This evening I was amused by a video that commented on Mali choosing for itself by a 97% vote a new constitution that does not include French as an official language but includes fourteen (!) local languages among the 70 or so located within the country’s borders, all while the constitution itself was written in French. As is common among post-colonial regimes, French has long served as an important intermediary language between people in the rather poorly-designed nation of Mali who speak different local languages. As is often the case around the world, many nations have a veritable babel of languages, sometimes from multiple language families altogether, that make communication difficult unless some language serves as the lingua franca between them. One of the more amusing aspects of the video was the comments section, where Mali fanboys commented on the various replacements they could find for French as an intermediate language and talked about how they thought Bambara, the language of about 40% of the country, could serve as a unifying element, and also brought in other countries, like Switzerland, as a comparison with Mali’s own situation.

In 1337, the Kingdom of England under King Edward III made the same decision that Mali made in ditching French as its official language and printing its laws in English, a hitherto neglected language spoken by the native lower classes. As was the case with Mali’s demotion of French as an official language, this too had to do with post-colonial politics. French-speaking Norman nobles as well as French-speaking rulers from areas like Normandy, Blois, and Anjou had been rulers of England for more than 250 years since conquering the country from its native Anglo-Saxon rulers in 1066. England’s king had a reasonable claim on the French throne on his mother’s side, and pursuing that claim was a lot more popular when he was able to make common cause with the feeling of nationalism within English society that was happy to see English move up into an official literary and legal language for the first time in more than 250 years, a move that first helped English’s rise as a world language from where it had languished since the demise of Old English.

So far, one can see at least some similarities between the situation of Mali and that of England, where two regimes that had been colonized by the French in one way or another sought to take advantage of the politics of language and nationalism in order to demonstrate their new-found cultural and linguistic independence. It is at this point where the similarities cease, though. At the time, England was already the largest part of the British Isles, and English, even if a lowly peasant language, was spoken by a large population of people, making its adoption a unifying factor for the kingdom. To be sure, English was not and has never been the only language spoken on the British Isles, with Cornish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, and Irish Gaelic all being spoken at the time in peripheral regions of the islands, but English was in a position of considerable dominance as a vernacular tongue in a way that Bambara is not, and certainly not the other languages of Mali.

So if England is not a suitable example for the linguistic situation of Mali at present, do any other nations present a better comparison for Mali’s attempts at nation building? When people want to bring up successful multilingual states, Switzerland is a common example to bring up, but this example is not the one that post-colonial regimes are able to use successfully because the circumstances are so different. Switzerland itself formed organically as a result of treaties entered into by small and somewhat independent cantons that developed a longstanding tradition of mutual aid, egalitarian federalism, and responsible self-government. While German is spoken by the vast majority of Swiss as their first language, French, Italian, and Rheata-Romansch (an obscure romance language) are also spoken in various areas within the republic, and other languages like English are commonly spoken by the Swiss as well, whose small federal cantons and the reasonable terms of their voluntary union have ensured that linguistic diversity has not led to political domination by cantons like Bern and Zurich. No contemporary African nation has the lengthy tradition of consensual government, federalism, and self-rule that have the sort of legitimacy that Switzerland has, nor the ability to transcend the ethnic and tribal rivalries that regularly tear apart nations.

Perhaps the best European example for most African nations when it comes to linguistic diversity and national identity would be a nation like Spain, and this is not a good thing for either Spain nor African nations. Spain is a nation with an ugly colonial history–not only as a colonizer, but as a nation that was colonized by Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths, Moors, and even the French, at least a little bit. Spain’s unification was not brought about by consensus or local traditions of voting and making treaties, but rather has been held together by force for centuries. Spain’s linguistic diversity once included Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew to go along with its several different Romance languages ranging from Galician (a near relative of Portuguese spoken in Galicia), to Catalan and a host of related Occitan languages, to a variety of forms of Castilian, and also the exotic language isolate of Basque, all of which are spoken in distinct regions of the country. These regions, representing peoples who have long had an independent linguistic and political culture, have never been content under Spanish domination and to this day seek to increase autonomy and even seek independence from Spain, despite Spain’s unwillingness to accept their independence. In Mali’s search, and in the search of other misbegotten African states, for linguistic freedom from colonial nations, it would do well to remember that seeking to preserve their nations by force and try to foist one language upon their domains is likely not to work out very well. Of course, things are already bad, so perhaps the rulers of such nations do not think that things could get any worse.