Strengthening Obama's "Mother Tongue"

OK, I admit it. Obama's mother tongue is actually English (even the 'birthers' don't deny that). But Kenyans, and many other Africans, generally use the term 'mother tongue' to mean the language of one's community (e.g. Kikuyu, Kalenjin etc.), whether one speaks it well, or at all. A bit like saying that someone from Cardiff who speaks only English has Welsh as their mother tongue.

Well, where was I? Obama is a Luo name (not Irish, despite a funny song to that effect), his father was a Luo, and the Luos speak (Dho)Luo. They live on the shores of Lake Victoria, in the West of Kenya.

Anyway... a Luo student came to see me the other day. He said that something to the effect that he'd realised that what we had done in class looking at multilingualism wasn't just words, but actually corresponded to reality. Comforting! He had been educated first in his mother tongue (whichever definition you use), and told me he could read fluently by his third year. Nowadays, though, the practice (but not the policy) is to use English in kindergarten, even in the countryside, where most people live, and where most children arrive at school not knowing it. This might seem to make sense, as one needs English in Kenya to get on in life. But it means that there's a big disconnect between the child's daily experience and school. Never mind that the child doesn't actually know what the teacher is saying at the start.

And schooling, at the beginning, isn't primarily about learning about language. It's about learning how to write (this works best in one's own language, or failing that, another one you know well), learning how to count, learning how to think. And you can't do much of that if much of what you do is repeating what the teacher is saying in a language you're struggling to learn. Various studies have shown more effective learning in the mother tongue, greater pass rates (as long as the exam is in the right language), lower drop out rates. And even learning English can go better if the child has first learnt other things in their own language - some studies have shown this, much to everyone's surprise.

So... my student, telling me that now many children can neither read Luo or English well, wants to develop some further school materials, some more reading materials. Some must already exist somewhere, as he was successfully taught in Luo, but the more the merrier!

The other big barrier to the use of 'mother tongues' (or Swahili) in school is teachers' and parents' attitudes - most think English is the way to go, right from the start, for the reasons given above. Ngugi wa Thiongo, a Kenyan writer who has mainly written in his mother tongue, Kikuyu, sees this attitude as something requiring "Deconolonising the Mind", the title of one of his books.