ktravula – a travelogue!

Multilingualism, Tourilingualism

One of the things that fascinated me about Kenya – though it shouldn’t, since we share a similar trait in Nigeria – is the robust multilingualism of its streets.

The peculiarity of the Kenyan experience is that there are at least two (actually, mostly three) layers of common languages with which citizens can communicate before they get to the local language (L1) on the fourth rung. On the top is English, which – through colonialism across the continent – has become the default language of contact, official business, and school. However, unlike Nigeria where the local language has seen a fast retreat, Kenya has another layer covered successfully by Swahili. Swahili is a trade language which originated from the coast, consisting of elements from Arabic, and a Bantu language of contact which no longer has an original indigenous speaking population. The third layer is what’s called “Sheng”. It is the closes to Nigerian Pidgin, and it’s used, mostly among young people, as a way to interact within the first two languages, and the local languages of the fourth layer. That fourth layer is the most fractured, just like in Nigeria. It is where the local languages flourish in different colours: Luo, Kikuyu, Kikamba, Kalenjin, Maasai, among many others. According to Ethnologue, there are about 68 languages spoken in Kenya.

But no, what fascinated me the most is not the use of these many languages, with pride, by people around the country and in the schools, and government offices (though that already offers a stark contrast to the current Nigerian educational policy where local languages are no longer even offered as subjects in our high schools, leading to a future language extinction and cultural attrition. That was saddening enough.) I was more fascinated by the acquisition – in spite of this already complex linguistic situation – of even more languages by many Kenyans working in the informal sector, in order to make more money from foreigners wanting to go on a Safari. It turns out that the presence of foreigners from Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, India, etc in the country has created a demand for tour guides fluent in any of these languages as well as the local rules and survival guides needed for a successful expedition. Smart business consideration in the face of this huge demand then necessitated the existence of formal and informal schools where locals can acquire sufficient competence in these languages enough to earn foreign exchange for their tour-guiding efforts. Within the one week of my stay in Nairobi, I spoke with at least two people – one a cab driver, and another a seller of artworks at the Maasai market – who claim to have become fluent in Spanish and German respectively, which had helped them earn more money as tour guides of visiting foreigners. A fascinating discovery.

Swahili itself has already achieved international appeal, especially in Black America. For some reason, over several decades, the language imagined to be spoken by ALL of Africa has, for a while, been seen as Swahili. And from Lionel Ritchie’s Hey Jambo Jambo to Michael Jackson’s murmurs in “Liberian Girl”: Nakupenda pia, Nakutaka pia, penziwe (I love you, I want you, my love), to the famous Malaika song by Mariam Makeba and Angelique Kidjo, and even to the Kwanzaa holidays of African American families, Swahili already made its way into the international mind as the only umbrella African language. Taraji P. Henson’s middle name is Penda, the Swahili word for “love”. What’s next then, perhaps, is an enrichment of that language’s own home environment with this intermittent tourilingualism that brings with it a colourful open door.

In the end, everyone wins, mostly. For years to come, Nairobi (and the rest of Kenya, as a result) will become more multilingual, and visitors – by some luck – will also learn to speak some Kiswahili as a way to interact with their new host environment. No one is threatened, and both parties learn something of the other. Rather than a depletion of the linguistic heritage of this magical place, we have an addition, certainly in economic but also perhaps also in cultural dynamism. We may not be able to say the same for the fauna, of course, but let’s take baby steps, shall we?

Meeting Eshu

Today a well-dressed man with a Sean Connery/Salman Rushdie look, beard, and an eerily similar Wole Soyinka/VS Naipaul voice walked into the language lab. He was accompanied by a colleague in the department who had brought him there to use the computer. I’d heard a little about him from the departmental emails. He is one of the prospective employees brought to take a tour of the department and meet members of staff. He had come earlier before I arrived at work. He stands a chance of being a new addition to our staff so I went to speak with him.

“Where are you from?” He asked after I’d introduced myself.

“Nigeria.”

“Bawo nee.” He said, and I was suprised.

“A dupe. How did you know this. Have you ever lived in Nigeria?”

“No. I’m from Brazil.”

“Wao. I didn’t know that you speak the language there.”

“Yes we do. The Yoruba religion is very big in Brazil. It’s a huge huge thing.”

I knew this, but was still very impressed. Then he went on.

“Do you know Shango?”

“Waoh.”

“And Orisha.”

“I’m impressed.”

“And Oshun.”

“Interesting.”

“And my personal favourite – Eshu*!”

“Hahahahaha.”

“I tell everybody about Eshu, especially the Christians I meet, and they look at me like an evil voodoo priest.”

We went on to talk for a few more minutes, and he then showed me a youtube video of a performance of the Yoruba religious worship in Brazil. The songs are a mixture of Portugese and Yoruba. One could pick out many Yoruba words, phrases and expressions in the song. The costumes however are a mixture of European and African. The drums were distinctly African.

The short conversation has given me a new appreciation of religion being the most enduring bearer of language. We’ve seen it with Latin and Catholicism, Arabic and Islam. Now we’re seeing it with Yoruba and Candomble.

It is was all just very interesting to me.

_____________

* Eshu is the Yoruba god of mischief, lost in the translation of the English bible into Yoruba as the devil himself.

Fingers Crossed

If given a 12 weeks opportunity in a research institution in Virginia this summer, all expenses paid, and a chance to develop my own linguistics ideas and projects, what will I do? I just got off the phone a few minutes ago with a recruiting agent from a popular language and linguistics research institution/company recruiting for summer internships for graduate students. I had been contacted as one of the people being interviewed for one of the three open slots for this coming summer.

I’m half ecstatic, and half perplexed because I realize the limitations or improbability of research openings for Yoruba language development for technology. Or not. In the area of research and development, I am limited to a choice between working on a scope of already tried theories on grammar, and developing new ways of making the language relevant in the new century. I’ve always been more inclined to the latter though it is not altogether possible without the former. My undergraduate project was a Multimedia Dictionary of Yoruba names, and I’ve written a few articles on language translation which is my favourite subject. What I wish to go further into however is examining the interface between machine translation and human translation with a view to improving what already exists. I’m talking about lexicography and research into finding new words to cater for new ideas not already represented in the language.

How much this research facility is willing to put their bet on a language spoken only by over 30 million people and is constantly being targeted by new technology (like Nokia, Samsung, Microsoft and others) is up for guessing, but I hope that I put up a good interview. I already enjoy the thoughts of sitting in small quiet campus thinking up new ideas to further bring an already capable language into more modern-day capability. The winners will be linguists, translators, research institutes, schools, student and new language learners all around the world. Fingers crossed.

Why Nwaubani Was Wrong

Many commentators have already responded fittingly to a recently published op-ed in the New York Times by Nigerian writer Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani. (One of them was Carmen McCain in this blogpost). In “The Laureate Cause” which you can read on NY Times or on 234NEXT, Ms. Nwaubani argues a faulty logic that implies that having new authors write in local languages is detrimental to national unity and cohesiveness and thus bad for literature. To momentarily ignore the fallacy in assuming that writers write so as to further nationalistic goals rather than to justify their creative potential by creating using whatever means they have, the argument she makes insults intelligence. Language diversity is one of literature’s best assets as well as one of its most assaulted elements. It doesn’t need anymore drawbacks.

With an array of opinions and ideologies as many as the tools of translation available to linguists, it is already difficult to prevent one work from misinterpretation. (Orwell’s Animal Farm was translated into two different ideological interpretations in East and West Germany respectively during the cold war.) However, the pleasure of being able to read works written in the native thought and tongue of the writer has aways been unquantifiable, as can be seen from the feting of writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Naguib Mafouz, Gunter Grass, Mario Le Clezio and very many others including recent Mario Vargas Llosa who have all written in their local languages. If Ngugi Wa Thiong’o had won the Nobel this year, he would have been deserving of it, not just for the depth of his creativity, but for his contribution to the development of Gikuyu by choosing to write in it. We can only hope for more of those kind, and not less.

Many of the books I read as a child were in Yoruba and I can’t say it enough how much it helped my appreciation of English and all the other languages I have learnt to use. If tomorrow I choose to write in Yoruba – which I have certainly considered, I would represent an important a voice in literature as someone who decides to do it in Igbo or Swahili without care for English as an international language as long as I stay committed to the craft and say something new (or even something old, in a new voice and style) and say it well. We’ll have literary translators to do the rest. To make the case for English as the only medium of creative process is easily the biggest one of the many flaws of her essay, and a disingenuous take on the African literary present and future.

Cross posted at Nigerianstalk.org.

In Africa, the Laureate’s Curse

South to North Notes

The railway track from Lagos reaches Ibadan, Abeokuta and then head up north towards Zaria, Jos and Maiduguri, and the very first proposals on this trip was to have gone via railway. How nice that could have been, except that it would have taken days if not weeks to commute between even almost neighbouring towns. At least, it could have been a good chance to see more of the countryside as one ascends up the country.

So here I am in Ilorin, a sorta border town between the North and the South. But don’t take my word for it. Most residents of this town know for sure that politically and geographically, Ilorin belongs to the North. There is a very long and bloody history behind this conclusion. Don’t ask me. One thing for sure is that everyone here speaks Yoruba, and perhaps Hausa as well, among other languages. The state’s motto is “The Land of Harmony”, perhaps a play on the diversity it embodies.

The towns of Ekiti that lay in-between the journey from Ile-Ife to Ilorin are interspersed between rocks and hills. It is also a land of diverse tongues. The Akoko area of Ondo and Ekiti States is one of the most linguistically diverse places in Nigeria. Many of the languages there are endangered or under some sort of threat from globalization, and the influence of Yoruba, thus the influx of linguists from all over the world to study and document those languages. I have worked with at least three of such linguists, doing fieldworks in villages in the Akoko Area, some from the School of Oriental and African Studies, in the UK, and a few from SIUE itself. Has anyone heard of a language called Ayere or Uwu?

So, Kaduna is the ideal next stop, and it is six hours away from here by car. That is not the problem however. The problem is where I intend to sleep when I get there. This, of course, could also be the most exciting part of the trip. Now imagine me in jeans and a ktravula t-shirt, with a backpack and dark specs walking up to the gate of the government house and requesting to meet with the Governor in person. “Yes sir. I am a Nigerian Fulbrighter from the United States on a short trip around my country. I need a place to lay my head just for a few days while I check out your state and I have come to you, being the chief executive of the state. I’m all yours. What say you?”

Now, that would be an adventure.

« Older Entries