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From the Oral Tradition to the Information Era: The Case of Tanzania
S
AFARI
M
AFU Sokoine University, Tanzania
Internet use is spreading among Tanzanians, as government institutions use it for the dissemination of information, as universities set up projects for distance learning and, as cybercafés become a commonplace in major towns and cities. However, it is necessary to remember that the phenomenon only touches a minority of the community. In a situation where the electricity grid does not cover the whole country, where the service providers are still experiencing difficulties and where there is a large group with no surplus revenue whatsoever, not only unable to afford to purchase the necessary hardware but also without the means to afford the comparatively modest charges of the cybercafé, Internet use will remain a minority and elite activity. This limitation is underscored by the language of the Internet. With few sites in Kiswahili, those Tanzanians who surf the WWW mostly do so in English. The Internet thus is one more domain where English has become the language of the Tanzanian elite. I
n the span of just less than a century and a half, Tanzania has witnessed a rapid transition from oral means of gathering and disseminating information and knowledge to transmission through the printed word to electronic means of information collection, storage and retrieval. This rapid development of means of transmission has also meant a change in the medium of transmission, with both beneficial and detrimental effects for the mass of Tanzanians. This evolution from an oral tradition to the literacy practices of the Internet has been neither culturally nor linguistically neutral, and one aim of this paper will be to comment on the language effect of recent changes. I base my analysis on the findings of the B@bel MOST project for which I was the Tanzanian researcher and on further research I carried out to understand the setting for these findings. As in the other papers in this collection, one of the issues I wanted to address was the question of whether the English language is spreading in tandem with the adoption of information technology and, in particular, with increased use of the Internet.
International Journal on Multicultural Societies (IJMS), Vol. 6, No. 1, 2004: 53 - 78 ISSN 1564-4901, www.unesco.org/shs/ijms © UNESCO
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1. The Oral Tradition
Before the arrival of Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa, literacy and written culture were to be found in very few centres.1 (See also 2 below). In African society, knowledge and values were transmitted from one generation to the next through the oral tradition. Folklore was used to entertain and educate. The knowledge necessary for agriculture and crafts was also transmitted orally as the younger generation served apprenticeship with older members of the group. For these farming and the pastoralist communities, learning took place with practice. The work was generally divided by gender and young boys would work side by side with older men cultivating and tending the crops. Young girls would work side by side with their mothers or elder sisters doing household chores. In pastoralist communities, the young boys (and sometimes girls) would look after calves around the homesteads, while older boys and elders took the animals farther afield to graze.
One important feature of the education of young people from the pastoralist and agro-pastoralist communities, such as the Maasai and the Iraqws, was their training in skills for warfare. War games were organised and managed by older boys to ensure that the mock fighting did not result in serious injury.2
Tribal values and traditions were transmitted formally during initiation and circumcision ceremonies. For example, among the Maasai, the Iraqw and the Wayao3, young boys and girls at puberty were taken into the custody of same sex elders to be trained for the responsibilities of parenthood. In the case of the Iraqws, girls used to stay indoors with the elderly ladies for up to two or more years. During the entire period of initiation they were not supposed to be seen by other people, particularly men.
In each clan, designated individuals specialised in healing. The role was often assigned to the blacksmith, goldsmith etc. Rulers and chiefs were entrusted with the welfare of the society in general. These dignitaries handed the knowledge and skills involved in their role to the next generation, often in secret rituals. Certain clans were held to be endowed with supernatural powers and here too the transmission of the knowledge needed to exercise these powers was always by face-to-face communication. The secrets were not written down.
Entertainment, education, initiation, government, welfare and religion were thus carried out through personal contact and in the language of the group. As in all face to face communication, the language of the exchanges was always parole, the dialect particular to the small group. There was no concept of standard language, except in the few places in contact with the Muslim world where the classical
1 For example along the East African coastal towns of Bagamoyo, Kilwa Kisiwani, Malindi and Mombasa where Arabs had settled as early as 950 AD and where literacy was acquired for religious purposes. 2 See, for example, Camara Laye’s The African Child, or Ole Kulet’s Is it Possible? 3 As an example. Many other groups did the same.
From the Oral Tradition to the Information Era: The Case of Tanzania 55
Arabic of the Koran might be known. Language was an important variable in group identity and, by their language usage, groups could define themselves as different from speakers further along the dialect continuum or from different language phyla.
2. Education and the Literate Society
In the territory of present day Tanzania, the inhabitants began to have contact with the outside world from around 950AD when the Arabs from Oman settled on Kilwa Kisiwani Island. The Arabs introduced Islam and educated young men in madrassa schools, which taught Islamic religion and culture.4 Madrassa students had to learn Arabic script, usually through rote learning in order to read the Koran. It is important to remember that Arabic influence was of limited effect and confined to the coastal strip and the islands. Later on however, as the slave trade gained momentum, Arabs slave traders began to travel into the hinterland and established centres such as Morogoro, Dodoma, Tabora and Kigoma. Some traders settled in these stations and introduced madrassa and the Islamic religion.
In the 16th century, the Portuguese arrived and settled along the coast in towns such as Kilwa, Zanzibar and Mombasa, where they established ports of call. The traffic along the spice route to the Indian sub-continent and the Indonesian archipelago was regular and sometimes moderately heavy. The Portuguese, how- ever, had very little impact on the local communities as far as literacy was concerned. Nevertheless, although the Arabs later drove the Portuguese from these towns, the Europeans were in the area long enough to contribute to the lexical elaboration of Kiswahili, the indigenous language of the coastal plain. Kiswahili borrowed extensively from both Arabic and Portuguese (and subsequently of course from many other foreign languages such as Hindi and English). The early Arabic influence and Koranic study meant that, when Kiswahili was first written down, Arabic was the script.
Formal education and literacy for the interior and for a wider social group came after the arrival of European missionaries and colonial governments. The Germans were the first colonial empire in the area, from 1884. After the German defeat in the First Word War, the British took over the administration of Tanganyika.
The missionaries came from a variety of different European countries and Christian denominations and had distinct spheres of influence. The Roman Catholics especially Missionaries of the Order of Saint Benedictine from Germany had mission stations in southern Tanzania – from Nyangao and Ndanda in Lindi/ Mtwara Regions to Peramiho in Ruvuma Region. Irish Catholic orders had major mission centres at Kipalapala in Tabora, and Kilema in Moshi. Lutherans (mainly from Norway) occupied the northern zone; the Moravian Church occupied the
4 These continue to the present day.
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Southern Highlands and the Anglican Church the Central zone and Zanzibar. Of course, no particular denomination dominated a particular area entirely.
In all these centres, formal education organised by Christian sects gradually replaced the indigenous traditions for educating and training young people. The missionaries, and later the state in the form of the colonial government, dislocated traditional education. This was sometimes overt as in the prohibition or discourage- ment of some traditional practices thought to be wrong, such as the practice of witchcraft and circumcision of girls. The dislocation was not total, however, as in some cases, the Christian church incorporated initiations and circumcisions into the church rituals, although the convergence was largely unacknowledged.
One change that was very noticeable was the spread of the printed word within the region. The advent of the printing press to the area had the profound effects that Benedict Anderson (1983) noted within Western societies. It encouraged the standardisation of the languages adopted for use as the medium of local administration and education, and added another tier to the hierarchy of imperial and indigenous languages. Standardisation of local languages came about principally as various Christian denominations attempted to translate their scriptures into the local languages. The missionaries were among the first to write Kiswahili grammar books Bishop Steere of the Anglican Church wrote a Kiswahili grammar book in (1870) while Krapf compiled a dictionary of Kiswahili in 1882.5 The Lutherans were particularly energetic translators, and in addition to the Christian sacred books also recorded local folklore in the language of the respective group – for example much folklore of the Iraqw was written in Iraqw. The preservation of culture from the African oral tradition was, however, quite a rare event and there was much that was not written down.
Among the first printing presses in the country to meet the demand for books and materials for schools and for religious literature for the church were the Vuga Printing Press in Lushoto, Ndanda Mission Press in Masasi, Peramiho Mission Press in Songea, and Tabora Mission Press in Tabora. The existence of the printing press within Tanzania greatly improved the spread of literacy since written books made practice available to those who had received a basic education. Both the Missionaries and the colonial government established more schools for the indi- genous people in different parts of the country. Sometimes, young men and girls were taken by force to attend such schools.6
5 Ludwig Krapf, and Johannes Rebmann were the first Europeans to see snow-capped Mt. Kilimanjaro in 1848. Krapf compiled A Dictionary of Suahili, which was originally published in 1882. It was reprinted in 1969 by Negro Universities Press, New York, ISBN 8371-1276-1 6 The author of this paper is a case in point. He was forcefully taken to school by the colonial government in 1958. The author’s parents were threatened with prison should they fail to make sure that their son attend school regularly.
From the Oral Tradition to the Information Era: The Case of Tanzania 57
The introduction of Western education was of course a threat to the training methods of the indigenous societies. One of the greatest effects was the language shift that it caused. Emphasis on the knowledge of the book and information transmitted by the written word meant that those who were educated mostly acquired Kiswahili. Religious institutions used it as the medium for primary education. This was true both of the Christians and the mission schools and the Moslems and their madrassa classes. As the missionaries and the imams converted indigenous people into Christianity and Islam respectively, they were instrumental in spreading literacy and Kiswahili. There were some exceptions to this as some of the other indigenous vernaculars were employed in church services and parts of the Bible were translated into these languages. For example, languages of the Sukuma7, Nyakyusa, Makua, Haya and the Chagga tribes were employed. However, this practice has not survived to the present day and Kiswahili is used throughout the Christian community for church service. This, as we shall see, followed the general spread of Kiswahili in a number of domains, to the detriment of other indigenous languages.
2.1 Languages of the Colonial Administration
The lingua franca for administrative purpose was Kiswahili. Only official govern- ment documents were in German (during German rule) and English (under British rule). During German rule, the medium of education for the indigenous population was Kiswahili. During British rule, a tripartite education system was introduced, differentiating provision for the three races that made up the population resident in Tanzania: the Africans, the Europeans and the Asians. Kiswahili was used as the medium of instruction in African schools while English was taught as a subject. English was the medium of the European and Asian schools.8
Kiswahili was used throughout the colonial administration to allow contact between ruler and ruled. This role, together with its use in education and religion, meant that the language was beginning to attain the status of lingua franca in Tanzania by the mid 20th century. Thus, when TANU (the Tanganyika African National Union) began to fight for Tanganyika’s independence in 1954, Kiswahili was adopted as the language of political association. If Tanzania was to keep the borders designated by the colonial treaties (and this is what the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) Charter had decided in 19639), there was a need for a language, which allowed communication among the many linguistically disparate groups in Tanzania.
7 The Sukuma are more than 5m people today – hence the largest ethnic group in Tanzania 8 Tripartite education system was abolished on 1.1.1962 just after attaining independence. 9 OAU was established on 25th May 1963 at a meeting of 24 Head of Independent African States at that time who signed the OAU Charter. Today all African states are independent and OAU has been renamed the African Unity (AU) as of July 2002.
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Kiswahili was thought to be a more unifying language than English, the language of the colonial masters. Nyerere called it the ‘language of Africa’, because of the lingua franca role that it had already played among the populations of the east coast. After independence it was an important tool in nation building and promoting national cohesion. Two social processes aided the language shift to Kiswahili. In Nyerere’s social experiment, the Ujamaa policy of 1967, rural people were moved to settle in Ujamaa villages to collectivise agricultural production. Tanzania’s urban population also grew as people came to the towns in search of work in the limited industrialisation that was also then taking place. Both these phenomena brought about contact among linguistic groups that then had a need for a communal language. Language shift was also promoted since the government was actively discouraging the use of indigenous languages in education and administration, to promote national cohesion. It was generally hoped that they would wither and die a natural death. Likewise, regionalism in Tanzania was discouraged. Today, Tanzanian central government continues to be unenthusiastic about promoting indigenous languages (which amount to about 130 altogether).
After independence national education in the national language was seen as the key to the success of the Tanzanian state. A number of policies were elaborated and introduced to make the language of education Kiswahili. This was only partially successful. Kiswahili was the language of the primary sector, as it had been for most of the population even before independence. Secondary education, however, was in English, and has remained so despite a number of attempts to change the medium to Kiswahili. The reasons for this are numerous, and there is not space here to discuss the failure of the policies. 10 However, among them was the availability of English language medium texts for secondary and higher education, which was of immense importance. Tanzania’s financial priorities in the 1960s and 1970s and financial difficulties in the 1980s and 1990s meant that the funding for translation of work into Kiswahili was not always available.
Before ending this section, it is important to point out here the difficulties of storage of the printed word in the tropics. The life span of books in the libraries and schools of Tanzania is seriously affected by hot humid weather, insect infestation and vermin. This is a common problem for centres of learning in such climates. In the hundred years or so of the printed word that Tanzania has experienced, no easy and cheap solution to this problem has been developed. If, as seems probable, there is a withering reading culture among Tanzanians, we should perhaps look to this reason as contributory alongside the more usual reasons that are given, such as the growth of audio-visual media and the decline of the idealism of the liberation period.
10 But see Mafu 2000 for discussion of the issues.
From the Oral Tradition to the Information Era: The Case of Tanzania 59
3. From Books to Electronic Media
Recent changes in how communication and information flow take place are now causing the same kind of seismic shift that occurred in the early colonial period. Information technology in general and the Internet in particular are causing great change in scholarship, literacy practices and communication. The very language of exchange has once again shifted. This third section to the paper, which presents the research I undertook in Tanzania in 2002 and 2003, will address the issue of language and information technologies policy, new patterns of research and interaction caused by new technologies, the barriers to the general extension of practices to the general public, the ideological framework of the new practice and end with an assessment of the undoubted benefits that these technologies have brought to Tanzania.
3.1 Tanzanian policies on Information and Communication Technology
Tanzania’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) policy is still at the draft stage as I write. This is understandable. For a poor country like Tanzania there must be a hierarchy of needs. Basic needs must be satisfied before computers can be procured to give access to the Internet to all students at institutions of higher learning, let alone pupils at primary and secondary school.
The Tanzanian authorities have been working with international organisations to bring information technologies and in particular the Internet to as many centres as it can. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has been developing multipurpose community telecentre (MCT) projects to bring telephone, fax, Internet, photo-copying, computers, Internet (both WWW and e-mail) and, in some cases, distance learning and telemedicine to remote villages around the world since 1998. Tanzania is one of the five ‘least developed’ African countries in this project.11 The Tanzanian centre in Sengerema, Mwanza, was officially inaugurated in April 2003. MCTs aim to provide communication and information facilities for a wide range of community uses, including the improvement of governance and public services. The Tanzanian project is supported by a number of donor agencies, among them UNESCO, whose theme is to promote telematics and learning without frontiers programmes world-wide. Other agencies include DANIDA, International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and ITU. Other partners include the British Council and international agencies such as the FAO, UNDP and WHO. The NGOs are also the source of some of the information technology hardware that has recently been installed in the universities and I shall discuss this further below.
Apart from the need to plan to acquire hardware, there is also a need to create the technical infrastructure. This has been slow in coming and existing telecommunication policies and the state Telco monopoly are both undermining the development of the Internet in Tanzania. There is an urgent need for the
11 Other African countries are Benin, Mali, Mozambique and Uganda.
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government of Tanzania to create a framework for compatible services. The lack of ICT policy means that there is no appropriate legal and regulatory environment to stimulate ICT development. Thus there are obstacles to Tanzanians fostering regional co-operation to harmonize regulation and rationalize usage of scarce bandwidth to the better good.
3.1.1 Use of the Internet in the Ministries
Despite the evident problems (of which more below) there has been a modest move towards use of the Internet in government offices. The development is very recent. For example, on 31 March 2003, the Ministry of Transport and Communication advised civil servants to visit the Internet to get information and news from different parts of the world to improve their competence and efficiency by applying recent knowledge, information and innovation. On 8 April 2003, the Zanzibar Government12 announced that it had received funds from donors to install Internet services in its offices to the same end. Similarly, the African Medical Research Fund (AMREF), which incorporates several African countries, recently encouraged nurses to visit its web site to find out about development in a number of nursing domains, including handling HIV/AIDS patients in their respective countries. In another example, Tanzanian midwives are also being exhorted to acquire IT skills.13 These modest moves are, however, hampered not only by all the technical problems inherent in Internet use in Tanzania, but also by the fact that most of this information is in major European languages, such as English, French, and German. Kiswahili, the national language of Tanzania, though spoken in other countries in eastern, central and southern Africa is not yet common on the Internet. The Internet user has to be someone who is literate in English.
There has been a modest move by the United Republic of Tanzania to promote use of Kiswahili. The government website is in both English and Kiswahili for external and internal use respectively. This is in accordance with Tanzanian commitment to the symbolic use of Kiswahili as national language in all situations possible. Alongside this is the recognition of the need to make information on the country available in the most widely used lingua franca at the current time and thus there has been an acceptance of the need to publish in English. Curiously, however, the Tanzanian High Commission and embassies abroad have web sites solely in English and this neglect of Kiswahili in its symbolic role is somewhat surprising.
The Tanzanian government has always produced clearly articulated language policy. In the aftermath of independence the aim was to promote the national language and in the decades since independence this policy direction has remained constant (even though the implementation has not always been successful – as in
12 Zanzibar government forms part of the Union government of the United Republic of Tanzania. 13 The advice came from an official of the Africa Midwives Research Network (AMRN) and was
reported in the Tanzania Sunday Observer April 6, 2003
From the Oral Tradition to the Information Era: The Case of Tanzania 61
the attempt to move to Kiswahili in secondary education). However, up to the time of writing there has been no measure to promote the use of Kiswahili on the Internet. There is policy to promote Internet use but the medium is not mentioned. Currently, therefore, English is the main language used for accessing information since there is no systematic translation of sources into Kiswahili.
3.1.2 Use of the Internet in the Universities
Prior to 1996, computers were mainly used for word processing in Tanzania. Even in the institutions of higher learning, the most the computers could be used for was data analysis using specific software. Those who were familiar with such programmes were regarded as computer wizards. Computers were not linked to networks. Thus, in order to make our learning institutions part of the electronic era, the universities galvanised themselves. The Council of Sokoine University of Agriculture (my home institution) directed in July 1997 that by December 2001 the University should have an ICT policy in place. The Computer Centre (CC) has been established and an ICT Policy now exissts. Since the establishment of the centre, the number of individual users (staff and students) and volume of electronic information circulating within SUA and to the outside has increased tremendously, enabled by a LAN (Local Area Network) connection. The main goal is to promote ICT in the implementation of the University mission.14 Currently 300 PCs are connected to a LAN at SUA.15
This number of computers however, is too small compared to the total student population of over 2500 and over 250 members of academic staff. Thus, the demand for computers to access the Internet is so great that today University computing centres at SUA, UDSM and Mzumbe cannot meet demand of their users (students and staff) to use the facility for academic literature search, entertainment and/or sending email. This fact makes the need for Internet cafés more pressing in major towns such as Dar es Salaam and Morogoro.
3.1.3 Recent IT initiatives
Currently the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) is undertaking an Institutional Transformation Programme (ITP) to integrate Information Communication Technology (ICT) into all its main activities. This will include teaching and learning as well as research and community services in order to enhance the quality of education delivery and also to expand enrolment through distance learning. On 9
14 SUA Information and Communication Technology Policy and Guidelines 2002:iii 15 LAN at SUA was made possible through generous support of NORAD and VLIR. Most of the computers at SUA were acquired through donor funding agencies such as NORAD, DANIDA, British Council (ODA), VLIR, USAID, Ford Foundation and similar agencies, without which SUA would not have been of the electronic age as it is now. The case is also true of the other institutions of higher learning in Tanzania
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June 200316, its Faculty of Education, the main institution that trains graduate teachers in the country, announced that it would convert some of its programmes for delivery through e-learning. This is because the conventional system to increase intake of students cannot match the demand for secondary school teachers. It was this need that had decided UDSM to go on-line. When faculties convert their programmes for e-delivery the venture will revolutionise teaching in the institutions of higher learning in Tanzania.
The University has already installed a Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) satellite which links UDSM to the computer centres of the Southern African Region (Kenya, Uganda, and Mauritius) and the rest of the world. The Faculty of Education collaborates with the eDegree Company of South Africa to implement its e-learning project. It is expected that the Faculty of will get support from other institutions such as the Virtual African University (AVU) and the Tanzania Global Development Learning Centre (TGDLC).
The challenges for this e-education project are many. They include the poor infrastructure and the lack of ICT facilities that I will discuss below. And not least among the challenges is the fact that, because of the nature of the programme and collaborating agencies, the language of interaction/instruction of the on-line programme will be English.17
Initiatives in other sectors include a computer studies sponsorship programme for secondary school leavers. The sponsorship programme run by the New Horizons Computer Learning Centres (NHCLC) in Dar es Salaam aims to accelerate Tanzania’s human resource capacity building in computer education. The pro- gramme is run in partnership with the head office of New Horizons in the United States. The move will help students to study computer through sponsorship programme to achieve greater efficiency and competitive advantage in their respective jobs, careers and professions. The language of interaction/instruction will be English.
It is also encouraging to report here that, through assistance from the World Bank Institute in Washington DC, Tanzania has established a Global Development Learning Centre (TGDLC) in Dar es Salaam. Among other things, the Centre has a teleconferencing facility linked to several African countries such as Ghana, Uganda, and Ethiopia and the World Bank Institute in Washington DC. The Centre has its own web site and is in English. Currently some World Bank meetings involving the African Zone can be carried out without travelling to Washington DC – thus reducing heavy costs in foreign exchange that are incurred to send public servants abroad for meetings, training and conferences. The Centre offers training
16 As reported in the Guardian Newspaper (Tanzania) and a follow-up made to interview some of the
Faculty members in Dar es Salaam. 17 English is the medium of higher education in Tanzania, and it is one hurdle in the expansion of the
sector.
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