In the first segment, Nadeema Jogee, Literacy Director at the South African branch of the Room to Read NGO, discussed how the colonial damage to African native languages impacted the identity, self-esteem, and social cohesion in African countries. She, however, noted that the lines that the Berlin Conference of the 19th century drew are still being contested, reimagined, and redrawn by Africans today.
“Colonization was a violent process, a series of violent processes, and it was done. A lot of it was done through disposition, so people would lose land, and people would be reclassified. A real good example of this would be the languages spoken by the hunter-gatherer communities, the San communities and the Khoi communities, which are ancient people, and their language is rooted in the land they live on, so if you dispossess people of land, then their language is under threat. And then those people, the same people, would be classified racially, and it would strip them of their ethnic identity, and so these forces, and then they'd go to school, and in school it would be forbidden to speak any other language except the colonial language,” Jogee pointed out.
Jumping forward nearly a century and a half after the Berlin Conference, the presidents of Kenya and France announced at the 79th UN General Assembly that Nairobi would host the 2026 Africa–France Summit. In his talk with Sputnik Africa, Kenyan jurist and Pan-African scholar Professor PLO Lumumba commented on the summit set to take place in Kenya—the first time the gathering will be held in a non-Francophone African country since its creation in 1973. For the professor, the announcement is far from historic. He describes the summit as a waste of time, arguing that France is merely repositioning itself after facing resistance in the Sahel, where military-led governments have expelled French troops and cut defense ties.
“It is bigger than Berlin in 1884 and 1885, creating a new sphere of influence. The French have lost out. They have literally been blood-nosed in the Sahel. So in order to regain other territory within the continent of Africa, they are going into places where their misbehavior is not known [...] I've asked at a different forum: Who bewitched us? You can ask the former slave master. You are a former slave; you are asking the former slave master, ”Tell me how to be free.” Is it in the former slave master's interest that you are free? No, they are tying you down, this time with invisible chains [....] What are the French going to tell us that is new? Nothing except to say we have found yet another planned state, which will dominate and exploit and strip to the bone,” the activist stated.
This episode also features:
Professor David Monyae, Director of Centre for Africa-China Studies, University of Johannesburg
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