Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti:Russian in Africa: Who and how teaches the ‘great and mighty’ Russian language on the African continent
Source: https://english.spbu.ru/news-events/university-media/russian-africa-who-and-how-teaches-great-and-mighty-russian-language Parent: https://english.spbu.ru/about/international-cooperation
10 February 2026
University in Media
Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti: Russian in Africa: Who and how teaches the ‘great and mighty’ Russian language on the African continent
Since 2023, St. Petersburg State University has been establishing centres for open education which offer courses in the Russian language and the teaching and learning process is in the Russian language. The centres are supported by the Russian Ministry of Education and the My History Foundation. There are currently 11 centres, nine of which are located in Africa. Artem Davydov, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Asian and African Studies at St. Petersburg State University, has been teaching in the Central African Republic (CAR) for five months and has recently returned from Zambia. We spoke with the Africanist scholar about the ‘difficulties of translation’ and not just translation across languages.
Artem Davydov does not even remember how many times he has been to Africa, but this was his first time working in Zambia. Photo from Artem Davydov’s personal archive.
English and French are quite good in Africa as they have a colonial past. Why do African people need Russian?
To continue their education in Russia. And then either to live and work in our country or return home. Ideally, any country would be interested in having graduates of its universities in vital positions in public sector in another country. In more practical terms, it simply means having people with whom you can collaborate and understand each other, including to enhance cross-cultural communication.
The Centres for Open Education at St. Petersburg State University are a young project. Yet Russian teaching has a long history in Africa. The Soviet Union sent teachers to African countries, say, in physics and chemistry to name just a few. The remarkable Soviet-Russian linguist Valerii Khabirov, who you have mentioned, taught French and English. He worked at schools and universities in the Central African Republic since the late 1960s.
Africa is a hugely diverse place made up of 54 independent countries. What is behind our myth about Africa as something... well... uniform?
There is a common perception: Africans lived their lives, and then white settlers arrived. On the one hand, that is true. On the other hand, European nations had been colonising different lands for four centuries, but before that, for a millennium and a half, some of the African peoples had also been colonising different lands.
‘Local’ colonisation can be traced, for example, by the spread of languages. Let us take as an example sub-Saharan Africa. This is a vast territory, mostly inhabited by peoples speaking Bantu languages, e.g. Swahili, Zulu, Lingala, and hundreds of others. These are as closely related languages as the Slavic languages. However, the Bantu speakers originally arrived in these lands not long ago in historical terms, just two thousand years ago. They had a technological advantage over the local people who were predominantly hunters and gatherers as they knew how to work iron. They were also more numerous, which enabled them to conquer the lands.
What African languages do you know?
At the University, I teach Bambara (also known as Bamana), the official language of Mali and, in some form or another, spoken in neighbouring Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire. I also teach Maninka, spoken in western Mali and Guinea. These languages are closely related. Although their norms differ significantly, people understand each other quite well.
Yet, Africa is not a place where knowing one or two local languages is sufficient. Typically, the greatest linguistic diversity is found in the places where languages originated. The farther from that place, the more homogeneous a language becomes. Take Russian, for example. In Siberia, which was settled relatively recently, there are significantly fewer dialects than in the European part of Russia, although Siberia is much larger in size. Take English as an example as well. In England alone, as part of the United Kingdom, the language diversity is greater than in the United States, Canada, and Australia combined.
The same is true for Africa. West Africa has several dozen language families, and their languages can differ as strikingly as Russian and Arabic. Chadic languages are part of the larger Afro-Asiatic language family, related to Arabic, Ancient Egyptian, and Berber.
Language is also a specific way of thinking. Someone with a European mindset finds it easier to learn European languages than Chinese or Arabic. How different are Russian and African languages in this regard?
The most obvious are phonetic difficulties. For example, West African languages are predominantly tonal, and learning them is as challenging as learning Chinese.
Next, the meanings of words. For example, Bambara is striking in its comprehensiveness. One word can mean ‘a door’, ‘an entrance’, ‘a mouth’, and ‘an edge’.
Education systems typically categorise foreign languages by the level of difficulty to learn. This classification is not objective in a way that it depends on those difficulties typical to speakers of a particular language. For example, for an English person, the easiest languages to learn are the Germanic languages, while the most difficult group may include Russian, Japanese, and Arabic. Persian for an English person, on the contrary, is easier, strange as it may sound. The written language may seem fundamentally different, while grammar is not challenging at all.
The Russian education system does not categorise languages by the level of difficulty to learn, although it might be useful. If we had such an approach, African Bambara would probably fall into the medium difficulty group. The language has a clear Latin script, although historically, as a Muslim community, its speakers used the Arabic script. Interestingly, Bambara has its own native alphabet, but it is not officially recognised.
Approximately 50 Russian language teaching methods have been developed at St. Petersburg State University throughout its history. They ‘take into account national and cultural characteristics’ of those who learn Russian, as they say. What are these methods?
It is necessary to take into account not only what characteristics a native language has (this can help predict what difficulties may arise in learning Russian), but also, for example, how foreigners learn in general.
In Russia, foreign language teaching tends to favour communicative methods, which means getting students to ‘talk’ right away, even without learning some rules. As a result, we use lots of games and colourful textbooks. In Africa, this approach is far from being appropriate. Africans easily learn languages through face-to-face interaction, simply chatting ‘on the street’. Simulating this situation in the classroom setting is simply unthinkable. The reason is that in Africa the distance between a teacher and a student is very strong. It originates from school, where everything is traditional. The teacher writes on the board, and the class repeats it in chorus.
What is most difficult in the Russian language for Africans to learn?
There are several ‘scenarios’ that are difficult not only for them but for foreigners in general. For example, verbs of motion: to go, to walk, to ride, to drive, etc. They seem to be about the same thing, but the words are very different.
How are the lessons going?
Centres for open education collaborate with universities, Russian Houses, and Orthodox church schools. They offer approximately two classes a week, for a total of 72 hours, which is four to five months. In the Central African Republic, I had students with no experience, while in Zambia, there were those who had already studied Russian.
As a rule, our students are expected to reach A1 Elementary level, enabling them communicate using familiar everyday expressions and very basic phrases. Of course, four to five months is the minimum required to achieve this level. We are currently working on online learning to keep improving and practising their language skills when one teacher has already left and the next has not arrived yet.
A good result is when there is a person who is getting interested in the language and seeking opportunities to learn it. There are plenty of them. For example, Russian pedagogical universities work in Africa under the auspices of the Russian Ministry of Education. There are also ‘Russian Houses’ run by the Federal Agency for the Commonwealth of Independent States Affairs, Compatriots Living Abroad, and International Humanitarian Cooperation (Rossotrudnichestvo). Our centres and pedagogical universities offer free language training, and the courses offered by ‘Russian Houses’ are quite affordable.
Everyone knows how it feels when you cannot learn a foreign language although you have had lots of courses for many years. In fact, a year is enough. What I mean is that people come to Russia from abroad, and learning Russian during a year at the Preparatory Departments at St. Petersburg State University or other universities, enables them to use Russian for their further studies.
A business trip to Africa may seem an exotic experience. But perhaps not for you, an Africanist...
I do not even remember how many times I have been to Africa. For the first time, I visited Africa as a student in 2006 on a linguistic expedition to Côte d’Ivoire. Since then, I have travelled to Africa almost every year. I would arrive in a village and study the features of the local language. Now, however, I do not visit villages, but large cities, universities, as part of my Russian language teaching programme.
The University, of course, has Russian specialists and experts in Russian as a foreign language, but they, as a rule, work with Europeans, sometimes with Chinese. For an Africanist who knows the local languages working in Africa is easy. However, on my recent assignments, I was in countries where ‘my’ languages are not spoken, so in Zambia I taught Russian using English, and in the Central African Republic, using French.
I love everything about Africa. Last year, I was in Africa with my family, my wife, and our five-year-old daughter. The city where we lived had quite a contrasting mix of neighbourhoods, from slums to very wealthy ones. Ours was in a fairly decent, middle-class neighbourhood. My daughter made some friends in the neighbourhood.
How did you become an Africanist?
My aim was the Faculty of Asian and African Studies. I chose between several areas of study: Arabic studies, Iranian studies ... I had preparatory courses, where lectures were delivered by representatives of various departments, and I was inspired by the lectures of Andrei Zhukov, who was Head of the Department of African Studies.
Sometimes, experts in African studies become experts in Russian studies. For example, Stanislav Beletskiy, originally from Siberia, initially taught Russian as a foreign language. Then, he worked in Tanzania for about ten years, learned Swahili there, and eventually defended his dissertation as an Africanist linguist. Two Russian textbooks for Africans were recently published, with my translation into Bambara and Stanislav Beletskiy’s translation into Swahili.
Valerii Khabirov, who I mentioned, was originally a Germanist, worked in the Central African Republic, learned the Sango language, and defended the first and, to date, only dissertation on this language in Russia.
I can also give you a counterexample. My student, an Africanist, recently returned from the Central African Republic. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree and simultaneously completed a course to teach Russian as a foreign language. She went to the Central African Republic because she knows French, one of the CAR’s official languages. This is an example of how an Africanist gains additional, practice-oriented qualifications. This is an opportunity, while working in Africa, to bring practical benefits to both her own country and the African community, while simultaneously engaging in fundamental research, if possible.
There is a common perception about any people: the French are gallant, the Russians are mysterious souls and fond of drinking, the Italians have the art of ‘dolce far niente’ (literally, sweetness of doing nothing). And what about Africans?
They do not make haste or hurry. You can see this by their speech etiquette. They greet each other at length, especially in villages. In Russian, it would sound like: ‘Dobroe utro’ (Good morning). —’Dobroe utro’ (Good morning). ‘A kak ty spal?’ (And how did you sleep?). — ‘Khorosho’ (Good)... Then follow questions about how the wife, children, parents, uncles, and aunts slept at night. And then the same questions from the other person. And finally, ‘Zhelau tebe blagoslovennogo dnia’ (I wish you a blessed day). — ‘I ia zhelau tebe blagoslovennogo dnia’ (And I wish you a blessed day, too).
Haste and fuss are frowned upon in their culture. There is a well-known East African term for a white person: mzungu, meaning ‘making haste and hurrying too much’. I think it is a precise observation.
#africa #russian language #cooperation
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