Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to examine how the learning of French and German entered the secondary school curriculum in the British colonial Nigeria, and explores the response of Nigerian and the French and German nationals to this new development.

Paper long abstract:

Governments and people in Africa have, over the centuries, recognized the importance of an efficient education and language policy in the development of a nation. Following the introduction of Western education to Africa and the scramble and partition of the region by European powers from the nineteenth century, the various European powers and the new educational providers who found the indigenous cultural practices and educational system, including the African languages inadequate, introduced the teaching of European languages to the different geographical regions under their authority for a myriad of social and political reasons. Africans, who began to appreciate the value of the acquisition of the knowledge of European languages, in addition to the local languages which continued to function effectively, mostly within the out-of-school context, began to patronize the learning. This paper explores the story of the teaching of French and German in Nigeria from 1859 when the first secondary school was founded, and the subsequent development under the British colonial rule, which encouraged the promotion of English language. It seeks to examine the decisive role played by the British Examining Bodies in the language crusade and how the Nigerians on their own, in spite of the absence of encouragement from the native speakers of the languages, and under difficult circumstances, began to take advantage of the available facility for learning the foreign languages. It concludes by exploring the relationship between political Independence and language learning and draws attention to the development which followed the attainment of Independence in 1960.