This book explains why many governments in Africa are including African languages alongside European languages as media of instruction in elementary schools. It argues that a number of factors have combined to make multilingual education attractive: France has changed its foreign policy toward its former colonies, language NGOs are transcribing more languages, and pressure toward democracy makes African leaders look for ways to divide the opposition.

The preamble to the post-apartheid South African constitution states that ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity’ and promises to ‘lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law’ and to ‘improve the quality of life of all citizens’. This would seem to commit the South African government to, amongst other things, the implementation of policies aimed at fostering a common sense of South African national identity, at societal dev- opment and at reducing of levels of social inequality. However, in the period of more than a decade that has now elapsed since the end of apartheid, there has been widespread discontent with regard to the degree of progress made in connection with the realisation of these constitutional aspirations. The ‘limits to liberation’ in the post-apartheid era has been a theme of much recent research in the ?elds of sociology and political theory (e. g. Luckham, 1998; Robins, 2005a). Linguists have also paid considerable attention to the South African situation with the realisation that many of the factors that have prevented, and are continuing to prevent, effective progress towards the achievement of these constitutional goals are linguistic in their origin.

This edited collection provides unprecedented insight into the emerging field of multilingual education in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Multilingual education is claimed to have many benefits, amongst which are that it can improve both content and language learning, especially for learners who may have low ability in the medium of instruction and are consequently struggling to learn. The book represents a range of Sub-Saharan school contexts and describes how multilingual strategies have been developed and implemented within them to support the learning of content and language. It looks at multilingual learning from several points of view, including ‘translanguaging’, or the use of multiple languages – and especially African languages – for learning and language-supportive pedagogy, or the implementation of a distinct pedagogy to support learners working through the medium of a second language. The book puts forward strategies for creating materials, classroom environments and teacher education programmes which support the use of all of a student’s languages to improve language and content learning. The contexts which the book describes are challenging, including low school resourcing, poverty and low literacy in the home, and school policy which militates against the use of African languages in school. The volume also draws on multilingual education approaches which have been successfully carried out in higher resource countries and lend themselves to being adapted for use in SSA. It shows how multilingual learning can bring about transformation in education and provides inspiration for how these strategies might spread and be further developed to improve learning in schools in SSA and beyond. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com.

This publication sets out to give content to the debate about multilingual education by providing both a conceptual framework and example of successful practice in bi/multilingual classrooms. Based on the firm belief in the maintenance and development of first-language medium of instruction throughout schooling, and on the need to learn at least a second language, the book argues strongly in favour of a policy of additive bi/multilingualism for formal schooling.

What have postcolonial Sub-Saharan African countries achieved in their education policies and programmes? How far have they contributed to successful attainment of the targeted 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on education? What were the constraints and barriers for developing an education system that appeals to the needs of the sub-region? Re-thinking Postcolonial Education in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 21st Century: Post-Millennium Development Goals is an attempt to demonstrate that Sub-Saharan Africa has the potential and capability to provide solutions to challenges facing its desire and ability to provide sustainable education to its people. To that end, the contributors are academics with an African vision attempting to come up with African home-grown perspectives to fill the gap created by the lapse of the MDGs as the guiding vision and framework for educational provision in Africa and beyond. The book seeks to articulate and address African issues from an informed as well as objective African perspective. The book is also intended to provide insights to scholars who are interested in studying and understanding the nature of postcolonial education in the Sub-Saharan African region. Given the objectives and themes of this book, it is intended for academic scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, human rights scholars, curriculum developers, college and university academics, teachers, education policy makers, international organisations, and local and international non-governmental organisations that are interested in African education policies and programmes. “Rethinking Postcolonial Education in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 21st Century provides contemporary reflections from multiple perspectives and re-positions the issue of education at the forefront of the debates on African development.” – Lamine Diallo, Associate Professor, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada “The book is a welcome addition to discourses and analyses on education in sub-Saharan Africa with reference to a postcolonial critique and the Millennium Development Goals framework on education in Africa.” – Michael Tonderai Kariwo, PhD, Instructor and Research Fellow, University of Alberta, Canada

This publication is built on two papers. In the first paper the author looks at the language question through the eyes of a social and political scientist. The second paper is an extended version of the author's talk to the NAI Research Forum on 24 January 2002.

The theme of this book cuts across disciplines. Contributors to this volume are specialized in education and especially classroom research as well as in linguistics, most being transdisciplinary themselves. Around 65 sub-Saharan languages figure in this volume as research objects: as means of instruction, in connection with teacher training, language policy, lexical development, harmonization efforts, information technology, oral literature and deaf communities. The co-existence of these African languages with English, French and Arabic is examined as well. This wide range of languages and subjects builds on recent field work, giving new empirical evidence from 17 countries: Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe, as well as to transnational matters like the harmonization of African transborder languages. As the Editors – a Norwegian social scientist and a Norwegian linguist, both working in Africa – have wanted to give room for African voices, the majority of contributions to this volume come from Africa.