Showing it can be done: a UCT booklet and the practice CoPAL exist to share

Progress in the teaching of African languages is discussed far more often than it is documented in a form that others can use. That is what makes a recently published University of Cape Town booklet worth the attention of the Community of Practice for the Teaching and Learning of African Languages (CoPAL). It takes work that has usually lived in individual classrooms and puts it on the page, where the rest of the sector can read it, argue with it and borrow from it.

The booklet, Reflections on Multilingual Teaching and Learning Practices, was published in 2025 by UCT’s Faculty of Humanities through its Multilingualism Education Project. It gathers case studies from academics across diverse disciplines, each describing how they have integrated isiXhosa and other African languages into their teaching. It is a UCT publication rather than a CoPAL one, but it sits close to the community’s heart. Its foreword is co-written by Professor Lolie Makhubu-Badenhorst, CoPAL’s deputy chairperson and the director of the Multilingualism Education Project, and one of its contributors is Dr Xolisa Guzula, who gave a conversation starter at the community’s June meeting in Johannesburg. The kind of work it documents, benchmarking good practice and sharing it across institutions, is close to the reason CoPAL exists.

The booklet arrives on the back of a significant policy shift. In December 2024, the UCT Council approved a new language policy, launched in March 2025, that recognises English, isiXhosa and Afrikaans as the university’s official languages and names Afrikaaps, South African Sign Language, Khoekhoegowab and N|uu as languages for development. For an institution with UCT’s Anglo-normative history, and one that felt the force of the #RhodesMustFall movement, that is a real break with the past.

The booklet makes clear that the policy did not create this work. The work created the policy. The academics whose case studies fill its pages were teaching through African languages long before there was an official mandate to do so, and the policy formalises what they had already shown was possible. That sequence, practice first and policy catching up, is worth noting for any institution waiting for permission before it starts.

The strongest argument the booklet makes is one it never quite states outright: multilingual teaching belongs in every faculty, not only in the language departments. The case studies span occupational therapy, engineering, medicine, feminist studies, sociology, and literary studies, and that spread is the point.

In occupational therapy, Professor Elelwani Ramugondo, UCT’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor for transformation, traces her own turn to multilingual teaching to a moment of discomfort. A test question on the meaning of “meaning” was answered well by her white students and failed by almost all her African and Muslim students, and she came to see that the concepts and terminology were not neutral. She began exploring the idea across several languages at once, including isiZulu, isiXhosa, XiTsonga and Tshivenda, and drawing on ubuntu to reframe ideas that textbooks had only ever presented from a Western point of view.

In mechanical engineering, Professor Brandon Collier-Reed and his colleagues took a more systematic route. Working with linguists and associate professors Kate le Roux, Malebogo Ngoepe, and Corrinne Shaw, they built a glossary of more than 300 technical terms in isiXhosa, then had it authenticated by the Pan South African Language Board so that the terms could formally enter the isiXhosa lexicon. The effect is to treat isiXhosa as a language of science, capable of conveying concepts such as stress and sustainability, rather than a language that stops at the laboratory door.

Medicine offers a third model. Dr Jaisubash Jayakumar, in the pre-clinical MBChB curriculum, greets his students in at least three official languages and builds collaborative translation of key biomedical terms into his teaching, arguing that humanising the curriculum in this way improves both learning and, ultimately, patient care. In African feminist studies, Dr Neziswa Titi opens her courses with a seminar that asks students, “Who are you in the world?” and treats their home languages as a resource for understanding gender, violence, and identity rather than as a problem to be managed.

The humanities case studies push in the same direction from another angle. In sociology, Dr Jacques de Wet teaches isiXhosa sociological concepts alongside the writings of Samuel Mqhayi, not by translating English ideas into isiXhosa but by centring African thought in the teaching of development. In English literary studies, Dr Kate Highman uses the isiXhosa-and-English writing of authors like Julie Nxadi to teach students, in her borrowed phrase, “to listen in the face of English,” and to notice the power the language carries. And in the School of Education, Dr Xolisa Guzula’s chapter on her Honours teaching, with its direct link back to CoPAL, shows students submitting assignments in isiXhosa, Sesotho, Afrikaans, and bilingually, and names the twin pressures of Anglonormativity and what she and a colleague call Kolonilingo-normativity.

If there is a single thread running through the collection, the postword by Dr Wanga Gambushe draws it out. For too long, he writes, multilingualism in South Africa has been more symbolic than real, celebrated in principle and seldom practised in the classroom. The booklet answers that there is no single model to copy. Each contributor offers one possibility, and others can be imagined, tested and improved.

The more pointed message is about whose job this is. Multilingual teaching, the booklet argues, is not a burden on colleagues who happen to speak African languages. It is a responsibility everyone shares. Monolingual, bilingual and multilingual lecturers alike can let students draw on their full linguistic repertoires without being fluent in every language in the room. That claim matters because it removes the most common excuse for inaction, the lecturer who says they cannot promote multilingualism because they do not speak the languages themselves. It also echoes almost exactly what Professor Leketi Makalela argued in his keynote and what Guzula described from her own classroom at the June meeting, which is part of why the booklet reads as a companion to the community’s own conversations rather than as a document from elsewhere.

CoPAL exists to advance the teaching and learning of African languages, to benchmark and share good practice across the country’s universities, and to treat the equitable use of those languages in mainstream teaching as part of South Africa’s wider transformation. Measured against that purpose, the booklet is a concrete achievement the community can point to. It turns scattered individual effort into a shared, citable record, and it gives other institutions something specific to adapt to rather than a general aspiration to admire.

It also sits inside a greater national effort. The booklet was supported in part by the Department of Higher Education and Training’s collaborative project on consolidating African languages in higher education, and forms part of a broader University Capacity Development Programme initiative funded by the same department. Two isiXhosa textbooks for full-semester courses, one in sociology and one in pathology, are described as forthcoming, which would take the work a step beyond individual practice and into the teaching materials themselves.

That is also where the booklet meets the practical call the June meeting ended on. Members were urged to take good practice back to their home institutions, to read and cite one another’s work, and to ask their libraries to buy the books their colleagues are producing. A collection like this is exactly the kind of documented, shareable practice that the call was about. It shows that the incremental, across-the-disciplines approach the community has been arguing for is not only possible but already underway. It leaves the rest of the sector with a clear invitation: read it and then go and do the work.

Mduduzi Mbiza is a contract writer for Universities South Africa