ABSTRACT
For the better part of this century educators and commissions of enquiry into the state of education in Africa have concurred that the primary language of the school pupil is the language through which education, and primary education at the very least, should occur. As each formerly colonised territory in Africa has achieved independence, policy formulation for the newly independent state has been generated, as might be expected, by the new ruling elite. The last four decades have shown us that very often the articulation of policy, particularly language policy has more to do with a sense of political expediency than reasons of economic or educational development. Over the last ten years scholars on the continent have argued that language policy is not only too government or top-down in orientation, but that it should be integrated into the national plan for development (see Bamgbose and Chumbow in Alexander, 1992), of which economic development is a major component. Other scholars, such as Akinnaso, Siatchitema, and Tripathi point out that there is often a mismatch between policy and the plan for implementation, particularly with regard to language policy in education. Thus the implementation plan has little potential for achieving the goals of the policy. The situation in South Africa is one in which a matrix of contradictory threads, both supportive of multilingualism and antithetical to it, have become entangled despite the progressive commitment to equality of language rights in the country’s recently crafted constitution.
