African languages in post-1994 education in South Africa: Our own Titanic?

From 2007 to 2009, one of the editors of this suite of articles, Dr Michel Lafon, supervised a research programme directed at the role of the African languages in education in South Africa, funded by the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS), in association with CentRePoL (Centre for Research in the Politics of Language) at the University of Pretoria. Several workshops were held as part of the programme. In the course of 2010, Ms Sophie Didier, then research director of IFAS, suggested that a publication be developed acknowledging the IFAS/CentRePoL research programme. Her suggestion has now led to this suite of articles. The author of this introductory article as well as the co-editor wish to express their gratitude to IFAS and to the associated Cnrs (Centre national de la recherche scientifique/National Centre for Scientific Research) in France for their support, particularly for making the project financially possible, and especially since it also led to Dr Lafon’s secondment to Ifas by the CNRS and LLACAN (Langage, Langues et Cultures d’Afrique Noire), and his appointment as a research fellow at the University of Pretoria as part of the CentRePoL programme. The articles in this suite focus on the role of the African languages in education in South Africa. However, it is necessary, obviously, that such a theme be approached within a more general language-political framework. In this introduction some general issues concerning the role of the African languages in the public domain as well as in the South African educational context are therefore taken into consideration.Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 2013, 31(2): 173–18