The Story of French (39 page)

The fact is, despite the way French benefited from the new world order, numbers still count for something. Had French been confined to its original domain, it might have gone the way of German or Dutch. No matter how one looks at it, the reason French has remained an important international language is that more people than ever have added their voice to the concert of French. What is really surprising is that French grew stronger in nine out of ten former colonies of France and in all the former colonies of Belgium after their independence than it had been before. It is one of the enigmas of decolonization that still puzzles people to this day.

Chapter 14 ~

Choosing French

We met Ibrahima Kouyaté because the Lonely Planet guidebook to Senegal recommended him as the best nature guide in Niokola-Koba National Park, the country’s famous wildlife reserve. While he was indeed an excellent guide, his story also gave us a first-hand illustration of the power of French in poor African countries. Ibrahima’s parents’ land was expropriated in 1954 when the French turned the area into a national park. Ibrahima, the youngest of five brothers, grew up in Dar Salam, the village located at the entrance of the park. As a child he spent hours exploring the park, and from this early passion for wildlife he developed an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the park’s flora and fauna. So his decision to become a park guide came naturally.

But as we learned during the three days we spent with him, passion wouldn’t have been enough to secure Ibrahima’s future in his chosen profession. To become a certified park guide he had to pass a written exam in French. The problem was that Ibrahima, who grew up speaking Mandingo, went to school for only three years. His mother died giving birth to him; his father, who suffered from leprosy, pulled him out of school early and sent him to work as a shepherd. Ibrahima was orphaned at age twelve, so he had practically no chance to learn French.

We couldn’t believe the story when we heard him tell it—in excellent French. He evidently wrote well enough in French to send a thank-you note to Lonely Planet for praising him in their guide. “I was inclined towards French,” he told us, a rather vague explanation for his remarkable success in mastering the language. Later, Ibrahima elaborated: After his father’s death he had sought out every opportunity he could to expand his French vocabulary and learn to read and write, even visiting the library in the next village. Over the years he also used his continual exposure to Europeans visiting the park to polish his French.

Before we left the park, Ibrahima asked us if we could send him back books about African wildlife from Canada. We offered to include a French–English dictionary in the package, thinking that such an ambitious fellow would see learning English as the logical next step in his career development (Lonely Planet recommended Ibrahima even though he didn’t speak English). Ibrahima told us he would like that very much, but we could see he was being polite. For most Senegalese, particularly those who, like him, live in the countryside, the advantages of speaking English are still pretty remote. French remains Senegal’s language of social promotion, and just learning it opens a world of possibilities. Before learning English, Ibrahima wanted to get his driver’s licence so he could pick up tourists in Dakar and tour them through the park without hiring a driver. That alone would multiply his business and profits by ten.

Like the majority of Senegalese, Ibrahima had not even been born at the time of independence from France in 1960. Yet, like him, millions of young Africans born after independence want to learn French. That’s because, in most former French and Belgian colonies, French progressed more after decolonization than it had during the colonial period. The only exceptions were Syria and Indochina.

The French and Belgian empires, like the British, began to disintegrate during the Second World War. The French protectorates of Lebanon and Syria became formally independent in 1941. Tunisia and Morocco followed in 1943. Wars of independence started in Indochina in 1945, and in Algeria in 1954. In the Belgian Congo, as well as Rwanda and Burundi, the cracks in the empire didn’t start to show until the 1950s, but by 1960 most of France’s colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, and all of Belgium’s, had become independent.

Most former French or Belgian colonies in sub-Saharan Africa kept French as one of their official languages. Countries such as Ivory Coast, Senegal and the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire) made French an official language along with some of their national languages. Some countries made French their only official language. In others, such as Madagascar and all the countries in North Africa, French remained the de facto language of administration and education in spite of official policies to eliminate it.

In the spring of 2004 we met Abdou Diouf—now secretary-general of the Francophonie, and president of Senegal from 1981 to 2000—at his office in Paris. At the time of Senegal’s independence he was a young politician and protégé of the country’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor. Diouf had watched Senegal’s independence unfold from a front-row seat, so we thought he was in a good position to explain why Senegal kept the French language even though they kicked out the French. His answer was simpler than we expected: “French was forced on us during colonialism, but then we chose it.” Newly independent countries had a number of reasons for holding on to French, depending on their situation. In most African countries, ethnic groups speak a very wide array of languages (as many as 250 in Cameroon). Today 750 African languages are spoken in the thirty French-speaking countries in Africa. At the time of independence French was a neutral language that didn’t privilege one ethnic group over another.

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 nineteenth 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).