The Story of French (40 page)

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.

Nonetheless, regionalisms have begun to spawn their own national literatures. The founder of this movement was Amadou Kourouma (1927–2003), a writer from the Ivory Coast also known as “the black Voltaire.” He belonged to a generation of writers, post-Senghor, who became disillusioned with the results of independence and expressed this through their writing. Kourouma’s first novel,
Les soleils des indépendances,
is written in French but the syntax is heavily influenced by that of his mother tongue, Malinké. The title itself is a regionalism:
Soleil
in Ivory Coast means an era, not just
sun.
To speakers of standard French, Kourouma’s writing can seem unsettling, or even unruly. In the 1960s two dozen French publishers turned Kourouma’s novel down before a Quebec house decided to publish him. It went on to become a classic of francophone literature.

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.

In many ways this is a surprising phenomenon, because, unlike sub-Sarahan countries, Tunisia, Morocco and especially Algeria did all they could to erase French from their country after independence. To Algerians, language was an important tool for exorcising 130 years of colonial occupation and a violent eight-year war of independence, which lasted from 1954 to 1962 and cost the lives of two hundred thousand to six hundred thousand Arabs and twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand Europeans. At the time of independence, only one in ten Algerians had fully mastered French. Immediately following independence Algeria embarked on a strict Arabicization program, introducing teaching in Arabic in primary schools by the late 1960s. This was later extended to secondary schools, and the first high-school graduates of Arabic programs appeared in 1989. Because most Algerians during the colonial era had been schooled either in French or not at all, Algeria had to import thousands of Arabic-speaking teachers from Egypt and Syria.

Yet these efforts were only partially successful at best, partly because university professors and civil servants rejected the program. On one hand, Arabic threatened their status. On the other hand, they foresaw the difficulties Algeria would have in finding enough university-level Arabic-speaking professors of as high quality as the French-speaking professors it already had. Furthermore, many of the Egyptian and Syrian teachers Algeria imported turned out to be Islamic fundamentalists, dubbed
les barbus
(bearded men). While the Arabicization program wasn’t entirely to blame, it was tensions between fundamentalists and modernists that led to the outbreak of Algeria’s civil war in 1992. The war cost a hundred thousand lives, lasted eleven years (some say it is not really over yet), cut Algeria off from most Western powers and produced chronic unemployment. But it also took a toll on the Arabicization campaign of Algerian Islamists, who were discredited in the eyes of both the government and many Algerians. Algeria today ranks as the most francophone among France’s former colonies—as our personal experience showed, even more francophone on the whole than Canada.

Today most Algerians have a more open attitude towards French than their country’s official policies suggest. More than half of Algeria’s thirty million inhabitants speak at least some French—a widely accepted estimate, though there are no reliable statistics on language use in Algeria. Arabic is the principal language of everyday communications and of government, but French is the language of social promotion and of science. In the media, eighty percent of newspapers and an even greater percentage of the total readership use French. The Algerian journalists who covered the conference with us in Tlemcen took their notes in French rather than Arabic. Most of the media, industry, most of the publicity and a large proportion of brands are French or in French. In 1997 the government required all laws to be decreed in Arabic, but in 2002 they were still being voted on in French and then translated. When asked, only ten percent of high school graduates of Arabic programs say they want to go on to study in university in Arabic. Although the country has never officially been part of the Francophonie, it never forbade its universities to be part of the Agence universitaire francophone, the international agency that networks francophone universities.