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Tony Calderbank, Country Director South Sudan, blogs about the challenge of teaching a new country to read and write a foreign language, when their native tongue is rarely written down.

I received an email the other day, one of those long chains that, although you weren’t copied in at the start, you now feel obliged to read all the way through just in case you miss something important. It contained 4054 words, a pan-African conversation about arts and development.

So many words! Here in Juba, everybody’s at it. Since I’ve been here I’ve read DfID reports, USAID reports, the EMIS report, the UNMIS report, the comprehensive strategic evaluation of monitoring and development outcomes interim report . . .

So much to read, so few readers – 85% of the population of South Sudan are illiterate.

Huge volumes of wordage are piling up on shelves and in cupboards all over Juba. How much is getting read remains a mystery. One recent study showed that employees in ministries are handing one another documents and reports with oral descriptions of the content because they cannot read the written words themselves.

The other problem is that writing everything in English rather defeats the object of encouraging communication in a country where hardly anybody speaks the language. Juba Arabic, on the other hand, which is the language of almost everyone in the capital, is rarely written down and so is certainly not appropriate for bureaucratic purposes.

Then there’s all the digital content.

In the hotel where I stay the restaurant is filled from dawn to dusk with consultants, journalists and aid workers tapping away on laptops: tweets and blogs and emails and updates full of insightful analysis and informed opinion. Virtual words circling in cybersky like vultures that never land.

When all is said and done though, South Sudan is essentially a pre-literate society.

Words are spoken under trees in village squares across this vast land, in languages that have never been written down and never will be. Over the last fifty years numerous languages whose native speakers numbered in the few thousands have died out. Others are set to follow in their footsteps despite the dedicated efforts of officials at the local languages department and the scholars and educators who support them.

Many of the teachers working in South Sudan today have barely finished primary school themselves. They will be expected to teach children in their mother tongues for the first three years of primary and then begin teaching in English. But, with over a hundred mother tongues and tens of thousands of teachers who don’t speak English yet, it will take some time.

There are other challenges too.

How do you teach everyone to read and write? How do you make sure that the unlettered have their say in the future of the nation?

I’ve met some very strong and inspiring people since I arrived here, who, untouched by the curse of literacy, are making big differences in the lives of marginalised and traumatised people.

It remains to be seen if their words will be heard and if the modernising forces we see working to build this nation will include the illiterate and the oral, and empower them to become masters of their own destinies.

Tags: South Sudan, Sub-Saharan Africa, Tony Calderbank

Category: English & Education

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Tony Calderbank

Tony Calderbank

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