West Africa is not like the USA or Australia or even Latin America for many reasons, but one is easy not to think about until you get here. Ghana is English-speaking, says the guidebook. Senegal, French.
Ha!
Virtually no one here speaks a European language in the home. And because of the long history of migrations within the continent, in any given location there are at least 3 or 4 African languages that are the first language of a large segment of the population. The language you speak at home is, as far as I can tell, the primary indicator of what tribe/clan/people you belong to.
But you also don’t just speak your in-the-home language plus English/French. Usually, you speak your own language, plus at least one other African language that is widespread in your area at the level of fluency, plus at least one other African language as well as I speak Spanish (which is to say, plenty well enough for daily practicalities, bargaining, etc). So for example, in the Gambia, the languages/tribes that are widespread include Wolof, Mandinka, Fula, and Sarahule. Of these, most people seem to have practical knowledge if not fluency in both Wolof and Mandinka, as well as their own language if it’s neither of those
You also probably went to Koranic school and memorized the entire Koran in Arabic as a child, and if you are particularly religious you may have learned even more Arabic than that or at least kept up your Koranic reading over the years. And then, if you went to school, you speak either English or French (possibly both) reasonably well (and if you didn’t, you probably speak enough to at least sell things to tourists). And none of these languages are luxuries – you need all of them to conduct your daily affairs.
Pictured is Malang, an 18-year-old member of Ibraheem's household, who speaks Mandinka, Wolof, Fula, English, and French, in front of an Arabic-language TV program.It’s enough to give me, with my practical Spanish and my beginner-level dabbling in German, Mandarin, and French, quite the inferiority complex. And it really puts Americans to shame in general. Imagine how much better off we’d be if every American spoke both English and Spanish fluently, as well as at least one other language at a proficient level! And we’d still be behind West Africans. [It also seems like quite the waste of brainpower here in an objective sense. Part of me feels like “gosh, if they’d just all speak English at home and then devote all that energy and time to learning Mandarin, Arabic, and either French, German or Spanish, they’d have valuable skills marketable the world over!” But of course that is not how it works…]
Other observations:
- Most people are not literate in any African language, with the exception I think being Wolof in Senegal, in which there is actually a growing body of literature, film, etc (though there is both Wolof written in the Roman script and Wolof written in Arabic script, called Wolofal). Even in Senegal, though all the Roman script writing I saw on signs/shopfronts/etc was in English, and I assume that all the Arabic script writing was in Arabic, not Wolofal.
- The two families who have so graciously hosted me both have televisions in the parlor that are on a lot of the time, and almost all the programming is in English. Watching cartoons takes on a whole educational level if you are learning a language while watching!
- I think I’ve gotten a lot better over the past 5 weeks at parsing English spoken with a West African accent. The big problem I have is not so much the different pronunciation of vowels and consonants, though there is a bit of that, but more the difference in emphasis on syllables and the rhythm of the sentence. Eg, the word “development”, which is used a lot here, is pronounced something like dee-VEL-up-MUNT by us, and something like "DUH-vlup-munt" by most West Africans I’ve encountered. String a bunch of differently-emphasized words like that together and change the emphasis/rhythm of words within the sentence, and it can be really tough for the American ear to parse.
There are a few concepts/types of communication that routinely cause problems for me:
- Relatives: The words “brother”, “sister”, “father”, “mother”, and so on, are used to refer not just to your immediate nuclear family, but to your cousins, aunts, and uncles – because in West African family structure, your father’s brother has equivalent authority over you as your father, and your responsibilities to his children are not that different from your responsibilities to your father’s children. It took me a while to break the reflex of assuming that when someone uses one of these words, they mean what we mean. There are other confusions like using “stepfather” to refer to your father’s brother (because if your father dies, he will probably marry your mother), and “uncle” to refer to the unrelated man your mother marries after your father’s death (I don’t know why – I guess because “stepfather” was taken and “uncle” wasn’t being used?)
Moreover, it’s clearly not just a translation issue – it’s a different way of categorizing the world. When I ask something like “what is her relation to you *actually*? How are her parents related to yours?” etc – people have to actually think about it as if solving a new math problem. Their relatives are classified in swathes of “grandparents” (people two generations above you) “fathers/mothers” (people one generation above you), “sisters/brothers” (your own generation), and “sons/daughters” (the generation below), and the question that Europeans consider critical of what percentage of your genes you share is simply not relevant.
What I am dying to know but can’t figure out how to get across the concept of asking is at what point the expansion of kinship ends. If your father’s brother’s children are also your brothers and sisters, then they are your children’s fathers and sisters as well. But clearly that can’t go on forever – how and when does someone drop out of that category and just because a loosely defined “distant relation”, which they also do talk about? - Referents/pronouns: First, I am often confused by stories in which gender pronouns are used because either the pairs he/she and him/her are used interchangeably or else my ears can’t hear the distinction within a West African accent.
Second, compounding the problem, I have a very difficult time making a question like “but I’m confused, who is the “he” you are referring to in this story?” clear. For instance if out of the blue someone says to me “You know, that woman owns the store down the road,” and I ask “who is that woman?” because I don’t know who they’re referring to (the woman we just greeted on the roadside? The woman we had an appointment with earlier today? The mother of a friend who we were just talking about?”), The answer is usually “The woman who owns the store down the road.” I repeat, yes, but who are you talking about? The frustrated response: “The owner of the store! I hope you understand now.” And so on… - Planning/time. This one I assume is only partly language, and a lot about the whole “African time” phenomenon. But questions like “how soon will he get here?” are often answered with statements like “he has already left.” “But how soon do you think that means he will arrive?” “Oh, that I cannot say…”
- Measuring frequency & ratios. (I think this is probably related to the African time phenomenon as well.) Being my father’s daughter a lot of my questions about culture and lifestyle come in the form of “How often do you do X?” or “What percentage of people are Y?” The answer to a question like this almost invariably comes in the form of an anecdote, about a time when they did X or a person who is Y. The anecdotes are usually very illuminating about how things work, but they do not answer my question!
In order to get a related answer, I have to repeat the question in several different but related ways (eg, “When was the last time you did X? or “How many times did you do X last month”? or “Are most of your friends Y, or just a few?”), and even then often fail. I have been thinking that I should actually try this on some random Americans and see how it goes – it seems entirely possible that my set of friends and colleagues think about frequencies and ratios differently from the average Anglo as well from the average African.
