Ghana's postcolonial embrace of globalization recognizes English and nine of Ghana's 73 Indigenous languages for a two-year kindergarten program and the first three years of primary schooling. In Safalibaland, a tribal area in a rural region of Ghana, the Ghana Ministry of Education and Ghana Education Service organize and support pedagogical practices, materials, their distribution, and professional teacher development in Gonja and English. Gonja is not morphosyntactically like Safaliba, relegating it a difficult second language for most Safaliba children to learn (Bodua-Mango, R. K., 2015; Schaefer, 2009; Schaefer, P., & Schaefer, J., 2003). In other words, Ghana's postcolonial embrace of globalization is a static model of a limited and strategic use of a small number of mother tongues for early transition into English. English is Ghana's only official language beyond early childhood reading and writing in the nine approved Ghanaian Indigenous languages, so even those are early-exit bilingual programs for which the lion's share of funding has been from the USA. This form of globalization has erases 64 of Ghana's Indigenous languages from international donor funding, materials development, workshops, professional development, and early-schooling generally. Teacher activists and allies from one of the 64 erased languages, Safaliba, have quietly resisted erasure of their language from their schools. This paper explores how they plan and facilitate reading and writing instruction in Safaliba with the support of parents and the council of elders in Mandari Ghana, Safalibaland's largest town. Data are ethnographic and a result of participant observation in school classrooms and during meetings among Safaliba teacher activists. All data are from a longitudinal study begun during two short visits in 2014 to the largest Safaliba speaking town, Mandari, Ghana, living in Mandari for 12 months on a Fulbright (2015-2016) and short visits in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2021. Data were collected via voice and video recording, field notes, interviews, photographs, and document collection. The paper provides an evidentiary trail of school language policy driven by teacher activists and their allies with wider community support. Findings show teachers and their allies as agents of social change in their schools.
References
Bodua-Mango, R. K. (2015). The phonology of a Safaliba three year old child. Thesis, University of Ghana, Legon.
Schaefer, P. (2009). Narrative storyline marking in Safaliba: Determining the meaning and discourse function of a typologically-suspect pronoun set. Dissertation, University of Texas at Arlington.
Schaefer, P. and Schaefer, J. (2003). Collected field reports on the phonology of Safaliba. (Collected Language Notes, 25) Legon, Ghana: Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana.
