Language Education in Cameroon: From the Colonial Era to the 21st Century

Language multiplicity is an easily perceptible trait among African countries. With the exception of a dozen countries with two primary languages,¹ and another seven countries with three primary languages,² the remaining two-thirds of Africa’s nations are awash with languages, including colonial and contact ones. However, the choice of which language to use for formal education was never that of the speakers, but of colonial administrators, based on economic and political interests, or cultural or religious/ ethnocentric biases. For similar reasons, colonial languages were introduced either to supplant indigenous ones, or indigenous languages were introduced to supplant their indigenous counterparts, or some languages were suppressed altogether. In sum, the language situation in sub-Saharan Africa has had a checkered history and has not properly served the peoples due to many factors, including European imperialism, colonialism, and a myopic vision by post-colonial leaders. Okrah imputes the responsibility for failed educational reforms in Africa partially on poor pedagogical leadership, fiscal strain, and lack of parental cooperation.

A UNESCO study has established that investing beyond primary education to secondary and tertiary education is economically rewarding over the long haul, and, inversely, countries whose budgetary allocations for education have been only a pittance have been left at the bottom of the pile. This correlation under girds Makulu’s (1971) position that “African education needs not the luxury of unproductive, philosophically oriented education but education that will produce men and women that will help in the exploitation of the technical coming of age of Africa in the task of nation building”.