Dickson Francis Mveyange: Campaigning for better deaf education in Tanzania

After years of hard campaigning by deaf people in Tanzania, the country has taken a huge step forward towards the bilingual learning environment we desperately need.

At International Week of the Deaf celebrations in September the Prime Minister launched a new initiative to implement Tanzanian Sign Language (TSL), which urgently needs updating and properly integrating into the education system.

Maria, a deaf student in Tanzania

The Government has committed to harmonising different signs and to agreeing an expanded TSL vocabulary. They’ll be supporting the development of a full primary and secondary school curriculum and TSL training for special needs teachers. This will be a breakthrough for my fellow deaf Tanzanians, the majority of whom end up the poorest of the poor.

In 2018 Tanzania’s main specialist school for the deaf made headlines when every single student failed the country’s most important exam, the O-level Certificate for Secondary Education Examination. Closer inspection of the results showed that deaf children across the country were failing on an alarming scale: 76% received a Fail at CSEE compared with 0.7% of hearing students. The statistic is extreme, but unsurprising when you consider the struggle deaf people face in Tanzania.

It’s difficult to overstate the enormity of that struggle. We are written-off at birth, dismissed as “stupid” and unteachable . The school system has few specialist trained teachers so it is almost impossible for deaf children to learn. The majority end up isolated, lonely and unable to communicate. 90% will reach adulthood unable to write their names or count to ten. Most will return to their home villages to spend their lives doing menial tasks – fetching water and collecting firewood – trapped in a vicious circle of poverty, ignorance, vulnerability, disease and almost total powerlessness. It is a lonely, silent existence.

Dickson Mveyange

I was one of the lucky ones. My younger brother and I were born with an ear defect so our parents sent us away together to the first deaf school in Tanzania. It was a specialist school but learning was a struggle because they used oralism (a system of lip-reading and mimicking mouth shapes) and we were punished if we used the Sign Language we had developed ourselves. We both managed to complete our secondary education and my family sent us to a High School for the Deaf in Sweden. Sign Language was the main language of instruction by lecturers who were deaf themselves and the education they gave us was fantastic.

Teaching Sign Language to a deaf child is like giving a wheelchair to someone who can’t walk. Deafness is a disability of communication, just like paralysis is a disability of movement. Study after study shows that Sign Language is not only the most productive medium of instruction for deaf learners but that it empowers and enables deaf people to fully develop personally and culturally. It is the only tool we have to fight against poverty, oppression, marginalisation and inequality. I would not be writing this article, you would not be reading about this struggle, if I hadn’t been taught how to sign.

People in the West take it for granted that deaf people use Sign Language but here in Tanzania it has long been stigmatised and only as recently as 2014 did the Government officially accept it as the language of instruction for deaf students. Still very few teachers, if any, are fluent in sign language, so deaf children end up isolated in the classroom

Another barrier is that pockets of different signing systems have developed across the country as charities and missionaries from different countries have founded and funded schools. The patchwork is further complicated by Tanzania’s three-tier linguistic system: at home families speak an ethnic community language, at primary school teaching is in Swahili, at Secondary level English is used. It’s a heavy burden for hearing children, let alone the deaf. Travelling around the country for my work as Executive Director of The Tanzania Association of the Deaf I have to understand at least nine different Sign Languages, including British, Finnish and Swedish plus signs associated with ethnic languages like Masai, Haya, Chaga, Makonde.

What we need is an up-to-date, standardised Tanzanian Sign Language and I’m delighted we’re now making progress towards that goal. The campaign is supported by a programme called Institutions for International Development (I4ID), which is funded by UKAid and Irish Aid.  I4ID have experience in navigating complex political, cultural and institutional challenges to enact change and it’s going to take nothing less to deliver the systemic change needed to bring Tanzania’s deaf people out of isolation.

Dickson Mveyange is the Director of Tanzania’s Association of the Deaf.