It’s about having a vision of language that’s not just a question of diversity, of linguistic pluralism in the sense of saying: well, there’s French, but there are other languages, no, it’s also a question of life within French, which is also a life of great vitality and diversity. So I think these are issues for which Africa is going to be a priority.
I’m Nadine Machikou, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Yaoundé II, where I’m also Vice-Rector in charge of cooperation, research and relations with the business world. In fact, I’m mainly interested in questions relating to the moral economy of emotions, which has been part of my work for some years now. I’ve been working on the way in which emotions, such as anger, in the context of the Anglophone crisis in Cameroon, could become disruptive and lead to a conflict, which has now become an open conflict with six thousand dead. I’m also interested, and this is also an important point in my work, in the question of compassion and the way in which Africa’s relationship with the world is, let’s say, based on a certain compassionate relationship with Africans and Africa. So I’m working a bit on this type of, this type of thing. The question of shame and humiliation as a springboard for political action.
The challenge lies in the scientific ecologies in which academics and researchers on the continent are called upon to contribute their knowledge. Over and above the more structural issue of, let’s say, low availability of publication media, there is still, internally, this divide that can be an epistemic divide between the global North and the global South in terms of access. And we’ll see that there’s a geopolitics of knowledge which means that works that are published, or in any case produced in these areas, have a very low level of international circulation, which is also linked to international classification schemes that aren’t always able to capture the epistemologies and knowledge that come from these areas. So this poses a whole range of difficulties. For example, in the case of a Francophone conference, many, or at least some, African colleagues don’t have access to a visa to come and take part, and so put on the table a set of epistemologies that are produced over there, but which will never reach or circulate because these people won’t have the capacity to deploy themselves, or at least a capacity that is prevented by the visa requirement. It’s clear, then, that we’re dealing with dynamics that are both, let’s say, political dynamics – in this case, the policy of research mobility – which in reality cannot be detached from the circulation of knowledge itself. The knowledge that circulates, the research that is valued, is also people, it’s also people, it’s also subjects who carry this knowledge, who produce this knowledge.
At the moment, there’s something going on in the linguistic offer, marked by a kind of repoliticization of French, both as a language of coloniality, but also as a language of response to coloniality. For example, if we think of the way a writer like Kateb Yacine writes that French is our booty of, it’s the booty of war of the Africans, because French is what’s left of colonial interaction, which was a brutal interaction, and which also means that when people speak French, in fact, they appropriate this French, that this French is no longer or not necessarily in forms, in norms, et cetera. This also raises the question of the plurality of French. As long as the French of the metropolis is supposed to be the bearer of a standard of French, for example a standard guaranteed by institutions such as the Académie française, etc., as long as we have this kind of hold, in fact, over the practice of French and we don’t actually take note of the fact that languages have a life of their own. And the question of the life of a language is why we have dead languages: languages die because they’re not spoken, they’re not transformed, they’re not anchored. And that the life of French is also its capacity to anchor itself, to transform itself, et cetera. And that this diversity or diversification, in any case, this enrichment of the language is not a loss, it’s the whole question of the relationship between the metropolitan language and the imperial language.
The future of French will be built on the African continent. The future of French is Africa, because it’s first and foremost a demographic future, quite simply. By 2050, nearly 900 million French speakers will be Africans. So this also means that, in reality, attention and priorities in terms of support for the French language must take this movement into account. But it’s a movement that has to take into account the fact that the younger generations arriving on the scene don’t have this historic relationship with French. That’s why these young people can, for example, multiply their uses of French, but also of other languages, and so on and so forth. Basically, these are questions linked to the use of this linguistic diversity or pluralism, which should be seen as an enrichment, while respecting the specificity of the French we speak. In fact, this is also the question of diversity, which must be guaranteed and protected as such, in other words, insofar as it is also, in its roots, in its own life, the reflection of a dynamism which is also the dynamism of populations, which is the dynamism of creation, of creativity, of language, and that it is basically so many issues that we must, let’s say, we must take an interest in. And that naturally presupposes that we have publication supports, that we have in fact scientific spaces that enable us to protect this, that enable us to celebrate this, its strength and vitality. It’s something that needs to be reinvested in the political arena as one of the materializations of political governance, and that languages are governed in the same way as societies are governed.
