Language

Africans frequently lament the tendency by non-Africans (especially in the media) to regard Africa as a single entity - and to extrapolate the problems in one country - it could be Congo, or Sudan, or Zimbabwe, or Somalia, depending on where the news is worst - to the entire continent.

They do so with good reason. Africa is an extremely diverse continent, and its diversity is exemplified by the extraordinary number of languages - and language types - spoken across the continent. Wikipedia informs us that there are at least 2,000 separate languages in Africa (about 30% of the world's total) with numerous different roots. For students of linguistics, Africa is fertile ground, in particular because of the number of creole languages which have developed from trading pidgins. I became interested in pidgins and creoles perforce - as Peter Muhlhauser's (my linguistics tutor at university) principal area of research was in the structure of new languages (creoles) developing from pidgins.

My first actual acquaintance with a real creole language was in Sierra Leone in 2005. Krio is widely spoken throughout Sierra Leone - a creole language based on English but with a structure similar to the Yoruba language from Nigeria. Krio's origins lie in Sierra Leone's history as a home for freed slaves, the first wave of whom returned to the West African country from Nova Scotia in Canada. The story of the founding of Sierra Leone is told in Adam Hochschild's brilliant history of the campaign against slavery, Bury the Chains, though the legacy of krio as a fusion between the English spoken by the returnees and the indigenous languages spoken by Sierra Leone's population at the time is not mentioned in his compelling book. While moving from meeting to meeting in ancient Freetown taxis, I kept hearing the same catchy but incomprehensible song on the radio, which, the taxi driver informed me, was called Tutu Pati, by Sierra Leone's most popular musician, Emmerson. Subsequent enquiry revealed that Emmerson's enormous popularity was partly derived from his campaign against corruption, and that he had released an album entitled Borbor Bele (picture attached) in which the title song condemned corrupt governmental officials who steal public resources and grow fat on their ill-gotten gains (hence the Bele of the title).


Not surprisingly, given the colossal number of distinct languages, language policy forms an important element in education and nation-building in modern Africa. Most countries elected to use the former colonial power's language for government, a decision which - despite the manifold advantages of using a widely-understood global language - did little to build a sense of unity among the various tribes that make up most if not all modern African nations. In this context, Julius Nyerere's most lasting legacy as the first leader of Tanzania will probably be the adoption of Kiswahili as the country's official language. Doubtless it is no coincidence that Tanzania has suffered less inter-ethnic conflict than most if not all other African states since independence, despite its multi-ethnic population. Unlike most "official" languages, Kiswahili is the language of the people - and not of either the ruling class or of a particular ethnic group.

On a lighter note, African English (as spoken in East Africa) has thrown up a variety of new words and usages. Among my favourites are the verb "jubilate", an amalgam of celebrate and jubilant): "the demonstrators jubilated when their leader got up to speak", and the verb "avail" used with the meaning of making oneself available. "The particpants in the workshop are requested to avail themselves for a group photo at 10.30 am".