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
