Paper long abstract:

The decolonial project in postcolonial Africa is suffused with quests and queries. Education has been touted as the singular platform for redress, reform and re-articulation of hope and redemption for the marginalised people. What has not happened in Sub-Saharan Africa is a strategic appropriation of the education sites and processes for the development of a pedagogy of hope. Half the world's one hundred largest economies are not countries, but transnational corporations (TNCs). These TNCs have crafted and disseminated powerful messages predominantly in the English language that essentially constitute what we understand today as globalisation. This insatiable demand for the English language has invariably enabled the deployment of an ensemble of electronic communication and computer-aided technologies to move massive amounts of financial capital across the globe, predominantly out of Africa to metropolitan Euro-American capitals. The same strategies have been used to globalise distance education, which has become massive business for American, Australian and British universities. In the new communicative apparatus and strategies that are owned by TNCs, globalisation has been disseminated simplistically to mean a multiplicity of international relations, diversity, personal encounters with foreign peoples, obscene dances, musical profanities and the spread of the internet. In tandem, globalisation has witnessed the spread and proliferation of private schools, Curro Academies, Heritage groups of schools, Anglican and Catholic sites that offer Cambridge International Examinations to rival the stymied domestic curricula. The same private schools use English as media of instruction from Grade One to exit Advanced level examinations and therefore justify their exorbitant fees: not one private school in South Africa has an indigenous language policy. We argue therefore that the clamour for universal literacies are subverted by the way in which postcolonial states privilege the English language, private schools and the modalities of the internet. Indeed, the weakening of the postcolonial state is a principal characteristic of the process of globalisation: who gets globalised into what. Globalisation, this chapter submits, is a capitalist market economy that surreptitiously strengthens former colonial languages to the detriment of translanguaging encounters that could be productively explored to generate new assemblages and knowledges. It is a maelstrom whose vortex is the supremacy of coloniality. Globalisation is epistemic and linguistic violence, marked by a deleterious businessification of educational institutions on the pith of the rights of the native languages of Africa.

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