Into the cauldron: An interplay of indigenous and globalised knowledge with strong and weak notions of literacy and language education in Ethiopia and South Africa

Abstract This article draws attention to a long, pre-colonial as well as contemporary history of successes in mother-tongue literacy and bi/multilingual educational provision in Africa. Two case studies of literacy and language education in Ethiopia and South Africa are presented in order to demonstrate, even under resource-poor conditions, that it is possible to provide bilingual and multilingual education in Africa. System-wide studies in Ethiopia show that such opportunities, developed as a response to the domestic needs of an African country, deliver more successful learning outcomes than do second-language, monolingually driven systems. The South African example shows that although there is a multilingual education policy intent, its application is impelled towards expensive monolingual imperatives which draw on contemporary, external-to-Africa debates on education. Such imperatives have not brought the anticipated educational rewards – rather, the reverse. The data from the case-studies are sufficiently compelling to show that neo- and post-colonial obfuscation in education is outdated.