African linguistics started out as a colonial discipline, when colonial administrators and missionaries started being interests in the languages of the the interior of the continent that they had conquered in the second half of the 19th century.
As a discipline that is concerned with sub-Saharan Africa β an entity that only becomes meaningful through European eyes, adopting problematic racial and geographic boundaries β it still is very much inscribed into a paradigm dating back to colonial times, which coincided with particular racial prejudices, and also with the heyday of romantic ethnonationalism in Europe. So my course started by discussing visions of language inherent in the work of colonial actors and investigating alternative visions of Malian linguists.
An example of the latter follows. The writing conventions developed by the colonial administrator and linguist Maurice Delafosse, which aimed at writing Bambara different from French, can be seen here:. The debate will continue tomorrow! To read more about the colonial history of linguistics in French West Africa, read these books:. Adejunmobi, Moradewun : Vernacular palaver. Imaginations of the local and non-native languages in West Africa.
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Another taster typed on my phone and posted while the internet gods are in a good mood. True to its name it brings you a snack straight from the streets of Bamako⦠or Lagos⦠or Accra⦠or even Salvador de Bahia:. These little morsels made from black-eyed beans have travelled all over West Africa and beyond, to Brazil, where they are especially well known in Bahia.
Its name as well has come along. So feasting on this snack in land-locked Bamako, hundreds of kilometres from the Atlantic, connects me with food stalls across the Atlantic world. For researchers looking at transatlantic entanglements, and for traces that link slaves in the Americas to their places of origin, names β for rituals, objects, foods β provide important clues.
