The Story of French
Page 29
The decision to keep French was also the product of a class struggle. The former évolués, who spoke the best French, took the reigns of power after independence, especially in Africa. Keeping French as an administrative language helped them maintain their grip on domestic affairs. The exceptions were in North Africa and Madagascar, where the political groups who came to power after independence quickly moved to erase French, mainly through campaigns to Arabicize (in the Maghreb region of North Africa) or “Malgachize,” in the case of Madagascar. Even here, though, French-speaking elites resisted so staunchly that the presence of French remained strong.
French also remained the language of education in almost all the newly independent countries, mostly because putting a new education system in place was a costly endeavour that few could afford. At any rate, in Africa most native languages lacked words to describe modern realities, and many had neither a full dictionary nor a complete grammar system. Berber, one of the few native groups of North Africa that survived the onslaught of Islam and Arabicization that started in the seventh century CE, speak their language, Tamazight, in half a dozen dialectal varieties across the region, few of which are written. Even in Algeria, where Tamazight has gained official status, few agree on a standard. So teaching in French (or Arabic) was more convenient, and schooling in French was also a guarantee of quality. Zaire, a former Belgian colony, rejected Flemish and switched its new education system to French standards. According to French lexicologist Jacqueline Picoche, Zaire’s President Mobutu (in power 1965–97) went as far as fining civil servants who used the Belgian terms septante and nonante for seventy and ninety instead of the French soixante-dix and quatre-vingt-dix.
Finally, French gave newly independent countries access to science, technology and industry, and not only from France. In countries such as Gabon, Rwanda, Algeria and Senegal, French quickly made it possible to reach beyond the former colonial power and develop commercial and intellectual relations with a francophone universe that included Quebeckers, Acadians and the Swiss.
France and Belgium, of course, made deliberate efforts to ensure that the newly independent Nations would keep French. With decolonization on the horizon, both countries made last-ditch attempts to boost their influence in their colonies by investing heavily in infrastructure and industry. When de Gaulle took power in France in 1958 he invested billions of francs to build infrastructure for oil production, ports and other industries in Algeria, including a nuclear testing site in the south, even though the country was in the middle of a violent war of independence. De Gaulle had seen the writing on the wall for some time, but he believed that even if French investments failed to convince the colonies to remain French, investment would help maintain links after independence. This effort buttressed the presence of French and Belgian industry, technology and capital in Africa at a critical juncture. After independence, when France no longer had colonial representatives in its former colonies, it sent forty-five thousand coopérants (equivalent to the Peace Corps) as teachers, professors, military advisors and administrators, all of whom were on the payroll of French ministries or multinational corporations.
Before decolonization the French had also attempted to unite their colonies in a short-lived federation called the Union française, which included France. The Union, created in 1946, was motivated partly by the desire to hang on to France’s colonies and partly out of recognition that its colonies had allowed France to remain a world power. It was a federative system in which former colonial elites became French citizens. The plan was never fully put into practice and anyway came too late to hold the empire together. But in 1946 colonies started sending representatives to the French parliament. Soon-to-be-famous writers Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor became members of France’s National Assembly for Martinique and Senegal respectively. In 1956–59 Félix Houphouët-Boigny became the first African to hold cabinet positions in successive French governments; he went on to become the first president of Ivory Coast in 1960.
But the Union française simply could not withstand the rising independence movement in Africa. In 1958 de Gaulle offered the African colonies the choice of remaining part of France or becoming independent. Initially all the colonies except Guinea chose full association with France. But independence fever was rising sharply. By the end of 1960 all of them (except Algeria) had chosen independence. In sub-Saharan Africa the former French colonies almost created their own French-African federation, but this project also fell victim to rising nationalism. Some parts of the former empire—French Guiana, Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean, and Réunion in the Indian Ocean—had opted to remain part of France. They became either overseas territories or overseas Départments, fully integrated into France in the same way that Alaska and Hawaii are part of the U.S. In the Pacific, Polynesia and New Caledonia have retained some theoretical autonomy, but their status more resembles membership in a French federation.
France and Belgium also used education to try to hold their empires together. Starting after the Second World War, they invested billions of francs to put in place universal public education systems, and even built universities in their colonies—the University of Dakar was opened in 1950. Belgian efforts were never as coherent as those of the French, partly because Belgium had to deal with its own ongoing quarrel between francophones and Flemish speakers. Still, Belgian missionaries continued to be so effective at teaching French that former Belgian colonies had the reputation of being more francophone than the French colonies. The world’s second-largest francophone city is not Montreal, Dakar or Algiers, as most people would assume, but Kinshasa, capital of the former Zaire.
The figure of Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001), president of Senegal from 1960 to 1981, stands tall in the history of French. Senghor was literally a product of two worlds. He worked all his life to tie Africa’s destiny to the French language, and vice versa. Senghor was a Serere, a member of an ethnic group that makes up fifteen percent of Senegal’s population. His father, a Christian who had retained the animist custom of polygamy (Léopold had forty brothers and sisters), placed his son in a missionary school at age seven to learn Wolof and French. A brilliant student, Senghor completed secondary school in Dakar and was admitted to the Sorbonne in Paris, where he arrived in the 1920s. His classmates there included future French president Georges Pompidou (ruled 1969–74).
In Paris Senghor befriended fellow poets from other colonies—most notably the Martinique poet Aimé Césaire (born 1913). He went on to play a key role in the cultural renaissance of sub-Saharan Africa that started in Paris in the 1920s. The climate of intellectual and (relative) racial freedom in Paris in the first quarter of the twentieth century had drawn many black American authors of the Harlem Renaissance to Paris. They in turn inspired African intellectuals and future African leaders and intellectuals such as Senghor and Césaire. The encounter between American and African blacks sparked a transformation of African language, poetry and politics. As Amadou Ly, a literature professor at the Sheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, explained to us, “Prior to that, the literature produced in Africa was a translation of colonial ideology.”
During the 1920s and ’30s, Senghor and Césaire formulated the concept of négritude, an affirmation of black cultural expression that celebrated African culture for its own sake. Négritude later became the ideological basis of Senghor’s effort to federate French sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, while he promoted négritude, Senghor never renounced his French heritage. In fact, he remained convinced all his life that the future of Senegal lay in cultural métissage (literally, cross-breeding) with France. In Senghor’s mind there was no rejecting the influence of French culture in Africa, even after independence. Throughout his life he famously refused to vitupérer contre (inveigh against) the former colonial power, and much of the beautiful poetry he wrote was inspired by the notion of métissage. Along with other African leaders, Senghor resurrected the concept of francophonie (the term had been coined in the nineteen
th century) and used it to lobby for the creation of a union of French-speaking countries, what would become the Francophonie. Forty years later, Senghor’s concept of métissage continues to inspire very active cultural, political and economic exchange within the French-speaking world (which we discuss in chapters 16 and 19).
The Senegalese have the reputation of speaking the “purest” French in Africa. The claim is impossible to substantiate, and the Gabonese and Beninese say the same thing about their French. But one thing is certain: During his life, Senghor worked tirelessly to boost the status and quality of French in Senegal. When he took power in 1960 he knew he couldn’t make Wolof the official language, as the speakers of Pulaar, Serere, Dioula, Mandingo and Soninke would have objected. Instead, he gave all six the status of “national languages” and made French Senegal’s official language. French was an obvious choice as a neutral language, all the more so since people such as Senghor, Diouf and the former évolués who were now running Senegal spoke and wrote it beautifully.
Culture and cultural development were outstanding themes while Senghor was leading his country through its first two decades after independence. Throughout the period he pursued his career as a writer and poet, and remained a fervent admirer of and contributor to French culture and, especially, the French language. His poetry won him a seat in the French Academy in 1983. A former teacher, Senghor became legendary for inviting journalists to the presidential palace to correct their written mistakes in French, and even to give them grammar lessons. He was famous for scolding Senegalese journalists with the phrase “Ar-ti-cu-lez s’il-vous-plaît” (“Please ar-ti-cu-late”).
France today retains an exceedingly strong economic hold on Senegal: Many schoolteachers, journalists and business leaders we met there remarked bitterly that the French still “own” Senegal. There is definitely resentment towards the French, but at the same time the Senegalese elite and urban middle class remain strongly attached to the French language, complaining just as bitterly about the fact that in recent years France has made it hard for them to visit and exchange with French colleagues in their fields. Although Senegal has suffered from abortive education reforms and a chronic lack of qualified teachers, in the last four decades French has still been spreading. More and more people outside of the cities are hearing French and picking up the basics of the language, thanks to the spread of radio. About ten percent of Senegalese master French, but another twenty percent are said to have a functional understanding of it; these proportions are higher in the cities and lower in the countryside. We didn’t meet many taxi drivers in Dakar who couldn’t communicate to some degree in French, though of course the language of everyday affairs in Senegal is Wolof (although only forty-three percent of the population are Wolof, more than eighty percent of the population use the language in daily exchanges).
In linguistic terms, Ivory Coast is a striking contrast to Senegal. Whereas thirty percent of Senegalese are considered to have a decent command of French, the proportion in Ivory Coast is seventy percent. The country has a significantly higher population than Senegal (sixteen million compared to ten million), but the main difference is that, unlike Senegal, Ivory Coast was never dominated by one African language, like Wolof. Ivory Coast has twenty major ethnic groups who speak different languages, including Dioula, the common language of trade in West Africa. Unlike Senghor, Ivory Coast’s first president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, was never a proponent of négritude. He was interested in making economic progress and maintained strong connections with France to that end. In the first fifteen years after independence, Ivory Coast became the economic miracle of West Africa, with rapid economic growth due notably to exports of coffee and cocoa. The country also became a magnet for migrant labour from neighbouring countries such as Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso, and for foreign investors, notably from Lebanon but also from China.
As a consequence, in Ivory Coast French became a language of communication within an extremely diverse population—it was not just the language of the elite. Ivorians are known to speak their own brand of French, français populaire ivoirien. In addition, Dioula melded with French to create a widely spoken dialect called Moussa. Young Ivorians later transformed Moussa into an artificial slang called Nouchi. Nouchi is grammatically based on French, but incorporates words from other languages that have landed on Ivorian soil—Arabic, Chinese, English and more. This slang, in turn, has developed into another, competing jargon called Zouglou. Linguist Robert Chaudenson, a Creole specialist, provides a good example of how the language works with the sentence “Même moro côco moyen tomber.” Literally, it reads “Even moro coco meaning to fall,” but it means “Even if you only have a five-franc coin on you, there’s going to be a sucker who’ll ask for it.”
Only a very small minority in former French colonies speak French as a mother tongue. Most learn it in school or later as adults, and among those, an even smaller minority master written French. As a consequence, there are important regional variations in the French spoken in different countries, and the influence of local languages is considerable, even within single countries. African francophones use the resources of French differently, and with much less constraint, than northern, native speakers, who are fully schooled in French and heavily influenced by the concept of the norme. In Mauritius, where the influence of English is important, the locals speak of contracteur (contractor) and laboureur (labourer), words that exist in standard French but with different meanings (constrictive and plowman, respectively). From the words doigt (finger), cadeau (gift) and grève (labour strike), Africans invent the verbs doigter, cadeauter and grever. A Congolese may speak of his girlfriend as a blonde and of his mistress as deuxième bureau (second office). From North Africa, words like kiffer (to get pleasure out of something) and tchatcher (to speak) have entered mainstream French, as well as caillasse, a regionalism for caillou (stone) that was extended into caillasser (to throw stones at). Caillasser entered the mainstream French political vocabulary, where it has the sense of opponents throwing things (eggs, stones, tomatoes) at a politician. Africans also express nuances that are not common in standard French: père (father) is a white missionary, whereas abbé is a local priest.
The variations of French found throughout France’s former colonial empire are striking. In Martinique and Guadeloupe the Continental French are called métropolitains (from métropole); in the same spirit, locals who move to France are called négropolitains. Someone who is timid is said to be a crabe (crab). In Africa, a writing mistake is a chameau (camel), which is made into the verb chameauser (to make such mistakes). In Ivory Coast, putting a curse on someone is called grigriser (from gris-gris, a spell or charm), while the Senegalese call this marabouter (from marabout, a religious leader). Of course, from a purist standpoint, many usages in popular African French are technically mistakes. Verbs are often used with a form of the auxiliary avoir rather than être, or the wrong verb ending; for example, fuir (to run away, in standard French) is sometimes pronounced fuyer and plaindre (to complain) becomes plaigner. Genders of nouns are often reversed. These variations are not surprising where a large chunk of the population communicates in a second language. But interestingly, Africans may be at the vanguard of an important linguistic shift, as most francophones are now generalizing the use of the -er infinitive ending for new verbs (this is discussed in more detail in chapter 17).
There are very few instances in African countries of French creolizing the way it did in the slave colonies two centuries earlier (that is, evolving far enough from the semantics and phonetics of French to create a new language). The main reason is that French-speaking elites in Africa cling to the norme and continue to impose it through the school system and the media, especially radio. Their mastery of French is often nearly perfect, and they purposefully project themselves as a model for others. In addition, the practice of African mother tongues is strong and this daily use means that the population doesn’t need Creoles the way slaves in the New World did.
It’s no accident that this type of writing came from the pen of an Ivorian writer. Linguists debate whether a process of creolization is actually underway in Ivory Coast, as well as in former Zaire. But everyone agrees that local variations of French run most deeply in these two countries. More and more contemporary African writers share the view expressed in 1976 by Congolese poet Gérard-Félix Tchicaya U Tam’si: “Il y a que la langue française me colonise et que je la colonise à mon tour” (“It so happens that the French language is colonizing me and that I am colonizing it in turn”).
There are many more Arabicisms in mainstream French than Africanisms. That’s because the largest concentrations of French speakers in the former colonial empire, in both density and numbers, are in North Africa. Their presence is significant; since independence two million Algerians have emigrated to France. As a result, terms such as clebs (dog), smala (tribe, following), caïd (big shot, mafia boss), flouze (dough, cash), baroud (ultimate battle), fissa (quick), souk (market, disorder), caoua (coffee) and bakchich (baksheesh) are now common in colloquial French in France and elsewhere.