By Rita Okoye

Leading African scholars, linguists and archivists have lent their voices in re-stating the growing relevance of technology in preserving endangered African languages.

These foremost scholars advanced this during the last Toyin Falola Interview Series held on Sunday across various social media and online platforms.

The Toyin Falola Interviews brings together resource persons of repute in discussing Africa and its extensions in the Diaspora.

The virtual gathering is hosted by Professor Toyin Falola, a globally celebrated African historian at the University of Texas at Austin, United States of America.

Members of the panel, led by Professor Falola, were distinguished African linguists and scholars such as Ghirmai Negash, professor of English and African literature and also the Director of the African Studies Program in Ohio University; Ngom Fallou, professor of Anthropology and former Director of the African Studies Centre at Boston University; Abiodun Salawu, professor of Journalism, Communication and Media Studies at the North-West University, South Africa; Ousseina Alidou, a distinguished professor of Humane Letters in the School of Arts and Science, Rutgers University, New Brunswick; and John Mugane, professor of African Languages and Cultures at Harvard University.

For Professor Ngom, creating appreciable space for the study of African languages in universities and the utilization of modern technologies would help in preserving many endangered African language.

 “What it means is incorporating these languages and these cultures in our curriculum for several reasons. It creates new skills that are much needed to engage African traditions and languages in knowledge production. It can be used to create new social mobilities, resources. But there is a huge market for advertisement in these areas, and I think we can connect that to economic growth. People have to understand that if you say you study these African languages, you have the skills, then you have also possibilities for social mobility.

But that is also a political issue. Until we are able to do that, until our governments are aware that these languages could be commodified just as French and English have been commodified, so that if someone is going to Yoruba land to do research, Yoruba should be required for that person. If you go to France to do research, you can’t do so in Yoruba, you have to do it in French. And I think these are the issues I’m really interested in. And I think that now with technology, initially there was a fear that technology was going to destroy African languages. We actually see that it is helping us in preserving some of these archives from being lost. It is also revitalising that some of these languages that were endangered are being saved. I do hope that in our conversation we will go into more details on how best we can create new centres of learning these languages in Africa,” he stated.

Professor Mugane however warned that despite technological advancement, indigenous African languages are exiting while many Africans are speaking better English than before, noting that pushing African languages to the centre stage of technology must be deliberate and unyielding.

According to him, “Our languages have been alive and well, except that with the coming of Tiktoks and all these other things I’ve been a little worried that Africans are speaking more English and better. These languages are in danger in a big way; they are just going to disappear. We are all saying Yoruba cannot go anywhere neither can Zulu language go anywhere, then you go looking at the demographics and you can see it exiting and so on. In Africa, we fail language exams throughout the continent.”

Professor Alidou, on her part, saluted the contribution of women in preserving the precious knowledge systems indigenous to Africa. She noted that despite the inattention paid to women in this area, it has not erased their immense relevance throughout history.

 According to her, “The Southern African region, the West African region, the Maghrib region and central Africa all have monographs which include important works by women. Women were forward-looking in terms of saying multilingualism is the Lingua Franca in Africa. So if we are talking about modern African literary figures, we cannot escape establishing women as critical in the formation of modern African literature in multilingualism. Women created an inter-lingual dialogue between writing systems in the poetic and literary sense, and also philosophising into that. The cultural policy of the Tuareg people was such that women were the transmitters, the custodians of literacy. However, with the interference of European colonialism in the French system, it was a total linguistic assimilation and dismissal of any indigenous literacy system. It is very important that we decolonise the psychology that comes to be associated with how we understand the history of writing in the multiplicity of the script system of Africa. We have to decolonise the way we write and think and also ways of translating Africa.”

For eminent archivist, Professor Salawu, national archival documents have become difficult to access in many instances due to the fact that they were written in colonial languages. He therefore stated that the use of indigenous languages for scholarship should be advanced, just as the possibilities that the digital age has brought should be harnessed.

“All over Africa, there are archives that have documents produced in African languages, even though colonialism affected us. That is why you discovered that in most archives in Africa, most documents in our archives are in the colonial languages. I was reading something about Tanzania in which it was stated that a lot of the archives in Tanzania are even in German, and this is because Tanzania was at a time under the colonisation of Germany. It has become difficult to even access these archives because many people cannot understand German in Tanzania now. And that is also the case in many parts of Africa. In South Africa, most of the documents in the archives are either written in Afrikaans or English. But with freedom, with the death of apartheid so to say, all the other official languages of South Africa are now being used, and there are documents in them in the archives. It is a recent thing, but these things are coming up. I believe that in Nigeria, you find a lot of documents that are either in Hausa or Igbo or Yoruba and I believe that in East Africa in countries like Tanzania and Kenya you find documents in Swahili and maybe some other local languages of those countries. So the languages are present in the archives but they are not as much as we would expect; we believe that with this age of digital technology, more and more of this will be done, not only to have these documents in the physical form but also in the digital form that people can access in decades to come. With the digital technology, the documents produced in some of these languages will be preserved,” he advised.