Abstract
English meant different things to different people in British India. For Ram Mohan Roy, a prominent Indian intellectual in the early 1800s, the English language was “the key to all knowledge-all of the really useful knowledge which the world contains.” A century later, the Indian nationalist leader Mohandas K. Gandhi felt it “a matter of deep humiliation” to have to address an Indian audience in English rather than a vernacular language and charged that the time spent learning English was a waste of six years for Indian youths. In Africa, such principled resistance to using English was much rarer, though the reason was not due to African nationalists’ lack of passion. Rather a dozen former British colonies there (plus Ethiopia and Liberia) chose English as a necessary and powerful tool for uniting their disparate populations and modernizing their societies. As Edward Wilmot Blyden, an Afro-Caribbean educator in Liberia, had predicted in the mid-1800s, when colonies were still few, “English is, undoubtedly, the most suitable of the European languages for bridging over the numerous gulfs… caused by the great diversity of language” among the peoples of Africa. In a postindependence essay in 1965 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe voiced a similar theme:
Let us give the devil his due: colonialism in Africa disrupted many things, but it did create big political units where there were small, scattered ones before… And it gave [Africans] a language with which to talk to one another.
Similarly, Tanzanian professor Ali A. Mazrui celebrated the role English has played in building pan-African unity, playfully referring to the great number of black English speakers as “Afro-Saxons.”1
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Notes
Roy’s remarks are in James W. Massie, Continental India: Travelling Sketches and Historical Recollections (London: Thomas Ward, 1840), II: 439;
Gandhi’s speech is quoted in Raymond Leslie Buell, The Native Problem in Africa (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 2:60;
Edward Wilmot Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 2nd ed. (London: W. B. Wittingham, 1888), 243–44;
Chinua Achebe, “The African Writer and the English Language” (1964), in Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1975), 95;
Ali A. Mazrui, The Political Sociology of the English Language: An African Perspective (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 9–11.
Thomas Jesse Jones, Education in East Africa (New York: Phelps-Stokes Fund, 1925), 20.
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Roland Oliver, Sir Harry Johnston and the Scramble for Africa (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959), 182.
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© 2013 David Northrup
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Northrup, D. (2013). English in Imperial Asia and Africa. In: How English Became the Global Language. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303073_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303073_4
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