A Taiwanese national Chang Ming Chuang has been reported dead after an attack by a hippo at lake Naivasha in Kenya after the man who was first falsely identified as Chinese is reported to have been tracking the hippo. It is also reported that there are about 500 deaths of people by hippos in Africa a year, although this very incident is said to have been caused by rising water levels that cause these animals that way more than 2000 kilograms to get into people’s farms and at hotels in search for food and African languages barrier.
It should be noted that in Taiwan the lingua franca for almost all the groups is Mandarin and the major languages are Hokkien and Hakka maybe that is the reason as to why the dead man and his injured counterpart were in the first place mistaken for Chinese where the Mandarin language originates from.
It should be noted that Mandarin is one of the most spoken languages on earth spoken by over 1.2 billion people putting in consideration the fact that there are over 8 billion people in the world. Is this a sign that schools in Africa should consider Chinese lessons just as they do for French, English and German? This means that 16% of the world’s population speaks some form of Mandarin.
This would make lots of sense considering the fact that apart from being spoken by 1 billion people, there are also loads of Mandarin speaking business folks in African country dealing mainly in restaurants, road construction works, car bonds which provide employment opportunities for the 14%-16% unemployed young generation out of the 1.2 billion African population as said by Tony Elemule, a Nigerian entrepreneur and philanthropist.
There are of course certain courses of Mandarin/Chinese in Africa especially in tertiary institutions, however it should be considered on the primary education level.
This would definitely ease the business relationships that Africa already has with China and other Mandarin speaking countries. To some point more Mandarin speaking people with investment power would be attracted by the effective communication.
Another way to go about it would be that with several Africans having excellent Mandarin language skills, they would act as interpreters and translators during business deals or tour guides by tourists thus eliminating the African Languages barrier.
Common or widely spoken languages in Africa include;
By Angela Kyolaba
For any kind of official or serious work/events attached to Africa, professional African translation services should be considered to deter African Languages barrier.
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