Howzit, my China? Unjani, mfowethu?

As the owner of a company that creates and deploys interactive and data-driven digital education content for English second-language students, the recent story on how a Chinese university has started offering isiZulu as a course piqued my interest.

The Beijing Foreign Studies University now has a Department of Zulu that promotes isiZulu, one of South Africa’s 11 official languages, to Chinese undergraduate students in order to strengthen ties between the two countries. According to one of the academics involved in the programme, Mthuli Buthelezi, the department has even developed the first Zulu-Chinese textbook and dictionary, to be used by both Zulu and Chinese-speaking students to develop a better understanding between the two cultures.

At first glance, and given the current controversial debate around English-instruction and African home-languages, I wondered how we can weave a global language tapestry and still preserve and enrich local languages across the continent, or in any emerging market economy, especially those earmarked for rapid growth.

At a dinner held in Tshwane in August 2019, the South African Basic Education Minister, Angie Motshekga, declared that 17 September would be celebrated annually as “South African Chinese Language Day”. Uganda and Kenya have followed suit, all three nation’s education departments are constructing Mandarin language classes for their schools. This has been criticised by academics and linguistics professionals from the introduction of the programme in 2015, who argue that “South Africa must fix its existing system first”, before considering the introduction of Mandarin.

This got me thinking. The issue with many emerging-market education systems is that too often the voices coming out of them argue “just fix the existing system first” as though new programme introductions, curriculum expansions, and technology transformations are not intent on doing that. These dialogues imply that the fixes in our current system are just a few seconds away from successful completion. If only it were that simple.

We must recognise that the world is moving at such a pace that not one of the proposed “existing system” fixes will be relevant by the time they are implemented (and that’s if they can be implemented at all).

In other words, if South African children are being taught in English as the only alternative first language from Grade 4 onwards, what is the reason for this? If the intention is to give every schoolgoing child a tablet, to what extent can it be ensured they benefit from this? And if these learners are going to be taught how to code, why ultimately is this being undertaken?

The emerging world is bound by an educational paradox; on one hand it is expected to leapfrog from its current (below-average performing) baseline to meet global economic pressures and on the other hand, it must do so, traditionally and following in the footsteps of the industrialised nations.

That raises an even more important question: can countries on the African continent, Southeast Asia and South America resist the pressures of globalisation on their labour markets and therefore on their education systems? Some would call it neo-colonialism and others free-market forces.

But in societies 1) where global language education policies are already a reality, driven by historical colonial and economic policies; 2) where technology is going to have an enormous democratising effect because current school and educator improvement programmes are delivering slower results than society wants; and 3) where continued low individual income drives a great short-term survival instinct, are the luxuries of the opinions of these debates even possible realities? Or are these sorts of programmes simply organic responses to a changing world?

So what’s the fear? That China may take on a foothold over Africa? You would have been living in denial if you haven’t seen the influence China wields in Africa. And certainly, with a more wary eye, teaching Chinese citizens African home languages may even raise further assumptions around China’s economic ambitions in Africa.

At the 2018 China-Africa Cooperation Forum, the country announced it would be providing $60-billion in financial support to the continent, and is clearly looking in Africa’s direction as a sensible and logical economic choice for itself in terms of the continent’s natural resources and expansion of its access to markets. What, therefore, is then obvious is that the establishment of a Zulu department at a Chinese university is not coincidental.

What we can learn from this is that we should brace ourselves for a South African education policy that looks to the holistic future needs of our students, not only of the here and now, but with a clear goal of how our existing system will benefit our youth today for their professional paths tomorrow.

In the next five years, we may see Chinese students, professionals and investors walking into meetings speaking isiZulu to South Africans. As a country, this is an important lesson to learn from Beijing. DM