1À l’occasion de la sortie l’an dernier des Selected Papers (Makoni 2020) regroupant, en pas moins de quatre volumes, l’ensemble des textes écrits par Sinfree Makoni, il était plus que nécessaire de faire la lumière sur un auteur peu connu en France. Si ce chercheur est parfois cité pour son travail commun avec Alastair Pennycook pour des ouvrages majeurs (Makoni & Pennycook 2005, 2007, 2020), cette large présentation de son œuvre nous permet de comprendre que son approche du langage, en Afrique notamment, s’est forgée dès les années 1990 alors qu’il enseignait dans différentes universités sud-africaines. Né au Zimbabwe, Sinfree Makoni a étudié à l’université du Ghana puis a obtenu son PhD à l’université d’Edinburgh, en Écosse. Il a travaillé longtemps en Afrique du Sud (à la University of the Western Cape, à Bellville, et de la University of Cape Town) avant de devenir successivement Andrew Carnegie African Diaspora Fellow à la Laikipia University au Kenya puis professeur au département de Linguistique Appliquée dans le Program in African Studies, à la Pennsylvania State University où il exerce toujours. Ce parcours entre de multiples lieux (Afrique du Sud, Kenya mais aussi Soudan, Australie, etc.) n’est pas sans lien avec sa conception du langage et sa méthodologie : il ne cesse d’engager des collaborations très nombreuses. Il revendique cette nécessité malgré « l’environnement académique hautement individualiste ». La dernière en date, avec Christine Severo, l’a conduit au Brésil où ils mènent un travail commun passionnant dans le cadre d’une linguistique « intégrationniste » ou encore « intégrationnelle ». Inventée par Roy Harris et ses collègues à l’université d’Oxford dans les années 80 (Harris 1998), cette approche de la communication vise à analyser les pratiques langagières en fonction des contextes et en intégrant l’ensemble de l’activité non verbale des interactions. Elle s’est créée en opposition à la notion de « langue » de la linguistique structurale ou chomskienne.
2Dans un entretien préliminaire que nous avons mené par écrit avec lui, Sinfree Makoni résume son parcours ainsi1 :
J’ai vécu dans de nombreux pays différents et encore plus de villes. Il y a deux dimensions principales à ma carrière que je n’ai pas encore conciliées. La première, qui fait l’objet de notre discussion dans cet entretien, est celle de la sociopolitique de la langue, la seconde aborde les questions de communication et de santé, et il y en a même une troisième dans laquelle je me complais parfois : la communication et la police. Pour autant que je m’en souvienne, je n’ai écrit qu’un seul chapitre qui a tenté de concilier les exigences des deux lignes de recherche. Je comprends pourquoi les efforts pour concilier mes deux axes de recherche n’ont pas abouti jusqu’à présent, car dans mon projet de recherche sur la sociopolitique du langage, la notion même de l’ontologie du langage en tant que signe est soumise à un examen sérieux. Mes recherches sur la communication et la santé supposent la validité de la notion de langage. Dans cette ligne de recherche, il n’est pas nécessaire de remettre en question la validité de la notion de langue, les efforts de recherche sont donc concentrés sur l’acquisition et la perte de la notion clairement délimitée appelée langue. Lorsque je réfléchis à ma carrière et aux choix que j’ai faits, je me rends compte que les différentes institutions ont réagi différemment à ces dimensions de ma carrière de chercheur. J’ai commencé à développer la dimension « santé » de mon travail en réaction à ce que je ressentais comme la nature ouvertement politique de la recherche sur le langage en Afrique du Sud. Le volet « santé » a également été plus facile à développer à New York, mais lorsque j’ai déménagé à [Pennsylvania] State College, je suis revenu à mes travaux antérieurs sur la sociopolitique du langage. Je me suis rendu compte que j’avais besoin d’étoffer mes intuitions sur la nature discutable de ce qu’est la langue, ou de ce que nous entendons par langue. Je revenais à un argument que j’avais avancé pour la première fois à la fin des années 1990, bien avant que les notions relatives aux ontologies du langage ne soient sur le radar intellectuel.
3En effet, Sinfree Makoni a commencé à mettre en cause la notion même de langue dès les années 1990, ses articles (souvent en collaboration) en témoignent. Il poursuit ainsi :
J’ai pris conscience de la nécessité de remettre en question les épistémologies et les ontologies de la notion de langue après avoir lu attentivement la linguistique missionnaire du xxesiècle. En lisant attentivement, j’ai pu facilement suivre comment les notions sur la langue ont émergé dans les contextes africains suite aux interventions des missionnaires. Cela m’a conduit à écrire ce que je pense être certaines de mes déclarations les plus radicales sur la langue à ce jour, bien que négligées par les universitaires internationaux. Par exemple, l’article « African Languages as European Scripts » est l’un de mes premiers arguments sur l’ontologie de la langue [(Makoni 1998)]. Il a été publié à la fin des années 1990. À la même époque, j’ai également commencé à affirmer que les langues indigènes n’existaient pas en Afrique précoloniale. Je ne voulais pas dire par là que les Africains ne communiquaient pas dans l’Afrique coloniale et précoloniale, mais qu’ils ne le faisaient pas sur la base de ressources communicatives appelées des « langues nommées ». Je pense que c’est à cette occasion que j’ai utilisé pour la première fois l’expression « langues nommées ».
4Pour Sinfree Makoni, la conception du langage en Afrique en termes de langues indigènes découle directement du concept européen de langues, ces dernières étant assignées à leur écriture et leur standardisation. Elle résulte de la projection coloniale d’un concept occidental sur une réalité communicative pourtant radicalement différente. C’est en ce sens qu’il défend l’idée que les langues africaines seraient le fruit d’écrits européens.
5Cette position radicale est en effet lourde à porter au moment où les Occidentaux se battent plutôt pour une reconnaissance des « langues » africaines à égalité avec les langues européennes. Il s’agit donc de mettre en cause les fondements même des sciences du langage qui font l’impasse sur l’histoire des pratiques langagières en Afrique dont la dimension hétérogène (constitutive du langage) n’est jamais appréhendée. Cette approche s’oppose à une conception plurilingue ou multilingue qui pense toujours le langage en formes discontinues (dialectes, variétés, vernaculaires, etc.).
6La revendication d’une écriture en langue nationale ne fait, du coup, que réactiver une vision coloniale du langage :
J’admire l’insistance de Ngugi Wa Thiong’o à utiliser le kikuyu comme moyen d’expression pour écrire depuis six décennies. Le problème, cependant, est que le support kikuyu auquel il fait référence est une variété de kikuyu hautement standardisée qui est aussi oppressive que l’anglais standard.
7Avec Alastair Pennycook, cette première intuition va prendre une forme théorique plus approfondie. L’idée de « désinventer la langue » n’a pas pour seul objectif de déconstruire une approche coloniale du langage, il s’agit aussi de reconstituer, de réinventer une autre manière d’appréhender les pratiques langagières dans leur hétérogénéité :
Je pense qu’en fin de compte, ce dont nous avons besoin, c’est d’une rupture ou d’une perturbation de la connaissance. Ce n’est qu’en rompant la connaissance que nous sommes capables de délier et ensuite de relier. Je suis assez surpris par la vulnérabilité de l’ordre mondial dans la mesure où des questions que nous ne pouvions pas soulever au siècle dernier sont la pièce maîtresse de la sociolinguistique actuelle. Je pense que [Walter] Mignolo a raison quand il dit [(Mignolo 2020)] qu’il n’est peut-être pas facile de décoloniser les universités en tant qu’institutions, mais qu’il est toujours possible de créer des espaces dans lesquels nous pouvons effectuer un travail décolonial.
8L’entretien mené avec Sinfree Makoni et présenté ci-dessous se veut informel : nous prolongeons une discussion déjà entamée dont nous gardons volontairement la forme oralisée et en anglais. Elle s’est déroulée en mars 2021 par visio-conférence.
9Cécile Canut: This special issue of Semen deals with the political dimension of our work as scholars of language and I think there is a political aspect in your work even though you don’t necessarily frame it that way. Our main perspective is to make your work better known in France, and since Mariem Guellouz and I have a good knowledge of it, we can emphasize some of the arguments we find most relevant for people in the French-speaking world to understand. Perhaps for me the most important and most political issue is the question of the concept of language, when you say that the way of thinking and framing language is imperialistic, even beyond the fact that some Empires were associated to specific languages.
10Sinfree Makoni: I think the critical aspect of my work is the argument that says that what is imperialistic in African multilingualism is the project and the way of thinking about language and society. That is the imperialistic aspect. It’s not so much like saying that English is imperialistic, French is imperialistic, Spanish is imperialistic, etc. That is a different argument altogether. My argument is that the way African languages or most languages are framed, is in itself very imperialistic. So, if that argument -- which I think is true historically, because of the way those languages were constructed, invented, etc. -- if that argument is correct, you can’t expect to introduce change by promoting the use of those languages in that form, because if you promote their use in the form they are currently conceptualized, you are just being imperialistic but now using local framings of language. That is where for example my view differs very radically from the position taken by people like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, where they would say: let’s promote the use of Kikuyu.
11My argument is: which image of Kikuyu are you talking about? If the image of Kikuyu that you are talking about is the product of the work of missionaries, colonial scholarship, etc. you can’t break away from the colonial matrix of power by using the tools that they themselves created. That is my sort of first difference with people who strongly argue for the use of African indigenous languages in the form that they are in. I’m not saying that they should not use indigenous languages. I’m saying that you need to understand the theoretical and political lens through which these languages are constructed, because they just don’t exist out there and they are constructed in a particular way, in the very specific way and this orientation does not help address the contemporary problem. So, I am saying it doesn’t matter how much resources you throw let’s say at language policies in Africa. Those policies cannot bring about liberation because the concepts are colonial. This is the core of my argument. The way these languages have been framed has been so colonial, but you are hoping that by using them more widely you’ll be able to address contemporary political problems, my argument is that conceptually you can’t use the colonial framing to solve the postcolonial predicament. That is one layer of the argument that I make.
12Mariem Guellouz: You consider that the idea is not to speak in Kikuyu for example but the first step before this is to decolonize the concepts and to decolonize the way these languages where framed by the colonial point of view and colonial epistemologies, and for you the political act in an applied linguistics would be to decolonize the concepts before thinking of how to practice a language.
13S. M.: Yes, when one looks at my career trajectory it is easy to see why I am so interested in epistemology and ontology and that sort of stuff. Because if we don’t address why we think the way we think, we are not going to make much progress. We can come up with some practical solutions and say “let’s go and think this way”, but the question is: “why we think this is a problem and why we think this is not a problem”. Applied linguistic problems are not self-evident, they are created through particular epistemologies and through particular philosophical orientations. What I admitted as a problem somebody else may not see it as a problem. There is nothing self-evident about a problem in applied linguistics because your theoretical orientation shapes your notion of what constitutes a problem: the problem of a problem.
14M. G.: So, you don’t think that language doesn’t exist but that there is an invention in the way we think of language. Could you define the concept of language from a decolonial point of view? Because language in an occidental point of view as the Saussurian definition as a sign system or in Benveniste’s theory, where the notion of subjectivity is important, in a White/colonial point of view subjectivity is linguistically constructed, how can we define language in decolonial point of view?
15S. M.: Saussure and all the work that he has done gives us an opportunity to think about language in one particular way, a way in which you separate language from geography, from history and you think of language as a system. This is one way of thinking about language. If Saussure for example had grown up in Mali in Africa for example, his view of what language or languages would or at least may have been radically different. So, the Saussurian view of language that we all ended up buying into is to some extent partially a product of the status of power of European scholarship. If the world was different and Saussure was Arabic or had grown up in Sudan or in South Africa or in a multilingual context and it had created his image of language, the image of language that we would talk about would be very different: language would be multilingual.
16In other words the historically contingent nature of language is lost, because we tend to think that this notion of language is common across the world, when the Saussurian view is actually a view of language that is a product of a very specific historical and intellectual climate. Then subsequently this intellectual view is propagated, and you get the impression that it becomes universal, but it originates from a very specific historical locality. If these circumstances were different like in my example, if Saussure had been an African growing up in Mali, I bet our notion in discussion about language would be different.
17So the way that colonial scholarship comes in decolonial scholarships in this case means you need to develop the capacity to free yourself from a prevailing circumstance and ask the question: what if circumstances were different? There is nothing natural about those circumstances that led to Saussure and the particular view of language that we have, which is tied to literacy, etc. But if the circumstances where different politically, if the geopolitics of the world were different, it would be a completely different understanding altogether. We would be entertaining the notion of language as multilingual which I suggested above. Decolonial scholarship is raising our awareness of the limited nature of some of the prevailing notions of language that we have from the West. The radical view I am making is not that the concepts are of limited value outside the West, but within the West itself. Decolonial Linguistics therefore seeks to liberate the West from constraints imposed by its own thinking. I am therefore arguing for the utility of the notions about language from Africa to the West.
18I’m not saying they [western conceptions of language] are not useful, but that they are relevant to the context that they are used in, they are only relevant to contexts also where there is literacy. The challenge that modern linguistics is confronted with is that it cannot imagine a discussion about language outside literacy, you need somehow to be literate, and you need the capacity to write. So the image we have of language is strongly shaped by literacy and writing, even if you say that you are going to transcribe what I’m talking about, you are using a written convention. So you and me have to struggle to imagine what does language look like and feel like outside the written form, because the problem we are faced with is that even a transcription of spoken language is a written rendition of language. Literacy has trapped our imagination about language. There is a way in which not only is it Saussure but it also is literacy that has tied our imagination of language. To break away from all this, you need to understand what non-literate laypeople understand and think about language? Do they think the notion of language is relevant to their everyday existence? My answer is no!
19M. G.: So, what is language?
20S. M.: It depends what you want to use the concept for. There is a part of me that says language away from a structuralist perspective may be completely different.
21Language, to some extent, could be a product of communication, interaction for example, in this case the argument I make is this: that language does not precede communication, it is the product of and consequence of communication. For example, if you go into a market, especially in these African markets where people are all talking, etc. Language for you in those cases is the product of this communication, it is something that is secondary, of secondary significance: what is important is the activity of buying and selling. There, the most important aspect is communication. So language in that case is simply tied to communication, so you can have communication without language, hence the argument that you put across is that language is an analytical apparatus that you use to talk about communication. So in most cases there is very little language that takes place but that doesn’t mean people do not communicate, people communicate. Language is the analytical apparatus that you bring to bear when you now attempt to make sense of communication, that is one way of making sense of communication, for phonology, morphology, all that stuff, that is an attempt to impose order on communication. So you can have societies that don’t have language, but they don’t need linguistics to analyze their communication.
22So when we say for example that certain communities don’t have language, we are not saying that they don’t talk to each other, they talk to each other but they don’t need linguists to analyze their communication. That is the story. There is no community that doesn’t have communication. Each society communicates but there are societies that don’t have language. The two are different!
23C. C.: Sinfree, I think that there is a point of discussion that is very interesting, first of all the question is that, in fact I have always said that there is no language, but now I think that we can have language, as you said, in one particular definition. But first of all, the problem is that in French we have the distinction between langue and language, which is a historical problem. Indeed, I made research for my new book and it seems that it a 16th century we had a verb like languaging, so I think that we can keep the word language (langue) and it’s better to show that there are different definitions in each part of the world and different situations because it’s very different between the people who write and those who don’t. My question now is that for French people studying language in Africa this position is very difficult to understand and if you start saying that there are no languages in Africa it is a really big deal.
24S. M.: Yes, it is because there is a tendency to confuse language and communication, when you say there is no language you are not saying people don’t communicate. But the way to go about that argument, when I have to put that argument, I am saying: OK, if you ask some people how many languages are in Africa, some say 300, some say 700 languages, another person will say 800. There is no consensus about how many there are. Then you say that you see that it’s possible you don’t agree on how many languages there are, not because we are not counting the language accurately but because the concept of language is not very relevant to the context that we are dealing with. When you ask people how many languages and that they give you different numbers they want to believe that the problem is not the concept of language they want to believe that the problem is the counting. But if you say look, since we all can’t agree on how many languages there are, is it possible that this phenomenon doesn’t exist that’s why it is too difficult to come up with this statement?
25Their resistance in some cases is not so much a resistance about the fact that language doesn’t exist, it’s because language with socialization and literacy gets tied to one’s own identity. So, when you then say there are no language they hear you say you are questioning their very own identity. That’s what they hear, that is the question that they hear. When you say: “OK, your language doesn’t exist”, they hear you saying that you, in terms of your own ethnicity and ethnic identity, you don’t exist. The main interesting thing about the Global South decolonial movement is that there is a young group of scholars who are brave enough to ask the following question: “What are the sociolinguistic implications if we say that language doesn’t exist?” Right! What happens to our analytical apparatus in sociolinguistics if we, just for theoretical sake, accept that this phenomenon doesn’t exist? What is it that we are going to be able to do? And what is it that we can do? That, to me, is the more interesting phase that we are in now, that we are able to sort of say: “OK since we will never completely agree on whether language exists or doesn’t exist, let’s just say for theoretical sake it doesn’t exist. Then, what type of sociolinguistics are we going to do?”
26Last week we had Eduardo Kohn2, and he was talking about anthropology beyond the human. Why I like what he does is that you can easily play around with his concepts and talk of sociolinguistics beyond language. What does that sociolinguistics beyond language look like? So that we don’t get confined by language we move beyond it now.
27C. C.: Yes, so what we need now is to develop a very concrete agenda on the way to practice sociolinguistics, so people can see what can be done.
28S. M.: We have to be clear! I was talking with Ofelia Garcia for the book in which you are contributing, Cécile (Makoni et al., à paraître), I was interviewing her and she had an interesting anecdote. She said that what she found useful now at the end of her career is that throughout most of her career she was describing things that she was not experiencing, that there was a mismatching in what she had experienced among Puerto Rican communities and what the analytical apparatus forced her to write and say. She says when it was the end of her career, she began to get more confident to try and match what her own experiences with what she was writing. That was the way that she said it. She then got enough courage. And she said that when she got the book I wrote with Alastair Pennycook, the first one (Makoni & Pennycook 2007), she said that it gave her an opportunity to start thinking about translanguaging and to say she wouldn’t have done this work about translanguaging without the intervention of African scholarships which simply said to her: this phenomenon you are talking about doesn’t exist!
29What I meant is this: those arguments from that African context were clearer about this particular problem. It’s only subsequently that I had an opportunity to expand on them but intuitively I already knew some of this, that OK the world was multilingual, that I knew, but I knew that multilingual can be used against you! Right! I knew that there were White farmers, for example, who exploited their workers and that these White farmers were multilingual. They were able to take advantage of their Black laborers. We need to shift away from a romantic view of multilingualism.
30C. C.: Somehow you were prophetic about this!
31S. M.: Yes, when I go back and look at the books I was writing in my early career that’s really to the point! When I read them, when I explain why I thought African languages were European scripts and people said I don’t know what I was talking about, it was the issue.
32C. C.: Something similar happened to me. A long time ago at a symposium and I said that languages didn’t exist. A professor said to another “Why is she saying this? Is it a provocation?” It was really violent you know!
33S. M.: Yes, that’s why the decolonial thing is interesting because we can now raise that question. What is happening here, that decolonial thing, that Global South thing is very interesting, we can now really raise the issue: What if there is no language, and say that doesn’t stop you from doing linguistics, it’s like you may not believe in God but that doesn’t stop you from studying religion… You can still study religion…
34And the other argument that I have been putting across is: “Why is it important to listen to the voices to people who are completely on the margin?”. I give this example: if you want to know how a mortgage works, I say don’t go and ask somebody who is a banker or who has a house, go and ask someone who lost his house or who lives in a homeless shelter.
35I think they will give you a better understanding of what housing means. Either they lost their house or they didn’t get any money to buy a house. I think their view is what is lacking in applied linguistics or language scholarships: you will have a completely different understanding of language.
36C. C.: It’s like freedom with covid now: we began to really understand what freedom is during the lockdown.
37S. M.: Yes, that’s true!
38M. G.: Maybe this question could be for both of you! Because you are very close in your way of thinking about African languages, my question is, and I’m sorry if it’s a bit provocative, but it’s a real question for me in my research field on Arabic languages: is the idea of essentialism. I know that for you, Sinfree, as for Cécile, it is important not to essentialize people through their way of speaking and not to give one quality to one language. Now in the debate in France we are very aware of this: for example, there is a stereotype that to speak Arabic is to be an extremist or a terrorist, thus linking the Arabic language to Islam and to radical Islam. I totally agree with the idea to break with this way of thinking but my question is when you said that Saussure couldn’t have written his linguistic theory if he was from Mali or Tunisia and how the geopolitical context influenced his way of thinking the theory. But you didn’t say that because Saussure was speaking French he was able to think this way to theorize the language. For me maybe this is also important to consider because there are differences in the categories of a specific language, in how to be in a language, in how a language enables our being in the world (Heidegger’s Dasein) from a phenomenological point of view. I said this was a provocative question for both of you but, for me, to accept a form of essentialization could also be a decolonial and a political gesture.
39S. M.: Ok! let me try and answer…
40M. G.: Sorry so I continue. If I think of an example of my fieldwork: what is it to be an Arab? To be an Arab is to speak Arabic, this is how to define Arab people.
41S. M.: In terms of Arabic what you have there is a strong relationship between Arabic and being an Arab. Is that what you are saying? But the Swahili are a lot of people who speak Arabic and who are not Arab. What I think is that there are categories of thinking and talking about using Arabic or about being Arabic. For example, we are talking about being Arabic means this, and all that. There are certain ways of thinking and talking categories about being Arabic. And the argument, the problem is that in linguistics, the categories we are supposed to use are supposed to be universal across all languages. But the example you are giving us, you are trying to say there are ways of thinking and talking about Arabic which might be different from the way I may think and talk about African languages.
42In other words, the issue is this: that is the metalanguage, the categories of linguistic analysis that we intended to use, we intended to create an impression that these are true and applicable across all different language situations but your example, what you are giving us, you are saying: “no that is not the case”. That these other categories don’t apply to the way you think of the relationship between Arabic and being an Arab.
43I know, for example, that my kids are African but do not speak an African language. But in your case that would be slightly different. So what is the nature of the relationship between speaking a language and being a part of that group depends very much on the context you are in.
44C. C.: This is true, just two words. We speak about Africa and more rarely about Maghreb because there’s another history, another context. It is very different because of religion and writing too. I’m learning Arabic now and I’ve never seen such a deeply metalinguistically constructed language. More than French, and it’s really, really important. So it would be very interesting to work on how, in Arabic, metalanguage is so closely attached to language, so linked maybe even more than in Western practices! Maybe if I can speak Arabic we can do some work about this, Mariem, because it’s a kind of black hole that’s rarely talked about. And in France it’s horrible how the Arabic language is demonized because it’s a literate language, and an important written language. In my research in Africa, I saw how colonizers escaped every time they found out there was Arabic practice. They erased Arabic or Arabic speakers, I wrote it in my last book (Canut 2021) and it would be very interesting to build on that.
45S. M.: I have a friend I write with once in a while when I write about Soudan called Ashraf Aldelhay, he knows a lot about Arabic and some of the questions he raises are very similar to what you are talking about. We can see that he is coming from a very different experience and what is important to mention is that your experience, Cécile, is expressed and articulated in applied linguistics.
46C. C.: In anglophone scholarship the concept of identity is very often used but very rarely defined. Brubaker critiqued the concept itself (2006a, 2006b), but this is quite rare. There is identity everywhere, but we never know what identity is. If we go further, we have to question not only the concept of language, but also those of identity and ethnicity, if we go really deeply into this perspective…
47S. M.: Yes. That is what decolonial scholarship should do or the Global South scholarship should do: we should end up questioning the concepts that we take for granted. That is what is happening, we must end up questioning rather than assuming that these concepts are valid. We need to think about these questions and ask: “What is the value of this, for the problem that I’m trying to address? Is it possible that the concept itself has become more problematic?” Let me give you a very interesting example: there are so many studies that were written in Africa on code switching but all end up saying: it’s difficult to determine where the code switching took place or didn’t take place, etc.
48It is a classic example of the notion of a code that is statable from, that you can then switch on to another. That is the problem. That is why they all end up saying it’s not clear with this mixing. It’s not clear because they were taking for granted that which they should have questioned in the very beginning, the idea of the code.
49M. G.: In our first exchange by email, I asked this question about reconciliation and in your answer you said you weren’t sure you understood it. The concept of reconciliation was in your book with Alastair Pennycook when you say: “Decolonization [...] focuses centrally on challenging colonial ideologies that emphasize the superiority of, and privilege ascribed to, Western/Northern thought and approaches. Another concept closely aligned with decolonization and indigenization is reconciliation. Reconciliation concerns effecting new relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. This means revisiting experiences of trauma that the Indigenous peoples may have faced. If reconciliation is an important concept in Indigenization and decolonization, we have to explore the role that trauma plays in a relearning of Indigenous languages and in applied linguistics” (Makoni & Pennycook 2020: 86). I was really interested by this concept of reconciliation and how you use it in applied linguistics.
50S. M.: I’d like to answer in two ways. First of all, I’ll talk about what I think it means and then I will ask why reconciliation is an effective strategy for addressing social problems. Reconciliation typically in African contexts mentioned where indigenous and formerly colonized people are trying to come together to resolve a problem. In the South African case, it was between the White settlers and the Blacks, so the reconciliation commission was interpreted to mean “Let’s all come together and overlook some of the problems that we had in the past. For me, the question is: “For whose benefit does reconciliation work?” It seems to work for the benefit of those that were perpetrating injustice. So in the South African case is it Blacks we should reconcile with the Whites and accept that White communities ill-treated them.
51It doesn’t work the other way round. So, why doesn’t reconciliation ever work effectively? Because it is the group that was perpetrating violence, which in some cases remains socio-economically more powerful, which is about to be forgiven: “We should all come together. In the South African case, the Blacks and Whites should come together, we should forget how the Whites ill-treated the Blacks and we should all live happily ever after. The question is who benefits from that? The people who get benefit from that are the ones who were in the sense the perpetrators of that injustice. But what you are basically saying to them, is “Oh you can go scot-free!” That is basically what you are saying. That is what happens in the South Africa case: “Oh fine let’s all live together! Because we don’t want to disrupt the power of the Whites. That’s what happens.”
52That’s why I was saying that reconciliation works for the group that was most powerful, which was the perpetrators, it is a way of providing them with an opportunity to continue into another epoch without being held accountable for what they did in the past. It is a strategy of suspending the reality of history in order for those there perpetrating violence in the past to be given an opportunity to project themselves into the future without any consequences of what they did in the past, that’s what happened in South Africa they were never held responsible for it.
53M. G.: The same thing happened after the revolution in Tunisia and this transitional justice and a law for reconciliation and then there was a group of activists named manish msahmih “We won’t forgive you” that was against reconciliation because the discourse of reconciliation was anti-revolutionary to them.
54S. M.: Yes, in the South African case the argument was being put across by Mandela in: “Oh no, we all need to live together happily ever after.” But that didn’t solve the problem. It just gave the impression that you could continue. The White community just continued doing exactly what they were doing because they were never held responsible anyway, they were never held responsible for what they did.
55M. G.: More specifically in this applied linguistics, how can we deal with the concept of reconciliation?
56S. M.: What it means in terms of an applied linguistics is this: that you need particular ideas at times that seek to disrupt existing ways of thinking rather than imagine that the way forward is to blend yourself with the dominant ideas. Reconciliation in scholarship simply meant abandoning a part of our own beliefs and then joining this particular group, this popular way of thinking in order to move forward. It never works because you don’t have a sense of your own intellectual trajectory of where you are going. What you have done is to admit this strategic decision to give over your own views in order to survive in a world of academy. So your reconciliation is with the dominant ideas but it means that you have no intellectual core which you can stand by.
57That is the problem: that you have no intellectual core, that you can’t say “OK this is what I believe in, you might not like what I believe in but you know where I stand, on this particular matter. It’s better for you to be disliked when people know what you stand for than to people to like you when they don’t know what you stand for. When people say they like what Makoni is doing but when you ask them “what is it he is doing?” they have no clue about what he is talking about. That doesn’t help. In other words, the argument I’m putting across is this: reconciliation is the bad strategy in scholarship. The idea that you have to be reconciled with other groups of people in order to move forward: that doesn’t work. I don’t know in French academia, but at least what I know in Africa and partially in the US is that you exist with your own identity.
58A lot of people don’t like what I do but that’s OK, at least hopefully they know what I am doing, they may not like the argument I make, but they know one thing: that I believe in those arguments and this is the reason I believe in those arguments so you can end up saying I disagree with him but I see what he is trying to do.
59M. G.: In the French context, when we position ourselves against reconciliation and when we are from the South, people, and in particular colleagues say: “Why are you so angry?” I’m not angry and maybe to be angry is also healthy.
60S. M.: You should say to them: “What to be happy about?” This scholarship thing is tied to another question you asked before: “How I do my scholarship”. Personally, I don’t separate it from myself: that’s who I am. What I’m talking about now is not different from what I’ll talk about if I’m in a class with my students or if I’m talking to my colleagues. They know exactly who I am. “That’s him!” I don’t have to adjust my tone temperament: they know that this is who I am.
61C. C.: It’s really a political engagement.
62S. M.: I agree, it’s a political engagement, I agree with that.
63C. C.: A lot in the academic world goes against these kinds of political or epistemological positions.
64S. M.: Yes, this is a political engagement, when I say to my White American colleagues that Euro-American applied linguistics is behind African sociolinguistics I know they get upset: this is a political statement that I’m making. When they ask: “What do you think of this advance”, I answer: “They knew way back!” If you think about it politically, they don’t want to hear that! The politics of such a statement are vast, because you are taking everything completely upside down! You’re telling them: “There are people that you thought should learn from you, but no, you are the one who needs to learn from them.” That’s why I say it’s all politics! Applied linguistics is all politics under the rubric of language.
65For example, I say that the point of my discussion is maybe linguistic but the final conclusion is the political discussion. I may begin by saying I’m looking for this particular aspect about verb, etc., but by the time I get to the end it’s a political discussion. For example, the Nick Riemer3 discussion about teaching of linguistics, you can say: “Oh! You need to teach linguistics to undergraduate student, how do you set up this program?” Then you get everything upside down and you say: “Is it to their benefit teaching them linguistics this way?” It’s all politics !