Ghana
was one of the first British colonies in sub-Saharan Africa to achieve
independence in 1957 and as such has had strong ties to the English
language as a modern country for over a hundred years. Most Ghanaians
who’ve been through some level of formal education learn to speak
English alongside their regional language.
But
since coming to office in 2017, Ghana’s president Nana Akufo-Addo has
been pushing for Ghanaians to also learn French and one day make it the
country’s official second language.
To
outsiders, the president might seem like an unlikely champion for
Gallic influences; after all he is known for his unplaceable English
accent; he descends from a Ghanaian political aristocracy with long ties
to Britain and was partly educated in England from a young age.
But Akufo-Addo also speaks French fluently, learned when he lived in Paris in the 1970s, and is always happy to flaunt his language skills given the chance.
The president has announced plans to make French a compulsory subject for high school students and in a 2018 speech (given entirely in French), he told colleagues
at La Francophonie Summit, “our goal is to live, one day, in a
bilingual Ghana, that is English and French, together with our own
indigenous languages.”
“The promotion of the French language is a major education priority,” foreign affairs minister Shirley Ayorkor Botchway said
last month. French is expected to feature prominently when details of
Ghana’s new basic school curriculum are announced in the coming weeks.
Akufo-Addo’s
support for French comes as France’s president Emmanuel Macron is also
making a soft power push to raise the status of French across Africa,
starting with former French colonies.
“As
France represents only a fraction of the active French speakers, the
country knows the fate of French language is not its burden alone to
carry,” Macron said in March 2018 as he launched a bold new ambition to increase the number of speakers of the language of Molière. That speech in Paris predated an earlier one in Burkina Faso
where he pleaded with students not to ditch French for English and
urged them to help make French “the number one language in Africa and
maybe even the world.”
Thanks to Africa’s youth, French is now the fifth most-spoken language in the world and by 2050, 80% of the projected 700 million French speakers will be in Africa.
While
there is no denying the push for French in Ghana has a lot to do with
the president’s personal affinity for the language translating into
national policy, there is a good case to be made for increasing the
number of Ghanaians who can speak French.
All
of Ghana’s immediate neighbors use French as their official language
and in the wider Ecowas regional block, eight out of 15 member countries
are Francophone. A “bilingual Ghana”, strategically positioned, could
stand to benefit economically from ever closer ties with her neighbors.
But the president’s vision to get Ghanaians to speak French will prove a lot harder to achieve.
“Au revoir Mister”
For
years, 14- and 15-year olds in Ghana have had to take a French language
exam as part of a national exam that allows students to progress to
high school. However, that has failed to translate into a sizable number
of Ghanaians being able to string together coherent sentences beyond
exchanging pleasantries.
In
many schools, French is taught once a week; the last subject of the
school day with at best 45 minutes of lesson time. By the government’s
own admission, it does not have enough French teachers to implement the new proposals and it hopes to tap into the increased resources Macron promised.
Also, the social currency that comes with English fluency remains a lot more desirable for Ghanaian parents. Given
the colonial history of most African countries, discussions around
learning international languages can often be a sensitive topic. But in
recent years, those discussions haven’t been about French but instead
about Mandarin and China’s increasing economic and political influence.
Countries including Kenya, Uganda and South Africa are all introducing Mandarin into their schools’ curriculum.
Dying local languages
And
while the Ghanaian public recognizes the usefulness of French
proficiency, there is no public support for mandatory lessons in
schools. Critics say, the new educational proposals privilege a foreign
language over Ghana’s 50 local languages, some of which are dying.
Linguists estimate at least a dozen Ghanaian languages have been lost
over the past century and about a dozen more have less than 1,000
speakers, according to a 2012 study.
The
study found that “a lot of the indigenous languages of Ghana are in
danger and could even be lost in the next few generations” and “the
language policy of the Ghana government [especially in education] is
contributing to the loss of Ghanaian languages,” the authors say.
Quartz.
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