Language - a vital & neglected topic in African agricultural development?

Following are some excerpts with minor modifications from the introduction I wrote to comments on a report about agricultural development in Africa several months ago. These are in italics, followed by some comments to put it in a personal perspective:

I see language as an important consideration often - and paradoxically - omitted from discussions on agriculture and rural development in Africa: language and specifically communication about agriculture in farmers' languages and/or local lingua francas. ... The issues of choice of language in development communication, and the implications of those choices for who participates, whose knowledge counts, how well knowledge that is exchanged is understood and appropriated, etc. [have] implications for analysis or action. ...

I think it is fair to say that only in Africa (esp. sub-Saharan) is it the general pattern that the languages dominant in agricultural research and extension are different from those the farming populations speak as their first languages and even lingua francas. There are various reasons for this of course, but the fact is important, and too central to any effort to communicate about science and technology with farmers to be left on the margins of the discourse, let alone to be totally ignored.

Rural realities as concern language and linguistic diversity are not unknown to scholars and practitioners concerned with agriculture in Africa, of course, and many of our African colleagues have themselves lived those realities to one degree or another. However, disciplinarily, such language-related issues are alien to agricultural specialists (to a greater extent even than the broad category of social science), and in practice language differences are left to extension agents and/or intermediary farmers in the field to deal with. Moreover, professional incentives, training and education, etc. are all in English, French and Portuguese, not the first languages of agriculture in Africa.

As a consequence there seems to be a linguistic divide with consequences for understanding, transmission and generation of knowledge etc. This issue, which has many unanswered questions but not easy answers, is underresearched, in part because of a disciplinary divide which linguists on the one hand and the range of specialists concerned with agricultural development on the other need to find the will and means to bridge.

I recall working in rural areas and there were many occasions where multiple languages complicated communication or even shaped the way the work was done. At the time it was just one of those things you and your co-workers dealt with. My main counterpart in an animal traction project in the Amlamé district of Togo spoke Ewe as his first language (L1) but the farmers spoke either Kabiye or Akposso as their L1. With a mixture of French and mostly Mina/Ewe, my counterpart could get the messages across. I worked mainly in French and while communication was possible with some of the farmers it was not with the rest. People there were adept at using their "language portfolios" as it were to translate and complete some sort of communication. How much was lost is another matter and I suspect in retrospect that this system is good for the gist but not nuance or detail, and the "devil is in the details" as the saying goes.

It was clear in any event that no one had planned systematically for how communication across languages was to happen - everything sort of depended on extension agents' and farmers' skills in the field.

In working on a forestry project in the Djenné district of Mali, language and ethnicity emerged as issues in deciding which villages to contact for participation in tree planting (the project was just beginning there and it was not possible by any means to go everywhere). The local staff was more comfortable in Bambara than in some other languages, and indeed it was in the Bambara-speaking villages that the work focused (other issues like perception of the readiness of some other groups to reliably participate in tree planting were also expressed - it is hard to sort out the different factors, but that would have been important to do).

The multiplicity of languages is sometimes pointed at as a problem in Africa, but I think that misses the point. In fact it is not the multilingualism that is the issue but the fact that no few if any (as far as I know) discussing how to best work in the linguistic environment.

At the same time, the skill of Africans generally in facilitating communication across languages (which has been discussed in the literature on African languages) may be obscuring the need for more systematic attention to the issue.

It was interesting to note that some researchers with ICRISAT and IITA who had to follow up on field trials with farmers by means of a questionnaire decided to translate the questionnaires into the farmers' languages (Bambara in Mali for sorghum trials I believe, and Hausa in central Niger for cowpea trials). Having one or many field agents translate the questionnaire from French each time it was administered was obviously going to introduce all sorts of unknowns into the quality of the data. The research need for greater precision led to the obvious choice to communicate in the farmers' languages.

So, one wonders, what about the way field agents translate extension information day-to-day?

It took me a while to really catch on to this issue, even though I have worked on language as well as rural development. Which has me wondering why - was I just slow or what? I do think now, as I indicated in the excerpts quoted above, that part of it is a disciplinary culture and divide issue: the issue was agriculture or forestry, and the foreign experts and the research/extension systems function in French (in those countries). Language, or optimizing communication in specific languages, were not something that entered into the discourse.

This gets into speculation for the reasons, but the main point I'm trying to make is that language is a big deal and there hasn't been enough thought given or research done on how big a deal it is, in what precise ways, and how to best address it. Discussing new approaches and techniques for agriculture in Africa, and especially discussing dissemination of knowledge about these, without engaging the issue of language seems to me to be a mistake we don't have to keep making.

Anyway, this is an issue that I've mentioned before (for instance, Sept. 14, 2006) and will come back to periodically.

Sidebar improvements

I've made some more changes on the sidebar, which hopefully is more useful now.

So, what about the last year?

Busy. Some work highlights:

• Vastly expanded the Pan African Localisation wiki (and that's still in progress). The idea with this is to develop a comprehensive information resource for people of a range of backgrounds approaching localization in African languages. First of all, localizers - people working on or planning a project for some aspect of localization in one or more African langauges. Also policymakers (ICT, language, and increasingly localization), development program planners, local activists, etc. It involves bringing a lot of information together (in many cases just basic with outlinks) and interlinking it. Localization to a certain degree involves bringing together of "previously unrelated skills, or matrices, of thought" (per the well known formulation of Arthur Koestler in another context some years ago) so this wiki is combining information on African languages and sociolinguistics, along with language technology tools, ICT4D information, mention of policies etc. In fact, all these "skils or matrices of thought" can also be understood as interacting parts of a larger "localization ecology," which is a concept I'm working on.


• Presented at and participated in "Regional Consultation on Local Language Computing Policy in Developing Asia" and "PAN Localization Project Phase II Meeting"meetings of the PAN Localisation Project, held in Thimphu, Bhutan in January. The PAN L10n project is funded by IDRC and has been particularly successful in facilitating localization work in several countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, Laos, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The discussion of "local language computing policy" involved representatives from several other countries in the region.


• Attended a one-day seminar on "Recent Experiences on Measuring Languages in Cyberspace" at UNESCO in Paris. This was on 22 February, the second day of a two day observance of "International Mother Language Day."


• Helped organize and participated in the "Pan African Research on L10N Workshop & Localization Blitz" held in Marrakech, Morocco in February 2007. This is another piece in IDRC's strategy to develop a network for localization in Africa. The workshop was organized by the Tactical Technology Collective - same organization that put together Africa Source I (Okahandja, Namibia, 2004) & II (Kalangala, Uganda, 2006) and the Localisation Dev workshop (Warsaw, Poland, 2004). Many of the participants also had been at the PanAfrican Localisation Workshop in Casablanca, Morocco (2005); three others and I came from the seminar in Paris mentioned above.


• Attended the 38th ACAL 2007 & 11th ALTA 2007 Conference held at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, US, in March 2007. This was an opportunity to connect with various people involved in research on and teaching of African languages. It has been my thought for a while that linguists and language instructors can be involved more with localization efforts.


• Submitted extensive comments on the Africa section of the "International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development" in May. More about this in a later post.


• Taught a distance course on "Language and Development Communication for the Payson School of Tulane University. This was an interesting challenge and opportunity to learn as well as teach. I hope I have the opportunity to give this course again.


• Continued to interact online with various people working on aspects of localization and internationalization. This is not really news though - have been doing this in one form or another for several years.

Reviving the blog - again (?!)

After a year's hiatus, I'm going to post at least a few more items here.

One task is to update the list of lists in the left sidebar and all the RSS feeds there - have begun that already. I tend to write more in various lists and online fora anyway, and those links and feeds will reflect those efforts (as well as posts by others of course).

What I will try to do more of here is posting material that does not go on public lists but might be of more general interest, as well as some items which do go out on lists but that I would like to include here. This will hopefully provide more material for thought, discussion, and action with regard to African languages and/in the information society(ies).

Retrospective: "Wikimania," 4-6 August 2006

Just a quick note as September fades into October, and referring first of all to August...

At the beginng of last month there was a meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts called "Wikimania", which brought together various experts and enthusiasts working on Wikipedia and related Wikimedia projects. Although I did not attend, I participated virtually, or as close to that as one could, in two sessions related to Africa, one by Martin Benjamin entitled "Huru na Bure: Swahili Collaboration and the Future of African Languages on the Web", and the other by Kasper Souren called "The Bambara Wikipedia, One Year Later" (see the discussion sections). In the runup to Wikimania I had corresponded with Martin and Ndesanjo Macha, cc'ing Kasper (at the time I did not know he was going to attend) about finding a way to support development of African language editions of Wikipedia. Some ideas found their way into a document called Facilitating African Language Wikipedias.

Following the conference, Martin and I set up a Yahoogroup called AfrophoneWikis for discussion of and collaboration on some of the points in that document. A list of African language editions of Wikipedia is available on the site for that group.

The BBC redio show, "Africa, Have Your Say", of Wed. 6 Sept. was devoted to African languages and Wikipedia, and featured among many others, Martin, Ndesanjo, and myself. (The recording of the show was apparently available for only a short period.

Anyway this is old news, except to say that the effort is ongoing and there is some noticeable expansion of some of the Wikipedias in African languages, notably Swahili, thanks largely to Ndesanjo.

Also, I think that the overall goals of localization are advanced by such specific / specialized projects to the extent that we communicate about them and share lessons.

Back again. Gates, Rockefeller & African languages

I've expressed reservations about the medium of blog before - in some ways very useful, but in some ways a drain on time. And then all the blogs and who has time to read most of them?

I've tended to drain my expressive time on several lists, which require less in terms of maintenance and in theory have a built in readership as well as a more egalitarian mode of interaction. As a collective enterprise, even when one person is the "owner," the focus is not so much on the personalities than the issue (though in practice perhaps a few people - and personalities - may dominate for various periods of time). And keeping the list going is a task shared by several people. (But enough on comparative dynamics of lists and blogs!)

Also I've been caught up in other tasks and issues.

Nevertheless, having set this one up and still feeling as strongly as ever about the principles that led me to do so, and being aware that a blog - however little read - still has a presence, I will take it up again. There are several reasons why, but the tipping point, as it were, is reading of a Washington Post article about the Gates, and Rockefeller foundations "joining together to fight African hunger. A lot could be said about this, but in terms of the topic of this blog, I would say that there is a great opportunity to think first about farmer education and building on the bases of their knowledge about their situations, and in order to do this, to work seriously in the languages most familiar to the farmers, their families and communities.

Crop improvement and various technical innovations are important to agriculture in Africa, at least as much as elsewhere. But the foundation for agricultural development there, no less than elsewhere, is educated farmers. This is not just my opinion, but one that is held by many experts. But in Africa there has been very little attention to working in the languages most familiar to the people, especially in rural areas. Mostly agricultural extension messages for instance are translated ad hoc in the field by extension agents, who as a general rule have never had training in use of African languages (even their mother tongues) for this work.

Farmers' languages are not an inconvenience to be worked around in Africa any more than any other part of the world. But in Africa and African development they are usually treated that way. If the Gates and Rockefeller foundations are really "looking for a more systematic, long-term solution to African hunger," they need to balance the usual technical and market approaches with an educational initiative that takes fully into account African languages as a media for communication and innovation.

All this is not to discount English and French but to get real. There is no substitution for communicating in the language(s) that people know best and are most likely to use among themselves, and there is a lot of advantage to promoting "domestication" (in Alpha O. Konaré's term) of new scientific and technical information in those same languages. It's not second best, it's just best.

And there's also an important gender dimension. In general African women farmers are have less facility in the "official languages" (English, French, Portuguese) than men farmers. So the extent to which the community languages are used will be proportionatly more beneficial for women in terms of inclusiveness. Everyone wins, especially women.

LISA Forum Cairo

Currently in Cairo for a conference organized by the Localization Industry Standards Association. I presented yeaterday and others who are part of the track on localization in African languages will present today. For more info, see http://www.lisa.org/events/2005cairo/.

I have not gotten to catching up on previous posts here, but will hopefully be able to do that soon (watch the space below) as well as give more info on the current event. Anyone reading this blog who has followed previous posts (not that I expect there is anyone, but you never know) will be familiar with the refrain that I don't always find it so easy to add to this.

Back in Chengdu

Arrived back from Ireland (Shannon-Dublin-Paris-Beijing-Chengdu). Long trip and some very tight connections (lucky that my check-in arrived on the same day).

The LRC-X conference at the University of Limerick was good. More on that in the next. For the moment, here are some notes and reflection on languages in Dakar and Shannon/Limerick from my transition.

Mon. 12 Sept.: Thoughts on languages and signage from Shannon airport and the bus to Limerick

One thing I noticed in Dakar was that there were some billboards with messages in Wolof - exclusively. These were commercially produced, so you'd see the same "Halib laam mô nêkh" ad for Halib powdered milk and also something for a sauce mix called Linguere in many places. Occasionally you'd see Wolof on local signs such as one for "nekh soow" (along with a French "oeufs à vendre ici" - what is interesting in this is the different sensibilities translated: you don't see a sign in Wolof saying buy this or we're selling this, but that it's nice eggs). Not sure on the translation for the billboards, but what is interesting there is that commercial outfits are finding it worth their while to pay for these.

Here in Ireland, the airport in Shannon has the Irish Gaelic (or simply Irish as they call it now) name above the terminal in big letters: SIONAINN. All official signs are bilingual as far as I can see. Limerick is Luimneach.

Actually there are some signs in English only and a few signs (noted one big one in front of a building) and insignias or mottos (noted one in aging gold leaf in a house window) saying something only in Irish.

If one were to be here a long time, it would be fairly easy to use signs as a tool for learning the language - since, unlike Chinese, the script is a phonetic one. (Signs even in Chinese can be an education too in that some characters can be learned for their meaning even when one does not know the sound of the Chinese words represented.) One wonders about the potential of bilingual or multilingual signage in Africa as a way of favoring literacy (and language learning) - I did see an informal version of this using chalk some years ago in Kangaba, Mali.

Anyway, this western part of Ireland is one where the use of Irish as a first language survives. It's a relatively rural area, quite picturesque in places (just looking from the road), and as they say, very green...

In Limerick (Luimneach) / recap of Dakar trip

I guess that the "journal" or "diary" facet of blogging would lead people reading this blog about a trip to Dakar and Limerick to expect a bit of a travelogue. In fact, there is much and not much to say. Moreover not much time to say it...

Nevertheless, I'm in Limerick (Luimneach in Irish Gaelic) - with a fast broadband cable access at the University of Limerick - and will have more on Shannon (Sionainn) and Limerick later, but will first catch up on Dakar.

One was immersed in certain realities of the city of Dakar for several days - unusually heavy rains and urban flooding; rides in beat up taxis, immersed in the fumes of badly maintained motors; feeling the heat and humidity; relying on "cabines téléphoniques" for phone communication; trying to situate myself with regard to places that I got to know a little in several visits in the mid-1980s. What makes it all worthwhile is the people and the sense of doing and learning something as I go. Would have liked to have time to get out into the countryside, but not this time. On this trip to Dakar - my first in almost two decades - I lost the sense of a center to the city, though it is there, and found some parts that I knew before seem to have deteriorated. On the other hand there is new building in various places in town as the city - like cities all over - spreads.

Re the taxis, the drivers' lot is a hard one, if for no other reason than the breathing of exhaust fumes constantly. There was a story about France and Britain putting an excise tax on airfares to help the poor. Well leaving aside questions about the effects of transportation taxes generally, one could make a case for some sort of surcharge on somebody to pay for health problems from this urban vehicle pollution. And while we're at it some program to alleviate the hidden tax of broken roads, which all vehicle owners and operators pay daily (and they're not all rich). And so on. Transporation is not so far removed from communication as a concern, but it is a bit offtopic here except that in town it was fundamental to getting to see people and visit offices. But enough on this aside.

Anyway, as previously mentioned, having shifted gears while in Dakar to staying with friends and not at a moderately upscale hotel, opportunities to connect were rather catch-as-catch-can. Did note among other things, that the going rate for most cybercafés here seems to be 300FCFA/hour (a little more than half a dollar and less than half a euro). Used one in Point E for an hour on the 8th; noted in the same area (where there are several offices I visited) that a power outage in the middle of the day (9th) simply put them out of action (the ones I saw were smallish - 2 to about 20 computers). Connected briefly at WARC (see below) but the speed was slow, and also using the ADSL connection at Charles Becker's office. Noted that the Sofitel in town has a good wireless conection on its lobby level (had to wait for someone there). The Meridian Président (fancier than Novotel or Sofitel) had a decent wireless connection but you have to pay 2000FCFA per half hour or 3500 for an hour (decidedly a worse deal than Novotel or Sofitel where the wireless connection was free). My hosts Anne Dodge and Chuck Kennedy have very graciously let me get on line at their place (but I was not able to hook-up to their ADSL connection because there was apparently some additional software necessary to connect via USB cable).

I will recapiltulate the past days in reverse chronological order as best as I can now, and return to today later... [this is still a bit rough and I need to edit/add some more later]

Avec mes excuses aux francophones, je ne vais pas tout traduire en français, juste les parties concernant la réunion Unicode/IDN.

Sun. 11 Sept.: Last day in Dakar

Finding people on the weekend is never easy. For this day I got in touch with Ibra Sene, a grad student at Michigan State (history) who is doing his dissertation research. The timing worked out ideally for me to meet him and several of the Michigan State faculty. However, after walking down to the hotel (Ngor Jambe) I found that the location had been changed. So via taxi (again after negotiations and not reaching agreement with the first 2 drivers) to the Meridien Président. There, saw Dan Clay (director of the Institute of International Agriculture at MSU) and Anne Fergeson (among other things director of the Women and International Development program there, both of whom I knew previously) and Irv Widder (director of the Bean-Cowpea CRSP) and ? who I had not met previously.

In the afternoon visited the Baha'i Centre back down in Point E. Hadn't realized it was so close to two other locations I visited in previous days. Saw an old friend among others, Aboubacrine Ba. Spoke Pulaar a little with them. This trip has had a lot of opportunities to practice my rusty Fula language skills.

Sat. 10 Sept.: More visits

Visited Sonja Fagerberg at the ARED office. It rained again as I headed down to that part of town. Interesting discussion of their work on publishing materials in African languages (notably Pulaar). Sonja, who did her linguistics dissertation on the Pulaar of Fuuta Tooro (mainly in Senegal), authored some instruction books on the language that I found very useful in my learning of Fulfulde in Mali and Pular in Guinea.For a number of years she has been working with the NGO "ARED" (Associates for Research in Education for Development) in Senegal. Aside from publishing a lot in Pulaar and other languages of Senegal, ARED has an expertise in education in these languages and the dynamics of publication in them. In fact she and others have completed a series of books in French about publishing in African languages.

One of the ideas that occurred to me (and there are many, such as pushing forward work on the Pulaar <-> English translator,

From there went to have lunch with Charles Becker, a researcher, historian, and longtime resident of Dakar. He also edits the H-West-Africa list. Gaelle Loir, a student of law and African studies, and currently an intern at the French embassy in Dakar, was also there. So discussions ranged over a number of topics related to Senegal and Dakar.

I called Ibrahima Thioub of the History Department at UCAD (he is someone that David Robinson and Ibra Sene of MSU know well), but unfortunately he was out of town. Found a number for Ibrahima Bob of OneWorld but the people answering said I'd have to call back on Monday. Unfortunate that it turned out that way but on the whole I think I had a pretty good percentage. (see earlier days, below).

Fri. 9 Sept.: Busy day

In the morning went down to Fann to see the West African Research Centre / Centre de Recherche Ouest Africain. I called Ousmane Sène and he was free so the timing worked out. We talked briefly about the WARC/CROA activities and future program. I also met Abdoulaye Niang who is the computer technician there. One of the things WARC is involved in is preparation of materials for the African Language Materials Archive (ALMA), of which I am on the board, so I took some time to discuss aspects of Unicode and WARC's hope to present ALMA documents in text format rather than only PDF.

After lunch tried again to get in contact with Ken Lohento of Panos-West Africa, but there was still a problem with the number - when I checked information (dial 12), which I should have done earlier, I found a slightly different number, but still no luck (it being Friday, they probably were off).

I had a meeting at IDRC/CRDI's Dakar office at 3, and discussed various aspects of their programs and also the PanAfrican Localisation project with A. Camara and Ramata Molo Thioune.

Following that tried to get in touch with Mme. Sylla, the director of the Digital Freedom Initiative in Senegal. Unfortunately she was already out, but I did get to talk briefly with her later on the phone. She was heading out of town on a trip, so no other possibilities of meeting.

I then got in touch with Tunde regarding meeting Ben Akoh. Ben had returned from a trip but was in a meeting on Gorée Island. Ben planned to come back later (Gorée is just a short ferry ride from downtown Dakar). In the meantime went out to the Sacré Coeur area to meet him and visit the West African Democracy Radio project headquarters. This is an interesting initiative financed by OSIWA to use radio for information and



Thurs. 8 Sept.: Heavy rain in Dakar; in town

It rained hard in Dakar in the morning of the 8th and for much of the day there was flooding on roads. Apparently there have been a few such heavy rains of late. In any event, the morning therefore provided an opportunity to catch up with some work. Also spoke with Mamady Doumbouya and Michael Everson re some aspects of the conference and their respective plans. Mamady plans to meet with some N'ko management groups in Guinea. Michael has some meetings of standards groups in Europe.

I had lunch with the Peace Corps country director, Malcolm Versel. I had corresponded briefly with him a couple of years earlier and he apparently worked with my former doctoral advisor, Jim Bingen, some years ago. Interesting opportunity to find out his perspectives on development in Senegal (he has been in and out of the country many times over the years) and learn about his approach to the PC program there.

Visited the OSIWA office in the part of town known as Point E (not far from the Universite Cheick Anta Diop, UCAD). Tunde Adegbola is working there on contract and introduced me to some of his colleagues including the director, Mme Tanko, and Mme Ly.

Wed. 7 Sept.: More on the Unicode/IDN meeting / plus sur la réunion Unicode/IDN

Some conversations and after the meeting 9/7 and at the dinner. Got to present aspects of the PanAfrican Localisation wiki to Adama Samassekou, in particular the language profiles. Spoke with him and others about aspects of localization.

Asked Anne-Rachel Inné about the situation in the north of Niger. She is from Niger, although based internationally. She had recently visited Niger and said there is some improvement but the price of millet is extremely high. Grain aid released on the market (which is often how it is done these days so as not to undercut local farmers who have produced grain) apparently assumed a high price very quickly (~30,000FCFA/bag) - higher even that rice, which is unusual. It is certainly tempting to say it is merchants who reap the advantage. On a broader subject, the importance of education for farmers and rural people generally (and the necessity of doing that in the farmers' first languages. This conversation brought in some other people too.

Preparing to fly out of Dakar tonight - via Paris and Dublin to Shannon, the airport closest to Limerick.

Connections have been catch-as-catch-can, with different plusses and minuses, since leaving the Novotel. I've explained this and recapitulated the main points of the last several days in a draft that is on my laptop. For some reason couldn't post to the blog from the last place I connected (Hotel Meridian President, where I went to meet some Michigan State people who just arrived for a conference). And I'm now writing from a machine I can't transfer the file to. So I will try to post that finally in Ireland (as if there won't be enough else to do there).

More later.

Been a busy couple of days. Connect times have been haphazard. Will add more later.

Meeting summary / Résumé de la réunion

It was a long day yesterday, but it covered a lot of ground. IDN seems like a narrow subject for a major project, but as I understand it, it is a way of focusing questions. Addressing issues of IDNs implies having arrived at solutions for a number of other issues relating to transcription and how it is handled in the international system (which means Unicode/ISC-10646).

C'était une longue journée hier, mais on a beaucoup fait. IDN semble être un sujet étroit pour un projet important, mais autant que je le comprends, c'est une manière de focaliser les questions. Aborder des questions d'IDN implique l'arrivée aux solutions pour un certain nombre d'autres questions concernant la transcription et comment elle est manipulée en TIC (qui veut dire Unicode/ISO-10646).

The agenda was modified somewhat from the original. Here is the way it went (according to my notes):
L'ordre du jour a été modifié légèrement de l'original. Voici la manière qu'il a disparue (selon mes notes) :

• Opening/Ouverture - Mouhamet Diop (Next SA; organizer of project/organisateur du projet)
• Presentation of project / Présentation du projet "Unicode & IDN" - Pierre Dandjinou (UNDP)
• Presentation of the Afrilang network / Présentation du Réseau AFRILANG - Pierre Ouédraogo (Agence Intergouvernementale de la Francophonie)
• Presentation of experience / Présentation des expériences - Michael Everson (Evertype)
• Presentation of the linguists' network / Présentation du Réseaux des linguistes - Maxime Somé (Université de Nantere, Paris X)
• Project finance / Financement des projets « UNICODE-IDN en Afrique » - Mouhamet Diop (Next SA)
• Roundtable on IDN / Table ronde sur IDN - Alex Corenthin (Administrator of .sn domain), Edmond Chung by phone link (Afilias), Don Osborn (Bisharat), Michael Everson (Evertype)
• Roundtable on linguistic aspects / Table ronde sur les aspects linguistes
• Presentation on N'ko / Présentation sur le N'ko - Mamady Doumbouya (N'ko Institute)
• Roundtable on experience in Africa / Table ronde sur les expériences en Afrique - Don Osborn (Bisharat), Michael Everson (Evertype)
• Ethiopic and IDN / Éthiopique et IDN - Daniel Yacob by phone link (consultant)
• Presentation of ACALAN / Présentation de ACALAN (Académie africain des langues) -
  Adama Samassekou (ACALAN)
• More on the project / Davantage sur le projet - Pierre Dandjinou (UNDP)

I will try to add more observations later. In the meantime I would like to add that another positive of this meeting was to be able to see a couple of people I've met before - Tunde Adegbola and Michael Everson - and to meet others, many of whom I have either corresponded with or know by reputation, or both (Adama Samassekou, Pierre Dandjinou, Pierre Ouédraogo, Mamady Doumbouya, Anne-Rachel Inné, Yéro Sylla, Chérif Mbodj, Ken Lohento, Alex Corenthin, Mouhamet Diop of course, and others... ).

J'essayerai d'ajouter plus d'observations plus tard. Entretemps je voudrais ajouter qu'un autre positif de cette réunion était de pouvoir voir deux personnes que j'avais rencontré avant - Tunde Adegbola et Michael Everson - et de rencontrer d'autres, dont certaines avec lesquelles j'ai correspondu, ou qui je connaissais par réputation, ou tous les deux (Adama Samassekou, Pierre Dandjinou, Pierre Ouédraogo, Mamady Doumbouya, Anne-Rachel Inné, Yéro Sylla, Chérif Mbodj, Ken Lohento, Alex Corenthin, Mouhamet Diop bien sûr, et d'autres...).

Unicode / IDN in Africa (en Afrique), Dakar, 2005/9/7

I will attempt to blog from this one-day meeting in Dakar on "Unicode and IDN in Africa." The pages on the meeting, which is about to start, are at http://www.next.sn/unicode-idn-africa.html

Je tenterai de faire le blogging de cette réunion d'une journée à Dakar sur "Unicode et IDN en Afrique." Les pages sur la réunion, qui est au point de commencer, se trouvent à http://www.next.sn/unicode-idn-africa.html

Three more items before the IDN/Unicode conference: Connections en route; education in African languages; African studies in China

Here are 3 unrelated items, the first was written mostly on the last leg of the trip yesterday, the second is part of a letter about education policy written earlier that I've been intending to post (relevant to this blog and in a way to the context of discussion of things like IDNs and localization), and the third to a link between where I just came from and where I am.

I will also quickly mention three other items that have just come up today relating to the upcoming conference: (1) I just received a note from Daniel Yacob with a powerpoint on IDNs in Ethiopic (script used for several languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea). It is of course with the non-Latin scripts that a lot of the most interesting problems for IDNs are encountered; (2) there is a series of articles on the IDN/Unicode conference and African language computing generally in a special issue of Les Echos here in Dakar (see the files section of Unicode-Afrique for the PDF of this); and (3) I just met Mamady Doumbouya of the N'ko Institute who is also here for the conference. We had a good talk about aspects of localization, African languages, and the N'ko movement. N'ko is a script devised less than 50 years ago, but is increasingly used in the Mandephone parts of West Africa (and it is in the process of being approved for addition to Unicode).

The three items I mentioned are as follows.

Connections en route: airport to airport

The travel day, and it is a long day traveling with the sun across Eurasia and then south to Africa, is not so hard as it is one that demands patience, then at points some frantic rushing and then more patience. Time to fill with some work and thinking. There is not much rest, but some adrenaline.

On this trip I had more opportunity to look at the various connection possibilities in airports. I was impressed that Chengdu airport now has a nice cyberlounge where you can link via cable (broadband) or use one of their computers. This is new, as far as I've noticed. Connection was broadband by cable.

Beijing has the same reliable but rather expensive business lounge (these are not the "business class" & first class lounges of the airlines). The cable hookup did not work for me even when trying to reconfigure my settings. The China Unicom wireless signal was not clear this time, though I didn't waste much time looking for it since you had to have a cellphone account with them to use it.

I was not able to link up on Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport for-pay wireless this time - not enought time in layover.. I did try in the plane as it was still loading, but the signal did not carry outside. This airport also has (or at least did as recently as last June) little for-pay internet kiosks.

No attempt to connect in Dakar airport on arrival, but I am pleased that the Novotel where we are staying has wireless in the ground floor (lobby, restaurant, bar).

Substantively some of what I'm doing is to keep thinking through all the things I want to cover with various people in Dakar in the conference and in diverse other meetings. Over the years so many issues and questions seem to have some connection with someone or some organization in Dakar. Part of what malkes this trip worth making the time is the potential to (re)connect with so many people.

Of course the IDN (internet domain names) & Unicode conference is the main event, and will bring together a number of people. Je tenterai d'ecrire un peu sur les participants et l'activite meme prochainement. From the description of the project of which this event is a part, it seems the issue is bigger than IDNs only. More soon - hopefully they'll put this document on the web.

Education in national languages of Ghana

The following is an excerpt (slightly edited to read better) from a letter I wrote to Paa Kwesi Imbeah on the subject of the apparently pretty exclusive focus on English as language of instruction that one sees in Ghana these days. I think it is useful to bring up the educational angle again as we prepare in Dakar for this Unicode/IDN meeting. (Paa Kwesi, by the way, will be presenting a paper on the Akan online dictionary at the Unicode conference IUC28 in Orlando, Florida, which also begins tomorrow):

English is the "language of the belly" or "language of the stomach," as they say. Some people see it as their ticket to eating enough. Others see it as their ticket to eating a lot. There is some truth to that but it hides other realities. One is that neglecting or, as a colleague once put it, taking for granted the indigenous languages leads to some significant losses and costs that aren't imediately apparent.

One you hint at in your letter is limited or impaired bilingualism or worse, semilingualism. This has been touched on in some entries on this blog and also in the Multilingual_Literacy group (link in the left hand column ; you can search the terms on the group's page).

Ghana's government is not alone in focusing on English. In the current global economic situation, the enhanced prospects of outsourcing industries, outside investments, etc. (already a part of the scene in the country) mean dollar and cedi signs to planners. But the global climate could change drastically in the future with English being less central (hard to see now but who can say?). So if Ghana sells its linguistic heritage for a middling average national competence in what is still essentially a foreign/international language, where would it be then?

But the worst of it is that it isn't an "either-or" question but a "both-and" issue. Good bilingual education can give you the best of both worlds (a lot of research worldwide shows this): Ghanaian languages and English. Unfortunately, the way it goes, they don't take advantage of the "both-and" approach and so somehow end up with a "neither-nor" result for a lot of the population.

I would add that there was a conference last month in Windhoek, Namibia on bilingual education in Africa. See an article and the conference document (the latter in PDF format and rather large).

African studies in China

I finally caught up with Prof. Li Anshan's article that was published a few months ago: "African Studies in China in the Twentieth Century: A Historiographical Survey" in the African Studies Review, 48(1): 59-87. Part of what interests me about China-Africa connections is that they are getting increasingly important. In and of itself, and as part of broader evolution of so-called South-South relations, the relationship between China (the world's most populous country with a rapidly growing economy) and Africa (the second largest continent with a rapidly growing population) will become ever greater in the development picture for Africa. It will be interesting also to see the evolution of studies and understanding of Africa in China and vice-versa. Anyway, an abstract from Johns Hopkins' Project Muse follows. I would add to it only that Prof. Li mentions that the only two African languages taught in China are Swahili and Hausa.

This article surveys African studies in China during the twentieth century. It is divided into five parts: "Sensing Africa" (1900–1949), "Supporting Africa" (1949–65), "Understanding Africa" (1966–76), and "Studying Africa" (1977–2000). From a Chinese perspective, the author tells how, when, and why Chinese scholars have conducted their research on Africa according to paradigms that evolved during the last century. In conclusion, the author points out the achievements as well as the problems in African studies in China today.

Cet article propose un aperçu des études africaines menées en Chine au cours du vingtième siècle. Il est divisé en cinq parties: «Approcher l'Afrique» (1900-1949), «Soutenir l'Afrique» (1949-65), «Comprendre l'Afrique» (1966-76) et «Étudier l'Afrique» (1977-2000). A partir d'une perspective chinoise, l'auteur examine comment, quand, et pourquoi les chercheurs chinois ont mené leur recherche sur l'Afrique, selon des paradigmes qui ont évolué au cours du siècle. En conclusion, l'auteur souligne les succès et les difficultés rencontrés par les études africaines en Chine aujourd'hui.

Remembering Rita Herkel

I have just arrived in Dakar, Senegal after the long trip west and then south from China. Before the work here begins in earnest, I wanted to first take a moment to remember someone who died suddenly and unexpectedly last week. (This is something I wrote earlier in the trip but was unable to post before now).

In a time when so many innocents are dying - victims of disaster (and sometimes inadequate help) such as in northern Niger and New Orleans, victims of a freak accident such as the Shiite pilgrims in Baghdad recently, victims of genocidal actions and policies, people blown up by others, other people caught in the crossfire of wars and conflicts, and so on, it may seem inappropriate to dwell on the passing of one person somewhere else. But every life is precious and this is one that I had the chance to cross paths with for a brief period.

Last week, on 27 August, one of the people who had served as a volunteer in the group I was responsible for in Niger, Jenny Paulk, forwarded a really nice letter by another former Niger volunteer who was in Malawi helping to build schools - Rita Herkel. Rita had written it on 24 August to some friends, telling with enthusiasm how the work with the communities was going and expressing her feeling of being so lucky at that time.

Four days later (31 Aug.) another e-mail from another former volunteer, Barney Smith, (it's considerate of them to keep me on some mailing lists) said that the Peace Corps office in Niger had decided to name the resource center at the office in her honor since she had died in a bush taxi accident a few days earlier.

There is so much that could be said, and others closer to her or more eloquent might say it much better, but once past the shock, I couldn't help but think that if she had to go so soon, this was the way to do it. She was doing something that made her feel lucky and indeed was helping others. She went out on top, as the expression goes, something we might all hope for when our time inevitably comes.

I knew Rita only as her Associate Peace Corps Director (APCD) - every volunteer is in effect assigned to a sector headed by an APCD - for the two plus years (2001-03) she served in the village of Holla Bella in the Balleyara district northeast of Niamey. I've always had a lot of respect for all volunteers, but as in any walk of life, some seem to shine especially. Rita as I knew her from being her APCD was one of them. In her work, in her integration in the local community (she had a very high level in Zarma language), and her relations with other volunteers she was exemplary. It was fitting that she be remembered back in Niamey

I did not know that after her planned travel following her close of service in Niger she went on to work in Malawi. But it didn't surprise me. As a volunteer and in other development work she took the risks that we all do - local modes of transportation are sometimes quite unsafe whether because of mechanical issues, road conditions, the fault of drivers, or some combination. I don't know what it was the last day Rita took a bush taxi some short time after writing such a bright letter about her work, but she was among 6 people who died in that accident that day. Such accidents happen frequently without world notice, and at a rate certainly much higher than what we know in the West.

There are so many senseless deaths, and with each we all lose something precious, intangible, and from that point on, forever unknown. Separation and distance from the ones we knew are never easy, but the sense of a lost future is hardest of all to take.

This, then, is to remember Rita, her work, dedication, and spirit, and by her the many others who have left us too early. May their souls progress serenely and their memory inspire rather than sadden.

Traveling west (Sept. 5)

Travelling today to Dakar for a meeting on Unicode and IDN in Africa. Will also meet with various people and visit some organizations in Dakar. From there will go to Limerick, Ireland for the localization conference, LRC-X. More to come, hopefully.

It's a very significant pair of meetings, and I appreciate my wife and son's parting with me for two weeks at this busy time.

I also want to express my thanks to the organizers of the 28th Unicode and Internationalization Conference (IUC28 in Orlando, Florida, US for understanding in my coming to Dakar rather than being there to present my paper (it is still possible it may be presented by someone else).

International Blogging for Disaster Relief Day

I don't have much more to add concerning the situation in northern Niger. The basic two issues for me are that:

1. Thirty years after the great drought in the Sahel of the early 1970s, and 20 years after a major Sahelian drought in 1984, with all the systems and networks in place to anticipate such a problem, this shouldn't have happened, and
2. Even without anything high tech, a simple look into the granaries in the region last November would tell you a problem was coming.

Some problems are sudden and catastrophic like the Indian Ocean tsunami last December. Others are forseeable as probable eventualities, like a direct or near direct hit by a huge hurricane in New Orleans today or earthquakes in various regions. No excuse for not having contingencies and basic preparations.

Other slow-developing but obvious situations like that in Niger are a simple matter of response, planning, allocation of resources, and delivery. With ample time to discuss each phase to boot. Seemingly the easiest disaster to respond to, but still fumbled.

"Can't win for losing" in the Sahel takes on new meaning in this context. There is plenty of analysis floating around of varying quality, I'm sure, but the bottom line is that all of us in a position to understand and address the situation bear responsibility for an avoidable tragedy.

With the tremendous disaster in the wake of Katrina in the US Gulf Coast (& especially N.O.), the loss of life and long term impacts of the famine on families, cultures, and local economy in northern Niger will disappear from the world press. So will we let history repeat itself yet again in the Sahel when (not if) there's another crop failure?

International Blogging for Disaster Relief Day

Perspectives sur la situation au Niger

Voici un mot d'un ami et ancien collegue qui est basé à Maradi:

En réalité, la crise alimentaire est localisée dans quelques zones pastorales et agropastorales du Nord Maradi, Tillabéry, Zinder et de quelques département de la région de Tahoua. Elle a surtout été causée par la rareté des dernières pluies de l'année passée et, par des dégâts importants des criquets sur la culture et le pâturage, entraînant ainsi la hausse des prix des céréales et les crises chroniques de malnutrition des enfants. Dans ces zones de taux élevé de sous-alimentation, évidement le niveau de mortalité infantile est très élevé. Voilà en un mot la situation. Mais elle n'est pas générale dans tout le pays. Ce sont les médias qui font d'une situation localisée, en situation nationale.

The New York Times has an article that, without clarifying this aspect, does attempt to look at different dimensions of the crisis, including chronic risk of famine, Niger's Anguish Is Reflected in Its Dying Children.

Among other things, the topic of poor agricultural technniques / tools / use of inputs was mentioned. This is true, but the solutions tried before haven't had much impact. One of the main avenues to improving agriculture is not more research or money, as important as these are, but more education of farmers. In fact there are a lot of issues intertwined in perpetuating rural poverty, and in the Sahel where rain is uncertain, turning that into annual risk of food shortfall or worse. But if there is to be a hope for any fundamental and long-term changes, it will require a concerted effort for education. And that should necessarily be done to the maximum extent possible in the farmers' first languages - which does not mean to exclude French or English, but if you are going to talk with farmers about farming etc., and expect them to discuss among themselves, best to use their languages from the start.

In the case of Niger, the language issue is one that is actually in its favor. Hausa, spoken by about half the population (not to mention millions south of the border in Nigeria), is a major language with a literary tradition. It would be easy to discuss all aspects of agriculture (and related aspects of rural economy) on any level of complexity in this tongue. Zarma, spoken by a quarter of the population and closely related to Sonrai spoken in eastern Mali, cannot lack adequate vocabulary either. Similarly, Fulfulde and Tamajak in Niger are dialects of major regional languages spoken by pastoralists, who have been surviving in this environment for ages. Why not put some resources into working in these languages for education and rural renaissance?

"Can't win for losing..."

The crisis in Niger is suddenly all over the press. An interesting analysis of how this situation was allowed to get so bad is in today's New York Times: A New Face of Hunger, Without the Old Excuses. "For decades famine was seen largely as a consequence of bad political leadership. ... Far from ignoring or playing down its troubles, Niger's government, in cooperation with international aid agencies, sounded the alarm back in November. It provided subsidized grain and other aid from its own stocks, and has apparently made every effort to avert disaster. The world simply failed to respond, leaving the government unable to mount a sufficient aid campaign." In effect, Niger's government did what it should have with its limited means but still the country is facing a serious problem.

Meanwhile, south of the border, BBC reports that Birds devastate crops in Nigeria. "Farmers in northern Nigeria beat drums to stop a plague of hungry quela quela birds eating their crops. ..." Different situation and context but a similar story - the farmers work hard and then what? Stay tuned.

At some later point I'd like to explore how ICT, localized in African languages, might be an "appropriate technology" for agricultural development in these areas.

Famine in Niger

I've written previously that although this blog bears the name of Niger's capital, where I lived nearly 4 years, this blog is not primarily about the country but about larger issues of localization around the continent. However since the blog does bear the name of Niamey, and there is no more important matter on earth than life, I want to mention the drastic circumstances that have befallen large parts of Niger (esp. the agro-pastoral zones towards the north). Would that mention here could save a life or make a positive difference somehow in the world response to the unfolding tragedy.

Niger is already practically the poorest place on earth even in a good year. As I used to explain to new Peace Corps volunteers when I was an Associate Director there, life for rural Nigeriens is like a stacked gamble: when it rains enough you survive to try again next year; when it doesn't rain, maybe you die. This grim assessment, something that I gained a little familiarity with when in neighboring Mali in 1984 (year of a huge drought regionwide), has been borne out this year with a vengeance. But this time it's not just an issue of rain but one of locusts - something that is favored by a lot of rain in preceding years.

In 2000, when I first arrived in Niger, the country was facing a shortfall in grain. Or actually, the previous year's crop was not going to stretch through the "hungry season" which is the period beginning more or less about the time you plant the new year's crops but the granaries from last year are running low. Obviously the less full the granaries are then the bigger problem you face the next. That is in effect what is happening now. What is a bit confusing hearing about this longdistance is how the state of affairs now couldn't have been better anticipated considering the les than full granaries last year. Indeed there was some early warning back in November, but apparently not all those on the ground agreed on how bad it would be (perhaps because it was mostly in areas away from the capital and administrative centers?).

Back in 2000, the problem was relatively mild, but saying "relative" is easy when you can retreat to a place with food and have money to buy it. That year I gained a renewed appreciation for Sahelians and their resilience, and also for the PCVs who were practically the only foreigners on the front lines as it were, trying to make sure that the villages they lived in were not forgotten when the lists of needs were compiled, seeking ways to generate project monies to assist in matters that get neglected when food is the bottom line, and more.

During the time I was in Niger, each year there was a kind of watch of the weather and then an assessment of the situation in various parts of the country where rainfall was marginal. When I left the country in 2004 I told some new volunteers, as I had earlier incoming groups, that there was a chance that they'd see a major drought or famine during their two years there. Would that I had been wrong.

Though the focus of this blog - to the extent I can add to it and have time to do so - will remain ICT in African languages, I will add any further information I receive from people on the ground in Niger. One letter by the Peace Corps Director in Niger, Jim Bullington, can be read on the Friends of Niger site, which also has links to other articles on the situation in Niger.

A quick catching up - currently in Morocco. It has been difficult to add to this blog. One short post I added a month ago did not load.

PanAfrican Localisation

Long preparations for the PanAfrican Localisation Workshop are over and we're in the midst of the workshop in Casablanca. It runs 13-15 June. Hope to have more to write on it later. For the moment, the page for the project of which it is a part is:
www.bisharat.net/PanAfrLoc/

Unicode Conference (IUC27)

This was held in Berlin, 6-8 April. My participation was in co-organizing a panel on African languages and Unicode (held in French).

Other

Work continues on other aspects of Bisharat. Also had a chance to visit and give a presentation at Peking University (Center for African Studies) on April 12.

Modifications on this blog

I made some minor changes, including modifying the blog description and adding a new group/list - MINEL - to the lefthand column.

The previous blog description (for the record) was:
Don Osborn's reflections on the Sahel, language, agriculture, development, education & more... "Beyond Niamey" has the sense of a personal & family transition, and also of reference to a key conference on African language transcription in 1978 that has implications for ICT work today

I am not sure how the RSS feeds are working - I suspect they are not but cannot see them where I am (continued trouble with accessing the blog, though much less, curiously, for accessing the blog editor).

Description of Bisharat, its evolution, & a12n

Andrew Cunningham asked me for a brief description of Bisharat (see link on lefthand column under "Work") and how the ICT4D focus has come to link with other issues, and of a12n. I copy it below:

Bisharat began with a vision that can be summed up as "ICT in African languages for rural development in Africa." The various insights, observations, and conversations that led up to this are another story. But the motivation was and is to address the barriers to greater use by Africans of their indigenous languages in ICT, and its audience is as much foreign ICT for development programs active in Africa as technicians and others from the continent.

Evolution of the idea of Bisharat has basically involved 1) a progressive exploration of different mainly technical factors that make possible computing and internet usage in African languages, and 2) a gradual recognition of various other factors having to do with language but not ICT that are unavoidable considerations. In addition to a largely informational and networking role that will continue, it is hoped to participate in the implementation of some projects in the near future, including about software localization..

"A12n" - Africanization with an explicit ICT meaning - is essentially localization (l10n) in Africa plus those aspects of internationalionalization (i18n) that facilitate use of African languages on computers and the internet. I sought some sort of term or acronym that was as linguistically neutral as possible, simple, and widely recognizable to capture this concept and use for a gateway page and e-mail fora on the Bisharat site. "Africanization" is a term with some historical baggage, but A12n gives a fresh take on it.

We are starting to see much more activity in African language localization of content and software. An interesting dimension that does not get a lot of attention is the importance of African expatriates abroad in localization.

A quick note to conclude 2004. Currently I'm working on two items: a French language section for the 27th Internationalization and Unicode Conference (IUC27) in Berlin next April and a project proposal with IDRC that would seek to advance localization in Africa.

I continue to contribute to the lists listed in the left hand column - note in particular the A12n lists, Unicode-Afrique, and AfricanLanguages.

It is my hope to put more on this blog, since there is worthy news and I expect will be much more in 2005, but time constraints and access to this site are a problem...

I will return later to the topic of work on localization (or localisation - that's why logograms such as l10n are useful) efforts later, but wanted to mention two New York Times articles - one on education that didn't mention African languages and the other on ICT that did. The latter, "Using a New Language in Africa to Save Dying Ones" (Marc Lacey, 12 November 2004) was a welcome recognition of localization. I posted some comments on it on the A12n-forum (link to the list in the left hand column).

Re the article on schools, "In Africa, Free Schools Feed a Different Hunger" (Celia Dugger, 24 October 2004), it brought up the jump in primary school attendance in many African countries following governments' elimination of enrollment fees. This is certainly positive, but unfortunately the article did not mention the issue of language of instruction. My letter to the author, Ms. Dugger, follows. It is the third time that I've noted similar oversights in the NYTimes - by Somini Sengupta on girls' education in Benin, and Nicolas Kristof on schooling in Chad (for the latter, see my entry in this blog for 25 March 2004) - and the third time I've written...

I appreciated your article on primary education in Africa but wish that you had brought up the issue of language of instruction in it. In most of the continent, instruction is in a second language, generally English or French. There are reasons for this, and there are costs. Unfortunately the reasons are unquestioned (some are unfounded negative assumptions about bilingual education and about African languages themselves) and the costs are not calculated (starting learning in a second language is an additional challenge to students - no wonder so many need to repeat and, as you point out, in Uganda "more than half of third graders still performed poorly in math and English"; it reduces potential parental & community involvement in their children's education, and arguably has longer term consequences for the very development goals education is meant to address). 

The case of Giriama [the article featured a visit to a school in a Giriama-speaking part of Kenya] might have been a particularly good one to consider. With about half a million speakers according to Ethnologue http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=NYF, it is neither a major tongue nor negligible. The issues of cost of materials and training teachers are valid concerns - though even in the case of more widely spoken languages these are often excuse by donors and governments to focus uniquely on the official language. The issue of medium of instruction has been around for years and merits at least mention.

If you come back to the education in Africa topic it may be interesting to look at the efforts to establish education in indigenous languages in a bilingual system in Mali. (Save the Children has worked a number of years on this.)

Thanks for you attention to this and all the best.

In Warsaw now. The localisationDev meeting was a lot of work and a great learning experience. I'll be preparing a proposal for a workshop in Africa (March). Also working on proposals for the Unicode IUC27 conference in Berlin in April ...

"LocalisationDev Sprint"

Travelling to Warsaw for this short event. More as time permits to add it, and perhaps also some catching up. The webpage for the event is: http://localisationdev.org/

Niamey news

This blog is not for Niamey news, but since some folks may come across it with that expectation, I will mention a few items that have been in the news over the last half year or so.

1. Rains were good, and an early rain in Niamey was too big.
2. A fire in the artisan center in Wadata a few months ago destroyed much of the center.
3. Locusts. The return of a plague - not as bad there as in some other parts of the region, though, from what I've heard.
4. Presidential elections. The first round completed, the second to happen. I've been out of touch with the latest...

La lutte continue ...

Aside from contributions to various lists (see column at left), I'm also communicating off-line re various items (as usual).

I've had touble accessing Blogger/Blogspot, but now that that appears to be slved, hopefully there'll be more soon...

Focusing most efforts now on the newly incorporated Bisharat, Ltd. Also some messages on the various lists (see bar at left). More in time, so Alla jaɓii ...

At the Annual Conference of African Linguistics(ACAL) - the 35th - this year at Harvard University. Had an opportunity to present on African languages and ICT, network, and learn quite a bit about other research relevant to my work and that of Bisharat. I will try to post more on observations and ideas in some next postings.

At this point I will modify the heading/description of this weblog to add a different take: "Beyond Niamey" will also have the sense of the implications of the Niamey 1978 "expert meeting," one of several in Africa on the topic of harmonization of transcriptions, and emblematic of the efforts to standardize scripts for the languages of the continent. Much of the work that was done in such conferences going back to before the seminal Bamako 1966 expert meeting and continuing after, has implications for discussions today about African languages and ICT.

Mi eggii, yaltii Niizer gilla balɗe sappo. Korka duu timmii gilla balɗe nay. Joonin miɗo waɗa jahangal ley Ameriik, fadde hootude galle amin ley Assiin.

Well beyond Niamey now. Events moving quickly, and too much to do, to maintain this blog regularly.

Some interesting meetings in DC when I was there. Mostly my time in this part of the trip is spent working on refining a presentation and paper.

In the meantime some other writing. One quick note to the authors of a report from last year, The impact of cybercafés on information services in Uganda, asking about how the dimension of language (multilingual ICT) fir in their research. It was not mentioned that I could see in what was otherwise an interesting article (similar issue to a recent survey of users' evaluation of content in Nairobi which did not broach the issue of language either - see my posting in this blog of 21 Feb. 2004). My note to the authors of the Uganda survey included the following:

A number of significant questions come to mind that are hard to ignore in a polyglot society such as that of Uganda: How are maternal and vehicular languages such as Luganda and Swahili used currently in cybercafés and in local web content etc.? What are user practices and preferences in this regard? What are the attitudes and knowledge levels of cybercafé operators, governmental authorities and development projects to exploring and utilizing the multilingual potential of the technology? What different uses might different languages have in the evolution of cybercafés and MCTs as they respond to the realities and needs of the country?

Another letter was in response to part of a dispatch "Is there any hope for Africa" by New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof. On a trip to Chad and Sudan he commented on, among other things, education and its importance. Like so many who evaluate the African development situation, he sees the importance of education, but not some of the complexities in the issue brought about by the way education is approached. I offered the following (edited slightly here):

I just looked at your dispatch re education in Chad with great interest. You touch on some important aspects of this vital issue but there's one missing factor - that of the language(s) of instruction.

Since colonial times in most of Africa, formal education has tended to be approached as a monolingual agenda, relying entirely on European languages. There were and are various reasons and rationalizations for this then and now, but relatively little attention I'm aware of to discussing the costs for individuals and societies of ignoring people's first languages in education.

For one thing it is a sink-or-swim thing for kids arriving in school the first day to encounter an unfamiliar or little heard language. For another it puts up a barrier to greater parental involvement in their children's schooling. I've also been working on the hypothesis that this monolingual approach means for most school leavers what amounts to an impaired bilingualism/multilingualism, where they plateau at a certain functional level in their first language(s) and never attain a high level in the school language. (Education is not my field of specialization - that is rural development - but I've become increasingly interested in the language & basic education issues over the course of several years work in and study of West Africa.)

The oft cited main reason for not having any instruction in any African tongue is that there are "too many" languages. This is so often repeated that it is accepted as dogma even when the local realities would not prohibit use of relevant local languages at least in the first years of primary ed. From that flow other justifications like the cost of producing materials in diverse maternal languages or the fear that teaching children in anything other than the language inherited from colonization will lead to divisiveness.

All such questions and issues need to be examined critically and fairly, but at the moment it seems that the topic of language of instruction is largely omitted from the discourse. Odd, to say the least, in as multilingual a region as sub-Saharan Africa. I previously wrote Ms. Sengupta about this following her story on girls' education in Benin. One of the leads I gave her was Lynn Lederer, director of Save the Children in Mali, which has been deeply involved in Mali's successful program for first language primary education in that country. There are certainly other programs of this genre and I would think a very interesting article or two on what the choice of languages of instruction means for students and communities.

A quick addendum - lest there be any misunderstanding, the issue is not monolingual African language education instead of monolingual French or English, but rather effective bilingual approaches that incorporate at least early instruction in first languages, such as what is being implemented in Mali. There are other approaches that may use African languages for instruction or as subjects at higher levels. Africa is complex and various such solutions could be adapted as appropriate in different places.

Part of the reason for this concern is that outside interest in advancing basic education in Africa seems mostly to ignore the multilingual nature of African societies. The role of African governments (elites) in this tends to be to more or less passively reinforce the status quo (monolingual instruction in French or English). Between the two, it is hard to generate positive evolution in educational approaches.

First day of the Baha'i fast today. Went better than the usual first day (surprised). For those not familiar, this fasting means not eating or drinking from sunrise to sunset (similar to the Muslim Ramadan). The Baha'is in this part of Niamey (as elsewhere) marked last night the end of Ayyam-i-Ha - the intercalary days corresponding with the end of February - and the beginning of the 19 day month of fasting.

After a hot spell over Ayyam-i-Ha, the sky was very dusty and the temp more moderate today. Hot season is on its way though.

Balɗe sappo e tati heddi faa mi egga.

Had an interesting exchange re the Gutenberg Project's interest in including works in African languages in its collection of e-books. I've long thought that weblishing older published material in various African languages, such as the old Classiques Africaines series, would be an easy way to get some good quality content on the web. This may seem somewhat far from applications related to development, the long-term focus of Bisharat (link at left, under "Other Links, Work"), but in fact any quality African language material in my opinion helps achieve a kind of "critical mass" making the addition of other temporary, current and targeted material easier. In the case of some of this material, it may also serve to help set the high-end standard for web-content in some languages.

There's a fair amount, from my recollection of some bibliographic work, but mostly it's tucked away in university libraries in the north, inaccessible in any form on the continent.

This all seems to be the result of connections made by Djilali Benamrane, formerly of UNDP, with a very positive response from Michael Hart, the director of Gutenberg. More on this later, hopefully.

The NYTimes Magazine had a piece yesterday on disappearing languages, "Say no more." I posted the following quick reaction on a small MSN list on which the link was posted, Language and Development (the link was also posted later on ILAT). If you understand Bambara, the first line attempts to play off the article title "Say no more":

N'ka kan ka kuma kelen fɔ...

But first, thanks for this article, which I had not seen.

We hear a lot about disappearing languages, those that have 6 speakers like Kawesqar, some with 30-some speakers others with a few hundred. These are important matters, but most of us cannot do much directly.

At the same time I'm convinced that there are dangerous processes at play for languages that have tens or hundreds of thousands, or even 1 or 2 million. When languages are not taught at school, when people don't bother to teach the mother tongue to their children, when the popular idea is that the indigenous languages are somehow inferior, then the writing is on the wall. In the meantime, long before language extinction becomes a concern, I think there is a certain amount of "language impoverishment." I've known native speakers of Bambara and Fulfulde who have baldly stated that there is no word for such-and-such in their language, when in fact I as a language learner know that there is one or more. Two examples:

1. A Bambara speaker, telling me that Bambara was not suited for science, only "dialogue" gave as an example that there is no word for research ("recherche" in French, the language he was comparing it to) - but in fact one can say (correct me if I'm wrong!) ɲini, literally to look for, or sɛgɛsɛgɛli, which has the sense of really getting to the bottom of things.

2. A Fulfulde speaker who didn't know the word for "blind person" - bumɗo - but instead only knew how to say neɗɗo mo yiyataa - person who can't see.

3. A Hausa agricultural researcher in Niger who spoke impeccable French, but mastered her first language less well than an American colleague who had spent 3 years in the country.

Many times I've chatted with people who've been through the formal schooling system (almost all in Africa use only English or French) who have remarked how their elders could talk above their heads in their common maternal language.

It seems that this is a process happening all over. As an outsider looking at it, it is tragic (the consequences of colonization) and puzzling. Many African languages are numerically as important as official languages in Europe like Dutch, Danish, Catalan, and many in East Europe, but are not used in education. There are probably more webpages in Basque or Welsh than in any African language. Etc.

There are a lot of disadvantages Africa and its socio-economies, that is to be sure, but ultimately it's up to Africans to decide about aspects of language and culture on the continent.

It may be helpful to know that there are ways to revitalize African languages and keep the usefulness of the international languages. Bilingual education - at home, in the community, and in school - has been shown to benefit children. And there is international interest in bolstering education in Africa, which African authorities can direct toward approaches that include use of children's first languages.

All that said, there are certainly minority languages in Africa that are in danger of disappearing. Some of this in Africa as elsewhere is ultimately unavoidable. But a beginning point to dealing with this part of the situation is to understand how many such languages there are, and before that even, to understand what is a separate language and what is a dialect of a larger language.

N'y'a sɔrɔ yan, n'y'a bila yen...

Rearranged & tinkered a bit with the lefthand column links. In particular added RSS feeds for several lists. Part of what interests me with this weblog medium is to facilitate access to active info across fora. This technique was just discussed by Andy Carvin on the DigitalDivide list (link at left, under More interesting lists) - thanks to him for sharing the info.

One problem I'm noting now, though, is that these are not the most recent posts that are displayed...

A new forum - Assimilation - is also included. This is a topic I've begun to think about in other contexts and seems to be worth offering a special place for. Given I don't have much time to promote it, it will double as a kind of experiment I guess, to guage how such a topic fares on its own.

Recently had some interesting exchanges about tapes from the old Sahel Oral Testimony Programme. Happily at least some of these are still extant. They are recordings of 500 interviews done in 1989 with people in the Sahel about their lives and livelihoods, the environment and changes in it. My hope is that connections already made can digitize these resources for safekeeping and that the means can ultimately be found to transcribe (in the original languages) and perhaps translate to "repatriate" these voices - audio + text - to the region via the internet.

Hannde mi winndi batake tati to Multilingual_Literacy. Ndaara to junngo ma nano e "kliku" dow innde mun.

Aujourd'hui ferié au Niger à cause de Muharram hier. On a visité et causé avec les stagiaires qui viennent de compléter leur première visit aux villages là où ils vont travailler pendant deux ans.

Today is International Mother Language Day, an observance established by the UN in 1999. Apparently there will be some ceremonies chez UNESCO on Monday 2/23. More info at www.unesco.org/education/IMLD2004. En français à www.unesco.org/education/IMLD2004/fr/.

In the panorama of holidays, anniversaries, and observances it may seem quite minor, but it is one of the only events calling attention to 1) language loss and 2) the too often overlooked (esp. in Africa) importance of first languages in education.

A couple of brief articles give more info: UNESCO urges teaching from earliest age in indigenous mother languages and UN's Mother Language Day Focuses On Conserving World's Linguistic Heritage.

There is no observance that I'm aware of in Niamey. A colleague I mentioned this to a while back asked, but there was nothing. And no time to generate something. Unfortunately the advance support from UNESCO for this seems to be minimal - they pull things together nicely in time (webpage, ceremonies), but for advance planning there is little. I did get a nice letter in response to inquiries offering to send materials, but it was too close to the event to allow for mail to arrive.

Problème avec l'affichage du français ici! Sur un autre ordinateur que j'utilise d'habitude pour regarder ce blog j'ai remarqué que les caractères accentés sont transformés en autres choses... Cela arrive je crois parceque ce page est en UTF-8, et selon la configuration du browser, les entités indiqués par caractères accentés veut transmettre d'autres informations que celles qu'on a esperé. A faami?? Franchement, je ne sais même pas si moi je comprends complètement. Une solution est de mettre, par exemple, & e a c u t e ; (sans les espace intercalés) pour e accent aigu dans le texte (html) du "post" etc. - mais c'est gênant. Donc je chercherai une autre solution...

Enfin, a couple of things written to someone re an interesting survey of cybercafés in Nairobi. It seemed to me that the question re language was missing. In fact language of content and access seems to be given little energy by people promoting ICT. Here are excerpts from my two letters; I omit the nice brief reply (basically saying no) to the first letter that I received this morning:

(Thursday, November 20, 2003 6:51 AM)

Greetings! I saw the item on your Nairobi cybercafé survey in Balancing Act's News Update #183 and found it very interesting. Indeed, this is a topic deserving more research and I hope your effort encourages same.

In looking at the News Update piece and the summary at http://www.ccoak.net/cyber_survey.html I did not notice mention of any questions in what I think is an area of central interest, that of language. Maybe this subject was discussed in the full report, but I had trouble downloading it.

Some questions I would look for would include the languages people use in e-mail and websurfing (not sure how many sites in Kenya have Swahili, for instance, though there are a number in Tanzania of course) and whether users have any preferences in this regard that are not currently met with regard to content language (i.e., would they like to see more content in Kenyan languages). The latter question would seem to fit with the overall theme of the report that users sought more local content: does the language of the local content matter, to whom, in what ways, and to what extent?

This all would bridge to another set of questions re computer interfaces: although Swahili for example uses the ASCII character set, I understand that Gikuyu has some diacritic characters (see http://www.bisharat.net/A12N/KENYA-table.htm ) and that this may pose an inconvenience to people who might want to use this in, say, e-mail (see for example http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AfricanLanguages/message/73 ). Have cybercafés dealt with this question or even thought about it?

Thanks in advance for any feedback and all the best!

(Saturday, February 21, 2004 10:51 AM)

. . . Re language I think it's always important and the interest is definitely real. Three things tend to submerge the issue in various agendas/discourses (including those relating to ICT):

1) In my mainly West African experience, there are things close to the heart that people don't make a big thing of overtly.
2) Many Africans have more or less bought into the line that their languages are "tribal dialects" or in any event unsuited for science, technology, and learning. This has been reinforced by the formal education systems which at best assign a secondary role to indigenous languages and in too many cases (esp. in former French colonies)
3) Many Westerners tend to assume away African languages, even though their intent be benign, since they generally don't understand them, and the Africans they interact with the most tend to be able to get by in English or French.

ICT adds another dimension to this. The association of English (or French) with technology, opportunity, and the exciting world elsewhere is understandable, but there could and arguably should be the opportunity for some balance. Nobody is suggesting that Africans have to use their languages on computers and the internet, but the current approaches in many ways tell them that they can't - or shouldn't be so foolish as to think of it.

The latter may seem gratuitous, but I've been dumbfounded by some things I've heard occasionally mainly from Westerners working in development here - why would someone want to use something other than French if they can understand that? ; we're a decade and a half away from any localization for African languages ; the plurality of African languages (and the inability to initiate use in all of them) makes it better to stay with English or French...

Coming back to your cybercafé survey, language is worth the question(s). Especially in the case of Swahili, which of course is an important regional language that is even being considered as a medium for instruction in higher education. But even in the case of Kenya for other maternal languages - there has been some significant publication in Gikuyu, for instance, so why not use it on the internet, or why shouldn't speakers of that tongue be interested in seeing some web content in it? The main thing is that behind the apparent "lack of excitement" on the topic there may be, and likely is, a range of opinion and interest. It would be interesting to know what this is currently and also to follow its evolution, if you are planning to continue the study.

. . .

Last item for this entry - I had joked about agricultural linguistics with a couple of our trainees not long ago. It's not as far out a juxtaposition as it might seem: I just ran across the term environmental linguistics looking for something else yesterday. That has a couple of senses it seems - depending on whether it's the built environment or the natural one - a distinction that means more perhaps to us with ag. & NRM backgrounds than to linguists. The latter sense seems along the lines of the operating premises of the NGO Terralingua. I still think that there's a fertile area for research and practice on language and development in Africa, and linguistics needs to be brought into the mix more vigorously.

A few quick items. In the last few weeks I've done some updates to several pages on the Bisharat! site (link on left), notably the links pages and the "basic documents." For the latter I am particularly indebted to CELHTO here in Niamey for the loan of some books and reports that I'm trying to find free time to scan - already done material for Abidjan '64, Ibadan '64 (tous les deux en français), Bamako '79, and la version française de Harare '97 (previously had only the English).

A few correspondence items relating to language in Africa, esp. of education. For instance just recently on the "Africa-oped"* list at:

• a reflection on monolingual non-African language education in some African homes


• comment on a posting re Cheick Anta Diop

I also discovered the "Mwananchi"** list - both it and the abovementioned have a staggering amount of traffic BTW - and posted something that was reposted on Africa-oped where you can see it in the latter's open archives:

a response on the topic of culture & development - here I veer off onto the question of language again

Mwananchi, so I discover, has a lot of input by George Ayittey, an American Univ. professor who has published on aspects of African development. His reply to the above I don't have permission to repost here - and the group is closed- archive - but here is my response to him today (in the socially equalizing etiquette of such groups, one is pretty much automatically on a first name basis):

Thank you, George. I'd be interested what you (and others) think of the work of Kwesi Prah and CASAS - http://www.casas.co.za - on standardization of regional & transborder languages for intercommunication in Africa. Certainly sets out to challenge some of the conventional wisdom.

The multilingual nature of African societies is a challenge but many argue a resource as well. The trick I guess is to find solutions to have the best of all possibilities, and Africa ends up (for reasons such as you indicate) with the worst instead.

I've been very interested in this regard to go over a number of documents on language policy in Africa from the last 40 years - which I find very thought provoking indeed. It seems that many good and realistic proposals for African languages have been made but never really implemented. See http://www.bisharat.net/Documents

Of course English, French & Portuguese have roles that are important, I'm not suggesting otherwise, but I do agree with those in other world regions that use of first languages in formal education (in proven bilingual approaches) has a lot of advantages for learning and personal development.

Anyway, that's one foreigner's take on it. Thanks again & in advance...

Don

* http://groups.yahoo.com/group/africa-oped/
** http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Mwananchi/

KIBAARU HANNDE:

1. The "beyond" in Beyond Niamey has been postponed until mid-March


2. I'll recommence experimenting a little with this medium...

Under item #1, the watchword is "It ain't over 'til it's over and over" - three times Peace Corps / Niger has advertised my position and for the third time the position won't be filled. This time it was no one's fault (a med. issue apparently) but three in a row has got to be some sort of record. So, if you know someone with good agriculture & development background, African experience, and an interest in the Sahel, pass the word to check the Peace Corps site's employment page (link to the site is on the left).

Anyway I will still be leaving - mi yahan Asiin, so Alla jaɓii, to jom suudu et cukalel ngoni joonin. As for Peace Corps, la lutte continuera, mais sans moi.

In previous entries I mentioned students in the streets. That has continued on and off. Mainly means stay off the streets in the midmorning. There are grievances apparently having to do with stipends, and a couple of anniversaries of students killed in ... previous demonstrations that went violent (some years ago).

Trainees off to visit their sites. This is sort of a moment of truth for many - they've been out on field visits before, but now it's to where they'll live. In the way PC trainings work here, they will return and we'll discuss the experience before they finish training.

That said, as I mentioned on 1/20 the overall training format is novel (for those of you familiar with PC) in that the pre-service training is just over 8 weeks rather than 11, and they will get a follow up mostly technical training later.

Re #2 that's obvious if you're reading this. I am still interested in linking a blog-lite with postings in other media, or perhaps finding a better way to repost what I post elsewhere.

The problem with blogs as I see it is that they are just one more time-sink (which is how I view most personal journal keeping nowadays - having kept journals some years ago) unless they have a clear outword-looking purpose & readership. The reason I have preferred to post on topical lists/groups is that one can contribute to a dialogue or share info with others who are there for that purpose. The problem is that one's writing can then be scattered all over (I run into old postings of mine, sometimes reposted, in various places).

Maybe if a blog could include an indexing tool - something that would facilitate recording or recuperating links to material elsewhere, and selective archiving. Or something...