Postcoloniality and English: Exploring Language Policy and the Politics of Development in Tanzania

373TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 36, No. 3, Autumn 2002

Postcoloniality and English:Exploring Language Policy and thePolitics of Development in TanzaniaFRANCES VAVRUSTeachers College, Columbia UniversityNew York City, New York, United States

This article presents a case study of educational language policy inpostcolonial Tanzania. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative datacollected between 1996 and 2001 on Mount Kilimanjaro, this longitudi-nal study of secondary school students’ lives after graduation sheds lighton the relationship between language and development. The profoundsense of economic hardship among these graduates was tempered bytheir optimism that their knowledge of English would eventually helpthem find employment or opportunities for further education. Currenteconomic conditions in the country appear to play an important role inshaping secondary school graduates’ identity as educated persons whoknow English and who can find ways to cope under these challengingcircumstances. The use of the term postcoloniality throughout the articleemphasizes the economic domain of everyday life in present-dayTanzania, but an examination of the cultural dimensions of students’support for English reveals the interconnection between the materialistand nonmaterialist aspects of language policy. The study has implica-tions for ESL practitioners and for applied linguistics research in theareas of bilingualism, world Englishes, and language policy inpostcolonial countries.

The presence of English language teaching in development contextsprompts TESOL professionals to probe the relationship between

language and development. Research on bilingualism investigates theinterdependence of language, cognition, and individual development aswell as studying societal development through bilingual education incommunities where the language used in the schools is distinct from thatin other social settings (Cummins, 2000; Cummins & Swain, 1986;Dicker, 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas, 1981). Research on world Englisheslooks at the link between language and individual development amongnonnative English speakers, especially in the former British colonies,

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where English has undergone a complex process of linguistic nativizationleading to the creation of new Englishes (Kachru, 1983, 1990; Lowenberg,2000; Pakir, 1991). Additionally, the study of world Englishes highlightsthe potential for English to promote societal development throughenhanced communication in an increasingly transnational world (Kachru,1986) and simultaneously signals the fact that English remains one of themost enduring vestiges of colonialism (Canagarajah, 1999; Pennycook,1998, 2000; Phillipson, 1992; Tollefson, 2000).

This article addresses the issues of bilingualism and the spread ofEnglish in sub-Saharan Africa, but its focus is on a third dimension ofapplied linguistics research—educational language policy—in the formerBritish colony of Tanzania. With 90% of the population identifyingthemselves as bilingual in a vernacular language and in the nationallanguage, Swahili, Tanzania serves as an ideal site to explore issues ofsocietal bilingualism (Rubagumya, 1990). Because Swahili and Englishare official languages and are the only ones used in the education system,the literature on world Englishes in “Outer Circle” countries (Kachru,1988, p. 221) helps explain the desire among Tanzanian youth to learnEnglish for intranational and transnational communication. However,the research on language policy in postcolonial societies is the mostcentral to this study because of its emphasis on the sociopoliticaldimensions of language in development that concern both criticalapplied linguists and critical development scholars.1 From a criticalperspective, the political dimensions of language policy are as importantas its linguistic aspects because language can either impede or promotedevelopment by changing people’s vulnerability to forces they do notcontrol (Markee, 1997). The notion of reducing vulnerability is centralto my definition of development and to my analysis of the support forEnglish among Tanzanian youth during a period of economic uncertainty.

My interest in the socioeconomic conditions that influence languagepolicy is revealed by my choice of the term postcoloniality for the title of

1 The term critical has been popularized by the work of scholars in the field of educationwhose research and teaching advocate for social change (Apple, 1990, 1993; Giroux, 1988;McLaren, 1989). TESOL Quarterly devoted a special-topic issue (Pennycook, 1999a) to thedevelopment of a critical theory approach to language teaching in the hope that it will “help usunderstand in much more complex ways the contexts in which TESOL occurs and offer theprospect of change” (Pennycook, 1999b, p. 346). The work of two groups of scholars indevelopment studies shares with critical applied linguistics the goal of effecting social change byanalyzing relations of power: (a) Marxist and neo-Marxist researchers who examine theeconomic dependency of Third World countries in the world capitalist system (Cardoso &Faletto, 1979; Frank, 1967; Wallerstein, 1982) and (b) researchers working within a post-structuralist paradigm that interrogates power/knowledge relations in development programsdesigned to alleviate inequalities based on gender, race, or socioeconomic status (Escobar,1995; Ferguson, 1994; Sachs, 1992).

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this article. I ascribe my use of the term to Pennycook (1998), whodefines it as the “material state after the end of colonialism” (p. 39).According to Pennycook, postcoloniality differs from postcolonialism inthat the former examines the lasting impact of the “economic depriva-tions of colonialism” (p. 39) whereas the latter explores the cultural andideological aspects of colonialism that continue to influence the present.Pennycook does not propose a rigid distinction between the materialand nonmaterial dimensions of colonialism; instead, he suggests thatculture, ideology, and economics are interconnected without one domainbeing prior to or constituted by the others. My analysis of educationallanguage policy in this article emphasizes the material aspects ofeveryday life in present-day Tanzania, focusing on the use of English andSwahili in school life, teachers’ perspectives on education, and students’lives after graduation. These material conditions are intertwined with thenational economic conditions as well as with beliefs about language indevelopment in postcolonial Tanzania.

BACKGROUND

Language, Education, and Economic History in Tanzania

The United Republic of Tanzania, formed in 1964 with the union ofTanganyika and the island of Zanzibar, is made up of 20 regions on themainland and 5 regions on the islands (Bureau of Statistics, 1997).Although these regions consist of many different ethnic groups withdistinct mother tongues, Swahili serves as the language of intranationalcommunication because it is spoken by the vast majority of the popula-tion (Rubagumya, 1990). Efforts to standardize Swahili began during theBritish colonial period, which lasted from 1920 until independence in1961. The Inter-Territorial Language Committee, formed in 1930, stan-dardized Swahili orthography throughout British East Africa (whichincluded Kenya and Uganda) by publishing textbooks and dictionaries(Whiteley, 1969). The greatest boost to the promotion of Swahili as thenational language occurred in 1954 with the formation of TanganyikaAfrican National Union (TANU), the party that would eventually governthe country after independence. TANU and its successor, the ChamaCha Mapinduzi (Party of the Revolution), have been in power since 1961and have consistently supported the use of Swahili as the language ofnational unity by making it the language for official government businessand for instruction in primary school (Abdulaziz, 1980; Mwansoko,1990).

The use of Swahili in the education system was closely tied to the 1967policy of Education for Self-Reliance (ESR), which was part of the

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country’s socialist development program known as ujamaa and pro-moted by Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere. Ujamaa was explicitlyopposed to the Western neoliberal model of development that privilegesurban development, free markets, and production for export (Gillette,1977; cf. Apple, 2000; Mundy, 1998). The primary goal of ujamaa wasrural development because the vast majority of the population livedoutside the urban centers and made their living through agriculturalproduction. The policy of ESR was intended to complement thiscomprehensive rural development strategy by emphasizing primaryschooling for the masses rather than secondary and tertiary educationfor the elite. During the period of ujamaa, Swahili was seen as a symbol ofnonalignment with the West, adult literacy rates reached the highestlevels in Africa, and the achievement of universal primary education wasregarded as a sign of success for the new government’s policy of self-reliance (Brock-Utne, 2000).

Although Nyerere’s socialist views were radically different from thecurrent neoliberal ideology of development discussed below, he, too,placed great faith in the power of formal education to transform thecountry from an underdeveloped nation to a developed socialist state.His belief that primary schooling could instill unity and cooperation atthe village level has been described by some as “modernization bytraditionalization” (Mushi, cited in Hyden, 1980, p. 98). Yet “tradition-alization” did not supersede pragmatism in all aspects of education, asthe strong nationalist ideals of ujamaa did not lead to a change in the useof English as the medium of instruction at the secondary and tertiarylevels. Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, the government madedeclarations about its intention to use Swahili at all grade levels, but bythe early 1980s the plan to change the policy was all but abandoned(Rugemalira, Rubagumya, Kapinga, Lwaitama, & Tetlow, 1990). The1982 Presidential Commission on Education, for example, stated clearlythat “English will be the medium of education at post primary levelswhere the teaching of Kiswahili as a subject will also be strengthened”(Ministry of Education, 1984, p. 21).

The most recent comprehensive education policy, published in 1995,reconfirmed the use of English at the secondary level and increased thenumber of years in which primary students would study English, mandat-ing that students start in the first year instead of the third. This policydocument did not explain the rationale for the increase in the numberof English periods, but it made clear that English would be a schoolsubject at the primary level and the medium of instruction in secondaryschools. The document also stated that the economic restructuringunderway in Tanzania since the mid-1980s, known as structural adjust-ment, necessitated the privatization of schooling by allowing morenongovernmental organizations to manage schools (Ministry of Educa-


tion and Culture [MOEC], 1995). Another consequence of structuraladjustment was that students’ families began to pay fees and otherschool-related costs that were once paid by the government (Brock-Utne,2000; Maarifa ni Ufunguo, 2001). Because of the negative effect onschool enrollment (Brock-Utne, 2000; World Bank, 1999), the govern-ment reconsidered this policy, abolishing school fees in 2002 at theprimary level but not at the secondary and tertiary levels (Kabale, 2001).

Theoretical Dimensions of Postcoloniality

Language and the Production of Human Capital

The privatization of schooling in Tanzania has led to the proliferationof private secondary and tertiary institutions and to the intensification ofthe national English-only language policy for postprimary schooling.Many private schools now advertise themselves as English-medium orinternational schools to attract fee-paying students, and some of theseschools have opted out of the national secondary school examinationprocess by offering the Cambridge International General Certificate ofSecondary Education instead. On a recent visit to two private schools onMount Kilimanjaro, I was surprised to see several students wearing signssuggesting they had misbehaved in some way. These placards werereminiscent of the moving description of colonial schooling by Kenyanwriter Ngu ]gı ] wa Thiong’o (1986), who wrote about the commonpractice of children being forced to wear signs with “I am stupid” onthem if they spoke Gı ]ku ]yu] in school (p. 11). At one prestigious privateschool, a girl was wearing a burlap vest with the words “Shame Upon Me”written on it, and at another private institution a student had a woodensign on her chest announcing that she would not speak Swahili. When Iasked a teacher at the secondary school about the student’s offense, shetold me that the girl had spoken in Swahili during class and was beingpunished for violating the school’s policy of using English only on schoolgrounds. Although tempted to point out that we were conversing inSwahili, I inquired instead about the reason for such a strict languagecode on campus. The response was a familiar one: “Educated girls knowEnglish.” The teacher believed that the school’s strict adherence to thegovernment’s educational language policy would improve her students’proficiency in English and provide them with advantages when theybegan searching for jobs in an era of high unemployment.

This teacher’s views about language and individual development weretroubling to me as a former secondary school teacher in Kilimanjaro whohad watched her students struggle in their classes because of theirlimited communicative competence in the medium of instruction,

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English. Moreover, the teacher’s remark highlighted the contradiction inmy roles as an English teacher and as a critic of the imposition of Englishthrough international aid programs that is described so forcefully inPhillipson’s (1992) Linguistic Imperialism. Perhaps most disturbing to meabout this teacher’s equating a knowledge of English with being edu-cated was its apparent endorsement of the neoliberal economic theory ofhuman capital, which challenges critical theories of development. Ac-cording to its advocates, human capital theory has “no genuine rival”(World Bank, 1995, p. 21) in the field of development. Formulatedseveral decades ago by Schultz (1971), the theory contends that eco-nomic growth depends on the health and education of the labor force—human capital—in addition to improvements in a country’s physicalcapital, such as roads, dams, and factories. From this perspective,education not only increases productivity by teaching young people newskills but also promotes development through the inculcation of so-called modern attitudes about work, education, fertility, and health. TheWorld Bank, one of the most important institutions shaping educationalpolicy in the Third World, uses human capital theory to explain therationale for promoting education within its overall program of eco-nomic development there.2 A recent World Bank publication explainsthe relationship between human capital development and neoliberaleconomic policies:

The emerging consensus favors encouraging private sector initiatives, reduc-ing the presence of government, and allowing market forces to operate; inshort, a market-oriented approach to development . . . . Hence, investment in thehealth, nutrition, and education of the people has high returns for society. Itraises their productivity, decreases the number of days they are ill andprolongs their potential working lives. (Psacharopoulos & Nguyen, 1997,p. 4)

It is certainly difficult to imagine individual and societal developmenttaking place in the absence of a healthy, well-educated populace, butcritical scholars are quick to point out that the presence of skilled humancapital does not guarantee economic prosperity for Third World coun-tries. Furthermore, they contend that a country like Tanzania may investheavily in human capital development, but the international capitalistsystem operates to maintain the country’s peripheral status and perpetu-ate its state of underdevelopment (Frank, 1967; Rodney, 1982). Other

2 Although the term Third World is often used today as a synonym for underdeveloped, it wasfirst used by representatives at the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia to express theircountries’ nonalignment with either capitalist or socialist world powers. I use it in Young’s(1990) suggested dual sense of “a positive term of radical critique even if it also necessarilysignals its negative sense of economic dependency and exploitation” (p. 12).


critical researchers argue that education reproduces intranational socialinequalities rather than alleviating them because certain forms ofknowledge acquired in school, such as English, function as symboliccapital to which only a minority has access (Bourdieu, 1991; Bowles &Gintis, 1976; Fuller, 1991).

Language and the Formation of Identity

Despite their popularity, human capital and critical developmenttheories have been criticized for their common assumption that “people’slives are determined by economic relations” (Pennycook, 1994, p. 55).Critical applied linguistics research on identity formation can helpremedy this problem by showing how one can explore the influence ofsocial, economic, and political relations on the lives of people in anondeterministic fashion. Norton’s (1997) definition of identity pro-vides a useful point of departure: “I use the term identity to refer to howpeople understand their relationship to the world, how that relationshipis constructed across time and space, and how people understand theirpossibilities for the future” (p. 410). Central to Norton’s work is the viewthat identity is dynamic, that it is affected but not determined by changesin social and economic conditions, and that it derives largely from animagined view of one’s future place in the social world. This perspectiveon identity construction as a fundamentally social process is shared byMorgan (1997) and Toohey (2000), whose research also explores thesociopolitical dimensions of language learning without reducing class-room participation to examples of structural relations.

Canagarajah’s (1993) study of English and identity among Tamilstudents at the University of Jaffna is particularly relevant to this researchon secondary school students’ identity in Tanzania. He contends that thestudents’ loss of interest in the ESOL course he studied came frommultiple sources, including opposition to the textbook and pedagogicalpractices, and also from their adherence to “the promise of social andeconomic advancement English holds” (pp. 621–622). On the one hand,the students felt that their English lessons posed a threat to Tamil culturebecause they drew on Western culture and communicative pedagogyrather than use the grammar-based approach some students preferred;on the other hand, there was a recognition in the class that Englishmight prevent the spread of Sinhala nationalism and might assist thestudents in seeking refugee status in the West. This tension surroundinglanguage and identity in Sri Lanka resembles the current situation facedtoday by Tanzanian secondary school graduates, who are also aware ofthe cultural costs that may result from using English in school and thepotential benefits that English may bring in creating job opportunities at

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home and possibilities for study abroad. These imagined future sce-narios for Tanzanian youth represent the complex and at times contra-dictory relationship among language, identity, and the current materialconditions of life in the country.

THE RESEARCH PROCESS

I conducted the research for this study during three different periodsof fieldwork between 1996 and 2001. The project began when I engagedin a year of participant-observation research at Njema Secondary School3

on Mount Kilimanjaro in northern Tanzania. The school had approxi-mately 300 male students, both boarding and day pupils, but all 45 girlswere day students in 1996 because a girls’ dormitory did not open until2 years later. Njema has a history dating back to 1926, and for the past 15years it has been managed by the Evangelical Lutheran Church ofTanzania, which supervises many secondary schools for Lutheran andnon-Lutheran students in northern Tanzania and elsewhere in thecountry.

During the 1996 school year, I taught Form 2 English (the second yearof high school) and communication skills (English writing, speaking,and listening skills) for Forms 5 and 6, a 2-year program of advancedsecondary schooling that is roughly equivalent to the first year of collegein the United States. In my role as teacher, I prepared the year-longsyllabus based on the national curriculum, attended staff meetings andschool assemblies, supervised examinations, helped organize graduationceremonies, and served as faculty coordinator for the Girls’ Club. In myrole as researcher, I made formal and informal observations of classes atNjema in all subjects and at all grade levels, and I observed classes andheld focus groups with students at four other secondary schools in theKilimanjaro region. Although participant observation was the primarymethod of data collection, I also interviewed students, teachers, princi-pals, and parents about their views on schooling. Some students andteachers met with me again during focus groups toward the end of thefieldwork year to discuss the themes that had emerged from earlierobservations and interviews.

I also developed a questionnaire and essay task that involved studentsat Njema and at a neighboring coeducational school. Two hundred andeighty-two students completed the questionnaire about their family’seducational history and socioeconomic status, and they wrote essays inresponse to five questions addressing themes that were central to the

3 The names of the school and all participants are pseudonyms.


fieldwork. The students who completed the questionnaire in 1996 wereasked to write down their home address if they wanted to participate inthe research project in the future. In the summer of 2000, I returned toTanzania and sent a second questionnaire and essay task to 225 of theoriginal 282 students in the study. Fewer students participated in the2000 study because some had not provided explicit written consent forme to contact them in the future, and others had given the address oftheir former secondary school rather than a home address. This secondquestionnaire included questions about level of completed schooling,current employment, marriage, and children, and the essay asked theseformer students to write about the important events that had occurred intheir lives since 1996. They were also asked to indicate whether theywanted to continue with the research project by participating in a focus-group discussion the following year—2001—when I would be in Tanza-nia again. All of the 125 people who returned the questionnaire agreedto continue with the longitudinal study, so the 82 young women and menwho currently lived in the Kilimanjaro Region were invited to attend oneof four focus groups during June 2–10, 2001. A total of 20 peopleattended these four sessions, each of which lasted 11/2–21/2 hours. Thetopics for discussion came from the essays written the previous year,which included the reasons for limited employment opportunities forsecondary school graduates, the impact of HIV/AIDS on education, andEnglish as the medium of instruction in the Tanzanian educationalsystem. The questions discussed during the focus groups varied, but thefollowing five were covered at all the session: (a) What benefits, if any,have you gotten from completing secondary school? (b) Which languagewould you have preferred for your secondary school studies, English orSwahili? (c) What is the meaning of the phrase “I am at home and haveto work,” which appeared in many of the essays written last year? (c)What are young people doing about their sexual relationships given thecurrent problem of AIDS? and (e) In what ways is life better today whencompared to 1996 and in what ways is life worse?

These multiple methods—participant observation, interviews, focus-group discussions, and survey research—help capture the multifacetedprocesses and relationships that affect language and development incontemporary Tanzania.

EDUCATION IN THE KILIMANJARO REGION

Statistical Portrait

The Kilimanjaro Region is considered by many to be in the vanguardof development in Tanzania. It has very high primary school enrollment

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rates compared with the rest of the country, and it has the largestnumber of public and private secondary schools of any region inTanzania (MOEC, 1996). The strong support for schooling in Kilimanjarobegan over 100 years ago, when Chagga chiefs on the mountain vied witheach other for missionaries who would set up schools, churches, anddispensaries in their communities (Bennett, 1964; Rogers, 1972). Withthe introduction of coffee as a cash crop in the late 19th century, manyChagga communities had money to invest in the building of roads andclinics. Education, however, received the bulk of these new funds:

By far the most important cash investment the Chagga made in the new wayswas in paying school fees for their children. The demands for education onKilimanjaro grew from early mission times and a generation later becameunremitting. (Moore, 1986, p. 129)

The current education statistics for Kilimanjaro look good relative to theother regions in the country, but schooling has been greatly affected bythe precipitous drop in the export price of Kilimanjaro coffee in globalcommodity markets. From the time this study began in 1996 to the timeof writing, the price that farmers receive for their crop fell by 50%(Maarifa Ni Ufunguo, 2001; Oxfam International, 2001), and fees atprivate secondary schools more than doubled (Vavrus, 2001). As onefarmer in Kilimanjaro put it,

What has happened to the price of coffee is a disaster. Years back, when coffeeprices were good, we could afford to send our children to school. Now we aretaking our children out of school because we cannot afford the fees. (OxfamInternational, 2001, n.p.)

Similar sentiments were expressed to me by parents living near NjemaSecondary School who participated in eight focus groups held in June2001. Not only had the drop in coffee prices affected their ability to payfor schooling, but the costs of fertilizer and pesticides to care for theircoffee trees had also risen dramatically in recent years (Maarifa NiUfunguo, 2001). In short, many families are finding it more difficult tosend their children to school, yet this has only heightened their desirefor their children to learn English because of the promise of advance-ment the language holds.

Njema Secondary School: English and Swahili in School Life

The sign on the door of the English Department at Njema SecondarySchool read “Speak English Only,” and Mr. Mwenge, the most seniorteacher at the school in 1996, used only English with students who came


to speak with him. He was a member of the small cadre of young menwho had attended postprimary school (Standards 5–10) during theBritish colonial period in Tanzania. He went on to study in the UnitedKingdom in the late 1950s and eventually received a bachelor’s degree inEnglish. Although Mr. Mwenge had many complaints about the harshcolonial school system, he had greater disdain for the current educa-tional system, in which teachers and students do not take schoolingseriously. Mr. Mwenge, like most of the teachers I interviewed, laid theblame for this situation on the poor economic conditions in Tanzaniasince the mid-1980s:

The economy of the country plays a very big role in helping the administra-tion of the school and the other developments, you know, of the academicinstitutions of the country. And if the teaching materials are not there, ifthere are no books and the buildings begin to decay, all of these thingscontribute to the indiscipline of the students. The economy began to runbadly in this country. In those days, the economy wasn’t bad. Now we feeleconomically that we are very poor, and we cannot afford to make ourinstitutions look attractive in such a way as to attract students. We cannotmake the students believe that whatever they are learning is good for theirlives. (interview, November 7, 1996)

Mr. Mwenge’s Form 4 English classes were the only ones at the lower-secondary level (Forms 1–4) in which I never heard Swahili in use,except in classes taught by visiting British or U.S. teachers who did notknow Swahili. In many classrooms, especially in bookkeeping andscience classes for Forms 1 and 2, teachers used Swahili to clarifyterminology and explain concepts, and students used it when askingquestions of their teachers and classmates. In several classes at Njemaand at other secondary schools I visited, Swahili, rather than English, wasthe necessary medium of instruction because the students or teacher—or both—did not have the requisite proficiency in English. The heavyreliance on Swahili during the first 2 years of secondary school suggeststhat teachers are well aware of the benefits of gradually introducingEnglish as the medium of instruction, which is a position consistent withthe recent research on bilingualism by Skutnabb-Kangas (2000a, 2000b).

Mr. Mwenge, however, was completely fluent in English and felt duty-bound to uphold the official English-only language policy for the benefitof his students, who would soon be taking the national Form 4 examina-tion in English. If Mr. Mwenge heard students whispering to each otherin Swahili, he would shout at them, “Use English only!” He was also oneof the minority of teachers at the school who had his students work insmall groups, and he insisted that they discuss the reading passages inEnglish to give them a chance to improve their oral language skills.

Miss Mosha, a young English teacher at Njema Secondary School,

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provides a far more typical picture of teachers’ use of English and Swahiliin school. Although Miss Mosha greeted Mr. Mwenge and me in Englishwhenever we were in the English department office, she and I alwaysexchanged greetings in Swahili when we met off the school grounds andwhen we discussed course content in the office. Miss Mosha expected herForm 3 students to speak with her in English on campus, but they wouldfrequently be conversing in Swahili when I would walk past her class-room. Miss Mosha did not seem comfortable talking with me in English,and she used a lecture format in the classroom that left little time forstudents to speak in English among themselves or with her. Instead,English lessons consisted primarily of question-and-answer sessions aboutthe class readers or presentations of grammar topics from the nationalcurriculum, as exemplified in the following vignette:

Miss Mosha and I arrive for her third-period class. She asks one of the boys toerase the board even though one of the girls is still writing down notes fromthe previous class. Two other girls bring in a desk for themselves from theclassroom next door, while a boy goes to get a chair for me because there areno extra ones in this class of 36 students. Miss Mosha begins writingENGLISH/Continuous Aspect (Progressive Aspect) on the board as a few moreboys walk in. She then writes He, She, It Examples and asks for sentences fromthe students. A girl gives an example and then a boy gives one. “Moreexamples?” asks Miss Mosha. Another boy says, “He is playing football,” butMiss Mosha doesn’t hear him properly so he repeats the sentence. “SpeakEnglish,” she says to him and then asks the students to come up withexamples using we, you, and they. After a few examples with plural subjects,Miss Mosha asks, “Any problems so far?” The students respond in unison,“No.”

Twenty minutes into the lesson, Miss Mosha erases part of the board andwrites on it Past Continuous Tense. She then says to the class, “Yes, let’s go onwith another tense. It is past continuous tense. I can see you writing. You mustbe sharp.” Miss Mosha provides a few example sentences: “She was eatingfood. He was playing football . . . . Can you add more examples as far assecond person plural, singular? James?” James, one of the best students inForm 3, responds to her question about the second person with “They weregoing to church.” Miss Mosha indicates that this is correct and then calls onseveral other students. After a few more examples from students, Miss Moshareads a definition of the past continuous tense from her notes and gives anexample of something that was happening during the night. She thenexplains in Swahili the use of the past continuous and asks the girls in classwhether they have any problems. The girls remain silent, but Miss Moshareplies with “no problems” and tells the students they have 6 minutes tocomplete the seven fill-in-the-blank exercises she is going to write on theboard. After writing the exercises, Miss Mosha walks up and down the rows ofstudents and looks at their answers. She slaps the back of one male studentwho has made a mistake and tries to pull the ear of another, but he puts his


hand over his ear to guard it. Miss Mosha finally dislodges his hand and pullshis ear, and then she takes another boy’s notebook, asks, “You can say ‘Theywas’?”, and then pulls his ear, too, because of his mistake. She asks anotherboy in Swahili who taught him English because he wrote “They will be eating”to complete a sentence that required the past continuous. The pattern ofchecking notebooks and pulling boys’ ears continues until the bell rings. MissMosha spends a few minutes at the end of class looking at the girls’ notebooksand talking to them in Swahili about their mistakes rather than using corporalpunishment with them. (participant observation, February 29, 1996)

When I returned to Njema in 2001, I learned that both Mr. Mwengeand Miss Mosha had left the school, the former retiring after many yearsof service and the latter getting married to someone who lived far fromthe school. I also learned in the focus-group discussions with formerNjema students that they greatly respected Miss Mosha’s proficiency inEnglish. To my surprise, the students said that Miss Mosha had instilledin them a love of English and served as a model of an educatedTanzanian woman. She knew English well, they told me, because sheexpected students to greet her in English and she was thorough ingrading their exercise notebooks. They also reminded me that she hadspent a lot of time in Kenya, a country that many people in Kilimanjarolook to as the model for educational language policy because English isused more extensively there. These former students also hinted at therumors I had heard in 1996 that Miss Mosha had had a Kenyanboyfriend, which some of the female students found desirable because itopened up opportunities for international travel.

These former students’ comments about English and educated womenhelped me understand my problem of associating the content of MissMosha’s lessons with the identity ascribed to her as a person who knowsEnglish. Moreover, Miss Mosha’s connection to Kenya was significant toher students in ways I had not appreciated because it indicated that sheknew English and was building the kind of “relationship to the world”and “possibilities for the future” (Norton, 1997, p. 410) valued by thesesecondary school graduates. As Stambach (1998) writes about theteaching of home economics in Tanzania, “the influence of schoolinglies in what the school signifies locally, not in its literal content.Schooling constitutes and provides an institutional forum through whichpersons . . . might operate to shape and define their worlds” (p. 188). Inaddition, Markee (1993) notes in his discussion of another formerBritish colony, Sudan, that the adoption of English as the officiallanguage in the Christian Southern Region “provides an official counter-weight to Arabic” (p. 350) spoken by Muslims in the North, even thoughmost southerners use a variety of Arabic rather than English for widercommunication. In a similar way, the situation at Njema Secondary

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School reveals the important symbolic dimensions of language policybecause knowing English did not necessarily mean speaking it likesomeone who had studied in the United Kingdom, such as Mr. Mwenge.Moreover, the designation of English as the official language in Tanza-nian secondary schools may be inconsistent with research on bilingual-ism and cognitive development, but it reflects the sociopolitical context,in which English signifies an orientation to the future for individuals ina transnational world.

Teachers’ Perspectives on Education

The contrast between Mr. Mwenge and Miss Mosha extended beyondtheir proficiency in English and their teaching styles; it also includedtheir educational philosophies, which represented a shift from the childdevelopment model introduced by progressive teacher educators towardthe end of the colonial period when Mr. Mwenge was in school to thehuman capital model emphasizing education for employment thatbecame popular during Miss Mosha’s education. Mr. Mwenge was clearin his conviction that teacher education was a lengthy process thatshould only be pursued by those whose calling it is to teach becauseteachers’ primary responsibility should be to encourage individualdevelopment:

And I believe the training of teachers today does not emphasize the need totake particular care, to become child centered. I think you understand whatI mean. If a teacher, a trained teacher—teaching is an honorable profes-sion—knew that he was obliged to teach his child [student] good mannersand make sure he is growing properly spiritually, physically, and mentally, allthese things combined . . . I believe this would go a long way to minimize ourdiscipline problems. I remember during our course in teaching in thiscountry much attention was given to child development. Teaching meant todevelop a child to be a man. That was the theme of education we had in thosedays. (interview, November 7, 1996)

Several of the younger teachers at Njema explained to me that theyhad not chosen to become teachers but had had no other optionsavailable to them when they completed Form 6. Such was the case withMiss Mosha: She had wanted to study law but did not have a sponsor topay her fees, so she chose the shorter and less expensive option of adiploma course in teaching. When I asked her about the qualities of agood teacher, Miss Mosha explained (in Swahili except where italicized)that it had to do with being well prepared: “She/he should have a schemeof work, a lesson plan, and especially a lesson notice [for the students]. Theseare the three things that make a good teacher.” We then talked about the


reasons parents sent their children to school these days, and Miss Moshabrought up a topic that I would hear in many interviews with parents,namely, the idea that schooling kept children from becoming a burdenon their parents: “They [parents] only send their children to school sothat later they will have a better life. They don’t want them to botherthem like a child who hasn’t been to school and who is a burden”(interview, April 15, 1996). This idea is quite different from the notionthat education provides spiritual, physical, and mental development, asMr. Mwenge described it. However, the emphasis on the instrumentalbenefits of schooling is understandable in the context of postcoloniality,where economic difficulties shape people’s perceptions about the benefitsof education.

Students’ Lives After Graduation

The belief in English leading to individual and societal developmentwas consistently expressed in my research on secondary school students’lives after graduation, but this view was more complicated than theoptimistic theory of human capital development. It was also morecomplex than the critical theories of language policy (e.g., Phillipson,1992; Skutnabb-Kangas, 1981, 2000a) on which I had relied to justify myopposition to the use of English as the medium of instruction inTanzanian schools. The focus-group discussions with my former studentshelped me appreciate the ambiguous role of language in developmentfor multilingual societies and for multilingual individuals whose futuresare intimately connected to English.

The subtle complexity of language planning was evident during focus-group discussions about the questionable benefits of secondary school-ing that I perceived and the advantages that the students thought wouldaccrue to them in the years to come because of their knowledge ofEnglish. Although they generally believed that knowing English creatednumerous possibilities the world over, the students were also well awareof the limitations for young people like themselves living in the ThirdWorld. The students’ essays from 1996 showed that most of them hopedto still be in school in 2000 or to be employed in the nonagriculturalsector of the economy. However, the follow-up survey conducted 4 yearslater revealed that less than half of them were still students or wereengaged in steady employment. This situation of completing secondaryschool but finding few postsecondary educational or economic opportu-nities may explain why only 13% of the respondents said they were moresatisfied with their lives in 2000 than they had been 4 years earlier(Vavrus, 2001). They recognized their good fortune in completingsecondary school in a country where less than 15% of the population

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receives a postprimary education (World Bank, 1999), but this educa-tional experience neither satisfied their educational goals nor createdopportunities for steady employment. Given these findings from thesurvey, I was eager to talk with the students about the reasons for theirdissatisfaction with life after secondary school.

The focus groups in the summer of 2001 provided an opportunity todiscuss the questionnaire and essay components of the 2000 follow-upstudy. One of the most striking commonalities among the students whoparticipated in the focus-group discussions was their overwhelmingpreference for secondary schooling over some other form of postprimaryeducation. In response to a question about whether they had receivedany benefits from secondary school or whether they now wished they hadchosen to study at another kind of school, such as a computer school ora vocational training program, only one young woman said that shewould have preferred a tailoring school rather than secondary schoolingbecause she would have found employment more easily after graduation.Even though most of the young women in the focus groups wereunemployed, almost all of them insisted that they had received one veryimportant benefit from secondary schooling that they would not haveotherwise: learning English. The young women and men—except for thefew who were still in school—admitted that they were not using Englishvery much then, but they saw English as essential to connecting with theworld beyond Tanzania now and in the future because it is an “interna-tional language,” as they said repeatedly. The following comments (inSwahili except where italicized) illustrate these sentiments:

Another advantage of knowing English is that if you get friends from anothercountry you can communicate with them. (young woman, Focus Group 1,June 3, 2001)

If you go to another country, you will discover that the language used tocommunicate with others is English. (young man, Focus Group 3, June 9,2001)

If you know English, you can use it for communication with people otherthan Tanzanians. (young man, Focus Group 3, June 9, 2001)

Swahili is not an international language. It’s a language that is spoken a lot inEast Africa . . . but it’s only known here in East Africa. And it’s not everyonein these countries who knows Swahili well. There are differences in theSwahili of Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, and Zaire [Democratic Republic ofCongo]. If we use Swahili, we will be like an island. (young man, FocusGroup 4, June 10, 2001)

The focus-group discussions became quite animated at times, espe-cially when I challenged one group on the idea that English is an


international language because many people in the Third World do notknow it. Two of the participants responded strongly by saying thatTanzanians needed to learn English to communicate with other Africansand not just with Europeans and Americans. One young man admittedthat it was the colonial legacy of English that made some people opposeits use, and he explained that there was growing opposition to Englishamong some groups of students at the national university in Dar esSalaam. However, he was very concerned about the consequences fortransnational communication in Africa if Tanzanians do not knowEnglish:

Last year, during the Uhuru [freedom] Torch celebration, there were a lot offoreigners there along with [Tanzanian] university students. You know, manyuniversity students are poor in English because there is no one there like Mr.[one of the English teachers from Njema Secondary School] to make thestudents speak in English because they are free there. They are fearful to speakin English, but this is sad. There were students there from other countries likeKenya and South Africa who were surprised that our university students don’tknow English well. There are Form 6 students who know English better thanthey [university students] do. (Focus Group 3, June 9, 2001)

A young woman in the same focus group then added her pragmaticassessment of the situation: “Because Africa depends on Europe, both ofthese languages [English and Swahili] are important for us to know. Also,at institutes and schools, teachers should give students advice aboutknowing English well and Swahili well.” I then asked her, “But whoselanguage is English?” She gave this question some thought and replieddiplomatically to my query: “It is an international language.” Sheexplained that the status associated with knowing English is not becauseit is the language of the United States but because it is a language thatinvites respect: “When Africans see someone speaking in English, theyare very impressed and they respect them. Yes, even if they are not welleducated but only know this language, they are respected” (FocusGroup 3, June 9, 2001). The issues of respect and bilingualism werecentral to this young woman’s identity because of her imagined future asa respected Tanzanian woman who knows English well enough to studyoverseas but who still feels strongly about the importance of Swahili forintranational communication.

The significance of English as a language of wider communication wasapparent when participants discussed how English would provide themwith the means to participate in the international community in Africaand beyond. Several people mentioned traveling to Uganda or Kenyaand using English instead of Swahili, and others talked about peoplethey knew who had found sponsors to support their studies in Europe orthe United States. A few of these young people mentioned specifically

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that they, too, wanted to study abroad, but most discussed the need toknow English as a way to benefit from the international developmentand tourist industries closer to home. Tourism is a popular topic ofconversation in northern Tanzania because many English-speaking visi-tors come to climb Mount Kilimanjaro and go on a safari at the nearbyNgorongoro Crater or Serengeti National Park. The sentiments of oneinsightful Form 6 graduate expressed the students’ general feelingsabout the relationship between language and societal developmentthrough tourism:

Because our economy is small and our strength as a nation is small, we can’tmake Swahili be an international language . . . . In other sectors, like tourism,Tanzania is a country that has an abundance of traditional things that haven’tyet been destroyed when compared to all other countries in the world.However, because of the language problem, the tourists who come herearen’t shown these things or the proper welcome, but how can you communi-cate with them? You can’t. They don’t know Swahili and you don’t knowEnglish or German or French. If you compare this to a country likeSwitzerland, it’s a small country but those people are rich in terms oflanguages. You might find someone there who knows eight languages, so allthe guests who go there can communicate with them [the Swiss] well and aremade to feel welcome. Tanzanians are hospitable, but the problem is language.(Focus Group 4, June 10, 2001)

The strong feelings expressed by the focus-group participants aboutTanzanians learning to communicate with tourists may help explain whythe students overwhelmingly believed that English should be made themedium of instruction throughout the entire education system, frompreprimary school to the university level. Some talked about a recentstudy they had heard about showing that Tanzanian students did poorlyon their national exams because of their low proficiency in English.Government sources appear to support this claim: A recent statisticalreport from the Ministry of Education and Culture (1999) shows acontinuation of the pattern in which 70–79% of the students taking thenational Form 4 examination received a Division 4 (lowest division) orfailed completely. The reason for these disappointing results, accordingto the Executive Secretary of the National Swahili Council in Tanzania,was “students’ low level of understanding of the English languageresulting from the weak foundations of the subject in primary schools”(Raphael, 2001, p. 1).

These former students were well aware of the barrier to learning thatEnglish poses at the secondary level, but their solution was to intensifythe use of English rather than abandon it. They felt the problem layprimarily in the poor foundation that students have in the languagewhen they begin Form 1 because most primary school teachers do not


know English very well. My proposal to use Swahili as the medium ofinstruction throughout the education system but offer English as asubject taught by qualified bilingual teachers was roundly rejected.These young people were unconvinced by my example of Germanstudents who are taught in German but know English well even thoughthey study it only as a subject. The difference, according to one Form 6graduate, has its roots in the economic conditions in Tanzania that makeit difficult to get the books in Swahili and English necessary to do a goodjob of teaching English as a subject only:

It’s fine [to study English only as a subject] in countries . . . like Germany andother European countries, but their foundation from the beginning of theirstudies is good. They write their books in their own language from thebeginning, and English is taught as a subject. The books we have are inEnglish, but the language we use for everything is Swahili. For others inTanzania, for example, they use their mother tongue language although theyalso know Swahili. So if we could do this [bilingual teaching] from thebeginning, there wouldn’t be a problem. The problem here is a result of ourpoverty. Where will we get the money to change these books, to changecomputers [laughter]? This is where our problem lies. Of course, it is good tobe taught in a language you know. You will understand well and succeed inyour studies. (Focus Group 4, June 10, 2001)

These comments and the previous ones suggest that young peoplesupport an English-only approach to education because they do not feelthe country has the resources to implement a Swahili-medium curricu-lum at the secondary and tertiary levels. If such resources were availablethrough governmental and nongovernmental channels, then studentswould be likely to accept a bilingual approach to education rather thanthe oppositional framework of using English or Swahili that has markededucational language policy in Tanzania from the colonial era to thepresent. However, this study also indicates that secondary school gradu-ates want to capitalize on the social and economic benefits that mayaccrue to them by knowing English. In general, these young peopleappreciate the benefits of bilingualism for individual and societal devel-opment because it would help them establish a solid academic founda-tion in Swahili and transnational communication skills in English.

IMPLICATIONS FOR LANGUAGE SPECIALISTS

This article has explored some of the ways that sentiments about theeconomic situation in Tanzania are reflected in people’s views about theeducational language policy in the country. I have argued that thecurrent condition of postcoloniality is marked by a decline in income

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and a reduction in educational options for many families as a result ofneoliberal development policies that increase the burden on individualsto pay for social services. Learning English has become an importantform of symbolic capital that young people believe will help themimprove their material conditions through employment in tourism orthrough higher education abroad. These optimistic possibilities for thefuture are tempered by young people’s recognition of the difficulty ofachieving these goals when jobs are scarce, salaries are low, and languageskills are often limited even after 4 years of using English as the mediumof instruction. Despite these challenges, English remains inextricablylinked to secondary school students’ identity as educated persons duringuncertain economic times.

The principal goals of this article were to illuminate the problemsassociated with language in development in Tanzania and to drawattention to the more general issue of English in postcoloniality. Inparticular, I sought to raise questions for critical applied linguists andcritical development scholars about the widespread view that the use ofEnglish as the medium of instruction in postcolonial societies is synony-mous with imperialism and imposed models of development. Using myown pedagogical journey as an example, I have attempted to show howone can maintain a critical approach to the study of language indevelopment by examining power/knowledge relations and advocatingfor social change without being dualistic in one’s views of educationallanguage policy. My earlier notion of Swahili being the “good” languagefor education and English being the “bad” one has given way to adialectical position that recognizes the contradictions between these twoideas and seeks a resolution without negating the continued tension intheir interaction. The resolution in the case of educational languagepolicy in Tanzania could take the form of an official dual-languageprogram in the schools, but it would be naive to think that this solutionwould completely resolve linguistic tensions due to the inherent com-plexity of language in development. If language is defined in terms ofcommunicative competence and development as a reduction in partici-pants’ levels of vulnerability over things they do not control (see Markee,this issue), then people’s support for a language will change over time asthey seek competence in the language(s) that reduce their current senseof being vulnerable to material and nonmaterial forces. I contend that acritical theory approach to language in development should begin with abottom-up analysis of the ambiguous and often contradictory linguisticstrategies that individuals use to gain control over the economic andcultural dimensions of their lives, coupled with reflections by theresearchers on the reasons why these strategies may be radically differentfrom their own a priori assumptions about how to enhance the commu-nicative competence and reduce the vulnerability of others.


The philosophical issues about language in development raised by thisstudy lead to several practical lessons that may help ESL practitionersresolve professional dilemmas in similar teaching and research situations.

Bilingual Education as a Middle Ground

The first lesson is that bilingual education has the potential to createa middle ground between the exclusive use of English or anotherlanguage as the medium of instruction. Despite the “belief in monolin-gual teaching” (Pennycook, 1994, p. 137) that has characterized much ofthe work in applied linguistics, research on bilingualism (Cummins &Swain, 1986; Skutnabb-Kangas, 1981, 2000a) suggests that teaching an L2through interaction with the L1 yields many academic, cognitive, andcultural benefits. The extensive use of Swahili by Form 1 and 2 teachersin this study draws attention to the fact that bilingualism is the de factoeducational language policy even when teachers are constrained bymonolingual textbooks and teaching aids. Official support for thegradual introduction of the number of subjects taught in English at thesecondary level—or a dual-language approach—would alleviate some ofthe conflict for teachers between engaging in pedagogical practices thatfoster the immediate cognitive development of the individual andfollowing the language policy of the government, which may have long-term societal development as its goal. ESL practitioners may need toadopt a critical approach to teaching that “aims at transformation”(Pennycook, 1999b, p. 341) of language policies hindering the educa-tional success of their students in the present while still recognizing thatthese policies may be maintained because of the symbolic functions theyperform for students, teachers, and government officials.

Critical Engagement

A second lesson that ESL practitioners might consider regards thedifferent views of teachers and students about the spread of English inOuter Circle countries. My experience in the focus-group discussionsillustrates the problem of embracing a critical approach that assumesagreement between teacher-researcher and participants on issues oflanguage and power in the teaching of English. Instead of expecting myformer students to share my critique of postcolonial language policies, Iwould have been wise to heed the advice of Pennycook (1999b) in hisassessment of critical theory in TESOL: “A more plausible way forward isthrough a critical engagement with people’s wishes, desires, and histo-ries, that is, a way of thinking that pushes one constantly to question

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rather than to pontificate” (p. 343). One way to establish such engage-ment is through longitudinal research with a group of students orteachers that creates the possibility for the development of a meaningfulrelationship over time and an open exchange of ideas about thesociopolitical dimensions of language in development.

Critical Practice and the Colonial Legacy of English

A third lesson from this study concerns the tension for critical TESOLpractitioners surrounding the colonial legacy of the language they teach.The economic and cultural deprivations of postcoloniality in many partsof the Third World can never be completely divorced from their colonialpredecessors. Thomas (1994) cogently argues that as scholars andpractitioners, we cannot “complacently situate ourselves in a postcolonialepoch. To do that, we would need to have transcended the cultural formsand procedures associated with colonial dominance” (p. 195). Compla-cency has seldom been a problem in the dynamic field of TESOL, butpractitioners still need to struggle with the colonial dominance associ-ated with the teaching of English in some contexts and with the a prioriopposition to its use in others. Being aware of the sociopolitics of Englishdoes not mean that one must necessarily abandon the teaching ofEnglish in postcolonial countries because of fears of reproducing socialinequalities; instead, this awareness should heighten one’s ongoingcultural critique of language and development policies for individualsand societies in specific contexts.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Tim Leinbach, Numa Markee, and the three anonymousreviewers for their useful comments about the article. I especially thank the reviewerwho suggested the phrase the dilemma of postcoloniality as a way to identify the centralproblematic of the article.

THE AUTHOR

Frances Vavrus is assistant professor of education in the Department of Internationaland Transcultural Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her researchand teaching interests include development studies, gender relations, and educationreform in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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Documents

Postcoloniality and English: Exploring Language Policy and the Politics of Development in Tanzania