By Bhaso Ndzendze, Sizwe Dlamini, Siseko Kumalo and Mlamuli Hlatshwayo
Multilingualism in South African higher education sits at the uneasy crossroads of aspiration and impossibility. It is celebrated symbolically but abandoned structurally. We live and work under a constitution — not to mention university statutes — that call for the promotion of indigenous languages on the one hand but a culture of English hegemony on the other. The hypocrisy of a system that claims to honour linguistic plurality, while continuing to privilege English as the medium of intellectual legitimacy, is thus exposed.
The country’s history and democratic project demand that language become both a site and a method of epistemic justice, but the academy remains tethered to Eurocentric norms of coherence, citation and “rigour” that render indigenous linguistic systems ornamental rather than generative of theory. The ugliness here lies in the contradiction between the moral rhetoric of inclusion and the structural fidelity to monolingual epistemic power. This is despite the numerous studies demonstrating the benefits of multilingual teaching and learning strategies in the classroom.
Methodologically, the problem deepens. Translating thought across languages with distinct ontological grammars risks epistemic mutilation: isiXhosa’s relational metaphysics, for instance, cannot be cleanly transposed into English without losing its world-making logics. Consider how, within a Eurocentric philosophical tradition, the question “What does it mean to live a good life?” often warrants a stand-alone inquiry — a distinct moral problem pursued apart from one’s social relations. By contrast, in African traditions such as ukama or ubuntu, this question does not arise independently of one’s mode of existence within a community. To ask about “the good life” apart from the network of relations that make life meaningful is, within these traditions, an odd or even unintelligible proposition. Goodness is not an extrinsic property of the individual but the outworking of proper relation in the web of life.
Practically, universities face infrastructural and human-capital deficits; there are few scholars fluent enough in multiple languages to sustain serious multilingual pedagogy and scholarship. Only when language is restored as an epistemic infrastructure, central to knowledge production, rather than decorative to transformation policy, will the decolonial project cease to be cosmetic.
This is not to paint a gloomy picture. To be sure, strides have been made, including by the writers of this article in their various fields. These include edited multilingual books, postgraduate dissertations that transcend language, translations of classical texts into indigenous languages, teaching innovations that utilise artificial intelligence, and accessible short learning programmes in Sepedi and isiZulu.
We must also make the case for more self-confidence among South African universities
More is needed, however. An epistemic reorientation is required, wherein we treat indigenous languages not as mediums of translation but as sites of theoretical production. This entails developing conceptual lexicons in isiZulu, Sesotho and other languages through sustained scholarly collaborations. As a second move, we can look to the much-cited notion of curricular decolonisation, which would entail introducing multilingual teaching streams and assessment models that legitimise code-switching as an epistemic practice rather than a linguistic deficiency. Most importantly, research method innovation is crucial insofar as we ought to encourage methodologies grounded in the linguistic and rhetorical forms of African languages — such as poetic reasoning, proverbs and orality — thus redefining what counts as philosophical and scholarly argument: a process being explored in the Black Archive project.
But that can only happen when the incentive structure aligns.
A key challenge is the limited number of publication avenues available for South African indigenous languages. While there are numerous publication platforms for research written in English, there are very few options for works written in these languages. For instance, when it comes to academic journals, there are only three in the country that cater for South African indigenous languages. As a result of this limitation, many scholars prefer to write and publish their research in English. This, in turn, becomes a stumbling block in the quest to promote multilingualism in research. It should also be noted that, though there are international journals with an interest in South African languages, their scope typically covers research about South African languages rather than research written in these languages.
The department of higher education & training’s research outputs policy, already quite generous in many respects, should be reviewed to provide an incentive for publication in indigenous languages, as should institutional-level practices across universities. For example, in much the same way researchers retain more of their research subsidy when they have published in a top journal internationally, they should be rewarded and supported when they publish in indigenous languages through a more favourable subsidy ratio.
We must also make the case for more self-confidence among South African universities. One of the more churlish obstacles to multilingualism in South African scholarship is the requirement that all doctoral theses be examined by at least one international assessor, who, almost by definition, is unlikely to be literate in these languages. This, in turn, leads to a lack of students willing and able to conduct research in indigenous languages, which in the long term limits the pool of future scholars capable of producing and supervising such research. At a minimum, then, institutions should have mechanisms in place to accommodate doctoral assessments by allowing, should the need arise, for the evaluation of theses written in indigenous languages. We cannot think of any major nation decreeing that none of its own doctoral graduates can be awarded without being assessed internationally. Such would be to cast doubt on the very graduates they have “produced”. Yet South African universities have, to the predictable outcome that indigenous languages have little place, let alone parity of esteem, in scholarship.
- The authors are, respectively, affiliated with the University of Johannesburg’s departments of politics & international relations, African languages, and the Ali Mazrui Centre for Higher Education Studies. They write in their personal capacities
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