African languages in digital society
Workshops on applications of information and communication technologies to African languages

Post-Symposium at the University of Zurich Oct. 22-25, 2001

follow-up on the International Symposium

"Text in context : African languages between orality and scripturality Oct. 17-20, 2001

Symposium homepages:
www.unizh.ch/spw/afrling/afrosympo
www.unizh.ch/spw/afrling/afrosympo/reports/ReportMainpart.pdf
www.unizh.ch/spw/afrling/afrosympo/reports/ReportPostSymposium.pdf

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Two closely related general issues merit attention as a result of this conference:
1. The discovery of Africa as a subject of science.
2. Crossing the abyss of digital apartheid in Africa

Early discoverers and Africanist scholarship have constituted Africa as an object of science. As this conference has demonstrated to anyone who could see and hear – almost half of the 131 registered participants were Africans - it is time to take Africa seriously as a SUBJECT OF SCIENCE, even in the humanities. Why is this so important? Here are just three reasons:

• Much of the knowledge about Africa is only accessible in Africa itself.
• Africa is the think-tank of Africa and potentially one of the most prolific think-tanks of an emerging global scientific culture which concerns us all.
• A huge mass of data relevant to African studies in the field of human sciences is hidden in works unaccessible to the scientific community at large: unpublished theses, memoirs, reports and historical accounts. Even more is enshrined in oral discourse and performances of verbal art.

What difference does it make to take Africa as a subject of science more seriously in the field of humanities than has been the case so far?
One example – from one of the two smallest African countries represented at the conference - may stand for many others:
Research of the Centre international de civilisations bantu (CICIBA) in Libreville on the roots of violence and ethnic war in the Great Lakes Region and of the Rwandan genocide provides a perspective which is significantly different from that of most Western authors because of its capacity to counter-balance European sources with African language sources, e.g. Kinyarwanda traditional texts. (Regrettably, the Congolese scholar invited to talk on this subject was refused his entry visa, but see e.g. M. Balibutsa, Une archéologie de la violence en Afrique des Grands Lacs, Libreville: Ciciba, 2000.)
Can we afford the luxury of going on relying exclusively on Western research agendas, ignoring the original contribution of African scholars teaching and doing pioneering research in and on Africa in various fields of the humanities? No, we cannot. Can the richness of this research be made accessible to the scientific community at large? Yes, it can. However:

• Safe and equal access to the new technologies of communication on a continent-wide scale is an indispensable part of the answer to this question. Equipping African institutions and researchers with adequate resources to ensure internet search as well as web- and CD-ROM publication will go a long way in breaking the deadlock on publication and dissemination of Africa-generated scientific knowledge in all fields of the humanities.
• The "technologised word" (Prof. Russell Kaschula in his keynote address on "Southern African Languages, Globalisation and the Internet", see http://www.unizh.ch/spw/afrling/afrosympo/abstracts/Kaschula.htm) offers a new alternative capable of overcoming the methodological dilemma between oral and written modes of transmission which was often seen as the major handicap in text-oriented research on Africa. Kaschula gives examples from South Africa's oral literature being documented over internet, including the famous case of Bongani Sitole's poetry being purchased by Microsoft.
• Cultivating the link to African languages – several practical ways to achieve this were explored in the Post-Symposium workshops (see www.unizh.ch/spw/afrling/afrosympo/reports/ReportPostSymposium.pdf) – is the only way of avoiding a repetition of the very same mistakes which were made in opting for exoglossic educational politics in large parts of colonial Africa, and then again in the early post-independence era when African languages were declared unfit for purposes of education and development. The digitalisation of African languages which is well under way offers a new chance for reversing the adverse effects of a policy which had tragically led to the exclusion of the large majority of the African population from the benefits of wider communication and access to corresponding vital resources for coping with global trends, changes and threats, while at the same time preventing the flow of vital indigenous-based knowledge from Africa to the rest of the world.
• While trying to overcome the digital divide, one must by all means avoid deepening it inside Africa. See Kaschula's keynote address for a number of South African initiatives in this direction.

Recommendations
1. Ensure that graduate students at African universities get at least comparable facilities in accessing internet resources as undergraduates have normally access to at Swiss universities. This will go a long way in upgrading African universities as places of higher learning rather than of social unrest and paralysing strikes.
2. Encourage the establishing of editorial sites offering academically recognized facilities for web-publishing of matching quality for African-based students and researchers.
3. Matching funds amounting to at least one third of the budget that goes into research on the past involvement of Switzerland in apartheid politics should be devoted (i) to help African Academia bridge the new global apartheid caused by the quickly widening digital gulf which threatens to cut off African-based research from the world scientific community to the detriment of both, and (ii) to ensure that this help is also geared towards overcoming the inner digital rift between the African academic community and the population at large.