Trailblazing School in Haiti Teaches Younger Kids in Creole, Not French

A 5th grade class at the Matenwa Community School in Haiti. Credit: Amy Bracken (Used with permission)

This article and a radio report by Amy Bracken for The World in Words originally appeared on PRI.org on December 22, 2014 and is republished as part of a content-sharing agreement.
Frandy Calixte is an 11-year-old boy who lives in a small village on the drought-prone island of Lagonav, Haiti. Sitting outside his house with his mother and teacher, he tells me he wants to be a nurse when he grows up, but his mother corrects him.

By Public Radio International@PRI

“Doctor,” she says, and he amends his answer.

Almost everyone here is a small farmer; higher education is virtually unheard of. But Calixte is bucking the trend by going to a different kind of school: The Matenwa Community School, just down the rocky road from Calixte’s house.

Matenwa is also bucking the norms of Haitian education. At the start of an all-school assembly, students stand up and share what’s good and bad — a lesson they enjoyed, or how they didn’t like the behavior of other students or even teachers. In class, students sit in a circle, following the school’s philosophy that children should be seen, heard and treated with respect.

There's another essential part of the school's method, the staff says: teaching in the students’ native language, Creole, instead of French.

Only an estimated 5 percent of Haitians are fluent in French, but it's still the language of government-funded textbooks. “When I was in school, I never really learned French,” says Calixte’s mother, who calls herself Madame Frantz Calixte. When I ask how she succeeded in school, she laughs. “I didn’t really pass my exams,” she says.

But of her sons? ”They’re learning better than I did,” she says.

Abner Sauveur, who grew up in the village of Matenwa, was also taught entirely in French, despite not being able to understand everything. When teachers got frustrated with the language barrier, he says, they lashed out — literally — at their students.

“The way they beat me in school, I knew the system was bad,” he says. “People can’t learn like that.”

Sauveur never finished high school. But, in 1996, he and American teacher Chris Low co-founded the Matenwa Community School to provide “education that allowed people to reflect and share their ideas,” he says, “education that lets them learn better.” Using Creole was a necessity.

Matenwa uses Creole in all its instruction and textbooks through the third grade, when French is introduced as a second language. After that, textbooks for subjects like geography and history are all in French, simply because such books still aren’t available in Creole.

Matenwa’s co-founders hope that one day all books will be in both French and Creole. For earlier grades, the administration raises money to buy Creole books, and students make their own.

Fifth-grader Kervenson Succès reads a student-authored book, “A Cure for Being a Pest,” printed in Creole, French and English. Credit: Amy Bracken (Used with permission)

But many parents still believe French is the language of education, even in the earliest grades. They believe its spelling and grammar are more established than Creole, and that the earlier children are exposed to French, the better off they’ll be — even if they don’t understand at first.

“When the Matenwa school started, it was very difficult,” Sauveur says. ”There were parents who would withdraw their students from school because we were teaching in Creole.” But he says those parents have returned their kids to Matenwa. Now political leaders from the prime minister on down are calling for more Creole education, and some are calling Matenwa a model.

Jonès Lagrandeur, the superintendent for the more than 200 schools on Lagonav Island, was also against Creole instruction at first. “Of course! Because of the way we were raised,” he says. “But then we came to better understand it. I was a skeptic, but now I’m a die-hard fan. Since Matenwa came along, we’ve turned a page in history.”

Matenwa also offers ”mother tongue” training to educators around the country, but mostly works with neighboring schools. Lagrandeur claims that’s why national exam scores on the island this year were the highest ever.

Michel DeGraff, a Haitian linguist who works at MIT, says tests already show the Matenwa students’ Creole reading skills are almost three times the average score for 84 mainland schools tested by the World Bank.

DeGraff says he can tell French-based education isn’t working just by hearing people study. “It’s this sing-along type of tone, where often they break the sentence in the middle,” he says, “which means that they don’t understand what they’re studying.” It's the same kind of studying he did as a child, when Creole was disdained at his schools.

Now, as a member of the new Creole Academy, DeGraff is now tasked with promoting the language in all areas. But his main focus is education, including tools to help teachers teach science in Creole, and the translation of 21 math computer games into Creole.

Back at Matenwa, I visited on a Friday, when educators gathered for mother tongue training. They got pointers and books, and they discussed how they'd go back and train more people themselves.

“In the beginning it was just us who were teaching in Creole,” says Abner Sauveur, the school's co-founder says. “Now there are 10 schools who come here for training, every month. When I look at that experience, I believe that after 15, 20, 30 years, I might be dead already, but it’s possible that the system will be completely changed in Haiti.”

But at the training session, Sauveur distributes manuals that seem to have nothing to do with how to teach in Creole. They’re about stopping corporal punishment, communicating productively with students and protecting kids from sexual abuse. So is Matenwa a model because of Creole, or because of that attention to the rights of children?

I ask the teachers: Wouldn’t this school be influential even if all the classes were in French?

Their response? This could never happen in French.
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Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that the spelling rules and grammar of Creole are not well-established. That is the opinion of some Haitian parents, but is not established fact. The story has been changed to reflect that

Reprinted with permission from Global Voices.

5 Modern African Thinkers on Identity, Language and Regionalism

Street Philosophy at City Bowl, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa. (Photo by Anne
Fröhlich on Flickr – CC license-NC-2.0)

By Rakotomalala
African philosophy is generally overlooked in the field of philosophy. The reasons for that are unclear. Some argue that it may be because African philosophy is closely tied to its oral traditions, making its extended history difficult to share to a larger audience. Others argue that its Afrocentric nature makes it less palatable to the rest of the world.

Nigerian born Philosopher K.C. Anyanwu defines African philosophy as “that which concerns itself with the way in which African people of the past and present make sense of their destiny and of the world in which they live.” Although it remains mostly a mystery to other countries, African philosophy is a well-established discipline, enriched by centuries of research dating back to Ancient Egyptian philosophy to the modern post-colonial thinking. Throughout its history, African philosophy has made important contributions to Greek philosophy, mostly through Egyptian philosopher Plotinus who was instrumental in continuing the Greek tradition of Plato's philosophical academy, and to Christian philosophy via Algerian thinker Augustine of Hippo, who established the notion of the original sin.

To further understand the current evolution of contemporary African philosophy, here are five thinkers that you ought to keep track of from the continent:

1. Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux (Côte d'Ivoire)

Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux is an Ivorian writer for magazine Jeune Afrique and the author of “Philosophies africaines” (African Philosophy), in which she reviews the current elite of African philosophers. She writes that modern African philosophy has been usually classified into 4 main groups: ethnophilosophy, philosophical sagacity, nationalistic–ideological philosophy, and professional philosophy. However, Kodjo-Grandvaux believes that the defining trend for modern African philosophy can be summarized in how it has evolved from its colonial influence.

In a discussion of the book, her colleague at Jeune Afrique Nicolas Michel presents a summary of the origin and evolution of comtemporary African philosophy and Kodjo-Grandvaux's theories:

In her role as an archaeologist of ideas, Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux explores the layers of a discipline which was built mainly in response to the West during the past century. During the colonial period, it moved along under the overarching control of its imperialist colonizers, then it evolved as a counter-reaction against the colonizers’ influence [...] As the Independence movement swept throughout the continent (in the 50′s), the philosophy of trying to return to “the African identity” and move away from the Western mold grew stronger. Kodjo-Grandvaux argues that such a “return to the origins” ideology is a risky proposition. She writes: “As philosophy is trying to fit into a “regional “pattern, [i.e, continental, national or ethnic], it must avoid several pitfalls, including the pitfall of homogeneous thinking and excessive isolation”. The contribution of Western philosophy as well as that of other currents of thought should not be dismissed.

Kodjo-Grandvaux highlights a debate about ethnophilosophy that African philosophers have been grappling with for a long time: the idea that a particular culture or region has specific philosophy that is fundamentally different from the other philosophical trends is controversial in itself. However, many modern African philosophers argue that their work is a critical reflection on African leaderships and how it impacts their compatriots daily lives. As a result, it is paramount that African philosophy develops in the context of the African continent and communicates to an African audience.

2. Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Senegal)

Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Senegalese philosopher and pionner of the
new African philosophy scene. (Photo - Public Domain)

Souleymane Bachir Diagne, a Senegalese philosopher and professor at Columbia University, believes that African philosophers must make their work more accessible to their compatriots. He opines:

We need to produce our own texts in African languages​​ and one of my former American students is working towards making an anthology of texts written by African philosophers who were asked to write articles in their own language. Then, native speakers will translate them to English.

African Ubuntu philosophy via Pencils for Africa. (Photo - Public
Domain)

3. Léonce Ndikumana (Burundi)

In addition to the importance of addressing their African constituents better, there are other trending ideas that are coming forth today from African philosophers. Léonce Ndikumana grew up in Burundi and is now a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In his book, “Africa's Odious Debt: How Foreign Loans and Capital Flight Bled a Continent“, Ndikumana strives to combat many of the common narratives about Africa that are held as facts worldwide, such as the thinking that foreign aid subsidizes the African continent. In fact, capital flights from the African continent (1.44 trillion disappears without a trace from African countries, ending up in tax havens or rich countries) largely exceeds that of foreign aid (50 billion to Africa).

Ndikumana is also one of they key opinion leaders in Africa pushing back against international agency guidelines that often go against the will of African citizens.

4. Kwasi Wiredu (Ghana)

Countering false narratives is a growing trend among African intellectuals. Kwasi Wiredu, a Ghanaian philosopher, is one of those trying to do just that. He argues that a multiparty political system, often regarded as the base of democracy, is not always conducive to unity and stability. Instead, a democracy of consensus is a better suited to the African context:

Given that democracy is government by consent, the question is whether a less adversarial system than the party system, which is bound up with majoritarian decision-making, cannot be devised. It is an important fact that reasonable human beings can come to an agreement about what is to be done by virtue of compromise without agreeing on issues of truth or morality.

5. Kwame Anthony Appiah (Ghana)

However, another Ghanaian philosopher, Kwame Anthony Appiah, who currently teaches at New York University, is bucking the trend of Afrocentrism from African philosophers. He argues that Afrocentrism is an outdated concept. He believes one should encourage more trans-cultural conversation and less “regionalism”:

[Ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes] rejected the conventional view that every civilized person belonged to a community among communities [...] A global community of cosmopolitans will want to learn about other ways of life on radio, on television shows, through anthropology and history, through novels movies, news stories and newspapers, and on the Web.

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@lrakoto