ABSTRACT
On balance, the relentless efforts of some Westerners, researchers, scholars, missionaries, administrators, throughout the age of the slave trade, and colonial and neo-colonial times, have been directed towards locating more positive roles for African languages. To put the story simply, even until today missionaries have remained among the first to give African languages their due importance or to reinstate them as languages of civilizations and cultural experiences. This has been partly due to their avowed religious interests and, partly, because being more exposed to the daily lives of African languages, missionaries are more conscious of the usefulness of African languages within the cultures which feed, uphold, and transmit them more adequately into the future. Over the years they have been working with the aid of Africans to promote the use of African languages in writing.
