The point of this exercise is to try to sift out the observations that could be evidence of either the French government’s independent activity OR the influence of the epistemic community from those that can conclusively point to the influence of the epistemic community. An added complication is that some of the apparent influence of the epistemic community on government might be intentional; that is, if the government does not want to take responsibility for its change of strategy, and in effect wants to “blame” someone else, the epistemic community might be a convenient front for decisions made independently by the government. Meetings between epistemic community members and government officials, circulation of writing by epistemic community members and their citation in French government documents and in interviews with officials might be evidence of the community’s influence, or they might simply be fronts for decisions made independently by the government.
It is difficult to find evidence that could conclusively point to the influence of the epistemic community. Promotion of members of the epistemic community to positions of bureaucratic influence might be one piece of evidence, as this action by the government would likely be too costly to be a front. If the government is citing the ideas of the epistemic community without acknowledging them by name, it might be evidence that they have been truly influenced by their writings, since they are not attempting to use them as a front.
Finally, some falsifying evidence of the influence of the epistemic community might be the government’s citation of other ideas – different from those generated by the epistemic community – as rationale for their actions. And implementation of policies that differ in substance to those recommended by the epistemic community might be another indication of their lack of influence.
Further Evidence
Obviously, my theory will be stronger if I can show that it travels beyond these three cases. If it is correct, one should see francophone countries introducing mother tongue education policies in the mid- to late-1990s, and anglophone countries stagnating or retrenching in these same policies. Appendix I shows a very rough grid that was constructed using secondary literature74 for all cases besides the three I visited personally. I have been told that UNESCO is working on an Atlas of language use in education for all countries, which I plan to compare with my own information and add or modify as necessary.
While any conclusions drawn can only be tentative because of the scarcity of recent data, it appears that generally the trends are in the expected directions. Former British colonies vary in their current treatment of local languages, from Tanzania at one extreme, using only Swahili in primary education, to Ghana at the other, now using only English. Many of the countries have remained committed to their mother tongue programs, but others – Botswana, Kenya, and Zimbabwe – appear to be favoring English over local languages for education.
In francophone Africa, the grid shows that several countries experimented with mother tongue programs in the 1970s – almost all were begun under socialist regimes for nationalist reasons and rarely were sustained after a change in government. The most striking observation, however, is that since 1995, 12 out of the 17 cases have begun or expanded experiments in mother tongue education. It may be that CAR, Chad, Congo or Togo can be added to the list, but I am lacking recent information.
Conclusion
This paper has tried to show that policy outcomes in African states are still very much the product of their colonial heritage, but it is an exact reversal of what one would expect in the area of language use. This assertion of external influence is not to deny the agency of Africans within these states, for as the brief case studies have shown, in each situation it was a critical indigenous actor who pushed his preferred policy within the national bureaucracy. Yet it was only when France shifted its own strategy that the proverbial “window of opportunity” opened and the mother tongue advocates in francophone African countries could put their preferred policies in place. As indicated at the outset, there are three links in the causal chain:
Epistemic Community French Govt African Govt Language Policy
It is only the first that has been explored in depth in this paper. The specific steps between the French government and African governments, and between African governments and their policy outcomes, have only been touched briefly. They will account for the variation in timing and implementation of the outcomes. Furthermore, the absence of a similar epistemic community in the anglophone world has been asserted, but not explored. These are the subjects of my dissertation.
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Appendix 1: Language Medium in Primary Schools
( Provisional Data)
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