[Q&A] Why Should Africans Learn Chinese When Chinese Don't Learn African Languages?

Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden are the duo behind the China Africa Project and hosts of the popular China in Africa Podcast. They’re here to answer your most pressing, puzzling, even politically incorrect questions about all things related to the Chinese in Africa and Africans in China. If you want to know something, anything at all… just hit them up online and they’ll give it to you straight:

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Dear Eric & Cobus,

More and more African countries are starting to offer Chinese. Now African children are expected to learn Chinese even in schools. But why must our children learn Chinese when Chinese are not learning African languages? Shouldn’t there be some fairness here?

-- Kaweme in Lusaka via email

Hi Kaweme, You’re completely right that the teaching of Mandarin is becoming much more common in Africa. South Africa is probably the leader on the continent, with 44 schools offering Mandarin-language education. Other countries, like Madagascar and Tanzania, have also started offering this education.

Many Africans have reacted quite negatively to this trend. Some, like you, have argued that the implementation of Mandarin teaching in schools is an unfair burden on African children, and reflect the power of China in the world, over African countries. I’ll come back to that issue in a moment.

Other African commentators have compared the teaching of Mandarin to the forced teaching of English, French and other European languages during the colonial era. Here the argument goes that the introduction of Mandarin will disrupt Africans’ ability to live a full life in their own language by weakening the position of those languages in their home country. These commentators felt that the teaching of Mandarin was another insertion of foreign power into African society. This was seen as especially bad because African languages were seen to receive so few resources already. When the issue of Mandarin came up in South Africa, many on the left of the political spectrum took this view.

I feel that there are two separate issues at stake here. The introduction of Mandarin doesn’t necessarily mean that African languages will be neglected. If there is political will, African languages can be supported while Mandarin is introduced. Of course the issue is resources, and even with volunteers coming from China, the reality is that African children don’t have to fear rampant Mandarin education because there are simply not enough teachers. 

So what will end up happening is that a small elite of African children will learn Mandarin and that will help them to make even more money than they would have without Mandarin education. This will give them even more of an edge over other, poorer, African children. You can see where I’m going here: why was the issue of Mandarin education characterized by so many African commentators as a threat, rather than an opportunity?

It seems to me that the reason embedded in your question. You asked why African children have to learn Mandarin when Chinese children don’t have to learn African languages. The very same question was asked by a representative of the South African teachers’ union during the Mandarin debate: “There’s no Chinese person who’s going to be taught isiZulu or isi-Xhosa or Sepedi – none. We’re not going to teach a Frenchman isiXhosa. They speak their own languages. There’s no country that says we’re now going to subordinate our languages to another country’s language. They believe in ownership and citizenship. Why is it that it’s only Africa that finds it simple to talk about economic ties?”

Actually, that’s not true. Mandarin immersion education (where other subjects are taught in the medium of Mandarin) is taking off in the United States, and it is estimated that by 2020, about one million US students will be learning Mandarin. This is explicitly linked to perceptions that language skills are crucial to success in the job market. In addition, there are actually Chinese learning African languages. Some learn them because they live in Africa, and some because they plan careers dealing with African issues. For example, I have met Chinese academics who speak various African languages fluently because they focus on Africa.

However, the numbers of these Chinese are of course much smaller. Only a few Chinese will bother to learn African languages because they aren’t forced to. Learning a language is a pain in the butt. Why learn it unless you have a compelling reason to?

The blunt fact is that the reason why African schools are starting to offer Chinese while Chinese schools probably won’t offer African languages outside of a few specialty courses is that China is much stronger in the world than Africa. This is of course the real reason why Africans balk against the teaching of Chinese on the continent – because the clear unfairness of it rankles. To that I have to say – yes, it sucks. It sucks that China is so much stronger than Africa. But not learning Chinese is not going to change that. In fact, not developing young Africans’ language skills is the one thing guaranteed to keep Africa unequal forever.

However, this is not to say that those critics who fear that African languages are suffering from a lack of support. The teaching of Mandarin cannot be allowed to take resources away from African languages. Many linguists now believe that education in one’s mother tongue is key to the development of many skills, including one’s ability to learn a second language.

The real aim is multilingualism, and I would argue than rather being in a defensive crouch, Africans should have their children learn as many languages as possible. If those include Mandarin, and with it access to a market of more than a billion people, and knowledge of a sophisticated language millennia old, is that really a problem?

-- Cobus

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