Power of Babel Chapter 1: Language & Race in the Black Experience: An African Perspective

Racism and Linguistic Chauvinism “It has been said that the French did not mind who made love with whom provided the preliminaries were conducted in impeccable French. The British did mind who made love with whom. Sometimes they minded who made love at all.” French were less racist, but suppressed indigenous languages British were more racist, but supported indigenous languages

Cultural and racial arrogance The French were more culturally arrogant The British were more racially arrogant, which meant that indigenous languages fared better under the British

The spread of Arabic Egypt was a fountain for the spread of Arabic in Africa Sudan saw rapid spread of Arabic Arabic spread along Nile Valley Spread of Islam and Arabic went hand in hand

Four forces spread languages: Religion, economics, politics, and war Note that the last three of these forces involve men more than women, and consequently men are more multilingual than women

Languages: communalist & ecumenical Communalist languages -- define a tribe (exx. Luganda, Luo) Ecumenical languages -- transcend boundaries of racial or ethnic definition -- the most important non-European languages of this type are Arabic, Hausa, Kiswahili

Some properties of ecumenical languages Most Kiswahili speakers have it as their 2nd or 3rd language, so it doesn’t threaten anyone This is not true of Hausa (especially in Nigeria) There are more Arabic speakers in Africa than outside it, but all of its speakers are considered “Arabs”, because the central defining characteristic of an Arab is linguistic, even though “Arab” identity is still understood as “race”

The colonial languages French expansionism focused on promotion of its language, but ultimately receded (although the Congo is still the 2nd largest French-speaking nation in the world) British expansionism did NOT promote its language, but succeeded anyway, and there are more black native speakers of English than British inhabitants

Black metaphor & English semantics “Black aesthetics has to rescue blackness & darkness from the stifling weight of negative metaphor.” Color bias in the language is a problem for African writers; English needs to be deracialized To some extent this metaphor is also embedded in Christianity

Conclusions Colonial period endangered indigenous languages, and post-colonial African policy makers do not pay enough attention to indigenous languages Arabic, French, and English have played a particularly important international role in Africa