President of ACALAN's Assembly of Academicians, Prof. Beban Sammy Chumbow has inferred that the Berlin conference which regulated European colonization and trade in Africa divided Africa.

He made this known in a recent chat with CEOAfrica in Brazzaville.

According to him, "The AU realized that from the unfortunate situation of colonization from the Berlin conference, the wall of Africa was arbitrarily partitioned, so that people who belonged to the same ethnic-cultural communities, speaking the same language were divided and placed in different nations and became strangers to each other.

"To redress this situation the AU has taken a position that these languages will be developed and used as common properties of the various nations that speak them and that is why we have vehicular cross border languages," he said.

Prof. Chumbow added that commissions have been set up to ensure that the orthography and writing systems of these languages are harmonized.

"The commissions set up will ensure that the languages are instrumentalized, will provide the languages with terminologies that will enable them to express new knowledge in science and technology, that these languages are given new functions, they get new economic functions, used in education, public service and can therefore serve the purpose of development in African countries," he stated.