Language conquest, unlike the military form, wherein the victor must subdue the whole population directly, is cheaper and more effective: the conqueror has only to invest in capturing the minds of the elite, who will then spread submission to the rest of the population. The elite become part of the linguistic army of the conqueror.

Balanced and inclusive education calls for a new slogan: Network, not hierarchy. We have to understand that all languages, big and small, have a common language: it is called translation.

Education systems should never lead to linguistic and cultural self-isolation. I want to connect to the world, but I don’t have to negate my starting base first. I want to connect to the world from wherever I am. I believe that the goal of education is knowledge that empowers, that shows our real connections to the world, but from our base. From our base we explore the world: from the world we bring back that which enriches our base.

Language has always been a battlefield of ideas. It is a war zone in the struggle between enslavement and empowerment, between the dominated and the dominating, the colonized and the colonizing. The history of a language, Tom Paulin has written, is often a story of possession and dispossession, territorial struggle, and the establishment or imposition of a culture. Language has been as much the tool of conquest and resistance as the sword. Indeed some of the fiercest battles have been fought and continue to be fought in this zone.

The African continent continues to suffer the consequences of linguistic conquest. Political independence may have freed the body, but it certainly did not free the mind. This is the long-term effect of linguistic domination.

The result for Africa is a gigantic disconnect between the educated middle class and the general population, which was always the intention of the colonial enterprise. If you think of languages in terms of war, it was as if the African generals became captives in the enemies’ camp. By generals, I don’t just mean government alone.

Language is a product of a community in its economic, political, and cultural evolution in time and space. In their very negotiation with nature and with one another, humans give birth to a system of communication whose highest expression and development is the organized sound that we call language. But language is also the producer of a community, for it is language, after all, that enables humans to negotiate effectively their way into and out of nature and that makes our multifaceted evolution possible. It is in that very negotiation with nature that a community comes to know itself as a specific community different from others.