Blogging: a Way to 'Decolonise Cyberspace' (fwd)

Tue May 31 17:51:08 UTC 2005

Blogging: a Way to 'Decolonise Cyberspace'

Highway Africa News Agency (Grahamstown)
NEWS May 26, 2005
Posted to the web May 27, 2005

By Emrakeb Assefa
Johannesburg
http://allafrica.com/stories/200505270204.html

Ndesanjo Macha, 35, a Tanzanian writer and lecturer with a background in
law, journalism and socio-informatics, is campaigning in Africa to
'decolonise cyberspace' so that African languages and cultures could
flourish in it. In order to achieve his goal, he has become the first
African to launch a blog in the African language KiSwahili in June
2004.

Macha is one of a group of young Africans who started a movement to
place African languages on the internet by blogging novels, songs and
poems in African languages and allowing the free use of content under
the Creative Commons (cc) project.

He told Highway Africa News Agency yesterday that twenty one blogs in
African languages have been set up since June 2004. Today, there are 17
KiSwahili blogs, the language spoken by over 100 million people in
Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda; a single Bambara blog, the Malian language;
two KiChagga blogs, a language spoken in the Kilimanjaro area of
northern Tanzania; a Shona blog from Zimbabwe and one Berber blog from
Morocco. Macha hopes to increase the number of indigenous African
language blogs to one hundred by the end of the year.

The movement to use African languages as a means of communications on
the internet stems from a fear that African cultures and languages are
in danger of disappearing.

"A language disappears every two weeks", says Macha, comparing this to a
"whole library burning down."

Though Africa is known to be by far the most linguistically diverse
continent - there are around 2,000 African languages, i.e. one third of
the world's linguistic heritage - its languages are largely absent from
internet content.

According to UNESCO, although there are over 6,000 languages in the
world, the content on the internet is largely disseminated in 12
languages - dominated by English. "The rest are subject languages, like
most indigenous African languages; they are talked about but have no
content in their own language," Macha says bitterly.

Moreover, there are no tools for creating or translating information
into these excluded tongues. Huge sections of the world's population
are thus prevented from enjoying the benefits of technological advances
and obtaining information essential to their well-being and development.
Unchecked, this will contribute to a loss of cultural diversity on
information networks and a widening of existing socio-economic
inequalities.

However, the cc project and blogging, says Macha, are providing
opportunities to African artists with no English language skills to
introduce their creativity into the mainstream industry. This way,
African cultures and languages remain vibrant and alive.

Macha's inspiration is the Kenyan Ngugi Wa Thiong'o whose novels
Decolonising the African Mind and Move in the Centre had led him to
this movement.

Quoting Thiong'o, Macha says that the dominance of English on the
internet is like saying that there is a flower which is more of a
flower on the basis of its shape or colour. Or that the flourishing of
one flower should depend on the death of other flowers.

He stressed the importance of "decolonising the cyberspace of the
dominant position of English language" to create a cyberspace that is
multilingual and multicultural.