Bamako 2002 Conference

African Languages and Internet workshop

Within the framework of  the Regional Conference Bamako 2002 on "Africa and the World Summit of Information Society", the African languages and Internet workshop took place at the Palais des Congres, Bamako, (Mali), on May 26, 2002.

President:  His Excellency the Minister Adama SAMMASSEKOU, President of ACALAN

Moderateur:  Ms Aida Opoku-mensah (Economic Commission on Africa), Ethiopia. 

Rapporteur:  Mr Maxime Z SOMÉ (Director of  RECLA Review (Research on Africa  languages, literatures and Civilizations), France. 

His Excellency  Minister Adama SAMMASSEKOU opened the session by a speech in mandingue and  closed it in English. 

Ms Aïda OPOKU MENSAH directed  the workshop with a high quality of synthesis of the interventions and a great control on the distribution of the time granted to the participants. 

1. Current situation of the African languages and the Web:

A document on African Academy of Languages entitled "special Bulletin, ACALAN, January 2002" was distributed at the beginning of the workshop.  It is related to the current missions of ACALAN and the various stages to undergo to set it as  a panafrican structure .

After reviewing the issues related to the status, the roles and the places of the languages in the process of  endogenous development of African countries and the various opportunities offered by the new information and communication technologies, the document gives the strategy to be set up for the use and valorization of  African languages and cultures in the new information society. 

Presentations were made by representatives of ACALAN, BPI (Canada), CYBERSOFT (Ethiopia), IDN Committee of ICANN (Senegal), AINC (Morocco), MINC, AfriMINC, ECA, Intergovernmental Agency of Francophony,  National  Polytechnic Higher School of Yaounde (Cameroon).  The speeches were followed by questions and comments from the participants. 

In addition to the presentations mentioned above, the President of ACALAN insisted, in one hand, on the need to set up the panafrican structure and, on the other hand,  for experts (linguists and data processing specialists) to collaborate to ensure the presence of the African languages in the development of African countries. 

An additional meeting was proposed among software/software packages producers of the North and of the South during the Bamako Conference. 

Regarding the incongruity for Africa to continue expressing themselves  through non African languages, the experts insisted on the need  to appropriate african languages and Internet as a strength for  social  and economic development. 

2. Workshop Recommendations:

2.1 Economic:

2.1.1 To create a HAMI (Highway of African Multilingual Information) to finance the production and maintenance of Web sites in African languages.

2.1.2 To create a vocational training fund for African data processing specialists, to continuously train Linux system administrators whose tasks are to configure, support and maintain the Linux web hosting servers sites in African languages.

2.1.3 To assign data processing and Web sites contracts to African data-processing companies in order to support their economic activities, promote them, stimulate their growth and ensure a greater sustainability of specialized human resource base in Africa.

2.2 Technological: 

2.2.1 African countries work out a strategic plan to assume their data processing transition and the implementation of new international UCS/JUC standards in their respective national data-processing environment.

2.2.2 All African initiatives on African language coding for computerization be listed in order to detect the commonalities, difficulties and solutions.

2.2.3 The LABTIC created with the support of AIF in the countries of the South become genuine platforms of confrontation, test and validation of the characters standards of the African languages.

2.2.4 That the creation of national structures and associations for applications development in national languages be encouraged by international organizations to promote an African Dot Force whose essential mission would be to ensure the convergence of the present standards in African language (SIL, BPI, etc) applications towards an integrating generic standard.

2.2.5 For all the national and inter-official languages of Africa, that African specialists set up lists of the composite characters requiring a sequence from 2 to 3 UCS-2 codes as UCS/JUC encoding.  That this list be officially submitted to the committees of ISO standardization so that these characters would be added to UCS/JUC standard as “ a pre-composed African character”.

2.2.6 That data processing specialists and other African specialists act together in order to formulate, standardize and propose to the concerned African States 8-bits character sets allowing the support of Latin characters of the continent’s languages.  These 8-bits character sets can be considered as at endogenous stages of transition towards the international UCS/JUC standard.

2.2.7 That data processing specialists and other African specialists act together in order to formulate, standardize and propose to the concerned African States keyboard developers and unified conventions to key in African characters for all African and transborder languages of African countries.

2.3 Political:

2.3.1 All the member States of the African Union sign the ACALAN Charter.

2.3.2 The member States should quickly commit themselves to setting up the Panafrican structure for ACALAN.

2.3.3 ACALAN should become an ideal framework to put in synergy all the initiatives in the field of languages.

2.3.4 To develop human capacity and increase the number of potential users of new information and communication technologies, a) at primary school level, at least each member State should set up a true linguistic policy with the introduction of African languages from the two first years as a medium to be gradually replaced by the official language which would become a teaching language, b) at secondary and higher school levels, each member State should introduce the teaching of one or several African languages.

2.3.5 The OAU/AU through its agency, ACALAN, take the responsibility to follow-up administrative and political issues with the ISO standard technical committees to add and adopt the new list of the “precomposed African characters” in UCS/JUC standard.

2.3.6 The OAU/AU makes an effort for linguists, the educators, data processing specialists and researchers to participate in the setting up of the Panafrican project ACALAN.

2.3.7 African countries through their national standardization organizations, officially adopt national data-processing standards for 8-bits character sets according to their respective national and inter-states languages.

2.3.8 African countries, through their national standardization organization, officially adopt national and inter-states data-processing standards for African keyboard developers.

2.3.9 Once these standards of African 8-bits character sets are adopted as national standard, undertake administrative and political actions towards ISO to add these new African character sets, as international standard, among the list of the other 8-bits character sets of the ISO-8859 series.

2.3.10 African countries and their data-processing companies, to establish UCS/JUC standard, share their UCS/JUC experiences while collaborating more narrowly with other States involved in language issues and similar multilingualism, for example: Vietnamese in liaison with French; Kampuchean languages with French; other Asian languages with certain African languages.

2.3.11 African countries share their UCS/JUC experiences while collaborating more narrowly, on the techno-polical plan, with the different States of Asia, Latin America and Australia whose national languages are under represented in the universe of the current Web.