The language barrier we call knowledge

By Namarome Makila, Strategy Director, IFA

My late father spent years collecting ethnobotany data. He was a walking encyclopaedia of plant knowledge and the science of what different plants do for our bodies. He first named all the plants he recorded in our local language and then went through a painstaking process of finding the scientific and common English names. The local names were more than a label. They carried information on where the plant grows, or the season in which it grows. The information on contemporary uses of the different plants was added to the indigenous knowledge which he had, in his own, my own mother tongue.

New knowledge should not have to fight for space in your head — it can attach itself to something already there. My father had scientific knowledge. He just held it in Lubukusu first.

We have built systems that assume knowledge does not count unless it arrives in the right language. In Kenya in the seventies, children caught speaking their mother tongue in school were made to wear a disk around their neck and pass it to the next child they caught, forcing them to police one another into silence. The late Kenyan literary legend Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o described this practice plainly: “Language was the means of spiritual subjugation.” The school system was designed so that a child did not simply learn a new language but came to feel that their own was something to be ashamed of.

As Ngũgĩ wrote, “language is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history.” My father’s plant names were that memory bank—holding where a plant grew, in which season, and what it healed—carried in Lubukusu long before any Latin name was found to match. The knowledge was never absent. Only the translation was.

Senegal has chosen to go against the grain by adopting the Modèle Harmonisé d’Enseignement Bilingue au Sénégal (MOHEBS), a reform that puts mother-tongue-based bilingual education at the heart of foundational learning. This reform, which now runs in 13 of the country’s 16 education regions, in six national languages, is based on empirical research that showed how pupils taught in their own languages were 29 percentage points more likely to meet reading benchmarks than peers taught only in French. And UNESCO agrees with them: they find that children who learn in a familiar language are about 30% more likely to read with understanding by the end of primary school. The knowledge lands faster because it latches onto an existing foundation. In For Africa is proud to be the strategic communications partner to Speak Up Africa in their ‘Driving Systems Change in Senegal’ advocacy program that aims to accelerate the adaptation of MOHEBS across the country. 

This conviction has been embraced by my team, too. I remember our excitement when we secured a BBC Africa interview, in Kiswahili, for one of the health research experts we support through the African Voices of Science initiative; ahead of World TB Day, she discussed her TB surveillance research. We also secured a Kiswahili interview on Radio France Internationale during the World Health Summit in Nairobi, where another expert spoke about genomics and precision medicine.

With over 150 million speakers in East Africa and more than 200 million across the continent, Kiswahili makes research access and relevant. Research only matters if people can understand and act on it. And the research is conducted by and owned by highly skilled local scientists. We already hold the knowledge and must stop counting the ability to communicate expertly in a foreign language as the hallmark of knowledge.

So, I would like to leave you with this challenge. When you next have to speak about your area of expertise, pause and ask yourself if the language you use is a door that admits others or locks them out from the valuable knowledge you have.