Jessica Horn and the need to center languages of struggle from the African continent

'''Episode 10 of Whose Voices? podcast | February 28, 2023'''

Jessica Horn and the need to center languages of struggle from the African continent

Reviewed by Radhika Bhardwaj Introduction:

You are listening to Whose Voices?, a podcast from Whose Knowledge?.

Adele Vrana:

Hello, here is Adele. We are recording the first interview for the Whose Voices? podcast during Decolonized the Internet Languages, and we are gonna talk to Jessica. So, hi Jessica. Tell us a little bit more about yourself and what brought you to Decolonizing the Internet’s Languages [conference].

Jessica Horn:

I'm an African feminist activist, a writer, someone really, really keen on knowledge production and helping to support the collective documentation and development of collective politics and sharing that with the world. So, I'm here because, obviously, working across the African region means that we work across multiple languages, but also, languages of struggle. And this question of being able to really, interact with and engage with the internet as a space for political consciousness, raising, mobilization, sharing information, documenting, and archive. Archiving is a live one for African feminists in our diversities. And so, I'm here with those questions in mind.

Adele Vrana:

How are you and your community using your languages online?

Jessica Horn:

I think that if we think about regional African feminisms and African feminisms that happen transnationally, most of it happens in English and, to some extent, in French and a little bit in Portuguese. Although the Angolans and Mozambicans would always say that because nobody's bothering to learn their languages, they deal a lot with Brazil. And so, so I mean, we are there online but largely discussing and debating in colonial languages.

And it also means that the internet has been a space where actually African feminism in new generations is flourishing. There are new feminisms and groups of people developing discourses, et cetera. Most of it,  though, is happening in English, I would say. And like I said, to some extent in French, et cetera. And so those are questions, you know, and there isn't really a lot of discussion and debate around how do we do that in other languages or even use the fact that we can now talk to each other across all these spaces to think about the question of language. And I think it's partly because we use, for the most part, these conventional spaces; we're using commercial platforms of Twitter, of Facebook, of Instagram, of WhatsApp to do our mobilizing. And most of them are framed, you know, in a very colonial way. The platforms themselves are only in a limited set of languages. And so, it's almost shaping how we're thinking about and how we're having the conversations.

Adele Vrana:

Yeah. So, can you tell us, if you can find your content in your language online, what exists and what is missing?

Jessica Horn:

To be honest with you, if we're speaking about African languages in general, I think that there's been some effort to have some of the dominant or more widely spoken African languages. So, Kiswahili, you'll find things in Hausa, you know, et cetera. But for example, my mother's language is Rutoro. And in that case, there's like a few old, sort of very brief, dictionaries. There isn't really a lot of Rutoro language online, and it is a written language. And interestingly, my grandfather was actually, so this, again, the struggle of decolonizing languages has been going on for generations. So, it's not just a new thing of the internet. My grandfather, Timothy Bazarrabusa, was adamant about this issue of needing to create literatures in African languages. And so, he was a big advocate of that and wrote the first books in Rutoro that were not the Bible or religious texts, so novels, etc., etc..

So, that struggle continues. I mean, that was three generations ago, four generations ago, and we're still working on it. So, again, there has been some movement in terms of some of the dominant languages, but there's still definitely a need to, I think, empower people who speak those languages to be the people shaping and creating the platforms. And the problem is that there hasn't been a lot of outreach and support, um, for people to be able to do that project. So, so much of what happens on, in terms of constructions of new internets, is centralized in the West, and who's deciding about what happens is not happening within our context. And so, that also determines, again, the shape of it. So, I feel like that, that we need to do. Um, so as I said, it depends on which languages, but I'd say for a majority of African languages, they're not really, you know, kind of widely available online. And certainly, search engines are still very, very English-centric. So, you might be able to find small domains in places where things are happening in the languages, but if you search those terms, you're not going to actually find the content.

Adele Vrana:

Yes. And have you or some of your communities tried to improve your language's presence online, and how did that work?

Jessica Horn:

I'd actually say that a lot of the, like I said, the African feminist work that's been done is offline when it comes to the question of non-colonial languages. When it comes to the question of trying to put African feminisms online and to articulate the way that feminisms happen and the languages we use to describe our work, there have been some efforts there, certainly, but in terms of the workaround language, not so much. And again, some women tried to create a brief dictionary of feminist terms in Setswana, the few efforts here and there, but actually, there hasn't been a big push and a big focus on it. And I think it's an area that we need to, again, invest a bit more, in particularly, as I said, because now the new generations of African feminists are very vibrantly active online, but as I said, it's largely in, in colonial languages.

Adele Vrana:

And how are you finding the experience of this conference? I know it's, uh, a bit early in our time together, but what is your sense so far of being here?

Jessica Horn:

Well, I think it's amazing to find people who share some collective passions or, like, intersecting passions. You know, I think the most valuable aspect of this space is the fact that it's interdisciplinary and very diverse in terms of where people are coming from with their own knowledge bases, their own political analysis situations, geographically, linguistically, culturally, et cetera. And so, for me, that diversity is beautiful. But what's also interesting is that already as we're identifying the kind of visions or the ethical basis upon which we think a decolonized internet would exist, what's interesting to me is for people who've never met each other, we're coming up with a lot of common points, which means that actually, we share a broad sense of direction in terms of where we think this should go. So, for me, that makes me quite hopeful because it feels that it means that the constituencies that we come from are already thinking about what we want, and we are communicating this as we're sitting here together. So, I feel like there's actually a constituency, you know, already pushing for this notion of a decolonized internet. We're already thinking about it. I feel like because we're already, we already have the paces, we're already moving. I feel like there's a possibility it can happen.

Adele Vrana:

And is there anything else you would like to add that I have not asked you?

Jessica Horn:

I think what's beautiful is, um, who invited us. So, it's like a collective of people whose knowledge, who are, you know, feminists, sisters from the south, and with the sensibility of thinking about power, knowledge dynamics. I think that's beautiful. So, again, when we think about the agency and where transformation sits, of course, anybody can be an agent of change, but I think sometimes we need to note who ends up pushing forward certain conversations. So, I'm very happy to see that it's actually this very diverse set of feminists who are actually pushing this question for all of us and creating a space where such a diversity of people can come together to really think again about a vision, but also really concrete ways that we might be able to see it happen.

Adele Vrana:

Thank you so much, Jessica.