The Africans Read Online Free PDF

happen if the United States had a similar problem. If you were a manufacturer in Milwaukee and spoke only English, you could not communicate with your suppliers in Chicago; if you were a state senator from Los Angeles, you could not understand a legislative debate in Sacramento; if you were a long-distance truck driver crossing Montana, you would have trouble ordering a meal in Butte, Great Falls and Helena. What would happen? You would do exactly what the rural African does: you would stay within the security of your linguistic boundaries.
    Only one country, Cameroon, officially uses two European languages, French and English. But the people who come from the old British part of Cameroon speak little or no French, while the people from the old French region speak little or no English. Meetings between Cameroon officials often bog down on the language problem. The government, though, seldom supplies interpreters for such meetings because the country is meant to be bilingual. As a result, few people understand one another until everyone drops French and English and begins speaking pidgin English, a language that developed in the slave depots of West Africa for the same reason that Swahili developed in East Africa: the slave traders needed a language to give orders to the slaves, and the slaves, representing many different tribes, needed a language to communicate with one another. Today pidgin is a written language that combines many English words with African grammar and syntax.
    The Reverend M. G. M. Cole, an African who spent several years in Britain, once delivered an eloquent Sunday sermon against the imposition of a single-party system in Sierra Leone: “Teday the country happ. Make dis thing go as ee de go, en den de go. Nor cause any trouble. Nor gee the president headache … Oona nor amborgin am … nor forget two party. We nor want one party.”
    Cole spoke the Queen’s English impeccably, but in this case he was just doing what he had to do to communicate—speak Krio, a language that grew out of pidgin English and is understood by 80percent of the Sierra Leoneans. What he said translates as: “Today the country is happy. Let’s continue things as it is, as they are. Don’t cause any trouble. Don’t give the president a headache … Don’t you humbug him … Don’t forget the two-party system. We don’t want a one-party state.”
    The colonization of Africa brought languages (English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Italian) that enabled Africans to communicate with the outside world and with one another. But the hodgepodge pattern that emerged when the European powers divided Africa did little to unify the land linguistically. Kenya, where about four dozen languages are spoken, is a fairly typical example of how an African country copes with the language barrier.
    Swahili (properly known as Kiswahili) is the most widely spoken language in Kenya and, like English, is an “official” language. In 1975 President Jomo Kenyatta remarked casually one day that henceforth Swahili would be the only language used in parliament, as the constitution required. A mild panic ensued, and lawmakers rushed out to buy Swahili dictionaries. Some of them made no headway at all and therefore did not utter another word in parliamentary debate for months. Before long the constitution was amended; English returned as the main language of parliament.
    Most Kenyans living in the city speak three languages—English and Swahili, neither of which they may command firmly, and a tribal tongue. Business and the affairs of state are conducted in English. Young children learn Swahili in school with English taught as a second language, but the language of Nairobi University is English. The government runs two radio stations, one in English and one in Swahili, and the six hours of daily television are about evenly divided between the two languages. In the deep countryside, peasant farmers and herders generally speak only their