ABSTRACT

For Mozambique, Katupha characterizes Portuguese, which was promoted as a tool of national unification in the face of troubling diversity, as contributing to defining élite membership. Certainly, not knowing Portuguese excluded individuals from the élite. At the same time, economic and technological development, if it is to involve the majority of the people, can be promoted only through the use of African languages. Katupha’s solution is the long term promotion, through the education system, of ‘functional bilingualism’ such that, with resources allocated to the development of African languages, it will be possible for Mozambican citizens to function in a variety of sectors in their own languages, while having access to other spheres of communication through Portuguese. For South Africa, the subject of the papers by Benjamin and Maake, the situation is further complicated by the fact that the development of the use of African languages was part of the agenda of the Apartheid state. Opposition to Apartheid involved, to some extent, the insistence on English as the medium for resistance; to promote the use of African

languages was tantamount to endorsing the so-called ‘independent homelands’. In this context, therefore, in recognition of the fact that National Party Governments since 1948 had vigorously, and successfully, promoted Afrikaans against English, resistance involved deliberately using English (as was demonstrated by the 1976 school strikes against the imposition of Afrikaans as medium of instruction in black schools).