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Mandarin, the most spoken language in China – and in the world – should join the school curriculum in Ghana, a country where 81 languages already cohabit, including nine national ones. The Director of the Ministry of Education, Divine Yao Ayidzoe, announced it to the press with great fanfare at the end of August, during a conference organized by the Confucius Institute at the University of Cape Coast (UCC). “Look at the expansion of the Chinese economy, it is the second largest economy in the world!, he exclaimed. It goes without saying that those who will have the privilege of learning the Chinese language [durant leurs études] will have a huge chance. »
For the time being, the contours of this reform are still unclear and the date of its implementation undetermined. The only certainty: it should be done on the basis of a partnership with the Confucius Institute. “We are discussing with the Ministry of Education the deployment of the Chinese language in primary and secondary schools in Ghana, eludes Professor Ishmael Mensah, co-director of the Confucius Institute at UCC, inaugurated in 2016. The Minister’s feedback has been positive, but I still don’t know when Mandarin will actually integrate the school curriculum. »
The bet may seem bold in Ghana, whose official language is English and where many young people choose to pursue their higher education in the United Kingdom or the United States. But Ishmael Mensah is confident: “There is a growing demand for Chinese education in Ghana. Not a day goes by that we don’t receive requests from schools that would like to teach Mandarin in their establishments, but we don’t have enough teachers available to respond to all these requests. »
Student scholarships
To future Chinese speakers, Divine Yao Ayidzoe and the two co-directors of the Confucius Institute praise job opportunities in Chinese companies established in Ghana, possibilities for Sino-Ghanaian collaborations and increased competitiveness in a globalized job market. “Beijing offers a lot of scholarships for Ghanaian students to pursue their studies in China, reports Ishmael Mensah. And we also receive a lot of job offers at the Confucius Institute from Chinese companies looking to recruit employees who can read and write in their language. »
Ghana to stop sending medical students to Cuba for lack of sufficient level of Spanish
During the same conference at the UCC, Mr. Ayidzoe paradoxically announced that Ghana would stop sending medical students to Cuba… for lack of a sufficient level of Spanish. “There is a loss of influence of Western languages in sub-Saharan Africa, and particularly in West Africa, says Selma Mihoubi, doctor in geopolitics and associate researcher at the “Mediations” laboratory at Paris-Sorbonne University. This forms a call for air into which Chinese soft power is engulfed. »
Ghana is not the first African state where the strategy of influence is deployed Chinese. Confucius Institutes are springing up on the continent like mushrooms, to the point that almost all of Africa’s 54 countries now have them, according to Ishmael Mensah. South Africa in 2015 and Uganda in 2019 were the first to integrate Mandarin into their school curriculum.
Brain drain
“I think the supremacy of English-speaking universities, Oxford and Ivy League in the lead, is coming to an end, underlines Eyram Ivy Sedzro, a Ghanaian student in international development at the University of Melbourne and author of a study on the brain drain in Ghana. Asian universities keep climbing the global rankings. In my opinion, in twenty or thirty years, the faculties of Peking or Tokyo will no longer have anything to envy to Harvard. » And all the more so since the number of scholarships granted to Ghanaian students by Western governments, in particular the British, is decreasing, while those granted by the Chinese government are constantly increasing.
The official Sino-Ghanaian discourse precisely hides the risks of brain drain. According to a study by Kajsa Hallberg Adu titled “ Student migration aspirations and mobility in the global knowledge society: The case of Ghana » and published in 2019 in the Journal of International Mobility, 52,370 highly skilled Ghanaians lived in 2009 in OECD countries. A decade later, while this emigration of highly qualified workers still mainly concerns Western countries, in particular the United States and the United Kingdom, more and more of them are now turning to Asia.
“ We must not deceive ourselves, recalls Eyram Ivy Sedzro. Towards the West as towards Asia, this brain drain remains in both cases detrimental to Ghana. In addition to threatening our vernacular languages, it is a form of chosen migration, reserved for the intellectual elite of our country. »