The Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literatures and its message to multilingual South Africa

Annie Gagiano

Asmara, the capital city of Eritrea, hosted the conference titled “Against All Odds: African Languages and Literatures Into the 21^st Century” which took place from January 11-17, 2000. To give a sense of the quality of life in this country, and why it was so appropriate a setting for such a conference, I would use the analogy of the Anglo-Boer War. If one could imagine an Anglo-Boer War not ending in surrender but continuing for 30 years “against all odds”, until South African sovereignty was achieved because the Afrikaners had made common cause with all the other local peoples and had recognised their equal status as partners against the common imperial enemy, one would be going some way towards recognising how (both politically and morally) impressive a society this is.

Add to this the fundamental element of Eritrean communities to a large extent overcoming entrenched feudal-type gender hierarchies (necessity proving to be the mother of invention, since among a population of barely four million, the independence war required young women as well as young men as soldiers), and the sacrifices and suffering, and you begin to understand the unmistakable national pride which almost all Eritreans seem to share.

A small catalogue of geographical and historical information: Eritrea lies along the Red Sea directly across from Yemen like a cap on top of Ethiopia and with Sudan as its Western neighbour. Eritrea in the distant past probably fell within the sphere of influence of Ancient Egypt and later the Axumite Kingdom. Towards the end of the 19^th century Italian colonisation began and this period was ended when Allied Forces defeated the Fascists in 1941. For a decade the British administered Eritrea, then in 1952 the United Nations assigned the country to Ethiopian administration against the wishes of the majority of the population (Eritreans are Coptic Christians and Muslims in roughly equal proportions).

The liberation war against Ethiopia is reckoned to have lasted from 1961 (a woman veteran made the point that the resistance struggle actually began 12-13 years before 1961) until 1991. Both Haile Selassie and Menghistu acted with great ruthlessness against Eritrean nationalist aspirations – use of languages other than Amharic was forbidden, books in Eritrean languages were burnt, there were numerous atrocities in the decades-long campaign of intimidation.

Especially significant is the fact that the Eritreans during the years of struggle against oppression stood virtually alone; in contrast with the enormous amounts of military aid (in the form of money, military instructors and weapons) which a number of Western powers pumped into Ethiopia.

Eritrea has nine distinct language-cultures and has established the legal and social equality of these cultures not only in its constitution, but to a great extent also in its civic life. It is one of the ‘safest’ countries one can visit: a single woman can walk alone in the city at any hour without anyone harassing her or even indicating surprise at such ‘audacity’. City traffic moves at about 30 kph, conserving fuel, vehicles and lives. In Eritrean administration, too, one recognises the healthiest of priorities (may it last!). When a group of men conspired secretly to try and block women’s access to land ownership when there was redistribution after the war, its leaders were jailed. Equally impressive is the complete absence of pomp or ostentation in the style of government: it was only after and at the insistence of his people that the president acquired a single bodyguard.

An especially memorable address at the conference was that given by Alemseged Tesfai – an Eritrean described as a “fighter-scholar” who interrupted his PhD studies to join the liberation war. He has written novels and plays as well as works of history. He read out from his wartime despatches how once, when he had the task of reporting on a crucial but bitterly hard-won battle (for the Eritreans) he came across what he described as a “miracle”: an anatomically complete human heart pumping away its last blood. This overwhelming symbol of national sacrifice, a body part from which no-one could tell either the gender or the cultural group of the soldier who had died there, was something Tesfai linked with the fact that many Eritrean languages associate wisdom with the heart (rather than with the brain).

In the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (the main, and eventually victorious, military-political group), Tesfai argued, it was the pen which drove the sword – and the process of war was also a process of national education. (To this comment Seniat Lijam of the Society of Eritrean Women replied that the sword also drove the pen – by giving it subject matter to write about!) In their training camps, the EPLF maintained very strict standard of equality among cultures, as they did between genders.

Yosef Libsekal, for the moment the only formally qualified Eritrean archaeologist, described how the long-term process of beginning to uncover more of the country’s enormous archaeological store was conducted with the assistance of local, oral histories from villagers and city dwellers, so that this process is simultaneously one of local cultural recovery and recognition and not merely the domain of “experts” (who are so frequently outsiders).

Haile-Michael Mesgina described culture as “the totality of community-based creations” and emphasised that the World Bank more recently has begun to recognise the role of local culture in “development”. Not that preservation of the cultural heritage of Eritrea involves attempts to erase all traces of former occupations. Although the statue of the Ethiopian emperor was determinedly pulled down and Selassie’s palace (both structures at the port city of Massawa) is being left a ‘triumphant’ ruin with gaping holes in its dome and walls, the Italian-style Art Deco buildings of Asmara are conserved with pride – as are some of the trenches and the underground hospitals and other constructions built during and because of the war.

The most impressive site – and sight – for most conference-goers was, however, no man-made construct. On the Sunday before the conference concluded we were all taken on a longish journey to an area even higher than Asmara, the Valley of the Sycamores, which is in the vicinity of the village of Segenieti. It is difficult to convey how awesome a location this is. The trees (about seven or eight of them) are huge and wide and must be many hundreds of years old, with pale yellowish trunks and dark green foliage. We were treated first to a wonderful concert by both local performers and several of the conference luminaries under one of these trees, and then taken to a picnic lunch under the largest of them – the image of this tree can be seen on the Eritrean five Nakfa note. We were about 700 people gathered under this tree – and many more could have been accommodated there. This tree was, indeed, in past times a ‘parliamentary’ gathering-place – and its atmosphere of grandeur, amidst the huge boulder-strewn, lonely landscape, left an unforgettable impression on all who went there.

At the moment, as most South Africans know, Eritrea is caught up in a bloody border dispute with its former allies who are now in power in Ethiopia (having overthrown the widely hated Menghistu regime). Although Eritrea’s president has signed the UN-brokered peace agreement, Ethiopia’s leader is (still) refusing to do so – he has declared a “no war, no peace” policy towards Eritrea (in his own words). This shadow of war was certainly felt at the conference. Although Ethiopian writers and scholars were invited to attend the conference, their government forebade their participation.

The South African press carried some reports of the conference and its resolutions, I am told. In the interests of fullness of information I now quote ‘The Asmara Declaration’ (adopted at the end of the conference) in its complete form:

The Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literatures
At this historic conference, we writers and scholars from all regions of Africa gathered in Asmara, Eritrea from January 11 to 17, 2000 in a conference titled Against All Odds: African Languages and Literatures into the 21st Century. This is the first conference on African languages and literatures ever to be held on African soil, with participants from East, West, North, Southern Africa and from the diaspora and by writers and scholars from around the world. We examined the state of African languages in literature, scholarship, publishing, education and administration in Africa and throughout the world. We celebrated the vitality of African languages and literatures and affirmed their potential. We noted with pride that despite all the odds against them, African languages as vehicles of communication and knowledge survive and have a written continuity of thousands of years. Colonialism created some of the most serious obstacles against African languages and literatures. We noted with concern the fact that these colonial obstacles still haunt independent Africa and continue to block the mind of the continent. We identified a profound incongruity in colonial languages speaking for the continent. At the start of a new century and millennium, Africa must firmly reject this incongruity and affirm a new beginning by returning to its languages and heritage.

At this historic conference, we writers and scholars from all regions of Africa gathered in Asmara, Eritrea declare that:

1. African languages must take on the duty, the responsibility and the challenge of speaking for the continent.
   
2. The vitality and equality of African languages must be recognized as a basis for the future empowerment of African peoples.
   
3. The diversity of African languages reflects the rich cultural heritage of Africa and must be used as an instrument of African unity.
   
4. Dialogue among African languages is essential: African languages must use the instrument of translation to advance communication among all people, including the disabled.
   
5. All African children have the unalienable right to attend school and learn in their mother tongues. Every effort should be made to develop African languages at all levels of education.
   
6. Promoting research on African languages is vital for their development, while the advancement of African research and documentation will be best served by the use of African languages.
   
7. The effective and rapid development of science and technology in Africa depends on the use of African languages and modern technology must be used for the development of African languages.
   
8. Democracy is essential for the equal development of African languages and African languages are vital for the development of democracy based on equality and social justice.
   
9. African languages like all languages contain gender bias. The role of African languages in development must overcome this gender bias and achieve gender equality.
   
10. African languages are essential for the decolonisation of African minds and for the African Renaissance.
    

Translated into as many African languages as possible and based on these principles, the Asmara Declaration is affirmed by all participants in Against All Odds. We call upon all African states, the OAU, the UN and all international organisations that serve Africa to join this effort of recognition and support for African languages, with this declaration as a basis for new policies.

While we acknowledge with pride the retention of African languages in some parts of Africa and the diaspora and the role of African languages in the formation of new languages, we urge all people in Africa and the diaspora to join in the spirit of this declaration and become part of the efforts to realise its goals.

Asmara, 17th of January 2000         [Thus ends the Declaration]

This comprehensive declaration indicates most of the points made at the conference and the position adopted by the great majority of the participants. There was a quite passionate sense of urgency, but also of excitement about the ‘possibilities’ of African languages at the conference. It is not to be merely facile to observe the irony, however, that English was the language used in the vast majority of conference sessions – Tigrinya (the main Eritrean language) and probably Swahili (from a few Kenyan participants) were the only other languages I observed being used on most of the ‘official’ occasions.

In an early paper the speaker made reference to a “Post Traumatic Colonial Disorder” caused by “incarceration” in languages of colonial origin. Over and over, speakers at the conference made the point that children educated in their mother tongues learn faster and better in all subject areas – including English! – than those taught through a language medium which is foreign to them.

Conquest always rests on language loss, said Kofi Anyidoho, since it allows the re-naming of the conquered region. He referred to Chinua Achebe’s example of the mere three generations within which the Japanese people absorbed modernity and technology into their own tongue. “Nation-languages”, said Katwina Mule, need to be used to reconstruct people’s indentities after colonialism. In Eritrea, the Tigrinya language has even retained its own script (see the illustration). Abdulatif Abdalla called African languages “our languages of being” as distinct from “languages of expression” (such as English).

A more critical position was taken by Sherif Hetata, who cautioned that one needs to look who or what (and especially which economic reality) lies ‘behind’ a language. Language does not matter in itself, he said, but what you say in it – any language can be used to mystify. As a warning example he referred to Egypt, where the reaction to globalisation has been (as he puts it) to turn to the past in a “reactionary” reflex, instead of facing the present and the future. He called this primitivism reborn as fundamentalism, an example of a local language used to close up minds.

Insistence on mother-tongue usage can be a mechanism to entrap people, one speaker suggested, citing the example of Somalia. Esi Sutherland-Adey made the point (reflected in the Asmara Declaration) that many African language cultures convey negative images of women in their proverbs and that new proverbs need to be made to replace these, while Abeba Tesfagiorgis emphasised that we need more women to write African history. A Kenyan speaker referred to the vibrant musical culture in that country – a practice in which the ‘mixing’ of various languages is a mechanism to escape the linguistic entrapment and censorship of official broadcasting rules.

There were warning voices to say that some languages are narrowing their range because speakers under 50 no longer know the full spectrum of vocabulary and that parents were pushing children ‘out of’ the mother tongue domain to learn the ‘international’ languages. The importance of radio as communication medium to help keep languages vital, was emphasised. Others warned that the elite-people dichotomy, which resembles the coloniser-colonised split, was often linguistically marked, with the foreign languages identified as the languages of power, even locally.

On the more practical side, the existence of a network of African publishers (known as APNET, with a small secretariat in Harare), which encourages publications in African languages, was celebrated. The need to give the continent more libraries and to take them to where people live (so-called “donkey libraries”) was noted.

The Zimbabwe Book Fair (coming up again this August) was mentioned as a powerful rallying point for African literatures and languages. South Africans who engage in the language professions and who participate in the debates around language choice and function would do well to take note of the Asmara initiative. Simultaneously, I believe, the conference confirmed despite itself what a tricky terrain the language issues of our time and place comprise, and how great the need is for sensitivity concerning the relative power(s) of different languages and the sometimes simultaneously empowering and disempowering effects of demands for particular languages, or ‘language rights’.

The Eritrean example of mutual recognition of languages is a fine one, yet even in Eritrea (I believe) it is going to be difficult to prevent a language (i.e. Tigrinya) used both by a majority and by most of those in power from seeming or being seen to dominate. Whether globally or locally, there always seem to be concentric circles of power around us. Because of the importance of this conference in tackling many language issues, great thanks must go to Charles Cantalupo of Penn State University and the other organisers who went to great length in the trouble they took to make this conference as memorable as it was.

In conclusion, I would like to raise some points for debate – against the background of the Asmara conference and the South African language situation and within the LitNet context (where the position of especially Afrikaans has been hotly debated). Firstly, I believe that the Asmara initiative and its emphasis on local, African languages is significant, especially in a country like ours where the condition of “underdevelopment” is measurable in the indices of unemployment, illiteracy and generally low education levels.

The push for the greater recognition of African languages is undeniably also a central contribution towards the empowerment of the people of this continent and their better access to knowledge and skills. Yet the demonisation of English which is often a corollary of this seems to me to be foolish and misguided. A conference like Against All Odds could not have occurred without the facilitation of this language, and a country like Eritrea has appropriately adopted English as its language of international access.

Internationally, intercontinentally (without denying the importance of, for example, French and Kiswahili) and – in many African countries, including our own – also nationally, English is an essential communication medium, probably the most significant lingua franca of our time. It is needed to do duty in many spheres where the more localised or more obviously indigenous language will not serve. But English is also, I hold (emphatically as an academic convinced of the educational and political relevance of the texts written in English by those African authors whose writing has come to constitute the canon of African Anglophone writing), by now, and despite all the ironies its importation into this continent by colonisation, an African language – in the sense of being, evidently not by origin, but through its present levels of use by many thousands of Africans across and within the continent. In our time, English functions in Africa as employed by Africans for African purposes. Though resistance against its dominance in contexts where other/African languages should and could be given great scope is understandable, the English language has been claimed and is now ‘owned’ by many Africans as a second, third, or umpteenth language which they would be the poorer for not having.

The exhortation from Asmara that Africans should insist on the recognition of ‘their own’ languages, utterly valid as this position is, is (I believe) in danger of being misused by a sector of those South Africans campaigning against English for Afrikaans. I am referring not only to the demonisation of English, but to a position from which people fight only for their own ‘language turf’ rather than (as the Eritrean position to a large extent illustrates) for greater recognition of all local languages.

My own institution, the University of Stellenbosch, is to my mind a case in point. Although this is not in fact a monolingual or monocultural institution, it is in danger of being manoeuvred into that position as “the” Afrikaans university of this country. Not only would that (I believe) be detrimental to its role as a university (an institution which should be as inclusive as possible, intellectually and culturally), but a failure of its South African and regional responsibilities (towards other cultures and languages).
All the languages of this country need development and promotion – but not in isolation from or rivalry against one another. An old, unfortunately only male-inflected Dutch proverb reminds us: “Zoveel talen als ik kan; zoveel malen ben ik man”. The complexities and difficulties of the language situation in our country and elsewhere in Africa are undeniable – but there are also crucial opportunities here, if we adapt and broaden our perspective.

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