East.
Despite all this diversity, and due only to its past as a British colony, the one and only official language in the country is English. And while it’s commonly used in government, academic and business contexts, it isn’t as widely spoken as the native languages. In the regions that I visited, I hardly ever heard the locals speak to each other in English.
In these rural communities, children often struggle to read, write or speak in English. Not only that, but often so do their parents and sometimes even their teachers. Even the official final exams contain grammatical errors and dubious phrased questions.
Some children could read fluently out loud but couldn’t understand what they were reading. Others could speak it well but couldn’t read at all. Others knew what they were expected to answer to a specific question, but didn’t know what the answer actually meant. A lot of students ended up achieving a merely mechanical use of English, held together by void memorization and repetition, resorting to a simplified, almost military mindset of “Sir, yes”, with little room for actual critical thinking and understanding.
And yes, there are other factors that do their share in feeding into some of these hindering patterns. In a culture where elders hold great authority and must not be disrespected, great hierarchical divides appear between teachers and students, which in turn enables dogmatic environments where teachers become an almost authoritarian figure not to be questioned, and where practices such as caning are still common. Not coincidentally, it’s pretty near exactly what school was like for a lot of European parents and grandparents. Again, some of these systems are not only an imposed replica of westernized values, but an outdated one at that.
Still, language lies at the heart of thought and discourse. Simplistic, dogmatic and military-like mentalities are too easily perpetuated through the limitations that English entails for some of these communities. Its imposition as Ghana’s only official language may very well pose one of the biggest obstacles to a much needed revitalization of scrutiny and criticism, and to the dismantling of many other counter-productive structures.
And let’s not forget, there’s no real reason for English to be Ghana’s only official language in the first place, other than the fact that it used to be a colony. Of course there are many great advantages to learn English as an access point to international spaces, and yes, there are plenty of Ghanaians who speak it fluently. But, as it currently stands, it’s a massive handicap on many communities of children who will always understand more, express themselves better, pose better questions and give better answers in their actual mother tongue.
English should be officially what it already is unofficially: a second language.
This whole issue does pose a difficult problem. Many argue that the friction and conflict that would ensue from trying to pick one of the indigenous languages as official is not worth the trouble. Some Ghanaians even regard English as a very desirable sign of status and intellect, pushing for further use of English in schools.
On the other hand, many other African countries already have one or two indigenous languages as co-official, next to whatever colonial language they were dealt. It might not be a cure-all solution, but it’s already happening, which means there are blueprints that can be consulted and revised.
The answer might be difficult, but the questions must be asked.
It all necessarily leads back to tackling the colonial origins of English as an imposition, to recognizing its arbitrary nature, and to take it off its pedestal so it can take a seat under an actual mother tongue.
But how present are these colonial origins to begin with?
I asked Dominic, the local coordinator at the volunteer program, about how colonialism and slavery were taught in the schools of the region. He said it was mostly brushed off, glanced over, not studied in detail. He described himself as fortunate enough to have had a knowledgeable and opinionated Politics teacher, who taught him about these things in depth. But such teachers aren’t as common as they should be, especially outside of the bigger cities. Meanwhile, another volunteer described having seen exams containing questions about what British person did what great thing.
Almost 70 years after its independence, Ghana’s colonial history often feels like a ghost, and some students are still being denied a deeper knowledge of the root cause of many of the obstacles they will face in their lifetimes. For now, a lot of English and western structures still fill the gaps that they made for themselves years ago, and in many cases remain as the measuring stick for many aspects of life.
Nevertheless, change is inevitable, and the seeds are already there. The critical voices sometimes feel quiet and hidden away, but they belong to people who have been observing and listening, quietly taking inventory, people who have long seen through the ghosts of history and who exist at the verge of the next big question and the next new conversation. And they are bound to keep on finding each other.
In the end, it might just be a matter of time. Like one of them said to me:
“Soon it will be our time, and then things will change”.