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.
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| 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.
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).
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| 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.
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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.
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
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Lexique Français-Kabɩyɛ-Eʋe |
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.
