5. LANGUAGE POLICY AND THE ROLE OF ENGLISH
Teachers in an overseas country have to operate within the language policy of the government. Courses should reflect the needs of the students as individuals and as members of their society. Language policy is an important aspect of these needs. East African language policies have changed.
During the colonial period English was the language of administrators and, especially in Kenya, of the settlers and businesssmen. People learning English in the schools could expect when employed to be working with native speakers in subordinate rôles. In the few secondary schools almost all the teaching staff were native speakers and classes were small (25). People learning English at this time often acquired an educated British accent and intonation (rather than a local variety, as is almost always the case nowadays), partly because they strove to do so for political purposes in order to be able to negotiate with the colonial rulers, partly because it was easy to do so when there were so many examples to imitate, and partly because of the high prestige of this accent at the time.
Thus in the pre-independence schools students not only had a high motivation to learn English in the high prestige form but also had the opportunity to do so from a teaching staff almost entirely British. (One may speculate that in colonial times students had learned English not so much from the formal English course but from the fact of hearing native speakers in every subject class and on the playing field and other school activities).

At the time of independence in Kenya and Uganda there was no linguistic policy, other than to continue with English as the language of government by default. This was partly because, unlike in Tanzania, in neither country was there a predominant local language able to replace English. In Uganda the government was a coalition of Nilotic northerners and Bantu (mainly Baganda) southerners and neither group wished to adopt the language of the other. Swahili in Uganda was associated only with the army. In Kenya a balance of language groups meant that none of them could become linguistically or politically dominant and Swahili still had low status away from the coast. Only in Tanzania was there a policy of developing Swahili as the national language (and this policy too was a continuation of pre-independence trends, since the Germans had introduced Swahili into the government of the interior by using Swahilis as their local administrators). This was made law with the Arusha Declaration of 1967 (five years after independence), after which all government documents had to be published in Swahili with the use of English becoming optional. Tanzania's policy was made possible because there were many small language groups, most of them without orthographies or political power.

Thus in Uganda and Kenya it was reasonable for teachers to assume, in the absence of any official directives, that students would