The Global South’s discomfort with the West’s idea of development isn’t a hidden secret. Much that has made its way to the majority/post-colonial nations since the modernization days have been ripped apart by professionals and scholars in the South to reveal the unsuitability of the West’s ‘gift’ in local contexts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
The growing outcry against the sector’s continued adherence to the Western ways of thinking about what development can do and how has resulted in the attempts to decolonize the field to empower voices from the margins. One of the areas that have seen intense decolonization efforts is that of development language. It is no longer critical that development initiatives are communicated, what also counts is how they are communicated.
The language that has primarily been used in the development sector is English. Practitioners adopting a decolonial approach believe that using English and other colonial languages to communicate development indicates the power hierarchies that continue to sideline regional voices and local expertise. For example, English continues to be seen by many, in both the Global South and the West, as a marker of capability and intelligence.
However, with the recent focus on sustainable development goals and bottom-up approaches for increased community participation, there is a push to adopt local and indigenous languages to better understand how people think about the world around them.
In The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021), Amitav Ghosh examines this interconnectedness of human life with its natural surroundings and concludes that the relationship is best captured in the folk songs and stories of the local/indigenous communities. What it shows is that the solutions to climate change and social injustices plaguing communities across the world can’t be sought using the “master’s tools” but through non-Western ways of communicating, interacting, and connecting that is informed by the immediate realities of the suffering communities.
The realization has convinced people and organizations to work toward decolonizing development language by questioning the extractive logic of human progress since colonialism, especially during the Enlightenment period. In his interview with Devex, Moses Isooba, the executive director of the Uganda National NGO Forum, stressing the role of language in creating structural changes for localization, asserts that
“Development is something that’s done in English, Spanish, and French. Yet, language sets the terms of relational engagement. If we are going to have the systems change that we want, we need to start by changing the language, reinventing the language, and removing these old hints of colonialism, in line with the decolonization agenda.”
Furthermore, highlighting the power asymmetries between the Global North and South, he remarks,
“Already the fact that someone is white and comes from the north means they come with power and privilege, and the fact that they speak English only reinforces that power.”
But is it easy to move away from the colonial language? Am I not writing this blog post in English, knowing very well that I could reach a wider audience, even in the Global South, by doing so? Abandoning the language they have been relying on to gain and share knowledge is tricky and puts students from post-colonial nations like India in a dilemma.
When, throughout our lives, we have striven to prove to others–parents, teachers, examiners, friends, and employers– that we can communicate in English, how do we step back? After putting time and effort into perfecting the language that we are told will determine our professional trajectory—not just the entry but also promotions in the long run—how do we step back? After spending thousands taking English language proficiency tests like TOEFL, IELTS, etc., to meet the Western academic institutions’ language requirements—how do we step back?
Writing about the hiring criteria in international development, Abbas Kigozi writes,
“In international development today, language carries its own form of privilege when it comes to getting jobs and promotions. In fact, proficiency in colonial languages is frequently prioritised above all else, including the local expertise that is essential to the sector’s supposed aims of localisation and decolonisation. If we are serious about these aims, I would argue that needs to change.”
And when we fail to step back because of our conditioning, “No English, No Future,” or “Good English, Better Outcomes,” we become susceptible to being called out for our insensitivity to different ways of communicating, and worse, by ‘white’ colleagues high on the decolonizing agenda. In no time, decolonizing language becomes about us being unable to jump from one wagon to another. It is then about our unwillingness to be a part of someone else’s politics before we get time to figure out our own.
It is then essential to trace where the calls to decolonize emerge from and under what contexts. Discussing Oxfam International’s language guide that, the organization sees as a resource among many in the direction of decolonization, Carla Vitantonio writes:
“Although Oxfam acknowledges the participation of many activists in the creation of the guide, we see no mention of any name. Conversations with other NGOs were not apparently part of the process – not even those NGOs engaged in the Pledge for Change. Traces of coloniality emerge also through the fact that the document is published under Oxfam’s copyright, raising suspicion of a certain knowledge extractivism.”
Reading about decolonization for this blog has at least made me aware that I may be the product of the unjust and problematic system that I wish to fight as a communications professional in the development sector. It has prepared me to turn towards languages I had sidelined as I spent hours perfecting my English—a project that will continue as I seek jobs after my course. It has also opened me to the idea of caring and learning about different communication styles from South and East Asia, as well as engaging with development communication from a multilingual perspective. I do have a long way to go. Till then, I leave you with some lines from Maleeha Sattar’s poem that beautifully captures where I stand as a conflicted user of English, aspiring to make it in the development field.
“Having internalised its status of bestowing statuses
I am also slowly imbibing English.
Immersing myself in it and yet when I miss its nuances those well
acquainted with it, judge me for being insufficiently Englishised,
Just like my village folks who deride me for being over-Englishised.
Amidst all this, I oscillate to and fro, from margins to near centre
Never making it to the centre!”