2. Language Demographics of Africa, Less French, More English: Half of African countries speak French
3. Note the fading use of French language, as well as the ongoing quite imperial use of France to protect the use of French speaking regimes--even when they commit atrocities. This is from the Korea Times, a novel article that is quite topical to this week's discussion of Africa.
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10-30-2008 16:42 Unstoppable Rise of English
By Gwynne Dyer
Just over half of Africa's 52 countries speak French, but the number is dropping. This month Rwanda defected, announcing that henceforward only English will be taught in the schools. It would not be overstating the case to say that this caused alarm and despondency in France.
You couldn't help feeling, either, that Rwanda's trade and industry minister, Vincent Karega, was deliberately rubbing salt in the wound when he explained why French was being scrapped.
``French is spoken only in France, some parts of west Africa, and parts of Canada and Switzerland," he said. (In parts of Belgium, too, actually, not to mention Haiti, but you get the point.) ``English has emerged as a backbone for growth and development not only in the region but around the globe."
No country cares more passionately for its language than France, and it has waged a long and expensive campaign to guarantee the survival of a French-speaking zone in central and west Africa.
It even provided the bulk of the foreign aid for the former Belgian colonies that spoke French: Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. But the present government of Rwanda has special reasons not to be fond of France.
Getting very close to the regimes in African countries that have French as an official language, even sending troops to protect them from their domestic enemies, has always been part of Paris's strategy for preserving the status of French as a world language.
In Rwanda's case, that put France in bed with the extremist Hutu-dominated regime that ruled the densely populated country before the genocide, to such an extent that Paris largely paid for the tripling in size of the Rwandan army in 1990-91.
When the Hutu regime began murdering the minority Tutsis in industrial quantities in 1994, France did not abandon it.
The French president at the time, Francois Mitterrand, is alleged to have remarked that ``in such countries, genocide is not too important …" And a principal reason that France overlooked its Rwandan ally's ghastly behavior was that the Tutsi-led opposition in exile mostly spoke English, because its members had found refuge in English-speaking Uganda.
An estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 1994, but the Uganda-based Rwanda Patriotic Front put an end to the genocide by invading the country and overthrowing the regime.
Even a direct French military intervention in Rwanda (thinly disguised as a humanitarian operation) could not save the Hutu ``genocidiaires," as they are universally known. So it was not to be expected that the new, mainly English-speaking government in Rwanda would have warm feelings toward France.
Fourteen years later, more than 95 percent of Rwanda's secondary schools still teach mainly in French, although an alternative English instructional program or intensive English language courses are usually available.
Knowledge of both English and French is required for university entrance (and for most government jobs), but the government's own statistics say that only 3 percent of the population are fluent in English. Nevertheless, the new decision ends the teaching of French in Rwandan schools.
The government defends it as a purely business decision, driven by Rwanda's membership in the largely English-speaking East African Community (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi), but there is no question that resentment of France also plays a role.
This is a country that has already expelled the French ambassador and closed down the French cultural center, international school and radio station.
But can an African country just switch from one European language to another like that? It can if, like Rwanda, it only uses one language domestically. Almost all Rwandans, whether Hutu or Tutsi, speak Kinyarwanda, so they have no need for a lingua franca to communicate among themselves.
Only those going into higher education or working with foreigners need any other language at all ― which is why only 8 percent of Rwandans speak fluent French after all this time.
This is far from typical of African countries, most of which have many different ethnic groups, each with its own language. Such countries use the language of the former colonial power as a neutral ``national" language, and have such a large investment in teaching it by now that switching is out of the question.
The Congo will always use French; Nigeria will always use English; Mozambique will always use Portuguese. So francophones can relax: their language is not about to be vanish from the African continent.
On the other hand, French will always lose out to English in situations like Rwanda, where there is a single national language and the main reason for learning a foreign language is communication with the rest of the world.
Vietnam, an ex-French colony, has long taught English as the main foreign language in its schools, and Madagascar, also formerly ruled by France, made English a national language last year.
English-speakers often assume that this world role for their language owes something to its huge vocabulary and wonderful literature, or at least to the fact that Hollywood speaks English. Nothing of the sort.
The sole reason is that the world's dominant power for the past two centuries has been English-speaking: Britain in the 19th century, and the United States in the 20th. Timing is everything, and English just happened to be the leading candidate when globalization created the need for an agreed global second language.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries. His new book, ``After Iraq: What Next for the Middle East," was published in London recently by Yale University Press.
2.France ready to deploy EU troops to Congo after ceasefire
3.When Africa has a conflict or war, Should the west be the peacekeeper? I wonder whether deploying EU troops to Congo can be a way of solving the conflict. It seems like unstopped colonialism of the west toward Africa.
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France ready to deploy EU troops to Congo after ceasefire
Last Updated: Wednesday, October 29, 2008 | 3:32 PM ET CBC News
Rebels in the eastern part of Congo declared a ceasefire Wednesday after thousands of displaced residents fleeing an upsurge in fighting began entering the eastern provincial capital Goma, threatening to overwhelm a 17,000-strong UN force.
Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the United Nations, said the rebels' four-day offensive was "creating a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic dimensions and threatens dire consequences on a regional scale."
While Congo's President Joseph Kabila has requested more troops, France, which holds the rotating six-month EU presidency, said it was discussing sending a European Union (EU) force of a few hundred men to Congo.
However, other members of the EU oppose the idea.
"We have discussed a group that is called the tactical group," Bernard Kouchner, France's foreign minister, told a news conference in Paris. "This tactical group is a military guard which on a rotating basis can offer between 400 and 1,500 men whom we could deploy in the name of Europe within eight to 10 days."
Ceasefire declared The National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), a rebel movement active in the eastern part of the country, issued a statement declaring a ceasefire.
Madnodje Mounoubai, a United Nations spokesman, welcomed the announcement, but said it was not yet clear if the "simple declaration" was being followed by action.
Goma is generally in a state of panic but confirms the rebels are not in the city.
Meanwhile, Maunoubai said, the UN peacekeepers had retreated to the airport and other strategic points.
Earlier, thousands of civilians and hundreds of Congolese government soldiers poured into Goma from the north, where the army had clashed with rebel Tutsi Gen. Laurent Nkunda of the CNDP.
The surge into Goma, a major crossing point and tin trading centre on the Congo-Rwandan border, sparked panic and accusations that the UN force was not doing enough to fight off the rebels.
Fierce fighting since the Tutsi rebels launched their latest offensive on Sunday has displaced tens of thousands of civilians in the north Kivu province, which has been racked by violence despite the end of Congo's regional war in 2003.
A very down to earth* kind of guy. I'm an environmental sociologist interested in establishing material and organizational sustainability worldwide. I'm always looking for interesting materials/technologies, inspiring ideas, or institutional examples of sustainability to inspire others to recognize their choices now. To be fatalistic about an unsustainable world is a sign of a captive mind, given all our options.
*(If "earth" is defined in a planetary sense, concerning comparative historical knowledge and interest in the past 10,000 years or so anywhere...) See both blogs.
2 comments:
1. Mark Whitaker
2. Language Demographics of Africa, Less French, More English: Half of African countries speak French
3. Note the fading use of French language, as well as the ongoing quite imperial use of France to protect the use of French speaking regimes--even when they commit atrocities. This is from the Korea Times, a novel article that is quite topical to this week's discussion of Africa.
---------------------
10-30-2008 16:42
Unstoppable Rise of English
By Gwynne Dyer
Just over half of Africa's 52 countries speak French, but the number is dropping. This month Rwanda defected, announcing that henceforward only English will be taught in the schools. It would not be overstating the case to say that this caused alarm and despondency in France.
You couldn't help feeling, either, that Rwanda's trade and industry minister, Vincent Karega, was deliberately rubbing salt in the wound when he explained why French was being scrapped.
``French is spoken only in France, some parts of west Africa, and parts of Canada and Switzerland," he said. (In parts of Belgium, too, actually, not to mention Haiti, but you get the point.) ``English has emerged as a backbone for growth and development not only in the region but around the globe."
No country cares more passionately for its language than France, and it has waged a long and expensive campaign to guarantee the survival of a French-speaking zone in central and west Africa.
It even provided the bulk of the foreign aid for the former Belgian colonies that spoke French: Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. But the present government of Rwanda has special reasons not to be fond of France.
Getting very close to the regimes in African countries that have French as an official language, even sending troops to protect them from their domestic enemies, has always been part of Paris's strategy for preserving the status of French as a world language.
In Rwanda's case, that put France in bed with the extremist Hutu-dominated regime that ruled the densely populated country before the genocide, to such an extent that Paris largely paid for the tripling in size of the Rwandan army in 1990-91.
When the Hutu regime began murdering the minority Tutsis in industrial quantities in 1994, France did not abandon it.
The French president at the time, Francois Mitterrand, is alleged to have remarked that ``in such countries, genocide is not too important …" And a principal reason that France overlooked its Rwandan ally's ghastly behavior was that the Tutsi-led opposition in exile mostly spoke English, because its members had found refuge in English-speaking Uganda.
An estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 1994, but the Uganda-based Rwanda Patriotic Front put an end to the genocide by invading the country and overthrowing the regime.
Even a direct French military intervention in Rwanda (thinly disguised as a humanitarian operation) could not save the Hutu ``genocidiaires," as they are universally known. So it was not to be expected that the new, mainly English-speaking government in Rwanda would have warm feelings toward France.
Fourteen years later, more than 95 percent of Rwanda's secondary schools still teach mainly in French, although an alternative English instructional program or intensive English language courses are usually available.
Knowledge of both English and French is required for university entrance (and for most government jobs), but the government's own statistics say that only 3 percent of the population are fluent in English. Nevertheless, the new decision ends the teaching of French in Rwandan schools.
The government defends it as a purely business decision, driven by Rwanda's membership in the largely English-speaking East African Community (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi), but there is no question that resentment of France also plays a role.
This is a country that has already expelled the French ambassador and closed down the French cultural center, international school and radio station.
But can an African country just switch from one European language to another like that? It can if, like Rwanda, it only uses one language domestically. Almost all Rwandans, whether Hutu or Tutsi, speak Kinyarwanda, so they have no need for a lingua franca to communicate among themselves.
Only those going into higher education or working with foreigners need any other language at all ― which is why only 8 percent of Rwandans speak fluent French after all this time.
This is far from typical of African countries, most of which have many different ethnic groups, each with its own language. Such countries use the language of the former colonial power as a neutral ``national" language, and have such a large investment in teaching it by now that switching is out of the question.
The Congo will always use French; Nigeria will always use English; Mozambique will always use Portuguese. So francophones can relax: their language is not about to be vanish from the African continent.
On the other hand, French will always lose out to English in situations like Rwanda, where there is a single national language and the main reason for learning a foreign language is communication with the rest of the world.
Vietnam, an ex-French colony, has long taught English as the main foreign language in its schools, and Madagascar, also formerly ruled by France, made English a national language last year.
English-speakers often assume that this world role for their language owes something to its huge vocabulary and wonderful literature, or at least to the fact that Hollywood speaks English. Nothing of the sort.
The sole reason is that the world's dominant power for the past two centuries has been English-speaking: Britain in the 19th century, and the United States in the 20th. Timing is everything, and English just happened to be the leading candidate when globalization created the need for an agreed global second language.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries. His new book, ``After Iraq: What Next for the Middle East," was published in London recently by Yale University Press.
---
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2008/10/137_33555.html
1.Sukyung Kim
2.France ready to deploy EU troops to Congo after ceasefire
3.When Africa has a conflict or war, Should the west be the peacekeeper? I wonder whether deploying EU troops to Congo can be a way of solving the conflict. It seems like unstopped colonialism of the west toward Africa.
-------------------
France ready to deploy EU troops to Congo after ceasefire
Last Updated: Wednesday, October 29, 2008 | 3:32 PM ET CBC News
Rebels in the eastern part of Congo declared a ceasefire Wednesday after thousands of displaced residents fleeing an upsurge in fighting began entering the eastern provincial capital Goma, threatening to overwhelm a 17,000-strong UN force.
Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the United Nations, said the rebels' four-day offensive was "creating a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic dimensions and threatens dire consequences on a regional scale."
While Congo's President Joseph Kabila has requested more troops, France, which holds the rotating six-month EU presidency, said it was discussing sending a European Union (EU) force of a few hundred men to Congo.
However, other members of the EU oppose the idea.
"We have discussed a group that is called the tactical group," Bernard Kouchner, France's foreign minister, told a news conference in Paris. "This tactical group is a military guard which on a rotating basis can offer between 400 and 1,500 men whom we could deploy in the name of Europe within eight to 10 days."
Ceasefire declared
The National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), a rebel movement active in the eastern part of the country, issued a statement declaring a ceasefire.
Madnodje Mounoubai, a United Nations spokesman, welcomed the announcement, but said it was not yet clear if the "simple declaration" was being followed by action.
Goma is generally in a state of panic but confirms the rebels are not in the city.
Meanwhile, Maunoubai said, the UN peacekeepers had retreated to the airport and other strategic points.
Earlier, thousands of civilians and hundreds of Congolese government soldiers poured into Goma from the north, where the army had clashed with rebel Tutsi Gen. Laurent Nkunda of the CNDP.
The surge into Goma, a major crossing point and tin trading centre on the Congo-Rwandan border, sparked panic and accusations that the UN force was not doing enough to fight off the rebels.
Fierce fighting since the Tutsi rebels launched their latest offensive on Sunday has displaced tens of thousands of civilians in the north Kivu province, which has been racked by violence despite the end of Congo's regional war in 2003.
---
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/10/29/congo.html?
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