geography paragraph

“What a lot of people call me here,” Prof. Aliu Babatunde Fafunwa said proudly, “is the father of mother tongue.”

Mr. Fafunwa, a 67-year-old Nigerian teacher and college administrator, has become a one-man movement fighting for the idea that children, especially in their early school years, should be taught mostly in their native language.

But in this former British colony where English is the official language and much of the intellectual elite is determindedly Anglophile, Mr. Fafunwa has until recently led an often lonely and seemingly quixotic crusade.

That, however, changed abruptly early last year when Mr. Fafunwa was named Nigeria’s Minister of Education, in charge of Africa’s biggest school system. Nigerian has about 18 million students, more than than the entire populations of all but a handful of countries in the sub-Saharan region. At the Top of the Agenda

And almost immediately, Mr. Fafunwa’s ascent has put the mother-tongue campaign at the top of the nation’s education agenda, and has perhaps inevitably been the catalyst for a growing debate about whether English should indeed be the nation’s lingua franca.

“In Europe, in America, in Japan, the average child goes to school in the language that he grows up with, from primary all the way up to the university,” Mr. Fafunwa said in a conversation in his modest book-lined office here.

“It is only those of us who are products of colonialism, whether in Asia or Africa, who are forced to go to school in a language different from our own.”

The substance of Mr. Fafunwa’s work is that because most Nigerian children enter primary school with a very limited understanding of English, throwing them into a primarily English-speaking environment is at best confusing and stressful, and often traumatizing.

Put another way, while most European and American children are acquiring new skills during the early stages of their education, African students are struggling to master a foreign language. And by the end of sixth grade, Mr. Fafunwa says, the stage when nearly half of Nigeria’s students quit school, they not only have difficulty reading and writing in English, but ultimately also in their mother tongue. Textbooks Are Translated

In his new position, he has moved quickly to change that situation. Already, nearly 100,000 primary school students in Oyo, one of Nigeria’s 21 states, are being taught mostly in Yoruba, one of the country’s three major indigenous languages. And nine other states, with about two million students, are in various stages of adopting the mother-tongue program.

At the same time, the Government has embarked on an intensive effort to translate school texbooks now written in English into Yoruba, Hausa, Ibo, Nupe and other Nigerian languages.

The Nigerian state conducts no language census, but Mr. Fafunwa estimates that only about 20 million of this country’s 100 million to 120 million people have a firm command of English.

The notion of educating young students in their mother tongue is hardly new. During the heady days of independence 30 years ago, some nationalist leaders argued that while the colonial languages — primarily French, English and Portuguese — enabled Africans to communicate with the outside world, they did little to develop a sense of national unity. Many, in fact, envisioned that indigenous languages would be taught alongside the colonial tongues and would eventually replace them. Raising a Thorny Issue

But almost nowhere has it happened that way. For one thing, said Dwayne Woods, an American political scientist doing research in West Africa, leaders soon found that trying to pick a national language “raised the thorny issue of which local dialect one chooses.”

In Zaire, for instance, President Mobutu Sese Seko has preached at length of the need for Africans to be “authentic,” Mr. Woods said, but he has not dared tried to promote an indigenous language as the official language for fear that doing so would anger other ethnic groups. “It would be a powder keg,” Mr. Woods said.

Much the same is true of Nigeria, said Ray Ekpu, editor of Newswatch, a Lagos weekly magazine. “It’s not purely a linguistic issue,” he said. “It’s also a question of political domination because each of Nigeria’s three main ethnic groups wants its own language adopted as the lingua franca.”

“It’s an ongoing debate,” he added, “and a debate that will be difficult to resolve.” Strictly as Educational Issue

Mr. Fafunwa insists that all those complex political and cultural concerns, while intriguing, are ultimately besides the point. Mother tongue, he says, should be seen strictly as an educational issue.

“According to psychologists,” he said, “the first 12 years of a child’s education are most critical, and all I’m saying is that within those early years, he must be himself. And once he has a good grounding in the mother tongue and developed self-confidence in himself, then it will be easier for us to teach him English, Latin, German, or whatever.”

In conversation, Mr. Fafunwa conceded that Nigeria’s school system is not about to adopt mother tongue wholeheartedly as its main instruction mode; he suspects the notion is far too radical to be accepted by Nigeria’s elite. Nonetheless, many here say they admire his tenacity and find his theories riveting.

“It has already bothered me on looking at a map of the world that, of all lands, only black Africa starts the child’s education in a language other than his mother’s,” Tai Solarin, an influential educator and newspaper columnist, recently wrote.

At the same time, the mother-tongue crusade has outraged much of Nigeria’s establishment, who, noting this country’s 250 languages, fear Mr. Fafunwa is creating a bureaucratic nightmare. Against the Colonial Mentality

“The least luxury we can afford in the last decade of the 20th century,” The Daily Times, a Government-controlled newspaper, said in a recent editorial, “is an idealistic experiment in linguistic nationalism which could cut our children off from the main current of human development.”

Given Nigeria’s enormous ethnic and cultural diversity, critics say, the Government’s time and money would be better spent on forging a strong national identity, with English as its centerpiece.