Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local and Non-Native Languages in West Africa / Edition 1

by Moradewun Adejunmobi

Overview

Vernacular Palaver examines the continuing appeal of the idea of ‘the local’ for cultural brokers in West Africa, even in instances where they have a growing interaction with diverse global and continental languages of wider communication. It highlights the contribution of foreign and indigenous languages of wider communication to the formation of the new alliances and sodalities that are testing the relevance of locality, and reshaping the concept of local culture, in West Africa. The author traces the role of discourse about language in West African identity politics from the cultural nationalists of the early 20th century to the religious transnationals of the contemporary period. Using examples from video film, popular literature, the activity of religious associations, and educational practice, this book seeks to advance our understanding of the varied functions of non-native languages in multilingual societies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781853597725
Publisher:	Multilingual Matters Ltd.
Publication date:	10/22/2004
Series:	Languages for Intercultural Communication and Education , #9
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Moradewun Adejunmobiis an Associate Professor in the African American and African Studies Program of the University of California, Davis, USA. She has also taught at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria and the University of Botswana. Her current research interests are in questions of language and identity in African literature and popular culture. She has also worked on Malagasy literature in French and is the author of JJ Rabearivelo, Literature and Lingua Franca in Colonial Madagascar.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Colonial Encounters and Discourses of the Vernacular

In his first novel, Climbié, published in 1956, the Ivorian author, Bernard Dadié, recalls in the following manner the climate surrounding the use of vernacular languages on school grounds during his early years of schooling in the French West African colonies:

The decision was therefore made, and circulars were distributed to all corners of the bush and even to the smallest village schools. 'The speaking of dialects on school property is hereby forbidden.' It was precise. The zones were clearly demarcated. On that day was born the token – a piece of wood, a box of matches, anything. It was entrusted to the top student in the class, whose duty it was to give it immediately to anyone caught speaking his own dialect. From the day the token first appeared, a coldness settled over the school. The students sang as well at the beginning of classes as they did at the end, but without the same abandon, the same gusto, the same fire. And the breaks, once so happy and loud ... they too felt the effects of the new rule ... Because of the token the students liked to get as far away as possible from the schoolyard as soon as the final bell rang. They waited anxiously for the time to leave and watched the shadows grow smaller ... (Dadié, 1971: 15–16)

Images of the schoolroom, of the token, and of other humiliations continue to hover over memories of initial encounters with the dominant tongue, with the standard language, with Received Pronunciation in fiction and non-fiction around the world. Certainly, experiences similar to Dadié's have been recounted by a number of other African authors, including Dadié's compatriot, Jean-Marie Adiaffi (1980), but also by the Congolese, Sony Labou Tansi, and most notably by the Kenyan, Ngugi wa Thiong'o (1981). Nonetheless, and despite the inauspicious beginnings, Dadié's protagonist in the novel Climbié, does manage to complete his education and to become as an adult increasingly sensitive to the injustices of colonialism. Even more significantly for the argument that I will be developing in this chapter, Dadié wrote this largely autobiographical work with its many criticisms of French colonial rule, manifested inter alia in its language policies, in the very language that had been imposed upon him as a child at school.

Language has been and remains one of the most potent symbols of ethnicity and group identity in human society. In the words of Fishman (1989: 32), language is the 'quintessential symbol' of ethnicity. To wit, there have been an increasing number of mobilizations around questions of language and identity around the world. From the language-based nationalisms of Eastern Europe in the 19th century to the more recent language movements of the post-Soviet Union, from the struggles over Afrikaans in Apartheid South Africa to the conflicts over bilingual education and the English-Only movement in the United States, language seems poised to become even more than in previous centuries, a convenient flashpoint and battleground for resolving disagreements over identity, nation, migrancy and territory.

My interest in this chapter is in what I will describe henceforth as discourses of the vernacular. And because there is a tendency to speak of dissimilar mobilizations around language in terms which obfuscate different types of responses to dominant cultures on the part of subordinated communities, I find it useful to start by explaining what exactly I mean by a discourse of the vernacular. I will use the term 'vernacular' to describe language in its specific function as a mother tongue while I define a discourse of the vernacular as the organized activity undertaken by concerned individuals with a view to making such mother tongues the officially recognized means of communication in the major institutions of a territorially circumscribed community.

I should point out that my concern with issues of language and identity in this chapter derives mainly from a desire to explain the emergence of African literatures in European languages and their continued resiliency in comparison to African literatures in indigenous languages. Scholars of African and postcolonial literatures are generally familiar with narratives recounting the imposition of European languages in the educational systems of colonial Africa. While such narratives provide invaluable insight into the intellectual climate of an age from the viewpoint of those who actually suffered through such experiences of imposition, it is worth noting that the majority of these narratives have nonetheless been recorded in texts produced in European languages. In other words, to the extent that these authors continue to use the imposed languages and have not become involved in movements to change the language policies of the communities to which they belong, their condemnation of colonial educational policy cannot yet be considered a discourse of the vernacular. It is the failure of many African writers to transform concerns about language into active discourses of the vernacular that I find particularly intriguing, and which leads me to some of the following reflections on major and minor discourses of the vernacular in the contemporary world.

In response to a tradition of criticism that largely overlooked writing in indigenous languages, there has been considerable effort in recent years to prove that African literature written in indigenous languages was as significant as writing in European languages. Accounts of this neglect of indigenous language literatures in the canon of African literature generally deploy a vocabulary replete with the well-known oppositions between colonizer and colonized, foreign and native, center and periphery. While the fact of colonialism is absolutely central to any discussion of the marginalization of indigenous-language literatures in Africa, discussions of the language situation that move rapidly from the fact of colonialism to the colonized mentality of the educated elite in explaining the continued dominance of European languages in literary writing, confuse the historical setting with the response to the setting. Like Zachernuk (2000: 183), I suspect that 'colonial intellectuals are [not] predictable simply by virtue of being colonial', and as such, responses to the colonial encounter are preferably studied as distinct from, and not as extensions of a particular administrative system. For even where colonized elites gave assent to colonial policy, their assent represents a distinct phenomenon often motivated and sustained by considerations of a rather different order. To overlook such considerations is to construct colonized elites as being always and totally devoid of agency.

In order to come to a more precise understanding of the response of educated Africans to questions of language choice in the colonial period, I have chosen to concentrate on instances where the colonizing authorities did in fact support the idea of vernacular literacy for the colonized, as happened with the British authorities in several of their West African colonies. Where the colonizers systematically imposed their own language, it is easy to conclude that the colonized elite had little choice but to acquiesce to the policy of imposition. But where colonizing officials embraced a discourse of vernacular literacy, we may have to consider other possibilities in explaining the reluctance of a colonized elite to take advantage of the opportunity that was, as it were, freely offered. Against this background, I intend in this chapter to examine the failure of colonial discourses on vernacular literacy to generate widespread enthusiasm among colonized elites in Africa and to prevent the emergence of vibrant literatures in the former colonial languages, particularly in the West African and southern Nigerian contexts. All colonizers no doubt considered their culture superior to the cultures of the colonized, but all colonizers did not develop a discourse around the vernacular. Most colonized groups sought to defend and safeguard their culture in some way, but all such groups did not develop a discourse of the vernacular as part of their resistance to colonialism. And perhaps for these reasons, the ambivalence of African nationalist figures and writers towards discourses of the vernacular ought to be considered not so much as an aberration to be deplored, but as a fruitful illustration of the circumstances in which discourses of the vernacular become unattractive to those who have been designated as its intended beneficiaries.

Vernacular Literacy and Colonial Education

To start with, in advancing our understanding of these circumstances, I propose to consider 'major' discourses of the vernacular, or discourses developed by those in a position of power, and the kinds of reactions that such major discourses engender on the part of designated beneficiaries who are usually excluded from positions of power. The activity of British authorities in the colony of Nigeria in the late 19th and early 20th century is instructive in this regard, as are the responses of the local educated elite. Here, as was the case in Dadié's narrative, the question of vernacular literacy in the colonies most frequently surfaced in relation to educational policy. In British West Africa, the first policy statements on educational matters by the British authorities were made public in 1882. The fact that the 1882 Ordinance, as it was called, made no provision for the teaching of the local languages, or instruction in the vernacular within the formal school system provoked an immediate outcry from missionaries in southern Nigeria who prepared a memorandum of protest, and from many educated Africans whose reactions were recorded in the lively Lagos press. The vigorous protests addressed to the British authorities on this matter are often identified with the onset of a larger wave of cultural nationalism among educated Africans in Lagos, which lasted from the 1880s roughly until the second decade of the 20th century. But for a host of reasons, which have been adequately discussed elsewhere, and which included the expanding institutionalization of racism, disagreements with the British authorities were increasingly played out on the political rather than cultural arena after the 1920s.

The 1882 Ordinance was apparently the foremost occasion when the colonial authorities disregarded the role of indigenous languages in educational policy in colonial Nigeria. The 1882 incident was also the main instance when politically active educated Africans made a discourse of the vernacular a significant part of their 'political' agenda. However, subsequent Ordinances passed into law as from 1887 reversed the provisions of the 1882 Ordinance regarding the place of indigenous languages in native education. In fact, the 1926 Education Ordinance stated that 'Among infants and younger children, all instruction should as far as possible be given in the vernacular ...' and it was responsible for such a turnabout in the language policies of the state that Awoniyi (1975: 99, 127) credits it with generating renewed interest in the work done on at least one of the indigenous languages, Yoruba, as from the 1920s onwards. Special memoranda were also issued in 1927 and 1943 by the British authorities stating preference for the use of vernacular, i.e. the mother tongue, at least in the early years of schooling in the colonies.

Support for vernacular literacy in southern Nigeria started long before the 1882 Ordinance. Earlier in the 19th century, Protestant missionaries had begun expressing reservations about the use of English in schools. Reverend Buhler, the German director of the Training Institution established in 1859 by the Christian Missionary Society, complained about the confusion caused by instruction in English, and recommended instruction in Yoruba (Awoniyi, 1975: 50–1). Among the missionaries, the initial impetus for supporting vernacular literacy arose from the desire to provide scriptures to African converts in their own language (Ajayi, 1965: 131). For the same reasons, they also felt that non-native missionaries ought to become proficient in the language of the community where they worked (Smith, 1926: 45–6). But with time, evangelization took a back seat, and the discourse on vernacular literacy was increasingly realized within the context of concerns related directly or indirectly to the form of the education to be provided for colonized Africans. Those who spoke most frequently on the need for vernacular literacy often spoke in the same breath of these other issues, so that they gradually became integral components of the discourse on vernacular literacy.

The European advocates of vernacular literacy in Africa during the colonial period made their views known in books, journal articles, and at international conferences linked to specific interest groups, namely missionaries, education officials, linguists and anthropologists. The international conference on Christian Missions in Africa, which took place at Le Zoute, Belgium in 1926, was one such forum which brought together missionaries and therefore those largely responsible for educational instruction in colonial Africa. The participants at this conference specifically debated on issues of language and in particular on vernacular literacy at several sessions. Opinions on language and education were also to be found in journals dealing with educational questions in the colonies, such as the journal Oversea Education published by the British Colonial Government. Articles on the subject appeared regularly in publications belonging either to individual missionary groups or linked to several Protestant missionary organizations such as the International Review of Missions, or The Bible Translator.

In my opinion, some of the most interesting articles on vernacular literacy and literature were featured in anthropological journals that specialized in African studies, including for example, the journal, Africa, and the Journal of the African Society, later renamed African Affairs. Founded in the early 20th century, both journals remain important players in the production of scholarly discourse on African culture. The journal Africa deserves special attention because it featured more articles on the structure of African languages, on vernacular writing, and on native education than other Africanist publications such as the Journal of the African Society.Africa made its first appearance in 1928 in Britain as the main publication of an organization called the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures (IALC), which later became the International African Institute. The establishment of the Institute, based in London, was proposed at a conference of linguists working on African languages in September 1925 (Lugard, 1928: 8). The actual convening occurred at a meeting of interested Africanists, including missionaries, anthropologists, colonial administrators in June 1926 (Smith, 1934: 3). The IALC intended to differentiate itself from other anthropological bodies working on Africa by giving special consideration to African languages and literature in the vernacular in a time of social change. Its special concerns were reflected in the constitution of the organization, where the first item in the list of objectives indicated that the IALC was set up 'to study the languages and cultures of the natives of Africa' (Smith, 1934: 4).

The founding editor of Africa was Professor Diedrich Westermann who had earlier served as a missionary in Togo, before becoming a professor at the University of Berlin. Professor Westermann was a staunch supporter of African vernacular literacy, and widely recognized as a foundational figure in West African linguistics. Westermann the linguist is well recognized in African language studies; Westermann the cultural entrepreneur, less so in studies of the literature and the cultural politics of the colonial period. The editorial inclinations of Africa, under Westermann's direction and his many publications on the subject of vernacular literacy provide numerous instances of the cultural entrepreneur at work. It was no surprise, given his predilections, and those of the IALC that the first three articles in the inaugural issue of Africa, dealt in passing, or extensively with the role of the vernacular in colonial Africa. Subsequent editions featured articles presenting linguistic findings on African languages, but also advocating vernacular literacy as educational policy. The IALC further established an annual competition for African vernacular literature in December 1928 to act as a stimulus for authors writing in indigenous African languages (Westermann, 1937: 497). The canon of early African vernacular literature was largely formed from authors who first received recognition for their creativity through these competitions (Gérard, 1981: 184).

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Acknowledgements
1 Colonial Encounters and Discourses of the Vernacular
2 African Literature, European Languages, and Imaginations of the Local
3 Foreign Languages, Local Audiences: The Case of Nigerian Video Film in English
4 Romance Without Borders: Narrating Love, Femininity, and the Local in Contemporary Ivory Coast
5 Languages of Wider Communication and Alternative Sites of Belonging
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index