The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Linguistic Temptation: A Comparative Analysis with Rwanda’s Switch-to-English

Abstract

The aim of this article is to assess whether the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) is likely to upgrade the status of English by constitutional or educational means. Indeed, neighboring countries such as Rwanda and Burundi adopted English as their official language in 1996 and 2014, but less writing in English is devoted to a potential linguistic transition in DR Congo, the most populous French-speaking country. This article will gauge DR Congo and Rwanda against the four criteria that arguably triggered Rwanda’s switch-to-English: historical factors in current linguistic trends; the role of charismatic leaders in sudden language policy changes; language-in-education policies; and economic incentives. The results of this interdisciplinary investigation into the language dynamics of the Great Lakes region indicate that, reflecting the vehicles of DR Congo’s domestic and regional evolutions, its leaders might be tempted to enhance the status of English as an official language in a way that, contrary to Rwanda’s radical switch-to-English, is more compatible with other languages.

Keywords

Rwanda Democratic Republic of the Congo switch-to-English language-in-education policies official languages East African Community

Introduction

Though apparently unassuming, the relationship between language and politics is multifaceted (Chomsky, 1988) and not necessarily hierarchical: language practices can alter the course of policies, and conversely, government or regime changes tend to trigger new language-in-education policies. This line of reasoning has been conceptualized by Guespin and Marcellesi who coined the term glottopolitics to “encompass all the acts of language whereby the action of society takes a political form” (Guespin and Marcellesi, 1986: 5). Like cultural goods falling under the intangible cultural heritage category, languages seem elusive. Yet they can bring about very tangible outcomes. These general axioms are reflected in a blunt reality: in Africa as in most parts of the world, English is perceived as the fastest channel for joining the global knowledge economy. Nevertheless, its imposition by governing elites is often pursued at the expense of vernacular languages – even though these are recognized as the best medium to enhance enrollment and retention rates at school (Pinnock, 2009). Compounding this linguistic ordeal, English and French policies are often implemented in colluding fashion, or at least, the lines that used to separate their appanage are increasingly blurred. Indeed, in 1998, former DR Congo President Laurent-Désiré Kabila tried to impose English as an official language but his linguistic coup was foiled; while Rwanda and Burundi – also former Francophone Belgian colonies – tilted towards the Anglophone sphere, respectively in 1996 and 2014.

The questions this paper seeks to address are multi-layered and could be funneled as follows. What relations do African states, and more specifically Rwanda and DR Congo, maintain with former colonial languages such as French and English? What are the motivations for moving away from former practices or at least inflecting them in new directions? In doing so, what is the state of competitiveness or compatibility not only between English and French, but also between these two European languages and vernacular ones? And beyond mere linguistic considerations, how do these evolutions feed on and fashion relations within and across state borders? This paper will first take a continental lens to sift changes in language status and thus better grasp the spectrum of variations that characterized language policies in postcolonial Africa. After justifying the choice of Rwanda as a counterpoint to DR Congo, it will then draw on the abundant academic literature on Rwanda’s switch-to-English to assess the less documented English policies in DR Congo and evaluate the extent to which these two countries’ linguistic fates might once again converge. The findings of this research will finally be synthesized and discussed in conclusion.

Linguistic fates and fixes in Africa’s postcolonial backwash

In When the South Reinvents the World: Test on the Power of Weakness¹, Badie (2018: 38–55) considers that decolonization failed for a number of reasons, namely: the absurd geometry of colonial borders; constitutions inspired by European law professors; the absence of strong horizontal bonds within civil society; and the fact that the actors from decolonization were more liberators than state-builders. The paradoxical result of integrating two-thirds of mankind into the so-called international society within a few decades was that many African states deemed it necessary to colonize their political culture in order to decolonize themselves. In other words, “Westphalia betrayed itself as it was fulfilling itself, leading to a deeply asymmetrical and hierarchical world” (Badie (2018: 19). To a certain extent, languages cast a cutting light on the asymmetries of the international system caused by the unaccomplished process of decolonization. Somehow, they contracted the same stigmas as those of power in the postcolonial order. African leaders’ attitude to their ex-colonizers’ language was no less paradoxical: while in the wake of independence many states distanced themselves from their oppressors’ languages and embraced local ones in the hope of soothing the wounds of the colonial era, these very languages – that were once used as double-edge weapons of promotion of local elites and discrimination of the masses – are more often than not the fastest conduits to join a globalized education and job market for citizens, a cluster of multilateral organizations for states. In fact, and upstream from Badie’s reflections, one might even assert that the incomplete process of political decolonization is but a byproduct of a failure to depart from ways of thinking that were forged by Western languages rather than African idioms and customs.

Therefore, by pulling in opposite directions, the two branches – vehicular and vernacular – of this linguistic compass opened up a complex panorama out of which five general paths have emerged since independence. The first of them, perhaps the most understandable, is estrangement. Sékou Touré’s Guinea provides the paradigmatic example of this category: from 1966 to 1984, French was dismissed from the education system as too “glottophagous” (Sylla, 1997: 145) but remained its official language. In a similar vein, Algeria’s 1963 and 1976 Constitutions sidelined French as well as, interestingly enough, Berber so as to legitimize the colonels and strengthen Arabization.² The second trend stands at the opposite end of this taxonomy, thus consisting of a rapprochement whereby policies, especially in the education field, encouraged the intensified use of the former colonial language except this time for the purpose of blending in with modernization. Apart from cosmetic changes in place names, Mobutu’s zaïrianisation and the previous ruling n° 174 of 17 October 1962 suppressed the recourse to local languages in education, a posture that went even beyond Belgium’s indirect colonial administration whereby lower-ranking Flemish-speaking civil servants largely resorted to vernacular languages at school (Kilanga, 2006). Similarly, in Senegal, despite his intellectual commitment to négritude, Léopold Sédar Senghor favored francisation over local languages (El Hadji, 2014). In between estrangement and rapprochement lies a happy medium, that is a continuation of former policies without drastic reforms. The epitomes of this category are harder to identify because they were often concealed behind the revolutionary rhetoric of newly independent states. Nevertheless, they are more numerous than one would have thought, if only because of the inertial power of policy habits or the inefficiency resulting from the chronic regime changes that occurred, to name but a few, in Benin, Togo, Cameroon and Côte d’Ivoire.

Timely reinvested by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) who declared 2019 the International Year of Indigenous Languages (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2019), a fourth category is composed of countries whose most noteworthy changes are not related to European languages but to local ones. Kenya has for instance promoted Swahili as a co-official language together with English in 2010. At a regional level, Swahili was also adopted as an official language by the African Union (AU) in 2004 and by the East African Community (EAC) in 2016. In this vernacular vein, Zimbabwe and South Africa have pushed the recognition of local languages to its paroxysm with respectively fifteen and nine local languages promoted to officialdom (Kibangula, 2015). Last but not least, some African states have surprisingly added former colonial languages to their Constitution or switched from one to another. In a drastic move, The Gambia’s former president Yahya Jammeh, following his country’s withdrawal from the Commonwealth in 2013, substituted English for Arabic as this country’s official language in 2014 (Harit, 2014) – a decision partly motivated by the commercial appeal of the Arab League and his confessional orientation. Of course, this five-pronged taxonomy cannot be interpreted too strictly since some states moved across or cumulated some of these categories. But it still is relevant inasmuch as it shows how the languages assigned to the education and political systems of a people are not set in stone. Closer to the region this paper will now focus on, in 1996 English became one of Rwanda’s official languages together with French, Kinyarwanda – and Swahili since 2017. Also, a former Francophone colony, neighboring Burundi followed suit in 2014 to “allow the country to be in conformity with other EAC partner states” (Uwimana, 2014). In the light of this Anglophile declination, it would not be misplaced to wonder whether DR Congo is about to emulate Rwanda and Burundi in recognizing English as its official language, thus culminating the Great Lakes region’s switch in linguistic allegiance from French to English.

Rwanda and DR Congo as unit of analysis

Languages have often been relegated to the literary affectations of authors, the policies that seek to bridle them to second-ranking ministries. Yet they offer insightful benchmarks on which to dock our analytical grid in order to seize the precise magnitude of the postcolonial backwash. Improving accuracy requires to narrow down the spatiotemporal scale of analysis while keeping it vast enough to include two countries within a meaningful window of time, and thus benefit from a comparative perspective. Geography shows why Rwanda and Eastern DR Congo are closely interconnected. In hydrographic terms, they are located between the White Nile and the Congo River, encompassing the Tanganyika, Victoria and many other lakes that have given their name to the Great Lakes region. Just as graphically, together with the “1,000 hills country” – Rwanda – “the creased edge of Eastern Congo belongs to the rift, the great fault line that splits Africa from North to South” (Van Reybrouck, 2012: 31). To add historical momentum to this cartographic layout, one must bear in mind that since precolonial times, and especially in the second half of the 19th century, Afro-Arab merchants called the arabisés – Al-Zubayr, Tippo Tip, and Misri – were all concentrating their influence from Southern Sudan to South-East Congo, with the Caravan Roads leading eastward to Zanzibar, westward to Luanda and Gilroy’s (1993) Black Atlantic, up North to Egypt. Van Reybrouck (2012: 84–85) has demonstrated that just like Belgium was established in 1830 to create a buffer zone in the European balance of power game, the Berlin Conference (1884–1885) reached a compromise that was as much a way of satisfying Leopold II’s ambitions as of consolidating a neutral space between Anglophone, Lusophone, and Francophone Africa. History is still a relevant guide to today’s evolutions since Burundi, Rwanda and DR Congo are on what the Canadian sociolinguist Leclerc (2008) calls the ligne Maginot linguistique between former British territories to the east and former Francophone colonies to the west. Far from being blurred into oblivion like any commonsensical reading of a postcolonial map would have us believe, this line, because it no longer corresponds to state borders is harder to identify and perhaps mobile to the extent that it would be more accurate to talk of a fiercely disputed frontier. But the difference between a border and a frontier is not just one of width, it is first of all one of nature. While borders materialize the limits of a juridical abstraction – sovereignty – and the contiguity of two political entities – states – frontiers rather epitomize the prolongation of issues that precisely permeate both sides of a border. The mere fact that around 2000 languages (Heine and Nurse, 2000) are crammed into 54 African states – with French, English, Swahili and varieties of Kinyarwanda overlapping Rwanda and DR Congo – validates the observation according to which these two countries, while separated by a political border, have in common a linguistic frontier whose substance will be discussed in the comparison below.

Comparing rationale and potential for switch-to-English

Linguistic legacies in today’s practices

Rwanda

In so far as juridical provisions are concerned, French was officially imposed on Rwanda by Belgium in 1923; and the first constitutional law of the Republic of Rwanda was voted on 24 November 1962. But during the first 16 years of independence, policies did not stand in stark contrast with the Belgium system of indirect administration since French remained “the language of instruction in Rwanda for all grades with the exception of P1–P3 which were taught in Kinyarwanda”³ (Pearson, 2014: 21). An endoglossic turn was initiated in 1978 in the form of Rwandisation (Rosendal, 2010: 248) when the Ministry of Education decided that Kinyarwanda was to be used as the sole medium of instruction (MOI) throughout all primary education, that is, from P1 to P8. In 1994, when the Rwandan Patriotic Front took over power after a civil war (1990–1994) and a genocide (April–July 1994), the education system, like most of Rwanda’s society, was in disarray. Today, Kinyarwanda, Swahili, English, and French are all on an equal footing as far as constitutional arrangements go. With regards to education, however, Kinyarwanda (P1–P3) and English (P4 onwards) are MOI with French as a taught subject, and Swahili gradually making headway in administrative circles alongside English. “Rwandan linguists differ on the number of regional dialects – from six to seven –”, among which Samuelson (2012: 5–9) points Luganda, Lingala and Runyankore-Rukiga. But in the Great Lakes region, taking quantitative data at face-value can lead the gullible observer astray. For example, a recent survey by the Financial Times has revealed how the World Bank and Rwanda’s government have misrepresented economic performance and poverty levels statistics over the past five years (Wilson and Blood, 2019). Cross-checking separate investigations conveys the combined, and more reliable, picture of more than 99% of Rwandans speaking Kinyarwanda; 1.9% to 5% speaking English; 3.9% to 15% speaking French; and 3% to 11% speaking Swahili (Borg, 2015; Samuelson, 2012; Sibomana, 2015).

DR Congo

Striking contrasts seem to make any comparison between the linguistic environments of Rwanda and DR Congo unreasonable. Article 1 of the 2006 Constitution (Lois diverses à portée linguistique, 2006) grants Kikongo, Tshiluba, Lingala, and Swahili the status of national languages while only one official language is recognized – French – compared to four in Rwanda – Kinyarwanda, French, English, and Swahili. The relative homogeneity guaranteed by the most spread-out vehicular language in Rwanda – Kinyarwanda – is to be set against a fragmented four-partite division of national languages whereby the Eastern part of DR Congo is Swahilophone; the Western part, Lingalophone; the central part, Kikongophone; and the Southern part, Tshilubaphone (Université de Laval, 2016). Perhaps even more yawning is the fracture in terms of the number of so-called vernacular languages or dialects, since 216 are currently spoken in DR Congo (against 321 in 1950) while, as was noted above, experts seem to agree that this figure does not reach even ten in Rwanda. But under the varnish of quantified taxonomy, convergence zones can nonetheless be identified at regional levels. Contrary to Pearson’s (2014: 40) assertion that Rwanda’s “linguistic landscape (. . .) is vastly different from its neighbors”, at least one common feature can easily be found in countries where an endoglossic language is spoken by a large majority of the population, thus serving as the national vehicular language. As noted by Niyibizi:

Burundi also counts more than 99% of its population who speak Kirundi. Similarly, 95% of the population of Swaziland speak Siswati as their native language; while Setswana is spoken by over 80% of the population as their mother-tongue in Botswana. Similarly, Somali is spoken as the mother tongue by over 95% of the population of Somalia; while Sesotho is spoken by the vast majority of the population of Lesotho. (Niyibizi, 2015: 101)

One could also add that the 1978 Kinyarwandisation of education is similar – or perhaps even inspired by – the 1973 Kirundisation in neighboring Burundi. But what really singles Rwanda out is that due to its unique historical background, it is not indigenous but European languages that operate as “quasi-ethnic identifiers” (Borg, 2015: 16), with the Hutus (84% of the population) and the Tutsis (15% of the population) more likely to speak respectively French and English – the remaining 1% of Twa completing this relatively homogenous ethnic background.

Nevertheless, some traits also span the linguistic panorama shared by Rwanda and DR Congo. Out of the education sphere, indicators of a state of polyglossia abound. In Rwanda, identity cards are issued in Kinyarwanda, French, and English; bank notes in French and English on one side and Kinyarwanda on the other (Rosendal, 2010: 245), while following AU and EAC regulations, some official documents are also drafted in Swahili. Even though Sibomana (2015: 27) notes that “most advertising billboards and posters in the most frequented places of Kigali are now in English”, many analysts point to the fact that rural Rwandans are not exposed to English on a daily basis, leading to a rural/urban divide (Basheija, 2014: 6; Niyibizi, 2015: 102; Sibomana, 2015: 39). In DR Congo, the national currency, the franc congolais, also displays three languages – French, English, and Swahili – commercial contracts are often written in English or even in Portuguese with its Lusophone neighbor Angola; and while French exerts a quasi-monopoly on administrative documents and newspapers, national and vernacular languages flourish in television and radio programs. This informal division of linguistic labor reinforces triglossic tensions between official, national and vernacular languages, and is eventually conducive to linguistic hybridization or entrelangue (Makita, 2013: 58). Similarly, in Rwanda, Niyomugabo (2012: 27) contends that the use of Kinyafranglais is “a disguise of language deficiency” even in one of the country’s most prestigious universities, the Kigali Institute of Education. In addition to the resort to hybridization, another common point between DR Congo and Rwanda is the low command of French and English compared to local languages: a report from the Université de Laval (2016) estimates that only 10% of Congolese fully master French, compared to 1% for English; in Rwanda, these figures are very close, respectively 3.9–15% and 1.9–5%. But put in historical perspective, the predominance of vernacular languages should not come as any surprise: these were the languages spoken in precolonial times; and under the Belgian rule in both Rwanda and DR Congo, contrary to higher civil servants who were mostly Francophone, Flemish-speaking lower civil servants and missionaries, who in concrete terms were in charge of education tasks throughout both countries, heavily relied on indigenous languages to impart knowledge. After a century and a half of geopolitical upheavals, these very languages now experience a rejuvenation which UNESCO has deemed global and vigorous enough to declare 2019 the International year of indigenous languages (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2019).

From the leader’s persona to personalized policies

Rwanda

Paul Kagame (2005) has always contended that each and every language spoken in Rwanda “evolves, moves forward or backwards within the framework of an open and free linguistic market. The state does not intervene”. Yet within 15 years (from 1996 until 2011), he ensured that Rwanda added two official languages to its Constitution – English in 1996 and Swahili in 2017 – and that it changed twice its MOI, a first time in 2008 from French to English – against the AU and UNESCO’s injunction that children be taught in their mother tongues at low levels of education (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2008) – only to revert it back to Kinyarwanda three years later. After all, it seems worth examining the motives behind Kagame’s not so invisible handling of language policies.

Understandably, languages are not the first thing on a warlord’s mind, especially upon attempting a military coup. But should the coup succeed and should its leader wish to hang on to power, languages spring back into the political equation for staying in power requires a different set of skills than seizing it. Extending the time factor inexorably turns short-term, political calculations into long-term, glottopolitical ones. Paul Kagame’s journey from guerrilla leader to lifelong autocrat illustrates that point. Exiled in Uganda since he was four years old, he probably had little time to dedicate to the intricacies of power and language when at 33 years old he was completing a military training as Command Staff in Fort Leavenworth (Kansas, United States), where his solicitous hosts were teaching him “field tactics and psyops, propaganda techniques to win hearts and minds” (Hepstein, 2017). After a four-year civil war launched on 1 October 1990 and symbolically ended on 4 July 1994, when the Front Patriotique Rwandais took over Kigali, Kagame held vice-president and Defense minister posts from 1994 to 2000, and finally became Rwanda’s President on 17 April 2000, a position he still holds today after three presidential elections – 95.1%, 93.03%, and 98.79 % victories in 2003, 2010, and 2017, respectively. But it is the combination – not the artificial distinction made for the sake of analysis – of Rwanda and Kagame’s trajectories that provides much of the rationale for provoking the transition from a linguistic panorama dominated by French and Kinyarwanda to one where English, Kinyarwanda and, since 2017, Kiswahili prevail. Their combined momentum occasioned the rejection of the doubly painful Francophone heritage into oblivion. For Rwanda, Francophonie was synonymous to crimes a first time under the Belgian tutelage from 1916 onwards – although Rwanda was less exposed than the Congo Free State (1885–1908) to the slave trade routes due to its landlocked position. And a century later, François Mitterrand tarnished the French language legacy further when:

France took the lead in undertaking a series of military interventions in Rwanda between 1990 and 1994. (. . .) the Mitterrand administration had provided the authoritarian regime of Major General Juvenal Habyarimana with over $160 million in economic aid and an untold amount of military aid from 1990 to 1994, essentially contributing to the genocide that unfolded in 1994. (Schraeder, 2000: 412–413)

This dubious involvement culminated in the Opération Turquoise which protected the Hutu regime and failed to provide a safe zone for civilians, claiming between 800,000 and 1,000,000 of mostly Tutsi lives. Reflecting many Tutsis’ attitude, for Paul Kagame “the entire experience of France and French influence” was negative. Echoing his leader’s opinion, Claver Yisa (the then Director of Policy Planning in the Ministry of Education) rams home the point: “Rwandans were not getting anything out of French” (Borg, 2015: 73–75). Subsequently, Rwanda chose English over French, amnesia over grudge.

DR Congo

In political regimes where the rule of law tends to be overshadowed by the charisma of their leader, it is worth evaluating the extent to which personal proclivities and linguistic fates are intertwined. For the first time since its independence on 30 June 1960, DR Congo was about to experience a peaceful democratic transition. But contrary to the International Federation for Human Rights’ estimates that recounted a 60% victory for Fayulu, Félix Tshisekedi was proclaimed President in what authorized sources have since then called an “electoral coup” (Burke, 2019). According to a political coalition agreement between Kabila’s Front Commun pour le Congoand Félix Tshisekedi’s Cap pour le Changement, Kabila would retain the majority in Parliament as well as in the provinces, thus making him a de facto honorary President, while Tshisekedi would hold the de jure presidency with prerogatives on the ministries of defense, foreign affairs and the army, all of whom still remain infiltrated by Kabila’s men. This outcome should have come as no surprise from a man who postponed elections two years beyond his second and last mandate and who previously sought to cling to power through another kind of coup, the constitutional one. As Battory and Vircoulon (2018: 5) point out: “constitutional revision is the method autocrats usually use to stay in power. This is what happened in Cameroon, Chad, Djibouti, Rwanda, Uganda and it is programmed in Burundi this year [2018]”. When Kabila convoked the constitutional court to submit to the nine judges the demand of staying in office, three of them failed to turn up. “That episode led Kabila to try to reconfigure the constitutional court from nine down to five members, with a quorum of just three. The National Assembly voted against the proposition” (Dizole, 2018).

The outcomes of Rwanda’s linguistic tribulations and the DR Congo presidential elections initially scheduled in December 2016 briefly summarized above prove the highly personal and volatile nature of decision-making in the Great Lakes region. Former DR Congo President Laurent-Désiré Kabila already sought to enthrone English in 1998 but his attempt was foiled as the glottopolitical conditions were not ripe yet. In Rwanda, it took one charismatic leader like Paul Kagame to order an overnight language-switch, not two. So far, Joseph Kabila – fluent in English and Swahili, which is commonly used in the East – and Félix Tshisekedi – fluent in French and Lingala, mostly spoken in the West – have not shown any sign that their officious coalition could turn into a viable cohabitation. In that sense, a still more recent development was the unexpected attendance of more than 500 members of parliament – while their number is technically limited to 500 positions – at the 19 August extraordinary session of the National Assembly (RFI, 2019). Sowing confusion, it delayed further the hardly negotiated composition of the government still pending six months after President Tshisekedi took office. Under this configuration, the concordance between symmetrical political and linguistic fault lines hold; and if partition is what DR Congo expects, languages will have foretold the political tale ahead.

How education and economics reshuffle the linguistic cards

Rwanda

Once part of the colonial paraphernalia, European languages are presently the fastest medium to access information related to education and employability. On top of the overwhelming presence of English online (25.2%) compared to French (3.3%) (Internet World Stats, 2019), Frath (2017) observes a more qualitative evolution which he labels “fixation on English”, a trend described as the substitution of one’s own language for English, even though a handful of languages such as French, German, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, and a few others are also capable of expressing the modern world in its totality. Never mind that politics has yielded grounds to the geoeconomics that shape the self-interests of actors in the so-called Cold Peace era (Schraeder, 2000). Not only has English become the world’s political and business lingua franca, but simultaneously, English is also increasingly perceived as the language of science and technology. These general postulates translated as follows in Rwanda’s 2020 Vision, a road map for the country’s future designed by the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning and set out shortly after Paul Kagame took office in 2000. No single mention of languages is made in the 4.2. Human Resource Development and a Knowledge-based economy (i) education section (Republic of Rwanda, 2000: 10–11). Nor does it feature in any of the 47 key indicators for economic development in annex 1 (Republic of Rwanda, 2000: 28–29). However, the fact that the country’s future strategy was laid out in English – a language at the time mastered by less than 5% of the population – speaks for itself. As Sibomana (2015: 40) notes, “English has become the benchmark against which the level of education is evaluated in many countries and a key factor in social mobility”, even though these practices might be counterproductive for children who have a far better grasp of Kinyarwanda. Samuelson is also inclined to think that:

the nation’s major higher education institutions – National University of Rwanda (NUR), Kigali Institute of Education (KIE), and Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) – are officially English-French bilingual institutions where faculty members could lecture in either language, with students expected to follow along in both. (Samuelson, 2012: 16)

As for the economic field per se, Rwanda’s genocide occurred 25 years ago and the country has gone to great lengths to turn its 2020 Vision into reality at the announced time. In raw economic language, this meant that Rwanda increasingly looked eastwards – that is, towards the Anglophone sphere – for business opportunities. The adoption of English as the official language became tantamount to a sine qua non (though always an officious criterion) to join the EAC, which Rwanda did in 2007. Switching to English was part of Paul Kagame’s two-pronged strategy. On a symbolic note with deep psychological roots, turning to English was another way of putting the country’s past further behind: interestingly enough, together with Rwanda, Algeria and Madagascar are also Commonwealth members not to have been British colonies that still maintain uneasy relations with France to this day. For Rwanda, drifting away from French can equally be related to the legal efforts to prohibit genocidaire rhetoric and any allusion to Rwanda’s troubled history. What better way of annihilating the connotative charge of words than replacing them with those of another language? At a more pragmatic level, Rwanda could from then on enjoy education and economic advantages (harmonization of primary and secondary schools’ curriculum, better access to universities for students, and to the Indian Ocean for labor and commodities) to transcend its landlocked, resource-deprived geographic fate. As the years unfolded, what could have been perceived as a linguistic whim of domestic insignificance became entrenched in a truly global scheme: in 1996, English became one of the official languages together with French and Kinyarwanda (and Kiswahili in 2017); in 2007, Rwanda joined the EAC; in 2008, English became the MOI throughout the whole education curriculum; and in 2009, Rwanda joined the Commonwealth. This strategy thus combined intangible and tangible results. But from an international official development assistance (ODA)/foreign direct investment recipient perspective, just like promoting English as an official language might give easier access to economic organizations, it also enhanced the chances of getting aid and funds from powerful English-speaking countries such as the US or the UK. McGreal noted that:

the UK [was then] the single largest donor to Rwanda, providing nearly half of its foreign aid. [A few years later], the UK government increased its funding to Rwanda by 50% over the 2010–2015 period, dedicating 27% of its total budget for Rwanda to education initiatives. (McGreal, 2008)

It is fair to conclude this section by acknowledging that Paul Kagame managed to cultivate a synergy between domestic and foreign policies that strengthened the link between education and employability and eventually tilted the economic balance towards greater competitiveness and attractiveness vis-à-vis English-speaking partners.

DR Congo

In terms of languages-in-education policies, while Rwanda’s chaos was caused by contradictory injunctions regarding the MOI – French, then Kinyarwanda from 1978 to 2008, English for three years, and again Kinyarwanda since 2011 – the same entropy results from the opposite factor in DR Congo: the lack, not the excess, of detailed policies and their vagueness in terms of implementation. This gray area feeds on the 14/004 framework law of 2014: “French is the language used for instruction; national languages or local languages are used as mediums of instruction and learning as well as subjects” (Lois diverses à portée linguistique, 2014). Concomitantly, the English language has infused DR Congo’s education field in much the same proportions that it did in Rwanda. The 2003 education reform Pacte de Modernisation de l’Université Congolaise introduced English in all university majors and as a taught subject in secondary schools. Beyond mere academic stipulations, English is also perceived as a means of hopping on the modernization train and implementing sustainable development, placed as it is on an equal footing with information technology courses and other cross-disciplinary subjects such as human immunodeficiency virus campaigns and biodiversity since the 2012 reforms (Lois diverses à portée linguistique, 2016). In line with the pervasive progress of English throughout the education field, Congolese studying abroad – a segment that increased by 85% between 2010 and 2015 (Campus France, 2017) – are less partial to Francophone universities than they used to be: among the top five destinations for students, South Africa, the United States, and Ghana host together 3560 Congolese students compared to 1236 in France and Belgium. In other words, out of four students, three will choose Anglophone universities. This brain drain could also have an impact on language policy since foreign students are more often than not the descendants of governing elites and are promised to become the future ones – Joseph Kabila, himself more at ease in English than in French, and other high-ranking civil servants send their children to American universities.

But this brain drain can also be expressed in a less elitist manner. Discontented with their low wages and derelict infrastructures, many Congolese teachers and other skilled workers flow to neighboring countries (Eyssette, 2018: 486). To identify the magnet and driving forces in which these individual fates give substance to regional economic trends, it is crucial to bear in mind that DR Congo does not belong to the zone franc and is therefore not necessarily encouraged to privilege Francophone companies. This claim is supported by two facts: at the regional level, South Africa and Zambia remain DR Congo’s leading trading partners; and at the same time, the volume of trade between DR Congo and Lusophone Angola is more significant than between DR Congo and any Anglophone EAC country. On paper, however, regional economic organizations offer no hint as to whether the economic sway is more likely to tilt towards Anglophone or Francophone spheres since DR Congo can be seen as the hinge of the Economic Community of the Great Lakes Countries, the Economic Community of Central African States, the Southern African Development Community, and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa. By noticing that “countries belonging to the mainly Anglophone East African Community registered a 5.4% economic growth rate in the decade up to 2012, compared with just 3.4% for countries of the predominantly Francophone Economic and Monetary Union of West Africa (UEMOA)”, Borg (2015: 71) raises an important point which deserves a sectorial analysis. Pondering on DR Congo’s economic levers for change, Braeckman (2016: 16) specifies that “in 1982 the artisanal mining sector became the country’s number one employer”. But DR Congo does not reap most benefits from its own “geological scandal”. At a structural level, tax incentives explain how natural resources produce 30% of the gross domestic product but represent only 10% of the state federal budget: indeed, multinationals are snapping up natural resources while being exonerated from tax for the first 15 years of exploitation (Braeckman 2016: 19), even though the article 247 of the new version of DR Congo’s Code Minier now establishes the corporate income tax at 30% (Journal Officiel de la République Ddémocratique du Congo, 2018: 62). As regards macroeconomic contingencies, from 2005 to 2015 DR Congo experienced a 6–7% growth; but due to the fall of mineral and natural resources’ prices on the international market (especially copper and coltan from Kivu) since 2016, this manna has plummeted to 2–3%, and engendered inflation and the devaluation of the franc congolais against the US$. Not refrained by bilateral deals – apart from China who builds roads in exchange for natural resources – South African, Australian, US and Swiss companies bypass the central government, when natural resources are not in the hands of militia from Anglophone neighboring countries (Ockrent, 2018). This state of affairs has turned Butembo, Goma, and Bukavu into cross-border regional hubs and revitalized old trade routes that once connected Zanzibar to the heart of the continent. Nowadays, a string of pearls allows companies – in and out of the mineral field – to sell their products from DR Congo to the Indian Ocean through English-speaking countries. Despite all the talking about Rwanda being Africa’s Singapore, it is still heavily dependent on the added value generated by its neighbor’s underground – a vital bonanza which explains much of Rwanda’s diplomatic posturing and military intrusions in the region. Although of a different nature, exchanges go both ways since DR Congo is absorbing around 30% of Rwanda’s exports and 30% of EAC exports (Ubwani, 2019; World Integrated Trade Solution, 2017). Crystallizing this eastward rush at all levels, President Tshisekedi has made no secret of his intention to join the EAC whose members will discuss DR Congo’s admission at the next November summit (Mugisha, 2019). Therefore, the consequences of DR Congo contracting the curse of natural resources go beyond the strict economic admonition which stresses that “the spillover effects are limited due to the importation of equipment and consuming goods, the repatriation of profits and expatriates’ salaries and capital flight and cronyism” (Hugon, 2016: 25–26). In as much as linguistic spillover effects can be diagnosed, DR Congo is pulled by more diversified economic magnets than they are often represented: while Lusophone Angola and Francophone countries constitute traditional commercial poles, under current circumstances, Congolese are no less enticed to use English and Swahili as a business lingua franca – whether with EAC or SADC members – than they are to speak or write in French.

Conclusion

While Ruanda-Urundi became the seventh province of Belgian Congo in 1925, a little less than a century later, could DR Congo emulate Rwanda and Burundi’s switch-to-English, sealing the Great Lakes region’s transition from a Francophone to an Anglophone area? Four indicators were deemed suitable to detect similarities and discrepancies between Rwanda and DR Congo’s recent English policies. As regards the first one – the inertia of history in current policy trends – one cannot help but observe that, irrespective of the long colonial digression, local vehicular languages are still the main vectors of communication among citizens, albeit Kinyarwanda spans the whole of Rwanda, whereas DR Congo is roughly divided into Kikongo, Tshiluba, Lingala, and Swahili-speaking zones. Despite massive national and international investments in English policies in Rwanda and policy recommendations regarding French and English in both DR Congo and Rwanda, there is a clear-cut disjunction between the status of these languages and their actual level of command by Rwandans and Congolese. This makes DR Congo no less prepared to switch to English than Rwanda was from 1996 onwards. In so far as the inclinations of leaders are concerned, the current duumvirate between Tshisekedi and Kabila only adds confusion to DR Congo’s future. The glottopolitical focus of this study stressed that the inadequacy between the leaders’ spoken languages and their constituency’s might prompt, if not partition in the mid-term, at least a continued lack of visibility. These systematic contradictions in policy goals are illustrated by linguistic ODA programs simultaneously granted to Francophone and Anglophone donor countries in DR Congo; and Rwanda’s unexpected lobbying of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie – now run by the Rwandan Louise Mushikiwabo – after 25 years of Anglophile embrace and strained distancing with la Francophonie. This dual pursuit can partly be attributed to what Prunier (2002: 105) called the “Fashoda syndrome”, according to which “the whole world is a political, cultural and economic battlefield between France and the Anglo-Saxons”. But a promising avenue for research would be to postulate that, conversely, this syndrome is now being instrumentalized by ODA recipient countries in Africa. At a personal level, Kabila and Tshisekedi might not have Kagame’s antagonistic relation with anything related to France and the French language, but sensitive issues with strong historical undertones in the bilateral relations between DR Congo and Belgium – such as the absence of official apologies for Belgium’s colonial past (Cessou, 2019) or the ongoing debate over restitution of cultural heritage between the Africa Museum and the recently built Congo National Museum – could have similar consequences with France’s involvement in Rwanda’s genocide in the 1990s – that is, disaffection vis-à-vis la Francophonie and a quest for alternatives. As far as education goes, paradoxically, Rwanda’s excessively interventionist approach and DR Congo’s opposite dilettantism have resulted in similar levels of entropy, whereby vernacular languages and hybridization fill in the yawning gap left by the inconsistencies of French and English language-in-education policies. As for the final economic indicator, there is no denying that DR Congo’s labor and trade routes have been crossing Rwanda and embracing the EAC orbit for many years now. The coming meeting between Tshisekedi and EAC members in November should seek to integrate further the Congolese applicant to its coveted economic organization. And if past members’ admissions are anything to go by, the adoption of English as official language has infallibly preceded or postdated EAC membership by a few years only.

Footnotes

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Chosun University in 2018.

ORCID iD

Jérémie Eyssette

Notes

Author biography

Jérémie Eyssette joined Chosun University (Department of Francophone Studies, Gwangju, South Korea) in 2011. Since then, he has been involved with research related to cultural history and linguistic policies. Before joining Chosun University, he worked at an immigration company in China as a consultant and translator, and at Liaoning University (Shenyang) as a Professor.

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