Cult & Society/International Perspective

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The dissolution of the European colonial empires in the second half of the twentieth century resulted in another postwar period where many new states were constituted. Liberation movements invoked the ideal of the nation in the fight against the colonial powers and, when they gained independence, took the nation state as the model for sovereign statehood. Although the leaders of the newly liberated countries were in very different settings from their counterparts in the earlier waves of nation state formation, the basic problems were felt to be much the same. On the linguistic and cultural front, the challenges were the ever intractable issues: how to achieve national unity, how to ensure inde- pendence, and how to educate the national population effectively.

4.1 The legacy of the colonial period

It may well turn out that Europe’s most enduring legacy to the regions it colonised in the rest of the world will be the tradition of the nation state as an organising principle. This form of political organisation was inherited, however, by groups where there was little cultural and linguistic cohesion or other factor that could be employed in an ethnic construction of nationality. As we have seen in previous chapters, there was rarely neat coincidence of ‘nation’ and state in Europe. But what was already fiction in Europe became doubly so in postcolonial Africa and Asia.

In postcolonial Africa, there was extreme heterogeneity within states and arbitrary borders between them. The imperial delegates to

4 Nation Building in the Wake of Colonialism: Old Concepts in New Settings

Nation Building in the Wake of Colonialism 79

late nineteenth-century conferences had carved Africa up according to the power balances among European states and drawn state bound- aries that were often geometric and that rarely took notice of ethnic groupings. The rationale for borders was simply that competing colonial powers were blocked in their advance by each other; ‘they reflect spheres of influence and trade carved out by the precursors of European colonialism’ (Fardon and Furniss 1994: 11). In consequence, societies that had been highly unified in terms of language and culture were divided and groups that were immensely disparate were joined together.

Despite this, after independence, there was no move to redraw the map. The member states of the Organisation of African Unity agreed to live with their boundaries. But, although these frontiers were main- tained, they were highly contentious, since they left governments with disparate linguistic populations within their borders and a high risk of irredentism where groups that had been dissected desired to regroup. Independence from colonial rule gave the African continent a mosaic of states that its autochthonous inhabitants had never willed and borders that they had never contributed to drawing.

Federalism and loose association would perhaps have been the best resolution in many cases, but the majority of newly independent states did not make that choice, instituting instead regimes where power was concentrated in the capital and where the people were treated as a single group. The nineteenth-century European model of political organisa- tion, which promoted the ideas of a single unified group on a single territory, total sovereignty and self-reliance, was immensely influential. This was a logical development in many ways since anti-colonial libera- tion movements had adopted nationalist ideology as a mobilising force and retained the philosophy after independence as the founding prin- ciple for the state (Nyerere 1999).

The end of empire thus left many governments in the same position as the state nations of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu- ries; that is, they had fixed boundaries, heterogeneous populations and centralised political systems. Rulers and governments saw a pressing need to unite their populations and mould a more homogenous citi- zenry. The nation state was the normative response. Planning for unity was undertaken consciously and in haste. The difficulties inherent in introducing the old ideal of ‘one people, one language, one state’ into the kind of diversity described above did not stop politicians from trying.

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This one party, one language, one nation project was thus typical of nation building in the postcolonial period. Bamgbose has categorised it in the African situation as ‘obsession with the number one’:

It seems that we are obsessed with the number ‘one’. Not only must we have one national language, we must have a one party system. The mistaken belief is that in such oneness of language or party we would achieve socio-cultural cohesion and political unity in our multi-ethnic, multilingual and multicultural societies. (Bamgbose 1994: 36)

4.2 The single ‘national’ language

Finding the one language that would purportedly promote unity and solidarity within the state was not a simple task. The heterogeneity of the populations presented no simple indigenous solution. In some states there were literally hundreds of different languages. Indonesia, one of the most linguistically diverse states in Asia, has more than 719 languages. 1 Nigeria, one of the most linguistically diverse states in Africa, has an estimated 400 languages (Elugbe 1994). 2 In both Nigeria and the Indonesian archipelago the languages are spread across different language phyla which means that, although there are dialect continua where some mutual comprehension is possible, on the cleavages between phyla there is no possibility of passive understanding. Even within phyla, speakers may not necessarily achieve comprehension through mutual passive understanding. 3 Indonesia and Nigeria may be extreme cases of diversity, but most African and Asian postcolonial states are linguisti- cally heterogeneous to some degree.

From the perspective of governments, the case for rationalisation was not difficult to make. Faced with extreme multilingualism, recognition of the rights of citizens to use their language in public life, in partic- ular their interaction with state institutions, was considered unfeasible. Pluralism was blocked, practically, by the logistics of implementing policy and, psychologically and ideologically, by commitment to the nation state model. Post-independence ethos was firmly against recog- nition of ethnic diversity. The identification of cultural and linguistic difference was seen as retrograde, a pandering to a ‘tribalism’ that had to be transcended in the modern state. In contrast, the embedding of different ‘tribes’ and groups into the nation was seen as progressive. There was optimism that this could be done through commitment to

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nationalist ideology, the charisma of the new leaders and universal education, all of which would provide ‘the nurturing for the integrated growth of these new nation states’ (Laitin 1992: 8).

The third argument against multilingualism was that it was antithet- ical to development and economic growth. Research had been produced which suggested that states that were highly heterogeneous in terms of language were characterised by low or very low per capita GNP (Banks and Textor 1963). Pool (1972: 216) reported the general view of the period that ‘language diversity breaks down occupational mobility and thus slows development’. 4

Multilingualism was also held to be unworkable if the aims of basic education and literacy for all were to be met. Sub-Saharan African languages had not generally been written down until contact with Europeans (Mazrui and Mazrui 1998) 5 and, therefore, producing basic teaching materials in the vernaculars depended on whether they had undergone what Charles Ferguson (1968) has termed graphisation. Only some of the vast number of languages had been codified, given an alphabet and elaborated so that they could function as media for modern education systems. It would be a mammoth task to under- take provision of teaching in every mother tongue (Ansre 1970; Elugbe 1994). 6

In their introductions to policy statements and constitutions, govern- ments may have lauded the linguistic skill of multilinguals coping with numerous languages in their daily encounters (Fardon and Furniss 1994), but they took little notice of this multilingualism in the substance of their laws which were aimed at national integration and efficiency through the imposition of a national language. The ethos was for national unity, and multilingualism was seen to be promoting what divided the nation and held it back from development and modernity and was rejected. Thus, in the early days of independence, no state made provision for bureaucratic and political interaction or education to be in all the language varieties found on the territory or even envisaged doing so.

Within the framework of wanting to designate one official language for a multilingual population, the problem then became the actual choice of language. There was always the possibility of using the language of the former colonial power. Supporters claimed that it was both neutral and provided a link with the wider world. Such a choice was, of course, prob- lematic. 7 The former colonial language could not be indexical in the way that is desired for national languages. The proposition was anathema to those who wanted to break with the colonial past. According to many

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who were looking for a new beginning, the imposition of the colonial language had already inculcated a sense of inferiority:

The language of an African child’s formal education was foreign. The language of the books he read was foreign. Thought in him took the visible form of a foreign language ... (The) colonial child was made to see the world and where he stands in it as seen and defined by or reflected in the culture of the language of imposition. (Ngugi 1986: 17)

To continue to use the language of that colonialism was to ensure a continued sense of inferiority.

Nonetheless, the government of many postcolonial states did just this. But most states were in a bind; their heterogeneity appeared to allow them no other solution than the language of the colonial power that had brought them together and their espousal of nationalist ideology meant that the pressure to find a single national language was strong. The former colonial powers backed this solution since it kept their lines of contact and influence open. The English lobby argued that English could be adopted as:

a politically neutral language beyond the reproaches of tribalism. (Moorhouse (1964) cited in Mazrui and Tidy 1984: 299)

The promoters of French argued that:

French finds favours among the people because it does not advantage any ethnic group. (Daff 1991: 152, my translation)

The British press found it ‘remarkable that English has not been rejected as a symbol of colonialism’ (Moorhouse (1964) cited in Mazrui and Tidy 1984: 299). The French were equally self-congratulatory (Conac et al. 1987). These reactions rather ignore the fact that given the disparate populations left by colonialism no other solution readily presented itself to a would be unitary state. 8 The adoption of English and French can be best explained as the least bad solution in the circumstances rather than by any claim that they could be politically neutral.

Finding a national language from the country’s own tradition that would not promote the interests of one group over the others was the ideal solution. Ansre, writing just after decolonisation and at the time

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of the great language debate, noted that the ideal in the search for the single national language would be to identify one that was:

indigenous because it can then engender a sense of national pride, facilitate the promotion of the indigenous cultural heritage and provide a certain amount of loyalty at the emotional level. (Ansre 1970: 2–3)

The revolutionary and socialist figures in decolonisation favoured this solution. Frantz Fanon stressed the link between language and culture:

To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilisation. (Fanon 1967: 17–18)

Ngugi (1986) taking a very Whorfian position, argued the corollary of this. He maintained that those Africans who forsook their mother tongue for English or French would be inevitably Westernised. The alien language would carry alien ideologies.

Choosing this ideal national language remained the problem. The languages of the larger groups were rejected as official languages of power as their adoption would have fuelled fear of domination and caused rejection of the unitary state. The ‘national’ language had to be one that would be acceptable to all sections of the ‘nation’. Few states had any ready-made solution.

In both Tanzania and Indonesia, however, there was such a language that could be employed for the purpose. These countries had three linguistic influences from which to draw: the indigenous languages, the language of an earlier regional power and the language of the European colonial period. The languages of the earlier regional power, Kiswahili in Tanzania and Malay in Indonesia, seemed to fit all the requirements for a national language. They were indigenous and so would have a symbolic dimension that would signal a new beginning after colonialism. They were not the languages of any politically prominent single ethnic group and so could promote unity within the state. They would foster a distinct identity on a regional basis since they were both regional lingua francas. They were languages with historical links that could be used to build a sense of national belonging and continuity. The only serious disad- vantage was that they would need to be imposed by planning diktat,

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top-down, since they were not spoken by the majority of future citizens, but as this was a time of general optimism and belief in technocratic solutions this was not held to be an insuperable difficulty.

The new nation states of Africa and Asia became the laboratory for conscious language planning with a mushrooming of university and policy groups committed to explaining how it could be done. Scholarly teams from Western universities (Fishman, Ferguson, Das Gupta 1968; Jernudd and Rubin 1971; Fishman 1974; etc.) analysed the experiences of the recent European nation building past and employed the knowl- edge to suggest frameworks for the postcolonial nation building future. They were quite optimistic that language change could be orchestrated:

Planning includes indicative, regulative, productive and promotional functions. The indicative aspect of language planning consists of assessing the language situation in terms of social developmental requirements and prescribing certain courses of change. The regu- lative aspect calls for authoritative action in the form of public measures accompanied by sanctions for encouraging specific uses of selected languages for defined domains. The productive aspect attends to the task of developing the capacity of a language to cope with the increasing demands likely to be made on it from the domains ... Planning authorities are likely to engage in active promo- tion of the products and standards among the potential user publics, including the administrative, educational, news media and other modes of language use. (Das Gupta and Ferguson 1977: 5)

Language planning scholars stretched along a continuum of opinion from those who believed that a decision could be taken centrally and imposed top-down through education to those who began to wonder whether language practice could be influenced greatly at all. Jernudd and Rubin posed the question (1971) ‘can language be planned?’ and concluded that some studies ‘convincingly show the absence of plan- ning from language planning’ (Jernudd and Das Gupta 1971: 201). Haugen (1966) reported the incremental force of individual decisions and suggested that top-down policy only succeeds when bottom-up patterns of behaviour are (or can be brought to be) in accord with it. 9 Other scholars and most policy makers were less cautious; they believed that language policy could be introduced top-down through the agen- cies of the state and citizens persuaded of the utility of the rationalisa- tion. Ansre records the advice contemporary policy groups were giving:

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For the purpose of national unity and progress it is necessary to have a language or major languages which can be used widely throughout the country not only so that government can communicate with the governed, but also that it could serve as the medium of national interaction at all levels. Governments are, therefore, exhorted to formulate and implement language policies for the nation as a whole. (Ansre 1970: 2)

The political elites in both Tanzania and Indonesia instigated language planning on all the formal levels (status, corpus and acquisition) and engaged in a massive ideological campaign to convert the ‘nation’ to the national language. Formal language planning institutes continued the work on codification, standardisation and elaboration. The following sections narrate how partial success was achieved in each country and explain why that success was never more than partial.

4.3 Language planning in Tanzania: the introduction of Kiswahili

Tanzania came into existence on 26 April 1964, when Tanganyika united with Zanzibar to form the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, renamed the United Republic of Tanzania on 29 October. Tanganyika had first been a German colony, and then, after the First World War, control of most of the territory passed to the United Kingdom under a League of Nations mandate. After the Second World War, Tanganyika became a UN trust territory under British control. In 1961, Tanganyika became an independent state under the presidency of Julius Nyerere.

Zanzibar came under Portuguese domination in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries but was retaken by Omani Arabs in the early eighteenth century. The Anglo-German agreement of 1890 made Zanzibar and Pemba a British protectorate which the British ruled through the sultan. Zanzibar gained independence from Britain on 10 December 1963. One month later, the sultan of Zanzibar was over- thrown and replaced by representatives of the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) with Karume as its head of state. Karume signed an Act of Union with Nyerere and the two countries combined later that year to form the modern state of Tanzania.

Tanzania’s 1964 frontiers brought together a number of dispa- rate groups: tribes that were still hunter-gatherers; nomadic herders; a large, illiterate peasantry; seafaring traders; a sophisticated urban

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intelligentsia. They also aggregated more than 120 ethnic groups with different cultures and languages. The larger groups (the Sukuma, Haya, Nyakyusa, Nyamwezi and Chaga have more than one million members) are Bantu-speaking peoples. Speakers of Nilotic or related languages include the nomadic Masai and the Luo, whose territory straddles the border with Kenya, thus dividing their populations between different states. Two small groups speak languages of the Khoisan family peculiar to the Bushman and Hottentot peoples. Cushitic speaking peoples, orig- inally from the Ethiopian highlands, are also present on the territory. Much of the African population on Zanzibar came from the mainland. The Shirazis, however, trace their origins to the island’s early Persian settlers. The small Asian community includes Hindus, Sikhs, Shi’a and Sunni Muslims and Goan Catholics.

In the first decade after independence Nyerere’s vision was an inclu- sive, secular non-racial nation state (Brennan 2012), unified through shared civic values and coalescing around a common national culture based on the ‘best of the traditions and customs of all the tribes’ (Nyerere 1967: 187). The Arusha Declaration of 1967 introduced the policy of Ujamaa (familyhood) and sought to apply socialist principles to the African context. This included a one-party system, with the democratic structure of competing interest groups rejected as divisive.

4.3.1 Kiswahili in the pre-independence era

In 1964 Tanzanians possessed an indigenous candidate for the role of offi- cial national language. This was Kiswahili 10 a Bantu language, from the north-east branch of the phylum (Hinnebusch et al. 1981) with a signifi- cant proportion of lexis taken from Arabic along with some features of pronunciation. It was a language associated with the Islamic tradition (similar to Hausa, Fulfude and Mandinka in west Africa and Somali and Nubi in other parts of east Africa) and with earlier conquests of east Africa (Mazrui and Mazrui 1998). It had become the mother tongue of the peoples of the coastal strip, a predominantly Muslim population (Ansre 1974). In addition, over the centuries the language had also acted as the language of commercial relations, accompanying trade inland, as far as the great lakes of Central Africa and beyond. At independence Kiswahili seemed a suitable choice for national language since its base was Bantu which made it an accessible medium for the 94 per cent of the population whose languages are Bantu related (Whiteley 1971). By 1964, the memory of the pre-European colonial hierarchies which had Arab or Shirazi at the top of the status tree had generally faded. Moreover, the language had some prestige; the Kiswahili-speaking group

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on the coast was generally accepted as the comparatively high status, urban and cosmopolitan section of Tanzanian society (Mamdani 1996).

There were also other reasons to choose Kiswahili. It was already the established language of much bureaucracy having been used in state institutions throughout the colonial period. The German colonial administrators had adopted the regional lingua franca as the language of contact with the populations they ruled in east Africa, rejecting the other two possible media for communication: the local languages were too numerous and each group of speakers too small for the contact role (Whiteley 1971); the colonial language was little used for intergroup contact as both the Germans and the British, who replaced them after the First World War, subscribed to a doctrine of distinction and Kiswahili served as a way of keeping the African population and the colonial class separate (Ansre 1974). 11 This was most evident in the three-tiered educa- tion system developed in British East African territories, with Kiswahili medium education from 1925. Those of the autochthonous population who had gone through primary education had done so in Kiswahili (Mazrui and Mazrui 1995). There had been a separate system for both British and the Asians.

Although originally associated with Islam, Kiswahili had also gradu- ally become the medium for Christian missionary work. Its adoption was uneven since some missionaries were opposed to Kiswahili because of its associations with Islam and some churches adopted local languages as a surer way of making contact with those they wished to convert (Whiteley 1971). However, Kiswahili had slowly gained ground in the second half of the nineteenth century. The codification of the language proved problematic. That traditional agent of standardisation, the trans- lation of the Bible, was less influential than it had been in European settings, because the translator, a Lutheran called Pastor Roehl, not only came from outside the Kiswahili speech community but also set out to purge the language used in the translation of all Arabic influence. This purism imposed from outside, for religious purposes, was ill received. The resulting text was difficult to recognise as a written version of the varieties of Kiswahili actually spoken and Ansre reports: ‘that native Swahili speakers who heard Roehl’s variety always asked: “Where is this Swahili spoken?”’ (Ansre 1974: 384).

In order for the Kiswahili to be used in the colonial education system, European linguists undertook codification and standardisation in the 1920s and 1930s. 12 Again local spoken varieties differed greatly from the written form, and again the standard was not universally recognised or accepted by mother tongue speakers (Ansre 1974). 13 A further difficulty

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was the existence of two ways to write Kiswahili: those educated in mission schools were literate in the Roman script and those educated in the Muslim tradition learnt to write Kiswahili in Arabic.

Some of the other factors noted in the spread of European national languages were also at work for Kiswahili. As rural Tanzanians moved to the towns they learnt Kiswahili, coalescing around the Kiswahili- speaking nodes in the coastal towns. Those who had been in the British army had also tended to acquire Kiswahili, which was the lingua franca of East African regiments. Soldiers became competent and sometimes literate in it, particularly those who fought in the Second World War (Hanley 1946).

4.3.2 Kiswahili and Ujamaa

The spread of Kiswahili was ensured in the 1950s 14 when it became the language of political mobilisation against colonialism. TANU (Tanganyika African National Union), the main organisation of the Tanganyikan independence movement, used it as its medium from its founding in 1954 onwards. Thus by independence ‘Kiswahili had already acquired the status of a party or national language’ (Whiteley 1971: 146) and was thereafter associated with the socialist ideology of Nyerere. After independence, Kiswahili was the language in which Ujamaa 15 policies were introduced; the language and the political ideology reinforced each other. The introduction of Kiswahili as the national language in 1966 has been described as: ‘an ideological imperative inducing a state of mind towards the language as one of the behavioral corollaries of the national ethos’ (Whiteley 1971: 151).

Interestingly for a language that was being promoted as a national symbol, it was also presented as a language of Africa. This was consonant with Nyerere’s stance as the great supporter of pan-Africanism. Whiteley records how Kiswahili was promoted on several accounts: its African pedigree, its role as the medium of mobilisation against colonialism, its indexical function as the language of freedom, socialism and the nation. He notes that the Tanzanians were exhorted to:

use Swahili on such grounds as ‘it is an African language’, ‘it played a crucial role in our struggle for independence’, ‘it is shameful to use the language of the colonialists and neo-colonialists’ or ‘it is the language of the people’. (Whiteley 1971: 151)

Kiswahili thus spread to become the language of the public space in Tanzania principally because it was the medium for a political

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philosophy that had a degree of acceptance, and vice versa (Blommaert 1994b). Ujamaa mobilisation of a majority of the country could not have happened without Kiswahili, the national language as symbol and medium (Mazrui and Mazrui 1998). Language engineering always has greater chance of success where there is ideological underpinning for new patterns of language use. Certainly, the Tanzanian government achieved a considerable degree of political participation through Kiswahili in the first 20 years after independence. Politics conducted through Kiswahili meant that a wider group could contribute than in countries which had retained the colonial language as the language of government 16 (Mazrui and Mazrui 1998). Education for self-sufficiency through Kiswahili also ensured a more democratic distribution of knowledge than in the post- colonial education systems where English and French continued to be the medium of primary schools (Blommaert 1994b; Mafu 2001).

Tanzania has been a comparatively stable state compared to many other postcolonial states and in some senses this is an indication that nation building policies, including the spread of the national language, were largely successful. Nyerere (1999), himself, claimed that language had played a key role in the cohesion and stability he achieved:

The Arusha Declaration and our democratic single-party system, together with our national language, Kiswahili, and a highly politi- cized and disciplined national army, transformed more than 126 different tribes into a cohesive and stable nation.

We can agree with Nyerere that one of the factors that allowed Tanzania to avoid tribal confrontation was the existence of a language sufficiently wide spread and well-rooted to provide a home-grown language for national integration. If we were to stop this account of language plan- ning for national cohesion in Tanzania 20 years after independence, it would be possible to present Kiswahilisation as a successful intervention in the nation building tradition and contrast it with what happened in Kenya and Uganda where English persisted and vertical integration was not so far advanced (Bratt Paulston 1992). Many commentators contend that Kiswahilisation held ethnic and religious divisions in check for 40 years (e.g. Gasarasi 1990).

4.3.3 Changing economic contexts and the language of education

However, as the Tanzanian story unfolds it becomes clear that the intro- duction of Kiswahili as a national language was not unproblematic.

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One of the sites of difficulty was education reform. Within the context of Ujamaa, an education policy based on socialist principles ( Elimu ya Kujitegemea or education for self-reliance) aimed to provide educa- tion for all at primary level and for adults who were illiterate. Literacy programmes for adults were staffed in part by young activists sent into rural Tanzania to establish Kiswahili as both the medium for informa- tion on new agricultural methods, health issues and political education, and a language whose acquisition in both its written and spoken forms signalled commitment to the nation and the Ujamaa project. Educational material promoting new ideas on the production of maize, wheat, rice, cotton, cattle or fishing and on political education was produced in Kiswahili (Buchert 1994). The primary programme was staffed too by militants and idealists. However, the policy proved difficult to imple- ment throughout the country and to sustain. Nyerere (1999) may have claimed near universal literacy and primary school attendance but this was never fully achieved (fieldwork interviews in Morogoro 2002). The money for education was difficult to find in a society where the prime needs of food, water, health and shelter could not be met for all the population.

Moreover, democratisation of education did not go all the way. The Kiswahilisation of secondary and higher education did not take place, and courses continued to be delivered through the medium of English and to an elite minority (Blommaert 1994a; Mafu 2001). This inevitably produced some stratification with a minority, mainly the children of the urban middle and upper classes, educated through English, and a majority taught in Kiswahili. A binary divide continued to exist.

When it became clear that Ujamaa was ultimately not able to deliver economic prosperity, the Tanzanians abandoned socialist solutions. In the late 1970s and 1980s Tanzania was desperately poor and the govern- ment turned to external bodies for assistance. As they accepted foreign aid and investment, the Tanzanians came under external pressures for economic and political reform. Lip service was still paid to socialism and the policies designed to foster self-reliance, equality and national iden- tity, but the impact of the structural adjustment programmes imposed by such investors as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, were at odds with Ujamaa philosophy (Buchert 1994). The major volte-face was the change from a state dominated socialist economic system to a market economy with a blending of public and private enterprise. 17

This new direction had an immediate impact on education. The emphases on mass education in Kiswahili, on widening access, on

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increasing equality and fostering social cohesion, which were the mark of the Ujamaa period, waned. In their place, the goal of the education service became the development of excellence in science, technology and vocational training as a means of modernising and developing the country. Such education was not for all, and the creation of a small, qualified, technical and commercial elite became the focus. The concern was no longer to expand and democratise education but to ensure high standards for a limited group. There was no significant expansion of secondary education and the language of provision remained English. It continued to be only a minority that progressed from primary. Both the language in which secondary education was delivered and the limited number of places available ensured this (Blommaert 1994a; Mafu 2001). The World Bank and the IMF had reinforced the decision to postpone the planned Kiswahilisation of secondary education, by making clear their preference for English (Mazrui 1997). Widespread English compe- tence had practical advantages for them and, as Mazrui suspects, there was probably an ideological dimension to the pressure. As aid was an increasing component of the education budget, the cash-strapped Tanzanians 18 felt they had little choice but to concur.

Among sociolinguists and planners the early euphoria evaporated. The flow of papers from the 1970s that stressed the relationship between language planning and national development, language acquisition and national cohesion began to dry up in the national language policy and planning literature (Blommaert 1994a). The spread of Kiswahili, the motor of national development and the language of liberation and Africanhood, appeared to have stalled, as English remained the language which allowed access to secondary and higher education. A period of austerity meant that education budgets had to be slashed, and literacy and school attendance declined sharply (Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2002; Ministry of Education and Culture 2000). The proportion of government spending devoted to education fell from 11.7 per cent in 1980–81 to 2.5 per cent in 1995–96 (United Nations 2000). School attendance had already fallen from 70 per cent in the early 1980s to 60 per cent in the late 1980s (Buchert 1994). Buchert also reports that adult literacy is likely to have fallen in the period 1980–94, suggesting that, the idealism of Ujamaa that linked literacy with political educa- tion and social change had disappeared. The young activists who had breathed life into the scheme were replaced with teachers doing paid overtime and without the same motivation or time to commit to the activity. The learners too had different motivations; increasingly literacy and education came to be seen as the means for individuals to improve

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their economic situation rather than as giving value to the community. The vertical integration of the population that had started to occur, with Kiswahili as part of the process, was slowing.

State schools came under attack for having unsuitable curricula. The number of teachers was inadequate and many of them were poorly trained (Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2002; Qorro 2013). The urban middle class was increasingly dissatisfied with the public educa- tion system. Once the barriers to private schooling were removed in the 1980s, large numbers of private academies were set up (Lassibille et al. 2000). Even at primary level these schools were English medium or placed a heavy emphasis on English (Boyle 1999; Mafu 2001) and charged a rate that was out of reach of all but a very narrow elite class ( Tanzanian Observer 12/01/03, p. 3).

In the state sector, the full commitment to free and compulsory education for 7–13 year olds made in the 1978 Education Act was abandoned. Parents were asked to pay fees and other school related costs that had once been assumed by the government. The fall in school enrolment was inevitable and the government had to recon- sider the policy in 2002. However, only primary school was made free for all; there were still fees for secondary and tertiary levels (Vavrus 2002) which exacerbated the binary divide between the basic level of education (potentially) for all in Kiswahili and the secondary fee- paying level with instruction in English for a small minority. As Mazrui and Mazrui (1995) point out, English medium was not necessarily intended as elite closure, but, associated as it is with fee-paying, it had that effect in both the public and private education systems. The strati- fication of education increased: the young of the rich were educated through English from kindergarten to secondary; the children of the majority were taught in Kiswahili in underfunded public schools; the very poorest received no education at all.

The national economic situation gradually improved following the macro-economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. In the twenty- first century, GDP growth continued to improve and in 2005 reached 6.8 percent, although half of the population continued to live in abso- lute poverty: 57.8 percent of Tanzanian people survived on less than US$1 a day and 89.9 percent lived on less than US$2 a day (UNDP 2006: 294). This poverty diminished slowly, moving from 34 per cent of the population on $1 a day in 2007 to 28 per cent in 2012. However, the number of very poor people in Tanzania remains significant, and, against a background of gradually increasing economic growth, inequality has increased.

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The situation for education is complex. On the positive side there were some legacies from the Ujamaa period, for example, an adult literacy rate of 69.4 percent in 2006, which was higher than for much of the Sub-Saharan region, and other countries with similar levels of income or human development (UNDP 2006). In 2006, 78 per cent of youth aged 15 to 24 were literate. The Tanzanians are committed to education and attendance in primary education exploded in Tanzania in the 2000s, after the implementation of the Primary Education Development Plan. African Development Bank (2011) figures showed a rise from 59 per cent enrolment in 2000 to 95.4 per cent enrolment in 2010. However, there is a negative side too. Many of those enrolled did not go on to the final years of basic education. The World Bank (2015) noted that Tanzania was failing its Millennium Development Goal on school completion rates. In secondary and higher education participation is also problem- atic. The African Development Bank figures for 2009 (2011) show that less than a third of Tanzanians progress past the very basic primary level of education. Only a tiny proportion of Tanzanians proceed to higher education. The African Development Bank (2011) reported ‘deteriorating educational quality’ in the secondary and higher education sectors.

The government thus faced several challenges in the secondary and higher education sector. The most important was to increase participa- tion. The challenges here were, of course, principally economic. Even where secondary education is free there are still opportunity costs involved in sending older children to school; the young of the very poorest are effectively deschooled by urban or rural poverty. However, low enrolment may also stem from language issues. A number of studies record that pupils taught through the medium of Kiswahili in primary do not make the move to English medium easily at the beginning of secondary, and that deficient English language skills are still an issue in higher education (Qorro 2013).

The ministry of education has adopted two widely different policy approaches. In 2009 the ministry proposed that state schools copy the private sector and increase English as the medium of instruction from nursery onwards. This provoked an outcry among educationalists who argued that English was not sufficiently anchored in Tanzanian society and that teaching content through imperfectly mastered English was at the root of many educational problems. As Qorro (2013: 16) argued: ‘In order for the majority of Tanzanian people to participate meaningfully in education, that education has to be in a language they understand’.

A set of very poor examination results in 2013 led to a reassess- ment of the situation. The government appeared to be listening to the

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pro-Kiswahili education lobby and took a diametrically opposing line to the 2009 policy. The new initiative was launched by the president himself. In February 2015, Jakaya Kikwete announced that basic educa- tion would be extended from seven years to 11 years, that it would be free and that it would be in Kiswahili. In 2015 the plan was to make Tanzanian secondary schools Kiswahili medium.

Thus the Tanzanians seem to have returned, at least in intention, to the era of bold solutions, the choice of a single African language in order to pursue the goal of national unity. This is surprising since as Fardon and Furniss (1994: 13) commented such policy had ‘generally been aban- doned as impractical or self-defeating in its own terms’. It is, of course, too early to make any comment on the implementation of the policy, or indeed whether it will endure. The discussion boards of the Tanzanian media suggest that the citizenry is very divided. Some posts reveal the relentless antipathy to further Kiswahilisation of education among the middle classes that has been apparent for decades (c.f. Mafu 2001). Those whose children attend state secondary schools feel that English gives them the advantage Bourdieu (1982) defined as cultural capital and they do not want to lose this. 19 Some point out that secondary education in Kiswahili is still education through a second language; not all Tanzanians are WaKiswahili (Kiswahili speakers) despite claims to the contrary. Kiswahili has not replaced local languages outside the main urban areas. Some point out that it will take years to replace English medium teaching materials with Kiswahili and that there will be a constant need to translate to keep abreast of developments. In the other camp some see the reform as an attempt to make secondary education available to all and to get better results from the process. Some feel some patriotic pleasure in a return to the Ujamaa policy. Some suggest that English as an auxiliary langue is not as useful as it once was; the pres- ence of so many immigrants, investors and collaborators from China means that some Tanzanians are reconsidering which is the most useful auxiliary language in Tanzania in 2015.

4.3.4 Conclusions

There are thus alternative assessments of the efforts of the Tanzanian language policy makers and planners to impose Kiswahili top-down on a diverse population in order to encourage feelings of national unity and solidarity.

A generally negative view dominated the literature and political discourse at the turn of the millennium. In this assessment, Kiswahilisation was seen to be a failure. The lack of an expansive economy to pay the social

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costs of national integration had brought about a discrepancy between formulated and implemented policies in Tanzania. Rather than growing at a rate that could cover costs, the economy had contracted under pressures from internal problems and external forces. 20 It had simply not been possible to pay for the educational policies to ensure cohesive national development in Tanzania. Thus society fractured linguistically; elite education through English ring fenced many professional openings and economic opportunities for the Anglophone upper classes.

A more positive view of national language planning has since resur- faced, taking the line that the Kiswahilisation policy achieved a limited success on its own terms. Status planning worked in so far as Kiswahili became the language of the state institutions and the language that citi- zens mostly use when interacting with or working within these institu- tions. Corpus planning worked in the sense that Kiswahili was codified, standardised, elaborated, disseminated and accepted widely enough for mutual comprehension to be preserved. Acquisition planning worked to the extent that large numbers of children had engaged with Kiswahili as they were educated in the national education system and many learnt enough to use it easily in their daily lives. Clearly full Kiswahilisation had never been fully realised and the language had never fully replaced English as the language of power. However, those taking this view would argue that the process is not complete and, as the policy announcements of 2015 showed, there is still will to promote Kiswahili and extend the domains in which it is used. The process is ongoing. In a period in which the economy is performing more strongly there may be funds to do this.

4.4 Nation building in Indonesia: the role of Indonesian

The other case study in this chapter, Indonesia, provides some evidence that what happened and is happening in Africa is happening elsewhere. Indonesia is also an example of the kind of tensions rising within multi- ethnic states between the centripetal efforts of the nation building centre and the centrifugal pressures of globalisation.

4.4.1 A large country with a heterogeneous population

Indonesia is also a country that was arbitrarily united by a colonial power. Consisting of more than 13,000 islands and stretching more than 5,000 kilometres along the Equator, Indonesia is even more heterogeneous than Tanzania, although, with few land borders, fewer groups had been summarily divided by colonialism (Grant 1996). The

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2010 census recorded a population of 237.4 million people, making Indonesia the fourth largest state in the world. The vast majority of the population (70 per cent) lives on the islands of Java and Sumatera (2010 census).

Indonesians were never ruled as a single group prior to Dutch coloni- sation. There had been empires in the area before the Dutch conquest, but they were never coterminous with present day Indonesia. 21 The Dutch built the colony from several territories and never attempted to unite the peoples in any way. The Dutch East Indies were inhabited by very diverse peoples ranging from those who lived in highly civilised societies in which sophisticated technologies and philosophies had developed prior to the arrival of the Europeans (e.g. at Yogjakarta and Surakarta, the political centres of central and eastern Java) to societal organisation at a very simple level (e.g. the hunter-gatherer societies of Irian Jaya/Papua 22 ). Their diversity was recognised, very belatedly in the colonial period, in a quasi-federal system set up by the Dutch in the final years of their rule.

4.4.2 Civic nationalism

At independence the new government had to deal with this diversity. The new nation would be composed of the hundreds of ethnic groups, recognised in the census. The groups differed wildly in terms of size. The Javanese community was the largest, followed by the Sundanese, Madurese, Minangkabau, Buginese, Batak and Balinese. Smaller ethnic groups include the Ambonese, Dayaks, Sasaks, Acehnese. And apart from these indigenous communities, there were other communities, which originated outside the archipelago (Chinese, Arabs, Indians, Europeans). Despite this mix, federalism was rejected by the nationalist movement, and the new Indonesian government declared Indonesia a unitary state in 1949. The model for nation building was necessarily civic, although leaders still sometimes evoked ethnic arguments for association:

The national state is only Indonesia in its entirety which existed in the time of Shrivijaya and Majapahit and which now too we must set up together. (Soekarno quoted in Drake 1993: 19)

Notwithstanding such rhetoric, Indonesians had no common history to draw on except for the experience of Dutch colonialism (Drake 1993); they had no common language; they did not subscribe to a common religion.

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4.4.3 The choice of a national language for Indonesia

The decision on the national language had been taken at the very start of the independence struggle. In a congress of nationalist youth organisations in 1928, Soekarno and others proclaimed their now cele- brated ‘Pledge of Youth’ which called for ‘one territory – Indonesia, one nation – Indonesian, one language – Bahasa Indonesia’. They made a politically astute choice of language. Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian) is closely related to Malay, the lingua franca of the seafaring commercial community that had been used throughout the archipelago for centuries (Ricklefs 1993). Thus it was a language rooted in the area and familiar to many. It was also a language with historical links to Islam, the religion of the majority in Indonesia. The Islamic courts of Sumatra had been Malay speaking (Johns 1996). At the same time, it was not the mother tongue of any of the dominant groups in the nationalist movement.

Malay also had a long history as the language of literacy in the archi- pelago. The earliest written records of the language are the seventh- century Buddhist inscriptions on Sumatra (Ferguson 1977). Certainly from AD 671 23 and perhaps even earlier Srivijaya was a centre of Buddhist scholarship and Malay the medium of learning (Hunter 1996). Ninth- century inscriptions show that the language was in early use on Java as a language of literacy. Muslim missionaries who arrived in the twelfth century adopted Malay as the language of their missionary work and, as areas converted, Malay came to be written in Arabic script. The new religion brought new ways of thinking, and much Malay vocabulary in theological, spiritual and legal domains clearly derives from Arabic. Malay was thus the language of prestige in the area for several centuries, and when Europeans came to the archipelago they found the language in widespread use in political and commercial lingua franca functions in almost every coastal region of the Indies (Ferguson 1977). Pigafetta, who accompanied Magellan, compiled a glossary of Malay words in the Moluccan islands for the use of explorers. The Dutch navigator, Huygen van Linschoten, wrote in 1614 that Malay was so prestigious among the peoples of this part of the Orient that for an educated man not to know it was like an educated Dutchman not knowing French (Kana 1994). In the following centuries, the Christian religious organisations that arrived in the wake of European adventurers and colonists used Malay as the main language for their missionary work.

After Dutch rule was established, it was usual policy to use Malay rather than Dutch in the education system for the various autochthonous groups, as this practice maintained the distance that the Dutch favoured

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in their colonial arrangements. This did not affect the majority of the population, however, since formal education was only for a select few. 24 In 1918, the Volksraad (People’s Council) formally recognised Malay as the second official language after Dutch. Under Japanese occupation it replaced Dutch completely as the medium of education in 1942, and in 1945 the Japanese accepted it as the official language of the colony. At independence, Malay was the evident choice as Indonesia’s national language. Its long history as regional lingua franca and administrative language alongside Dutch and its prestige as the language adopted and promoted by the independence movement made it the prime contender (Drake 1993). Its long association with Islam, the main religion of the area, gave it further status. Most importantly, its choice as official language of the state prevented interethnic competition for linguistic dominance, which would have resulted, most probably, in the imposi- tion of Javanese on the rest. Javanese speakers were by far the largest group in the country (47.8 per cent of population at independence), and one that attracted a high level of resentment for their perceived domi- nance in political and economic domains (Moeliono 1994). Javanese could never have played the role of single national language and mobi- lising force for unification. Malay, on the other hand, the mother tongue of only 5 per cent of the population, was conspicuously unattached to any politically salient ethnic community. In its Indonesian variety, Bahasa Indonesia, it was related quite transparently to the institutions of the state, yet at the same time retained enough historicity to stand as a unifying symbol with appeal to most Indonesians. Bahasa Indonesia was thus a perfect nation building language, able to add an iconic dimen- sion to its practical function (Errington 1998) and provoking few ethnic tensions. In the first decades of the new state the ideological importance of Indonesian as a symbol of unity and the basis for ethnic and cultural identity was enormous. Together with the national flag and Indonesia Raya, the national anthem, Indonesian became the symbol of national independence. In its practical function it enabled the political system, the army, the education system, the bureaucracy to function as national institutions and it acquired high status as elite groups used it increas- ingly among themselves and in their professional capacities (Drake 1993). Policymakers were optimistic that it would allow a community of communication within the new nation (Moeliono 1994).

4.4.4 Soekarto – the Old Order and language planning

Indonesia’s first president, Soekarno, saw his overriding priorities as national unity stability and development (Eldridge 2002). A short

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period of parliamentary democracy during the 1950s was attacked within national political circles as having failed to achieve either pros- perity or stability, and rebellions in West Sumatera and South Sulawesi appeared to threaten national integrity. Soekarno’s solution was to incorporate the army in government and administration, to return to the 1945 constitution and to institute his system of Guided Democracy, which curtailed the ability of different groups to present and defend their interests according to the traditions of liberal-pluralist democ- racy. The guiding principles underpinning the polity were enshrined in Pancasila , 25 a philosophy which prioritised the values of consensus and group unity. Decisions were to be resolved on the basis of delibera- tion and consensus. Competitive voting and the recognition of majority or minority interests would be avoided. An integralist discourse down- played individual and group rights and presented the nation as a large family. The result was a paternalist, monolithic system, allowing for no opposition (Eldridge 2002).

Language policy mirrored wider political developments. The spread of Indonesian as the language of state throughout Indonesia was to be one of the key means of achieving the national unity that was central to his vision. Indonesian was enshrined as the official language of the state by Article 36 of the constitution. It became the language designated for use in government, administration, the army and all education after the first three years. The former colonial language had no function in the new system and was not employed in domains where it would challenge Indonesian (Dardjowidjojo 1998). Other languages of Indonesia were guaranteed respect where they were ‘well preserved’ by the people (in a note appended to Article 36) but were to play a very limited and minor role in the public domain. 26 In 1972, the status of Indonesian was reaf- firmed by President’s Resolution 57 which gave further clarification on the domains of formal public life and state business where it had to be employed. The national language continued to have a dual function: it was both the language of literacy, modernisation and social mobility and the language of national identity and patriotism. It became the civic duty of speakers of languages other than Indonesian to become bilin- gual and societal arrangements ensured that it was to their advantage to do so. With this carrot and stick approach, the language spread. In 1971 40.5 per cent of Indonesians claimed to know Indonesian.

There had actually been a formal language planning agency for Indonesian since the Japanese occupation, the Indonesian Language Committee charged with creating terminology for science and tech- nology and writing a grammar of Modern Indonesian. The National

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Language Council, set up in 1947, built on this and became the Centre for the Development and Preservation of the National Language (PPPB) in 1975. Language planners saw themselves as having a key role in both nation building and modernisation: the language had to be standardised to maximise internal intelligibility and provide a medium for education; it had to develop in new lexical domains if it was to be a tool in the general drive for modernisation and development. Indonesian corpus planning was a classic top-down operation, typical of the technocratic 1960s and 1970s, and has kept some of that ethos to the present day.

The standard developed and promoted by the language planning agency was based on Johor-Riau Malay, the classical literary language, rather than on Bazaar Malay, the koine or lingua franca developed for use in intergroup communication. The result was diglossia. Indonesian became the ‘high’ form (H) used for state affairs, literature, education, administration and all written functions and Bazaar Malay continued as the ‘low’ form (L) used in the street, the market, in casual exchange and in popular entertainment. Thus, although the national language was related to a koine that many citizens either spoke as a first language 27 or had in their repertoire, that koine differed widely from the standard. In addition to the H/L difference there was much difference among L dialects. The diversity within the L language was to be expected given its development in several centres over several centuries. 28 The phono- logical, semantic and syntactical variation exhibited by speakers of the different varieties mean that some dialects listed as Malay were not easily intelligible to Standard Malay or Indonesian speakers. 29

The education system was charged with ensuring the spread of the newly standardised language, but in the first decades after independence the Indonesian education department simply did not have at its disposal the numbers of trained teachers with fluent standard Indonesian needed to implement its national language policy. 30 So before spreading the new standard Indonesian, the post-independence cohort of teachers had to acquire this standard themselves. Teachers acquiring the language at the same time as their pupils could not even draw on a bank of materials in the standard, since it took some time to rewrite all basic textbooks in Indonesian from the fourth year of schooling through to university.

In the face of these difficulties of introducing standard Indonesian into the classroom, little attention was given to the fact that children were studying through a second language (Rubin 1977). The preparation for Indonesian medium education for the children who did not speak it at home was only one hour per week in the year before they moved to Indonesian as the only medium of education. The education service had

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not decided whether it was teaching Indonesian as a second or foreign language, nor what the consequences of this would mean for pedagogy (Rubin 1977). Moreover, for those who did have some competence in Malay before entering the fourth grade, there were also problems. Pupils were not always aware of their language needs and deficiencies. Those who had acquired Bazaar Malay in an informal way regularly overesti- mated their competence in the Indonesian needed in school. They were not fully conscious of the functional differentiation 31 between the H and L varieties of the language and were resistant to attempts to plug what they could not recognise as a gap in their knowledge (Rubin 1977). Both foreign commentators like Rubin and Indonesian academics like Moeliono called for research and action.

4.4.5 Soeharto – the New Order and language planning

Soekarno fell from power after an alleged left-wing coup in 1965 which was put down by the army. A very bloody witch hunt ensued (Anderson and McVey 2009). General Soeharto assumed full presidential powers in 1967 and proclaimed a ‘New Order’ in Indonesian politics, which, although its main focus was economic rehabilitation and develop- ment, maintained the integralist aspects of Pancasila. The period of the centralised, military, bureaucratic state of Soeharto’s New Order was to last more than three decades and was accepted by the majority because it was accompanied by a steady increase in living standards fuelled in part by oil. 32 However, those who wanted political freedoms or who contested the highly centralised nature of the Indonesian state were to suffer. Soeharto’s regime imprisoned or killed large numbers of left-wing militants and regional activists.

During this period, the fragile coalition of different peoples, reli- gions and territories that formed Indonesia was only kept together by military force. The government’s policy of resettlement of people from crowded Java on less densely inhabited islands was seen as a melting pot strategy, but was often unwelcome to host groups and sometimes had to be enforced by the army. In many areas independence movements gathered strength, for example, in Aceh on Sumatra and on Irian Jaya/ Papua. East Timor was a particular case, a sovereign state that Soeharto had invaded in 1975 and annexed the following year. 33

Despite the corruption, nepotism 34 and human rights abuses of his government, Soeharto remained in power until 1998. His grip on power only loosened as the Asian financial and economic crisis hit Indonesia in mid-1997, accompanied by the worst drought in the region in 50 years. The rupiah plummeted, inflation soared and investors withdrew their

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capital, provoking a swift plunge into recession. Food shortages, bank- ruptcies and the suspension of Indonesian banking led to hardship and insecurity. The Indonesians protested and rioting gradually intensified, despite brutal police efforts to stem protest. After several months of clashes, students occupied the country’s parliament grounds, demanding the president’s resignation. On 21 May 1998, Soeharto bowed to the pressure and resigned, naming vice president Habibie as his successor.

4.4.5.1 Language planning in the Soeharto period

Indonesian continued to spread from 1965 to 1998. The decennial census reported approximately 50 per cent knowing the language in 1981 and 60.8 per cent in 1991. This is, of course, self-reporting, and so should be treated with some caution as the replies often showed as much about loyalty and identification as competence. More ‘objective’ monitors of competence may be the state exams for civil servants and for school leavers, which show improvement, although there are claims that scores here were manipulated to allow citizens through to higher education or employment (Sugiyono and Latief 2000).

There was also an issue in the statistics of what respondents actually meant by ‘Indonesian’. The planners found that the advantage of having a unifying national language based on a lingua franca that many already knew turned out to have drawbacks as well as advantages. Those who spoke one of the L varieties were often resistant to acquiring the stand- ardised version and even if they did not resist acquisition amalgamated features from their L variety with H forms.

Even when learners of standard Indonesian were not affected by the coexistence of related varieties, there were distinct regional differences. Given the size and spread of the population and their hundreds of different first languages, it was inevitable that when Indonesians learnt the national language in school there would be divergence linked to interference. Major regional differences can be traced to the regional languages. For example, Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese, Balinese, Toba Batak and Acehnese each provoked distinctive features of lexis and pronunciation (Moeliono 1994).

The valuing of variation within pluricentric languages that entered the discourse of language planning in the late twentieth century (Clyne 1984; Canagarajah 1999) did not make it to Indonesia. Belief in the goal of the unified, centralised state with a unified single language continued to frame the approach of language planners and Sugiyono and Latief (2000) report on how the state agencies set out to combat divergence from the norm. The tone is shown in the government’s

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campaign in 1988 urging Indonesians to speak ‘Good Indonesian’ and the 2000 planning document requiring ‘codeswitching to be stopped’ (Alwi 2000: 13).

A second problem stemmed from the way that Indonesia’s diglossia evolved to become societal cleavage not personal bilingualism. In the last decades of the twentieth century it became less usual for an individual to use the H form in one setting and the L form in another. Educated Indonesians started to use the H in an ever-increasing number of settings (Moeliono 1994; Fieldwork 2001, 2002). Thus the H form became the language of the elites, differentiated from the morphologically less complex language of the poor, Bazaar Malay, and from a hybrid variety developing among the young. 35 The work done by British scholars (e.g. Trudgill 1983) shows how speakers of English may be socially and economically disadvantaged when their dialect variety is different from English Received Pronunciation (RP), and that, in this situation, it may actually be better to be a Gaelic or Welsh speaker. Thus L speakers in Indonesian society were disadvantaged. Despite possessing knowledge of the national language, they were pigeonholed for speaking a non-pres- tigious variety and could be categorised as socially inferior with attitudes towards them more contemptuous and dismissive than towards mother speakers of major regional languages such as Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese, Balinese, Toba Batak and Acehnese whose Indonesian is learnt in the classroom (Kana 1994). This prejudice has not faded over the inter- vening decades as the comments in 2015 on President Joko Widodo’s thick provincial accent and provincial lexis show (Usman 2014).

4.4.5.2 Education in the Soeharto period

Under Soeharto, the education system remained highly centralised, the core curriculum being set in Jakarta. School participation rose steadily: primary level participation increased from 72 per cent in 1970 to 92 per cent in 1995; junior secondary participation rose from 17 per cent in 1970 to 51 per cent in 1995 (World Bank 2008 ). All state pupils took a national exam.

Islamic schools were brought under the umbrella of the Ministry of Education following the Presidential Decree 15/1972. Most madrasah thus became day schools funded by the state, which delivered the state curriculum for 70 per cent of the week and devoted the remaining time to Quranic study (Zuhdi 2005). The religious schools were centralised under the Ministry of Religious Affairs.

This ‘one size fits all’ approach extended to language. As the cities, particularly Jakarta, moved progressively to monolingualism, the

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education system adopted a pedagogy assuming Indonesian to be the first language of the pupils in the towns. However, in the countryside and on the periphery of the archipelago, Indonesian remained a second language and there were difficulties when Indonesian became a compul- sory subject from the first grade onwards and was increasingly used as a medium of instruction from the third grade (Fieldwork 2002). More Indonesian in the classroom meant a reduction in education through the mother tongue, which was widely seen as unwise in the bilingual literature in terms of child development (UNESCO 2005).

Overall the education system was in difficulties and external asses- sors held it to be failing (World Bank 1998). Low wages did not attract the best talent and many teachers were inadequately trained. The low levels of pay led to teachers taking other work to make a living wage and not always turning up to teach. The pupils were seen as having insuffi- cient contact hours, insufficient resources and an overloaded and unin- tegrated curriculum (World Bank 1998). School management was poor and sometimes corrupt with head teachers taking bribes from parents for favours and services. Millions of rupiah for building work was creamed off education budgets by central and local bureaucrats. School buildings remained in a state of disrepair or were repaired shoddily (Colmey and Liebhold 1999).

Unsurprisingly, Indonesian parents looked for other solutions. In the early 1990s many turned to what was being termed the National Plus school. The movement was a grass roots effort to raise the quality of education in Indonesia. The impetus for the first schools came mainly from Christians looking for religious values as well as academic excel- lence in schooling. The idea spread outside the Christian community and gradually the National Plus schools began to resemble the International School system in Indonesia particularly in the way they included English as a medium as well as a foreign language on their curriculum. In the capital the number of International Schools that were English medium or emphasised English language acquisition began to grow, although there were still legal restrictions on both foreign investment in schools and the medium of instruction.

4.4.5.3 The Chinese-Indonesians under Soeharto

At the end of the Soeharto period, the ethnic Chinese in the population were also fleeing the public school system but interestingly their solu- tion was sometimes different.

The Chinese population of Indonesia descends mainly from traders who settled in Indonesia and often married local women. The Chinese constituted (except in Borneo where they had come as indentured

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labourers) a middle class, well integrated into Indonesian structures. The linguistic shift from Chinese to Indonesian languages was more or less complete. The Chinese-Indonesians had been at ease with Soekarno’s civic nationalism but the increasingly ethnic tenor of Soeharto’s presi- dency had made life difficult for them. Despite the fact that the Chinese were a key part of the nation’s economy they were were marginal- ised and discriminated against in all social spheres: culture, language, politics, entrance to state-owned universities, and public service and public employment. There was enforced assimilation and pressure to Indonesianise names and convert to Islam. The teaching of Chinese was not permitted in the school system (Suryadinata 2008).

In the economic crisis at the end of the Soeharto period, the majority population directed their antagonism towards the comparative wealth of the Chinese-Indonesian commercial class and in 1998 attacked and looted their shops and businesses. The scale of the attacks and the clear, ethnically defined target was a blow to integration. One of the many outcomes of the riots has been an increasing tendency among the Chinese community to send their children to Mandarin classes and to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to study. There is a strong sense that as a group they should be forward planning for migration and be ready to move if necessary (Fieldwork 2001). This seems a logical deci- sion and very interesting to note in a period where English was so often seen as the medium to acquire for migration. 36

4.5 Post Soeharto – a period of reform

Indonesians’ expression of their dissatisfaction with the economic situ- ation widened to become general discontent with their political class, which they saw as steeped in corruption. Although Habibie started a programme of reforms, rioting continued and with it an increasingly harsh response from the government. Many died. In the elections in June 1999 Habibie was ousted and Abdurrachman Wahid of the National Awakening Party, PKB, became president. However, Wahid was unable to combat soaring inflation and rising unemployment; financial scan- dals scarred his administration. The IMF halted loans because of his lack of progress in tackling corruption. In 2001 Wahid was in turn forced to step down and Megawati Soekarnoputri, Soekarno’s daughter and leader of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, PDI-P, took over. Criticism continued, however, with Megawati widely regarded as a weak president. In the 2004 first ever direct presidential elections, a former general, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, replaced her. Yudhoyono’s two presidencies were difficult despite the improving economic situation

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since the Indonesians were hit by various natural catastrophes (earth- quakes, tsunami, landslides, volcanic eruptions and bird flu) and had to deal with the growing problem of home-grown Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. In 2014, Joko Widodo was elected president.

Despite these various difficulties, the first years of the millennium proved a period of radical reform. There was electoral and constitutional reform, decentralisation, a partial withdrawal by the military from its deep political involvement, the launch of an anti-corruption campaign, and the achievement of peace in two provinces that had been devas- tated by communal violence and regional rebellion (Crouch 2010)

First the nearly 30 year civil war in Aceh province was resolved. In the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, Sumatra became a disaster zone with hundreds of thousands of victims. The Islamist Free Aceh Movement had to find a means of working together with the government to deal with the emergency and a peace deal was brokered in 2005. Regional elections in 2006 brought the former separa- tist leader, Irwandi Yusuf, to power as governor. 37

Second President Megawati Soekarno granted West Papua, another province seeking to go its own way, limited autonomy in 2001. Since then there has been a significant, albeit imperfect, implementation of regional autonomy laws, and a reported decline in the levels of violence and human rights abuses (Tebay 2005).

After the anti-Chinese riots of 1998, the ethnic Chinese emigrated in large numbers, their proportion in the country falling sharply. 38 However with the optimism of the reforms, some returned and those who had lain low allowed themselves to become more visible. Many ethnic Chinese took advantage of the new democratic space to establish political parties, non-governmental organisations and action groups to fight for the abolition of discriminatory laws and defend their rights (Hoon 2008).

An International Monetary Fund bail-out helped the Indonesian economy recover from the 1997 financial crisis but the IMF imposed economic and political reform. This period, the Reformasi in Indonesian, was generally successful and after dipping to a low point in 1999 the economy began to grow steadily at a rate of 5 per cent to 6 per cent per annum in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Indonesian economic health was illustrated as the acronym BRIC, coined to describe the power of the emerging economies in Brazil, Russia, India and China, was extended to BRIIC to include Indonesia. Both the Yudhoyono and the Widodo presidencies focused on reducing poverty and inequality. In March 2015, the World Bank’s quarterly report on Indonesia gave a relatively positive assessment of the situation in Indonesia.

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4.5.1 Multilingualism

In this period of rising prosperity and reasonable optimism there are a number of linguistic behaviours that can be noted. First, the spread of the national language continues; the numbers of Indonesians reporting that they spoke the national language rose steadily with the decennial census reporting approximately 83.3 per cent of Indonesians able to use Indonesian in 2010. This correlates with rising school attendance. UNESCO statistics for 2008–12 show enrolment in primary at nearly 100 per cent and attendance at well over 90 per cent. Solutions have been found for some of the linguistic problems that dogged education in the early years of the Republic. There is no longer a shortage of teachers who have full mastery of Indonesian. Standardisation of the language has been completed and is accepted. Materials are available in Indonesian as Pusat Pengembangan Penataran Guru (PPPG) the initial and in-service teacher training for government schools worked on projects and published widely.

Second, the 2010 census revealed that Indonesian was not replacing the other languages of the archipelago. They remained vigorous and for most citizens the local language was still the family language. Table 4.1 shows that Indonesians maintain local languages to interact with their families, in their localities and in their provinces.

Table 4.1 Percentage distribution of most common language spoken at home by ethnic group

Ethnic Group Indonesian Own language Other languages

Javanese 16.33 77.36 6.32 Sundanese 13.31 83.70 2.99 Malay 18.95 76.23 4.82 Batak 52.56 43.11 4.33 Madurese 3.30 91.12 5.58 Betawi 72.57 25.41 2.02 Minangkabau 23.87 71.19 4.94 Buginese 32.15 59.14 8.71 Bantenese 10.32 33.13 56.54 Banjarese 10.85 86.13 3.02 Acehnese 14.67 84.17* 1.16 Balinese 6.29 92.69 1.02 Chinese 60.49** 24.07 15.44

Note: *Despite the history of conflict with Jakarta and the long struggle for independence it is interesting that there is no great difference in language behaviour between the Acehnese and the Indonesians in other provinces.

**Interestingly, the group that claimed to use the national language most in the family was the category ethnic Chinese, the group that had come under attack in the 1998 riots and the group from which there had been significant migration.

Source: Adapted from Indonesian Census 2010.

108 Language Policy and Language Planning

These figures suggest that many of the 83.3 per cent of Indonesians claiming to know Indonesian are only using it in formal settings such as education, media, contact with government departments and as a lingua franca to deal with the linguistic heterogeneity of Indonesia. In their majority Indonesians are bi- or multilingual and have not moved to monolingualism and exclusive use of the national language.

Their language of home, friendship and neighbourhood remains the local language. There is perhaps even a swing back towards the heritage languages. Many Javanese, for example, displayed great emotional commitment and predisposition to Indonesian as an indication of their support for the Republic. To have their children acquire it and use it properly was a commitment to make independence work. The Javanese, a high status group which hitherto had been literate in one of the pres- tige languages of the archipelago, were willing for their children to be educated in the new medium, in an unusual forfeiture of privilege. 39 In the twenty-first century there seems to be some regret that the previous generation made that decision and an indication of a return to Javanese literacy 40 (Errington 1998). Warih (2001) expresses a growing band of opinion when he calls for Javanese to be taught as a subject within the education system to ensure that the younger generation are literate in the language, and for more newspapers and magazines to be published in Javanese.

In other areas there are also calls for a return to the ancestral language and one of the telling developments is the change of attitude to be noted. Populations that had reported feelings of shame when they could not express themselves in the national language, now are more likely to express pride in their ancestral language (Miehle 2001). The 1999 Act No. 22 on the autonomy of the regions gives them the authority to finance the preservation and development of their languages. This was previously the remit of the PPPB, which caused if not a conflict of inter- ests, then certainly a conflict of agendas. Now regions have the right to standardise and then to introduce into the curriculum the languages that they choose to support and promote (Mahsun 2000). Thus the cate- gory of local languages that were eradicated in other nation building settings may be maintained in Indonesia

Third, there was more English on the curriculum. The 1997 economic crisis had graphically illustrated the vulnerability of domestic markets and the power of external influences. Government policymakers who had seen the spread of Indonesian as key to achieving economic and technological advance now rethought their strategy and decided that the needs of the knowledge economy meant that Indonesians should

Nation Building in the Wake of Colonialism 109

also acquire competence in English (Huda 2000). This was a challenge for the state system. The highly centralised education system which foregrounded national unity and equality of educational experience for all students did not allow for differentiation and so English became an obligatory subject for all students at Junior High and above. To grad- uate from Junior High students had to be able ‘to demonstrate skills in listening, reading, speaking, and writing in simple ... . English’. There were problems with this. Now it was teachers’ competence in English that was deemed a stumbling block to effective teaching and learning (Fieldwork at PPPG 2000; Hamied 2000). Problems of motivation among students was another. A proportion of Indonesian students did not see adequate reason to acquire English. In many of the islands they did not have regular contact with native speakers and did not see that their future roles would require knowledge of English as a lingua franca. The obligatory status of English thus led to a high level of disaffection among certain groups of students who were already having to master one second language in education and were now being forced to learn another (PPPG 2000). 41 In the early years of the English for all policy, the teacher training agency reported that:

[m]ost high school graduates are unable to communicate in English although we have been teaching them for six years. (Soejoto 2000)

However, in the cities and within the private school sector attitudes were different. Middle-class parents, anxious that their children be in a position to participate in the increasingly transnational nature of much economic activity, demanded more English as both subject and medium. They wanted to prepare their children linguistically for roles, not neces- sarily at national levels of activity but at global. The restrictions that had been placed in the early Republic on education through a foreign language were removed. Law No. 20/2003 on National Education allowed foreign entities to invest in Indonesian education, albeit in conjunction with local institutions. In the private schools in the big cities pupils were taking both English language classes and classes through the medium of English.

This prepared students for higher education where much was in English. In Indonesia 80 per cent of universities were now private. The Higher Education Act No.12/2012 July 2012 promoted the partnership between Indonesian institutions and foreign universities and relation- ships have mainly been with Anglophone countries. The increase in private education underscores the deep class divisions already apparent

110 Language Policy and Language Planning

in Indonesia, and the children of the elite group are increasingly differ- entiated from the rest by their language repertoire, which includes good English skills as well as knowledge of the national language.

Indonesia has never been an egalitarian society but, after independ- ence, linguistic divisions were being erased. Less economically privi- leged groups embraced Indonesian as the language of opportunity, which could contribute to their social mobility. Increasingly mastery of the national language has become a necessary but not sufficient skill for employment. It was those acquiring high levels of competence in English who obtained the most prestigious and well paid jobs. Private companies required English language qualifications before considering a candidate (Sugiyono and Latief 2000). Now many feel that the linguistic capital that they believed they were acquiring is worth less to them than in past decades and this may fuel some disaffection. Laitin (1999) has noted how alienated people feel, when competition for the best jobs goes to those who are linguistically advantaged. Since the economic crises of the late 1990s an English-speaking elite in Jakarta has increasingly turned outwards to grasp opportunity. In such a context, differentiation in linguistic skills and repertoire works against vertical integration and causes resentment.

In conclusion to this section we might ask how language repertoires will develop in the situation where Indonesians have not relinquished their ancestral languages, elites have embraced English and, at the same time, Indonesian is spreading as the responses in the census indicate. The respected Indonesian scholar, Anton Moeliono, addressed this problem two decades ago. He suggested then that Indonesian was under attack from the instrumental advantage conferred by English. At the same time, he observed that the integrational pull of the various vernac- ulars of the Indonesian archipelago has not waned as the nation builders hoped:

The lack of motivation to master the national language adequately, apart from the competitive influence of English, is related to language attitudes of people towards Indonesian We can say that people gener- ally have a higher level of emotional commitment towards their mother tongue than towards Indonesian. (Moeliono 1994: 211)

His analysis still holds true. And he raises a set of interesting questions. If Indonesians see their local language as the medium for intimacy, friendship, local solidarity, local employment – what is the role for the national language as a language of identity? If Indonesians see English

Nation Building in the Wake of Colonialism 111

as a language which gives access to the flows, networks and interac- tions of a globalising world and qualification for the most prestigious jobs – what is the role for the national language as a language of social mobility? If Indonesians maintain linguistic repertoires which include local language, national language and international language this will be an unusual development. Past experience suggests that groups do not maintain two languages for wider communication nor two languages for in-group interaction and identity.

4.6 Conclusions

The Tanzanians and the Indonesians have much in common. The insti- tution of a national language top-down has been moderately successful. Census data shows a growing number of Indonesians claiming to know their national language. Education policy to continue Swahilisation has been welcomed by many in Tanzania. However, the national language has not come to play exactly the same role that it did in European nation building. Although Kiswahili and Indonesian have become languages of social mobility, in the classic manner of nation building, and a Tanzanian or an Indonesian could not progress far without knowing them, they have turned out to be necessary rather than sufficient linguistic skills. The language repertoire necessary for social promotion has to include English since this language plays a major role in education and elite employment in both states.

The context has changed. In the past nation building took place within national boundaries and in relative isolation. In the late twenti- eth-century nation building was happening in tandem with increasing globalisation. Tanzanians and Indonesians have thus been affected by increasing global interconnectedness in their internal economics and politics. They have also been influenced by global networks as they attempted to construct their national communities of communication.

So it is perhaps time to explore the phenomenon of globalisation and enquire what evidence there is to suggest that the nation state system has been irrevocably altered by the processes, networks and practices of a globalising world.