Why African languages? My introduction to multilingualism in Togo, 1979-81

Togo was my first African country and my first overseas residence. I arrived there as a Peace Corps (PC) volunteer trainee along with several others in late September 1979. My job area was in the agriculture sector, as an animal traction extension agent.

 

Togo is described as "Francophone," with official French being a legacy of its post WWI colonial history. Of course, I knew all that before going, and indeed one of the reasons for my assignment there by Peace Corps was that I had studied some French in school. I also had a general awareness that people in Togo spoke a number of other languages, but it wasn't until actually being in country that I began to understand what that meant in practice.

 

PC/Togo letterhead in French, Ewe, Kabiye & English, 1980

 

Pre-service training

A story from probably my third or maybe fourth day in Togo: I remember sitting with 8 or 9 other paleface male rural development trainees under a shade tree shortly after arriving at the Cacavelli training facility just north of Lomé in September 1979, when a Togolese woman with a headload passed along a path nearby. "Yovo, way-zoh-low," she said, barely turning her head as she continued on. (Later I learned that that must have been "Yovo, miawòe zɔ loo!")

None of us knew to acknowledge with "Yoo!" (rhymes with "yo-yo," but the "o" is held for an extra half-beat), and one of the guys, in typical American fashion, speculated that she'd just said something sexual in nature. It turns out that she happened to be the first person to welcome us with a phrase common in Ewe (Eʋegbe) and Mina (Gɛngbe), which are closely related Gbe languages widely spoken in the south of Togo. (I'm still not sure about the exact relationship between the two was in common practice in southern Togo, but some people said that Mina functioned as a second language spoken by non-Ewes in markets, etc. - Ewe language also being said to be harder to master.)

Our language training initially focused on French, and did so for at least a couple of reasons. It is official in Togo, so used by counterparts in our assigned jobs. And it is spoken widely, since Togolese formal education was in it.

 

Then later, as was typical in PC programs in this region, those proficient enough in French would begin some training in the "local language" that was most important in the region they'd be assigned to. I actually began learning Kabiye when the training moved north to Kétao in the Kara region, so that was the first African language I actually studied (unless one counts my early foray into Arabic). I still remember some phrases in it.

 

Amlamé & environs 

After some discussion of a posting to Anié, north of Atakpamé, I was ultimately posted in Amlamé, to the southwest, in late December, 1979 (40 years later, I wrote a short remembrance of that day).

 

Detail from a cloth map of Togo (1979); Togo on a Michelin West Africa map (1998) 

 

Amlamé - called Emla in the Akposso (or Ikposo) language of its original and still majority inhabitants - is in the Plateaux region of southern Togo where Ewe/Mina otherwise dominates. My counterpart in the animal traction project I worked with was an Ewe speaker. (I briefly also had a second counterpart who was from a Yoruba sub-group known locally as Ana). Many of the farmers I worked with near Amou-Oblo spoke Kabiye (they or their immediate ancestors were resettled in this region from the north during the colonial period). Amou-Oblo actually had a Kabiye chief as well as an Akposso chief, and the weekly market there reflected this diversity. 

While I mainly used French and worked on improving my command of that language, there was always a lot going on around me in several languages. Stuck between several languages, I never progressed much with Kabiye, learned only a little Ewe, and even less Akposso (I found the lack of learning materials for the latter frustrating). My French carried me in most situations, as many of the farmers or their sons had learned at least some in school, and where it didn't, a counterpart or someone else could help in interpreting.

 

Some Kabiye farmers of Agbassa Kopé, plus the extension agent I worked with, Afo Koffi, who was an Ewe speaker (in back, 6th from right)

 

Also, as I came to learn was common in multilingual settings in West Africa, there was almost always someone (or in unusual circumstances a chain of people) who could interpret, when needed. For example, when I worked with my counterpart Afo Koffi, an Ewe speaker, and Kabiye farmers of Agbassa Kopé (ESE of Amou-Oblo), some communication went French to and from Kabiye, and occasionally it would pass from French through Ewe/Mina to Kabiye and back.

 

Those interpretations were generally summaries. That's not a criticism, just an observation. Later in my time in Togo I found myself assisting with interpretation between English and French, so came to understood better the challenges and results.

 

One unusual translation opportunity came in one of my visits to the hill village of Oulita, when an ethnic Akposso from Ghana who did not speak Akposso or French came to visit: I interpreted from English to French and someone else interpreted to Akposso. But usually, in this multilingual context, I was the beneficiary of others' language knowledge.

So, even when the mysterious dialogue around me was interpreted, I still felt a distance from what was actually being said. That was one takeaway from my first immersion in Africa.

 

 

Other observations about languages in Togo and their usage

 

Lexique Français-Kabɩyɛ-Eʋe

One aspect of Ewe I found particularly interesting was greetings that changed depending on when you last saw the person (earlier today, yesterday, or two or more days ago). I'll come back to this once I can (re)locate a good source verifying my recollection. This was one of the earliest examples of a linguistic mindset, if I can put it that way, or maybe a cultural paradigm expressed in communication, that was very different than what we have in English or French.

 

In my brief study of Kabiye and of Ewe - which are very different languages one from the other - I was introduced to their respective orthographies, based on the Latin alphabet with additional letters (what we now call  "extended characters") to represent sounds meaningfully important in those languages. Some of these are shown in the PC/Togo letterhead image above and the title of the lexicon at left. They are, for Ewe: ɖ, ɛ, ƒ, ɣ, ŋ, ɔ, ʋ; and for Kabiye: ɖ, ɛ, ɣ, ɩ, ñ, ŋ, ɔ, ʋ. I was to later encounter some of the same extended characters - and others - in the orthographies of other languages in West Africa.

 

Some notes on the personal experience

 

Finally, three notes about the personal experience of inching into multilingualism. 

 

First is a remembrance of one aspect of the mental experience at the early end of my arc of language learning. Coming to Togo, I was basically monolingual, with classroom experience learning French, some German, and one year of high school Latin, plus a minimal personal study of Arabic. During the course of my service in Togo, as I became more functionally bilingual with French as my L2 (second language), I got the feeling that I had three mental language "slots": English, French, and "other." And that the L3 slot, as it were, was the processing space for whatever other tongue I was learning or trying to speak at the time. That opened the possibility for confusion among those other languages, which eventually I worked past (until a much later on rare occasion between Bambara and Chinese, but that's a story for later).

 

Second was the experience of traveling outside of a Francophone space for the first time, after a year and a half in Togo. On a vacation trip to Ghana, I felt like French was percolating in my mind until I got used to being able to again default to English all of the time. That was the only time in my various travels that I ever had that sensation.

 

And third, was realization that competence in at least one locally used African language was key to fully functioning in a multilingual setting in Africa.

---

In the next post - my return to Africa, and learning and using languages in Mali.
 

Why African languages? Half a century with Arabic

Arabic, of course has long been established in Africa, notably as the mother tongue and heritage language of many people in the northern part of the continent, and as the language of Islam, which a great many Africans follow. I was not, however, thinking in terms of its African usage - or Africa at all, really - when I first got the idea of learning Arabic. In any event, this interest ultimately led to a lifelong, although intermittent, engagement with the language and the script. That said, since it has been mostly through self-study, it has not led to any fluency. Along the way, however, my familiarity with the language and the script became important to my experience in Africa.

An early introduction to Arabic

 

During my second year in high school (1971-72), after a period of studying the major religions, I became interested in the Baha'i faith, and from that, in the Arabic language. About half the Baha'i Writings were originally in that language (and the other half in Persian). It is not necessary to read Arabic (or Persian) to become a Baha'i.

 

Since there was an Egyptian family in my then new neighborhood, I asked them about possibly getting tutored in Arabic (they were not Baha'i). The father of the family, Mr. Awad, graciously agreed, and suggested that his son Ahmed, who happened to be at the same high school, but a year ahead, could teach me the basics.

 

This arrangement worked for only a while, due, as I recall, to the demands of school work on both Ahmed and myself. However, this provided me with basic knowledge of the alphabet and numbers, which I memorized, as well as a few fundamentals of the language, which I was later able to build on. So I am indebted to Ahmed and the Awad family for that foundation.

 

At college

 

While an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University, I enrolled in an introduction to Arabic class, but was somewhat nonplussed by the professor's approach to teaching first in a Latin transcription. I ended up dropping the class partially for that reason.

 

Of more lasting significance during this period, was my first purchase of a couple of books on Arabic - which had nothing to do with the abovementioned class. These turned out to be the beginnings of an assortment of Arabic learning materials that I collected over the years and still have today.

 

Rekindled interest during travel

 

A few years later, after college and Peace Corps service in Togo, when traveling through Sudan and Egypt to Israel, came the first opportunities to use my very limited Arabic skills in the field - basically a few greetings and being able to read the script. This experience, above and beyond my having traveled with French, showed me how even a modicum of language skills in a new place could enhance one's understanding and integration.

On return to the US, I spent some time studying David Cowan's An Introduction to Modern Literary Arabic (one of those books I had purchased a few years earlier), and practicing writing phrases in Arabic. That at least put me on a slightly higher plateau - but still far from even elementary command of the language - on the eve of returning to West Africa to serve in Mali.

 

A little Arabic as an asset in learning languages of Mali and Guinea

 

One of my goals in returning to Peace Corps, was to learn an African language. As I approached that goal in Mali, I had in my relevant language repertoire a little basic Arabic, from which some expressions and words were borrowed. That turned out to be a 2-way street, in that I found myself picking up some Arabic terms from their borrowed forms in Fulfulde and Bambara.

 

On one occasion in Fatoma, Mali, I found myself discussing the price of dates in Arabic numbers with a seller from the north. 

 

Later in Guinea, I was able to use my familiarity with the Arabic script to learn the Ajami transcription of Pular, although I wouldn't claim to have gained expertise at it. I'll discuss this further in the post in this series on my experience there.

 

Later years

In the following years I was able to access material on Arabic loanwords in Fulfulde for my work on the lexicon, and use my limited skills in working trips to Morocco and Egypt, and while in Djibouti. When in Niger, I learned that Arabic multiples of ten were used in Hausa numbers.

 

Bisharat, the language, technology, and development initiative, involved some prominent use of the Arabic alphabet, and the localization work I engaged in addressed Arabic and Ajami, although not very substantially.

 

At one point I briefly joined an informal class on spoken Arabic held in a Washington, DC bookshop, and again encountered an instructional approach using a Latin transliteration of the language (I found this distracting).

 

Current efforts & observations

Three years ago I took a different tack, deciding to try the Duolingo platform to have an interactive experience in manageable time segments. This decision was based on realization that (1) I had small gaps in my schedule which could be used in this way, and (2) I was not likely to find time to sit down to study Arabic with the basic learning materials previously collected. As it happened, I was able to supplement that work with reference to some of those materials.

 

I also appreciate that this app uses the Arabic script from the beginning of the course

 

Ultimately I completed the available sequence on Duolingo for Arabic (25, which is still in the CEFR A1 range). There were several observations from this experience:

• The alphabet introductions were a helpful quick review (I appreciate their decision to start the course this way, even if it would be harder at first for learners with no previous exposure to the writing system)
• In terms of vocabulary, it allowed bringing various words and terms I was already familiar with individually into their natural context. Obviously I was learning new words as well, but it was always interesting to see a term I knew and remember the context of learning it - mostly in connection with other African languages
• Early in the process I sometimes noticed what felt like subliminal memory kicking in, where I would recognize a word I didn't recall learning (this is something I have observed in another learning context, and a subject I should return to later)
• It was a helpful interactive way for getting into the basic grammar
• The use of other materials in tandem with this course has been helpful 

 

Thoughts & suggestions

 

Obviously, if I had completed a formal Arabic course early on, even just at the elementary level, I would have been on a different trajectory with this language. As things worked out, however, the skills I did acquire in the language tuned out to be useful in various ways while in Africa and in academic work generally, so I am very glad I had them when I did. In a way, it also provided one additional common thread through my academic and professional life.

 

Among the lessons from this experience: Even just being able to read (or sound out) the script expands one's range of literacy in a range of situations, even as far away as China. Knowledge of common Arabic loan words can open up doors (albeit small ones) to vocabularies of a number of other languages. And where Ajami transcriptions are or have been used, knowledge of the Arabic alphabet is an obvious advantage.

 

I'm given to thinking that an "Arabic for African studies" survey course, perhaps analogous to Latin for medical professionals, might be useful for a range of academics and professionals who seek linguistic and cultural understanding of at least some regions of the continent. Beyond North Africa, where actual proficiency in Arabic is necessary, these regions might include the Sahel and East Africa, for example.

 

---

 In the next post, I'll discuss my introduction to African multilingualism in Togo.