Newswise — The Swahili language may be familiar to many Americans because of The Lion King, but other African languages are beginning to roar at campuses such as Indiana University Bloomington.
Until Aug. 12, IU Bloomington is home to the national Summer Cooperative African Language Institute, the largest and most advanced program of its kind in the United States, which annually trains future diplomats, educators, aid workers and business people headed to the continent.
Given the recent genocide in war-torn Darfur, a region about the size of Texas in the western part of Sudan, and other human rights concerns in Zimbabwe, there is a need for SCALI, which is a cooperative effort between IU's African Studies Program and similar efforts at 10 other research universities with funding from the U.S. Department of Education.
Gracia Clark, acting director of African Studies and an associate professor of anthropology at IUB, said it is more important than ever that African languages be taught and understood.
"We want to know how people are talking behind our backs," Clark said. "A lot of people in Africa know English, and if they want to tell you something, they can tell it to you. But the difference is when you understand what they are saying to each other, when they are not phrasing it as something for your consumption.
"How do they talk about America when they're not speaking English, when they don't really know that there are any Americans around? That's when you start to understand what their image of America is. To do that, you need to know the language and the culture," she said. "You don't want to turn your back on any part of the world, or it will bite you."
Sudanese Arabic is one of the languages being offered this summer and will prepare those who hope to work in Darfur or elsewhere in Sudan. Shona, one of the major languages of Zimbabwe, was quite popular in previous years. Those who have studied it are today in a position to provide diplomatic counsel, Clark said.
"The institute helps to develop a national pool of people with language skills in what are known as the least commonly taught languages," said Maria Grosz-Ngaté, associate director of African Studies. "Although we offer a range of languages this summer -- 13 in all and some at more than one level -- this is only a minute number. More than 1,700 languages are spoken on the continent, representing one-third of the world's languages."
In addition to Sudanese Arabic, languages being taught during the institute include Afrikaans, Akan/Twi, Amharic, Hausa, Kiswahili, Luganda, Moroccan Arabic, Setswana, Wolof, Xhosa, Yoruba and Zulu.
Since the mid-1960s, IU's African Studies Program has been recognized as one of the leading centers for the interdisciplinary study of Africa with a strong African languages program. It has been a U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center every year since 1965. IU also is home to Africa Today, an interdisciplinary journal of African studies that publishes scholarship and reform-minded research from around the world on a full range of political, economic and social issues.
During the school year, enrollment in African Studies courses at IU has been steady. There particularly has been strong interest in the Swahili language, which is spoken by about 50 million people in East and Southeast Africa. Other languages taught at IU include Twi (also known as Akan), which is commonly spoken in Ghana; Zulu; and Bamana (or Bambara), which is spoken in several West African countries.
Alwiya Omar, IU clinical associate professor of linguistics and African languages coordinator, is the director of SCALI. She also is the president of the African Language Teachers Association. Also on the IU faculty is a former African head of state, former Liberian President Amos Sawyer, who is a research scholar in IU's Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis.
Many of the institute's students come from across the United States and are studying to be historians, anthropologists, social scientists and other professionals who will go to work on the African continent. All of the instructors are native speakers who are establishing their careers at American universities and are trained to teach the languages they are offering. "It enables the U.S. to have a larger core of people who are thoroughly familiar with African cultures, not only learning the language in the institute," Clark said.
Africa itself fights an illiteracy problem, because many of its languages are primarily delivered orally and not through written communication. "In Africa, the path to advancement has been to learn the European languages, the colonial languages, so African languages implicitly were considered less valuable," Grosz-Ngaté said. "Many people speak them as their mother tongue or as a second language. They may receive instruction in them in elementary school, but they are generally not studied at the university level."
Despite its poverty, Africa also presents much business potential because of its vast population, Grosz-Ngaté said. Another emerging market, China, has recognized this. It is exporting a great deal to African countries and is very involved in a number of business ventures there. The United States also has been looking to develop new military bases there.
Next summer SCALI will again be housed at IU Bloomington. Other universities involved include Ohio University (where it has been the last two years), Boston University, Yale University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Wisconsin, University of Illinois, University of Florida; Michigan State University, University of California at Los Angeles and the Berkeley-Stanford consortium. IU last hosted SCALI in the early 1990s.
In addition to language classes, the institute exposes students to the cultures and traditions through many extracurricular activities. The public is welcome to attend an African film series that has been organized, which includes selections from Burkina Faso, Chad, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa. Films will be shown in downtown Bloomington at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, 114 E. Kirkwood Ave., on Tuesdays at 7:30 p.m. from June 28 to Aug. 2. Tickets are $5 per show or $20 for the series. With the exception of one film in English, A Long Night's Journey into Day, all films will have English subtitles.
Below is a schedule:
-- Tonight (June 28): Karmen Geï, in French and Wolof.
--- July 5: Daresalam, in Arabic and French (Chad)
-- July 12: Kounandi, in Jula
-- July 19: Fathers, in Amharic, English and Swahili
-- July 26: Long Night's Journey into Day, in English (South Africa)
-- Aug. 2: Umgidi, in Xhosa and English
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