MARIUS VERMAAK

At present there are roughly 300 Con-fucius Institutes (CIs) in Asia, Africa,the Americas, Europe and Oceania.Twenty-five of them are in Africa. The ques-tion in my title hints at two other questions:First, should African CIs do something more than or different from the core busi-ness of the CI system as such, namely, teach-ing Chinese and encouraging understanding of Chinese culture? Second, are African conditions sufficiently distinctive to require distinctive functions? I would like to argue that the answers to both these questions are:Yes. African CIs must be different from, say,European ones; and African CIs need to go beyond the core functions as set down by the Hanban (National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language).