This paper draws on the notion of multilingualism as social practice (Heller 2007) to critique postcolonial language planning and policies in Africa. Drawing on illustrations from Ethnologue's (2009) languages of Africa, studies on language planning and policy in Africa, and recent developments in harmonisation of cross-border language research (Prah 1998;Banda 2008), the paper argues that there are distortions in the conceptualisation of multilingualism and what it entails in Africa's socio-cultural contexts. In turn, the paper faults monolingual biases in the notions and models used to describe and promote multilingualism in Africa, which mirror descriptions of the language situation in Western socio-cultural contexts. The paper argues for cross-linguistic and cross-border status and corpus planning to take advantage of multilingualism as a linguistic resource for socioeconomic development in Africa. The paper concludes by highlighting the prospects for linguistic repertoire-based multilingual models for language planning and policy in Africa.

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We examine 575 randomly selected articles on Zimbabwean immigrants from the South African Media (SAM) database to expose discourses of exclusion and the production of the psycho-social condition -moral panic. We use critical discourse analysis, notions of remediation and immediacy to scrutinize discourse structures and other discursive strategies designed to conceal mediation and authorial prejudices, and to make the reader 'experience' the actual content. In addition to making the anti-immigrant rhetoric appear legitimate, and the danger immediate and real, we argue that the apparent seamless content is often biased by selection and structured in such a way as to deny voice to immigrants and their advocates. Among other things, we conclude that since the readers' interpretations are filtered through lenses of subjectivities defined by communicative contexts characterized by job scarcity, poverty, crime and wanting healthcare, the news content heightens anxiety and miseducates more than it enlightens readers on migration issues. Hence there is a danger of SAM becoming unwitting conveyors of the same vices they preach against.

In addressing the dearth in studies on linguistic/semiotic landscapes in orallanguage dominant rural communities, we use the notion of repurposing to show how people from rural areas of Livingstone and Lusaka in Zambia (SouthCentral Africa) extend the repertoire of 'signs' to include faded and unscripted signboards, fauna and flora, mounds, dwellings, abandoned structures, skylines, and village and bush paths (with no written names) in narrations of place. We illustrate how they use the system of signage to transcend the limitations of the material conditions in the rural-scapes by redeploying memory, objects, artifacts and cultural materialities in place to new uses, and for extended meaning potentials. We conclude that focusing on the semiotic ecology in multimodal linguistic/semiotic landscapes helps to accentuate the multisemiotic and diverse processual characteristics of meaning-making, even in areas that do not have scripted place and street names.

This paper explores how bilingual learners and teachers challenge the monolingual discourses prescribed in language education policy and models in pursuit of voice and agency in classroom interaction. Through an examination of observation, interview and classroom interaction data in selected coloured primary and secondary schools in Cape Town, the paper investigates the tension between bilingual discourses of learners and prescribed models of education that value monolingual discourses. This entails an evaluation of the suitability of dominant Western models and notions of multilingualism, which it is argued do not fit the multilingual contexts in Africa. The paper concludes that in the multilingual education contexts of Cape Town learning often takes place outside the official models and languages of education; hence the argument for multilingual education models in Cape Town and Africa, generally, that take into the account local linguistic diversity and community repertoires.