The bulk of the book is based on papers presented during two virtual conferences hosted by the University of Leiden (Netherlands) in 2021. At the Africa Knows! Conference, a panel was devoted to ... Show moreThe bulk of the book is based on papers presented during two virtual conferences hosted by the University of Leiden (Netherlands) in 2021. At the Africa Knows! Conference, a panel was devoted to ‘The language issue and knowledge communication in Africa.’ It was initiated by the Universities of Ilorin (Nigeria) and Chemnitz (Germany). The papers by Eleshin, Oloruntoba-Oju, Sanon-Ouattara, Van Pinxteren, and Zatolokina were all first presented at this panel, before being peer-reviewed for this volume. The central theme of the conference was the decolonization of Africa’s knowledge production and related processes. The second conference was the 10th World Congress on African Languages and Linguistics (WOCAL) in June, where a workshop took place under the auspices of the Edinburgh Circle on the Promotion of African Languages, entitled ‘Let’s turn to policy.’ The papers by Alfredo, Dissake, and Nguere and Smith were also first presented during this workshop before being peer-reviewed for this volume. In general, the position taken by the editors is that using indigenous languages in education can make an important contribution to national development as well as to personal empowerment. Africa is characterised in part by its continued use of former colonial languages in education. However, sixty years after independence, it seems high time to question this colonial heritage. In the context of global and digital communication today, old African values of multilingualism and culture-specific communicative strategies should not be neglected, but revalued and revived in new ways. We do not deny the importance of a good command of international languages. However, this should not be at the expense of indigenous languages. The introduction to the book argues that a transition towards increased use of African languages in formal domains will not only be necessary and practically possible, it will become inevitable. Show less
Salazar, P.J.; Osha, S.; Binsbergen, W.M.J. van 2004
Democracy is about competing "truths". This is why "rhetoric"- the study of public deliberation and the training in public debate and argumentation - is part of democracy in development. This... Show moreDemocracy is about competing "truths". This is why "rhetoric"- the study of public deliberation and the training in public debate and argumentation - is part of democracy in development. This volume acclimatizes "rhetoric" to the philosophical scene in South Africa, and more in general in Africa as a whole, and reflects on the emergence of public deliberation in the South African democracy through a reading of the 1995-1998 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in terms of Aristotelian rhetoric. Four papers (part 1) tackle, from four different angles, the re-telling of private truths about a public regimen of affairs in front of the TRC. In Part 2, public deliberation and the fashioning of truth are approached from a variety of perspectives, examples and situations of "rhetorical democracy" from elsewhere in Africa (Nigeria) and beyond. Part 3 offers examples of how rhetoric may be brought to bear upon politics in order to understand how dialogue between different levels of agency creates democratic negotiation and, in the process, shapes policy, as for example in the case of the African Renaissance, the land redistribution programme in postapartheid South Africa and the 1991 National Conference of Congo-Brazzaville. The volume closes on a philosophical analysis of the "ethical" dimension inherent to public deliberation as well as to the contest of beliefs, and on an examination of the volume's contents in the light of long-standing concerns of African philosophy and of the journal 'Quest'. Contributors: Charles Calder, Barbara Cassin, Mary Jane Collier, Erik Doxtader, Eugene Garver, Yehoshua Gitay, Lisa Hajjar, Darrin Hicks, Johnson Segun Ige, Abel Kouvouama, Andrea Lollini, Reingard Nethersole, Sanya Osha, Philippe-Joseph Salazar, Lydia Samarbakhsh-Liberge, Wim van Binsbergen, Charles Villa-Vicencio. [ASC Leiden abstract] Show less
