I identify as Ga from the Ga ethnic group of Ghana. Throughout my education, I have loved languages and cultures and what they represented and still do. Ghana was a British colony from the 1850s to 1957 and with colonization came a creation, validation, and a reinforcement of English linguistic imperialism in the country which meant that Ghanaian languages and cultures were not perceived as standards of civilization and progress. I was schooled in the aftermath of this system where the pursuit of knowledge in Ghanaian languages and cultures was and is not encouraged but the acquisition of English language proficiency and Anglo/Western standards is applauded and promoted.
I began to critically study and reflect on how my indigenous language, culture, and knowledge had taken a back seat in my educational journey because of both overt and covert systemic policies and practices that negated, deprivileged, and silenced its use.
As a result, as a young student who had some French proficiency, and eventually, near native-like Spanish proficiency, I was excited as languages opened worlds unknown to me. However, in graduate school, I was challenged and inspired by scholars who were and are still working actively to preserve many African languages and encourage its usage. I began to critically study and reflect on how my indigenous language, culture, and knowledge had taken a back seat in my educational journey because of both overt and covert systemic policies and practices that negated, deprivileged, and silenced its use. Since then, my research agenda has been to highlight, decolonize, and bring awareness to the need to incorporate, use, privilege, and normalize indigenous and minoritized languages, cultures, literacies, and knowledge in educating students and in the broader society. I do this work using interdisciplinary approaches such as raciolinguistics, multiliteracies, and decolonization, often through telling the stories of these communities, in addition to, analyses of educational policies and systems including the practices of educational leaders that shape students’ ways of being. This work requires community engagement, decolonizing, and decentering dominant discourses in policies and practices that marginalize indigenous, African and minoritized languages, cultures, literacies, and knowledge especially in education.
Before I began this work in decolonizing, deconstructing dominant language discourses, and reimagining how to normalize indigenous, minoritized, and racialized languages and cultures, sadly I realized that I was able to speak, read, and write more and better in English and in Spanish than in my own native Ga language. This was because of poorly implemented language-in-education policies and practices of educational leaders and educators that silenced my indigenous language. This agenda is therefore also a personal one because I continue to unlearn, learn, and relearn, a position I believe students, educators, and society in general must take in order to center indigenous, minoritized, and racialized languages, cultures, and knowledge especially in (formerly) colonized spaces.
Edwin Nii Bonney 