Victor N Webb, Director

VIC WEBB is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pretoria and Director of CentRePoL. He  has taught linguistics at a number of South African universities, including the University of Natal, the Rand Afrikaans University and the University of Port Elizabeth. He obtained a D Litt et Phil at the University of South Africa (1976) and currently teaches the politics of language and sociolinguistics at the University of Pretoria. 

 

Michel LAFON (1950-), is a French linguist belonging to a research team dedicated to the (French) National Research Center. 

After having done  research on Eastern Bantu - his PhD is a description of shiNgazidja, the Comorian variety spoken in Great-Comoro island and he has published on Swahili too - ML turned to Shona from Zimbabwe. Besides an introduction to the language and culture, he has translated a Shona novel into French. From 1995 to 2000 he was an NGO coordinator in Mozambique where he developed mother-tongue adult literacy as well as bilingual education, making use of the local variety, Ndau.  He rejoined research proper in 2001 being posted at Ifas in Johannesburg. He learned isiZulu and studied the language policy situation in SA. In 2005, he initiated a joint research (IFAS/CentRePoL) on the use of African languages in education in SA, which continues to date through his secondment to the university of Pretoria.