Libraries and Linguisitc Imperialism in Uganda

African Studies Association Kate Parry
53rd Annual Meeting, 18-22 November, 2010 Libraries in Uganda: An exercise in linguistic imperialism?

Libraries in Uganda:

An exercise in linguistic imperialism?

Kate Parry
Hunter College
City University of New York

Libraries in Uganda

Uganda has had a network of public libraries since the 1960s, set up soon after independence

under a central Public Libraries Board. The principle was to have a library in every district

headquarters, which meant some seventeen libraries at the time. Since the Uganda Resistance

Movement came to power in the late 1980s, many new districts have been established, but the

public libraries have not kept up, so there are now many districts that have no library at all.

Meanwhile, responsibility for the old libraries was handed over in the late 1990s to local

governments as part of a more general move towards decentralization. The National Library of

Uganda still oversees them and offers advice and training, but it does not have the funding or the

legal authority to participate in their management. Some have fallen on hard times in

consequence, since for most local authorities—as, indeed, for the central government—support

for libraries is a low priority.

Yet the first decade of the third millennium has seen a remarkable growth of libraries in

Uganda. The evidence is in the membership figures of the Uganda Community Libraries

Association: when it was launched in 2007, it had fourteen member libraries, but within three

years that number had increased by nearly 400% (see Figure 1).

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80
67
70
60
50 46
41
40
30 25
20 14 16 16
10
0

Aug-07 Feb-08 Jul-08 Feb-09 Jul-09 Jan-10 Aug-10
Number of member libraries 14 16 16 25 41 46 67

Number of member libraries

Figure 1: Growth of UgCLA August 2007 to August 2010

These libraries are scattered over most of the country (see Figure 2), though the Central and

Eastern regions have many more than do the Northern and Western ones, and the central

northern districts have none at all, hardly surprisingly since for twenty years until 2008 that area

was ravaged by war.

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Uganda

Northwestern
9 Northeastern
1

Western Eastern
9
11 16
Central
29

Figure 2: Distribution of UgCLA member libraries

Note: There is one member from Rwanda that is not included in this map.

Many of these libraries predated UgCLA, but not by long; the earliest was established in the

1990s, but most are the product of the present millennium. In a country that is regularly

described as ―lacking a reading culture‖ this rapid development is a remarkable phenomenon,

and to people who have been raised on books it is a hopeful one: what could be more desirable,

and less controversial, than supporting libraries? Yet recent debates have raised troubling issues

with regard to cultural and linguistic relations between the so-called ―First‖ and ―Third‖ Worlds,

issues that must be addressed in any project concerning language and literacy. My purpose in this

paper, then, is to examine Uganda’s community libraries in the light of these debates.

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Libraries and linguistic imperialism

Public libraries such as those mentioned in the beginning of this paper have not had a happy

history in Africa. Professional librarians stress their colonial origins:

Britain passed on an intellectual inheritance to its former colonies which included

the idea that the library, particularly the public library, was an essential feature of

the complete nation state. What is more, it effectively prescribed the form such

libraries should take by the introduction of models in various of its colonial

possessions. (Sturges & Neill, 1998, p. 82)

The association of libraries with colonialism recurs regularly in Aissa Issak’s wide ranging

review of publications and reports of libraries in Africa (2000). Alemna (1995) ―considers that

library services based on Western models and implemented in Africa by colonial administrations

are not suitable for the majority of the African people‖; Lauridsen (1997) asserts that ―libraries

largely still reflect colonial values‖; Ogundipe (1998) writes of ―negative aspects‖ of ―the

colonial contribution to librarianship in developing countries‖; Rosenberg (1993) ―presents the

view that the creation of national library systems by colonial governments was based on the

desire to hold on to some control over their former colonies‖; and Cram (1993) goes so far as to

suggest that there is a current practice of ―library colonialism‖. Consequently, African public

library systems are based on a model that has been characterized as ―anachronistic and

inappropriate‖ (Mostert, 2001).

These criticisms from librarians are echoed in the debates that have taken place in the

field of English language teaching. A seminal publication in this regard is Linguistic Imperialism

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by Robert Phillipson (1992), in which he argues that a language is not a neutral tool but is both

embedded in and supportive of social, cultural, and political structures. The English language, in

particular, is a critical factor in the maintenance of an imperialist structure by which a

―developed‖ British and American center dominates a ―developing‖, largely Asian and African,

periphery (Galtung, 1980). This ―linguistic imperialism‖, in contrast to the political imperialism

that gave rise to it, works by hegemony rather than conquest: people in the periphery are

persuaded that English is superior to local languages and that to become truly well informed and

modern they must neglect their own languages in order to learn it. Alastair Pennycook presents a

rather more complex picture, but he too asserts that ―to use English is to engage in social action

which produces and reproduces social and cultural relations,‖ and, ―given the dominant position

of English in the world … there are inevitable questions to be asked here concerning language

and inequality‖ (1994, pp. 34-35). Citing Said (1994), Pennycook maintains that ―domination

and authority are not just questions of social, economic or physical control but rather are also

effected through discourse‖ (p. 60), and the problem with English is that it has been and still is

the major language of imperialist discourse. He provides an extended quotation that makes the

point even more strongly than he does himself:

Let us be clear that English has been a monumental force and institution of

oppression and rabid exploitation throughout 400 years of imperialist history. It

attacked the black person who spoke it with its racist images and imperialist

message, it battered the worker who toiled as its words expressed the parameters

of his misery and the subjection of entire peoples in all the continents of the

world. It was made to scorn the languages it sought to replace, and told the

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colonized peoples that mimicry of its primacy among languages was a necessary

badge of their social mobility as well as their continued humiliation and

subjection. Thus, when we talk of ―mastery‖ of the Standard language, we must

be conscious of the terrible irony of the word, that the English language itself was

the language of the master, the carrier of his arrogance and brutality. (Searle,

1983, p. 68, quoted in Pennycook 1994, pp. 308-309)

Such a damning indictment requires us to think carefully about what we are doing in

supporting libraries in Africa. Not only are they in origin colonial institutions which, according

to the library literature, maintain colonial practices, but they also promote colonial languages—

especially English, since libraries have historically been few in francophone Africa and almost

non-existent in lusophone (Sturges & Neill, 1998, p. 81). Thus libraries are implicated in what

Phillipson calls linguicism—the privileging of a particular language over others—and they are

propagating and endorsing the discourse that defines the African as a marginalized Other. The

suspicion that libraries operate is this way is strengthened by the interest taken in them by the

British Council (which is the particular villain of Phillipson’s narrative) and the United States

Information Service (now run directly by the Department of State through US embassies).

Visitors to the municipal libraries of Fort Portal and Mbale in Uganda, for instance, will be

familiar with the ―American Corners‖ that the US Embassy has set up there, where students may

find out about American politics and institutions of learning. Libraries, too, are the major

recipients of donated books, which are typically publishers’ remainders or the cast offs of grown-

up children from western countries. Such donations can be demeaning for the recipients, are all

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too often inappropriate and irrelevant, and undermine the development of independent African

publishing by feeding the notion that books should be free (Waruingi, 2009).

Objections and questions

If this is true, how are we to interpret the impressive growth of community libraries documented

at the beginning of this paper? Is it merely an extension of the linguistic imperialist project? The

possibility must be taken seriously, but not without consideration of the objections that have

been raised to the thesis. The questions suggested by those objections will then be used as a

guide to examining the situation on the ground.

The first objection is that in emphasizing the hegemony of the center, the model of

linguistic imperialism denies agency to the people of the periphery; they are portrayed as

―passive recipients of language policy‖ (Brutt-Griffler, 2002, p. viii) with ―malleable minds‖ that

can easily be shaped into ―false consciousness‖(Pennycook, 1994, pp. 55-56). Yet in the process

of language spread ―the essential actor is the acquiring speech community‖ (Brutt-Griffler, 2002,

p. 23), and Brutt-Griffler’s and Pennycook’s detailed historical accounts of the spread of English

in the British Empire demonstrate that it was more often than not the colonized who insisted on

access to English even against the wishes of their colonial masters. At the same time there were

and are groups, such as the Karimojong in Uganda and the fishing communities of the Niger

Delta, who have actively resisted education [get ref. to Andema 2003] (Ekpe & Evogor, 2005, p.

206), suggesting that whether or not people learned English in colonial times was not entirely a

function of colonial policies; the decisions of prospective language learners were at least as

important. In postcolonial times too, while the offspring of the elite may find themselves using

English without consciously choosing to do so (Mazrui & Mazrui, 1998, p. 149), the majority, in

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Uganda especially, are extremely active in demanding schooling and the language skills that go

with it (Parry, 2009a, p. 83). So, we clearly cannot assume that libraries are institutions imposed

from the Center, whether that Center be the Anglo-American metropolises or the elites that

inherited colonial authority. We need to look at the libraries themselves and ask the question of

agency: Who set them up? Who determines their policies? And who makes use of their services?

A second objection to the linguistic imperialism argument is that it assumes that the use

of an alien language necessarily implies acceptance of the culture and values that are associated

with it. The well-known Kenyan novelist, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, is the most frequently quoted

proponent of this view:

The domination of a people’s language by the languages of the colonizing nations

was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonized. (Ngugi wa

Thiong'o, 1986, p. 16)

The logical conclusion of this line of thinking is that to write in English is to perpetuate the

―colonization of the mind‖ that is implemented by reading it, a conclusion that led to Ngũgĩ’s

decision to write his fiction in his native Gikuyu (Talib, 2002). Few other African writers have

reacted in this way, however. The most commonly cited on the other side of the argument is the

equally well known Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe:

The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message

best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of

international exchange will be lost. … I feel that the English language will be able

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to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new

English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new

African surroundings. (Achebe, 1975, pp. 100, 103)

For Achebe, then, the influence could go the other way: the language could be altered to express

the culture (cf. Mazrui & Mazrui, 1998, pp. 54-55). Explorations of postcolonial literature

suggest that Achebe is right on this point, for they show authors from the Periphery appropriating

English, changing it, and using it to ―write back‖ against the Center (Francia, 1993; Pennycook,

1994; Rushdie & West, 1997; Talib, 2002). The question concerning libraries, then, is about the

materials that they make available: Do these materials represent Anglo-American culture and

promote its hegemony? Or, in so far as they are in English, do they represent the appropriation of

the language for the expression of African concerns and identities?

A third assumption made by Phillipson—and, indeed, Ngũgĩ—is that to promote English

is to detract from and denigrate other languages. This suggests a subtractive view of bilingualism

that is common in countries where monolingualism is the norm, but it does not make much sense

in Africa, where most people, as is well known, have at least two languages (Mazrui & Mazrui,

1998, p. 81). English is frequently one of the mix, having spread, as Brutt-Griffler puts it,

through the process of macroacquisition—i.e. acquisition by speech communities—without, in

most of Africa, any significant immigration of native speakers. The outcome, Brutt-Griffler

maintains, has been and is likely to remain stable bilingualism at the societal level (2002, pp.

116-120) similar to what has also been documented in India (Sridhar, 1989).

We cannot say that there is no problem, however, even if the society’s use of English

may not entail the loss of other languages; the unease so frequently expressed about the need to

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use it indicates strongly that there is (Parry, 2009a, pp. 81-84). That problem, I would suggest,

lies not only in the imperial history of English but in the functions for which it is used: for formal

purposes, for dealings with the Center at the national as well as the international level, and

especially for most activities that require writing (Schmied, 1991). As a result the growth of

written traditions in African languages is inhibited, so there is no insurance against language loss

for those languages that have few speakers. It is also horribly difficult for African children to

learn to read and for African populations as a whole to become literate. Languages that are in

oral use can, however, be developed for literate purposes, as was the case with English in the

sixteenth century (Barber, 1997), and libraries, as institutions that promote literacy, could play a

role in that process. Another set of questions, then, is to do with language use: not only which

languages are the libraries’ materials in but how do people use those materials, and in which

languages do they talk about them?

The situation on the ground

This section will attempt to answer the questions raised above by presenting factual information

about the libraries that are members of the Uganda Community Libraries Association. The

information was collected between 2008 and 2010 through personal visits to 55 of the 67

libraries, supplemented by responses submitted by twelve of them to a questionnaire that

UgCLA sent out in February 2010, proposals written by fourteen of them for a project involving

the use of children’s books, reports written by ten for the same project, and oral interaction in the

course of six workshops that UgCLA has organized to enable those managing the libraries to

share experiences and best practices. The figures given here are based on the data that we have

on all the libraries, collated and then analyzed with respect to the questions raised above. They

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are minimum numbers, since I have only counted a library in a particular category when I have

positive evidence that it belongs there; I have not counted any where I am not sure, even though

it seems likely. The quotations are taken from a journal that I maintain of visits to libraries; the

account is often written some days after a visit, but it is always based on notes made by hand at

the time.

Agency

One respect in which the UgCLA libraries differ markedly from the public libraries discussed

above is in their provenance. None was initiated as a government project, and although the

people who set them up take pains to establish good relations with local government authorities,

those authorities tolerate them rather than give active support. Often the impetus to establish a

community library comes from an individual inspired by the wish to make life better for his (or

her, but most of them are men) own people. He may no longer live in the community, but his

family is usually still there, and they keep an eye on the project. Family members as well as other

local leaders are also brought to serve on a library committee, which is a necessity if the library

is to be registered as a community based or non-governmental organization. We have identified

36 such individuals as founders of UgCLA libraries, 20 of whom have family support. Thus,

over 50% of those who come to UgCLA’s meetings are people with strong roots in the villages

where their libraries are located.

Another, sometimes overlapping, pattern is for a community library to be part of a larger

institutional framework, a farmers’ group, a coalition of such groups, an adult literacy program,

or a church. No fewer than 46 of UgCLA’s 67 members fall into this category. They include

two—Uganda Rural Literacy and Community Development Association in the Northwest and

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the Ruwenzori Information Centre Network in the West— which, being umbrella groups

themselves, have each sponsored eight or nine of their members to join UgCLA as well; this fact

accounts for the cluster of members that UgCLA has in each of these regions. Twenty-two

member libraries also have a strong affiliation with a particular school: six of them began as

school projects to which libraries were added, and a further nine are located in school

classrooms. The chronology can also be reversed, as when the Director of one library (Caezaria)

decided to found a school whose students could use it, or when another library (Kitengesa)

served as a base for establishing other development projects. Whichever way it goes, the strong

link between libraries and economic and social concerns at the village level represents just such a

break from the old, colonial, model as the librarians cited above call for.

In a few cases, eleven to be precise, libraries have been founded by foreign individuals or

groups. In one case, the project seems to have been a complete failure: the foreigner in question

imported a container full of books, set it up as a library in a school that was also an orphanage,

and then left it. As far as we know, the library is no longer active. In another case, where a

foreign donor had set up a beautiful library, it took a good number of years for the librarian to

convince local people that coming to read was not something for which they should be paid; it

should be said, though, that this librarian has become one of the most active members of UgCLA

and the library is now flourishing. Another foreign group that established a library—Under the

Reading Tree, registered in Vancouver, Canada—took care to consult with local people before

doing so and has worked closely with both the National Library and UgCLA. That library is also

doing well.

Setting up a library is one thing; maintaining it is another. Here is the movement’s

weakest point, because although local individuals and groups can muster the resources to set up a

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building or buy an initial collection of books, they are seldom able to pay a librarian’s salary,

build up their stock, or subscribe to newspapers on a regular basis. The most successful libraries

have met these costs through foreign support, with thirteen of them receiving salaries for

librarians and a further 34 receiving foreign book donations. In such cases, there is always the

danger that those who pay the piper will call the tune. An example is the detailed reporting and

accounting on which Under the Reading Tree (which supports four UgCLA libraries) insists; the

library managers involved find the work quite burdensome and have difficulty seeing why it is

necessary. Thus the organization is imposing its own, western, standards and patterns of behavior

on these people. On the other hand, UTRT’s own status as an NGO—and hence its ability to

raise the funds with which to support the libraries—depends on the managers’ conforming. With

one exception, the latter have accepted that argument, and UgCLA’s coordinator has spent a

good deal of time helping them learn how to produce the reports efficiently. Do we call this an

exercise in hegemony or in capacity building?

Such issues can be avoided if libraries can become self-sufficient, and twenty UgCLA

libraries are attempting to do so by developing income-generating activities. These generally

involve the use of electricity and electronic equipment: charging telephones, photocopying,

teaching computer skills, offering internet access. The equipment is expensive, though,

especially where, as in most rural areas, solar power is necessary, and foreign funds are usually

needed to buy it. Then, when the investment has been made, the income generated is rarely

enough to cover all the library’s expenses. Nonetheless, one UgCLA member (Village Connect,

Kijura) is already independent after only one year of operation, supporting itself through

providing computer training and internet access. Another, the Kitengesa Community Library, is

heading in that direction by investing donor funds in a hall that can be rented out for public

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events such as weddings. Several others provide telephone charging services which in at least

one case pay for the librarian’s salary and in another provide refreshments when the library

organizes a Children’s Day. The RIC-Net information centers have photocopiers and computers

from which they are able to generate their running costs. The initiators and managers of

UgCLA’s member libraries are deeply interested in such development: they have no wish to be

dependent on foreign funding, though they are willing to accept it and the demands of the

funders as a necessary step in getting their libraries going.

While foreign organizations play some part in initiating libraries and a greater part in

funding them, they have no role as library users, and it may be said that the users are the most

important agents in a library’s operation, since without them it has no purpose. The public

libraries discussed in the first part of this paper have been faulted for serving only an urban elite,

precisely that population that Phillipson describes as involved in linguistic imperialism by virtue

of its strong links (including linguistic ones) with the center countries (1992, p. 52). Most of the

community libraries described here, though, are located in rural areas where there are few of the

educated elite for them to serve. Many, it is true, serve secondary school students who aspire to

elite membership, but, surprisingly, the twenty libraries that are known to have such students as

patrons are less than a third of the total. The majority—44—focus on primary school children,

while 34 serve adults. These adults undoubtedly include the relatively highly educated such as

teachers and extension workers, but many of them are people with little or no formal education,

who are attracted to the libraries through adult education and other outreach programs. This is

particularly true of the URLCODA, RIC-Net, and Mpolyabigere networks, all of which are based

on the premise that information for adults is fundamental to rural development.

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Thus, the agents in Uganda’s community libraries movement are mostly indigenous

Ugandans. Foreign individuals and organizations are involved in an important facilitating role,

but the main impetus does not come from them. As for the Ugandan initiators, several of them,

being highly educated and working in Kampala, can be said to belong to the urban elite, but they

are people who have not lost touch with their rural roots, which is precisely why they are

involved with libraries. To argue that such people are promoting linguistic imperialism would do

them a serious injustice.

Materials

The first point to be made about materials is that many community libraries have very few at all.

Only eighteen are known to have collections of more than 1000 items, and ten have virtually no

books, although some of these have other print materials such as pamphlets and posters; the

number of those with hardly any books was larger a year ago before UgCLA itself distributed a

packet of 80-odd children’s books to ten of its members.

When a library has many books, and even when it may have only a few hundred, the

majority of them tend to be donated from abroad, the publishers’ remainders and children’s cast-

offs described above. The domination of a collection by books of this kind can constitute a

serious problem, since it suggests strongly that reading is foreign cultural practice which must, of

course, be conducted in English. In all too many cases, library patrons do not find such material

interesting, and so they dismiss the library as irrelevant. These effects can, however, be

mitigated. The Uganda Christian University Children’s Library depends almost entirely on books

donated from the United States, but it has done a particularly good job of educating its donors,

asking them to give ―children’s Bibles or books with Christian themes such as children’s prayers;

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... books with African children and settings and books with African or African-American

illustrators; and classics from every culture.‖ (UCU Children’s Library report to donors, 2010);

and it has helped UgCLA by providing it with a list of excellent African story books published in

the United States. Book Aid International, on a much larger scale, also attempts to ensure that the

books it gives out are appropriate (Waruingi, 2009)—and all them are new, for the organization

realized that the donation of used books was, in effect, insulting (Book Aid International,

personal information).

Nonetheless, donated books are always in English and often in English too difficult for

most rural readers to understand. Those meant for children illustrate lifestyles that are foreign

(showing televisions or refrigerators, for example) even if the characters have dark faces; and

those that are school textbooks, while covering appropriate material, do not follow Ugandan

syllabi and so are difficult for Uganda students, and their teachers, to see as relevant. Library

managers will accept the donations, since they believe that any book is better than none, but

given a chance to buy books, they will nearly always choose ones that are produced locally.

Uganda now has a number of publishing firms, four of which, the Children’s Writers and

Illustrators Association, Fountain Publishers, MK Books, and Mango Tree have worked closely

with UgCLA and supported it in various ways. These publishers are a primary source of books,

followed by ones that operate in Kenya. Libraries that have budgets buy school textbooks first

and foremost because they perceive these as being most in demand and most important.

However, many have substantial collections of story books as well, generally stories about

African girls and boys, or else traditional African folk tales retold in English. Many of these

books seem to European and American readers unduly moralistic or even gruesome, but they are

highly popular according to all accounts, and have been demonstrated to be so in studies carried

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out at the Kitengesa Community Library (Dent & Yannotta, 2005; Parry, 2009b). The giants of

postcolonial African literature, especially Achebe and Ngũgĩ, are also represented in some

collections, but it has to be said that they do not get read much, presumably because the books

are too demanding and the language too difficult.

Another type of material in the libraries can be broadly described as practical—

information about immediate local concerns such as agriculture and health. The RIC-Net

information centers focus particularly on this sort of material, generally in the form of leaflets

rather than books. Much of this material is distributed free by the Netherlands NGO, CTA, while

the Uganda-based organization for health education, Straight Talk, distributes its newspapers

free to all UgCLA member libraries. A few libraries also have books on political and legal

information; at the Kyabutaika Community Library one of the most popular books in 2005 was

an official report on the police service because all the local policemen came to read it (Journal,

18 August 2005). Finally, a few have newspapers, but these are generally old ones donated by

the library’s founders after they have finished with them; the Kitengesa Community Library

seems to be the only one that can—thanks to the generosity of donors—afford to pay its own

subscriptions. Among adults there is no doubt that the newspapers are one of the greatest

attractions of the library: nearly 1000 of the visits paid in 2005-6 were for reading newspapers

because, as one of the visitors said, they informed him of ―what is going on in the country‖

(Parry, 2009b).

This last point suggests an unfortunate irony in the situation of Uganda’s community

libraries, especially with regard to the question posed in this paper. I have argued so far that the

libraries are, on the whole, indigenous institutions directed towards local interests. Yet their

poverty dictates that they must look to foreign donors if they are to obtain the material that the

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people they serve seem most to want. Is it then possible to develop libraries that are not in some

way representative of the interests of the colonial centers? I believe it is, but only if the local

agents are clear about what they want and are firm in presenting their wishes and needs to

prospective donors; and donors, for their part, need to listen to their local partners and take care

not to impose their own, externally developed, agendas.

Language use

Even if these conditions are satisfied, there remains a stubborn issue to consider: the dominance

in these libraries of the English language. Nearly all the materials described above are in English,

necessarily, since not very much is published even in Luganda, which is the best served in this

regard of all Ugandan languages. The Kitengesa Community Library, for example, despite a

policy of buying everything it can in Luganda, has still only 261 books in the language out of a

total collection of 3800. Thus in trying to promote wide reading, the libraries are pushing the

language of the center, and in this sense can be considered to be furthering linguistic

imperialism.

English is not as entirely dominant, however, as the figures given above suggest. In the

case of Kitengesa, we need to consider that one of the library’s three newspapers is in Luganda,

and this seems to be the one most frequently read. More important, perhaps, and certainly more

widespread among the libraries, is the fact there is a constant interchange between the languages.

At Kitengesa, when one of the librarians reads a story in English to children, she translates it as

she goes—and some of the children will themselves do this when read a story by someone who

does not know Luganda. Likewise, since most of the women who participate in the library’s

Family Literacy Project have rather little English, their discussions are all in Luganda. Much of

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their work, moreover, is actually translating children’s books; having agreed on the translations,

they paste the Luganda sentences into their copies so that they have bilingual books to take home

and read to their children (Parry, Kirabo, & Nakyato, 2010). Other libraries carry out similar

local language activities. URLCODA has produced beginning reading books in Lugbara. The

Busolwe library is closely affiliated to the Lunyole Language Association and stocks the

Association’s books in Lunyole. The Kabubbu Community Library has published a Luganda

story book, which it developed by asking children to tell stories for the librarians to write down.

The RIC-Net information centers regularly translate leaflets and newspaper articles into Rutoro

or Rukonjo, and some of these translations are then published and made available in the centers.

Altogether, at least fifteen libraries are known to engage in some kind of translation work,

whether in writing or in speech.

More work of this kind is definitely needed. The Uganda government’s policy is to teach

literacy in the mother tongue, but the materials available for doing so are woefully inadequate, as

was shown clearly in the government’s own figures for 2006: over the country as a whole there

were sixteen children to each local language book in the lower classes of primary school and 38

in the higher classes (Uganda Government Ministry of Education and Sports, 2006). Libraries

can help a great deal not only by stocking local language books but also by encouraging and

carrying out translation themselves. Particularly important is the translation of more

sophisticated, adult, material so that the message does not keep being repeated that the local

language is only for young children: one of the Kitengesa library’s proudest possessions, for

instance, is a translation of Animal Farm in Luganda. UgCLA is a member of Uganda’s newly

formed Multilingual Education Forum, through which, it is hoped, more such translation can be

encouraged.

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Conclusions

To return to the original question: can these libraries be described as an exercise in linguistic

imperialism? In some respects, certainly, they do advance the English imperialist agenda. They

stock predominantly English books and so they expose more Ugandans to the language,

especially in the rural areas. Many of their books are from the USA or the UK, and as such they

reflect ways of life and cultural values that are associated with the imperialist centers. Some have

financial support from those countries and so are obliged to adjust their modes of operation to

satisfy their donors’ demands. Moreover, the literacy practices that they promote—reading

aloud to children, for instance—are closely associated those nationalities and social classes that

were most implicated in political imperialism. In all these ways the libraries are helping to spread

the English language and English-speaking culture and so they make the task of linguistic

imperialist institutions easier.

The libraries cannot, however, be described as linguistic imperialist institutions

themselves. Most of them are the product of local initiatives, and where foreigners have been

involved in their foundation, it has always been through negotiation and agreement with local

partners. The people who use them are emphatically not members of the ―comprador‖ elite so

condemned by Ngũgĩ; they are children who have no prospect of getting books of their own,

students who have no opportunity to attend the better schools, adults who have no access to

information through newspapers or the internet. Moreover, these people use the libraries entirely

on their own terms. The books may perhaps reflect American culture, but if people are not

interested, they do not read them. The dominant language of the books may be English, but many

libraries are actively translating or producing material in their local languages. When users do

Page 20 of 24


read English books, often with the explicit purpose of learning English, the ones they choose are

locally purchased and reflect local concerns. The model of linguistic imperialism is clearly not

an adequate representation of this situation.

The model does, however, offer a valuable tool for investigating the libraries’ work in its

focus on relations between the center and the periphery. For that is what it is all about—not that

the center is using libraries to impose information on the periphery, but that the periphery is

using them to access information from the center. Ultimately, we hope, these local institutions

will become so vibrant that they will help the marginalized rural communities that they serve to

perceive themselves, in effect, as their own centers, in no way inferior to or less informed than

other communities elsewhere in the country and the world. One student, a regular user of the

Kitengesa Community Library, suggested that the process had begun already. Speaking of

students in the urban schools nearby, he said, ―When we visit the library we are equal to them.

We also bring our knowledge to the town‖ (Journal, 13 May 2007). That is the kind of

empowerment that community libraries, in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa, should be working

for.

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