I'm better from malaria, and Ghanaian language discussion again

Hello family and friends!

It’s Thursday, and all’s well. This morning felt slightly ill (fried plantain tastes awesome, but always does a number on my stomach); however, I’m completely better from that and from my malaria and I’ve learned many new and interesting things ;) Also, I’ve received mail! My family got a postcard from Clare (hi Clare!) and I received a package and a cd from my parents. The cd was a taping of the Good Friday and Easter services at my home church, Bethel United Methodist in Midland, NC, and it was awesome. So many thanks to the Moreheads and everyone else at church – the handbells and the choir were beautiful, just beautiful, and I loved singing hymns with you. Watching it on the TV was like having an open window into the Fellowship Hall.

This week has brought discussions on child fighting in Ghana, American culture exports, the strangeness of accepting gifts, the continuing water shortages. You may or not be able to tell, but many of these kinds of discussions come up around my friend Katie, a fellow Guilford student. She helps me think about things a lot.
But anyway, the current list of “things to tell you about” goes like this: the rhyme book, air conditioning and water, marching, polytanks (water storage tanks), appreciating the taste of your teeth vs. congratulating mediocrity, Molly’s library, internet cafes, the state of notebooks, hissing & sucking to get attention, hawkers (who they are and what they sell), milk in Ghana, chocolate, watching Disney movies in Ghana, songs with different tunes, encounters with other Ghanaian languages, carrying things on one’s head, carrying children on one’s back, women in education in Ghana, the coolest proverbs, the gesture for “come”, every company trying to be Ghanaian, food, and getting sunburned.

All of these topics are so tempting, and if you have a special request for a topic, one that I’ve mentioned or one that you think I should have, let me know :) I’ll try to comment intelligently.

However, I should probably tell you what I’ve been up to first ;) This week is technically the last week of class, though I definitely have a couple of them next week. Exams start for the University on May 2^nd, and everyone seems to be studying like mad. Now, maybe I just have a peculiar set of relatively easy classes, or maybe it’s because I have the freedom to adopt a more laissez-faire attitude because I’m about to graduate and go to grad school, but I’m just not worried about my exams. To be honest, I’ve *been* studying, and everything I study for gets delayed, but I generally always feel prepared and ok. It’s hard to get worked up about the idea of being tested.

In other news, I went to Takoradi with my friend Katie this weekend, to visit the Laryeas again. Again, we went to the market, and this time Katie got a dress in the same style as mine, thanks to the Laryea’s family friend, Oliver. My sisters here tell me that this style is called “patapata”, and Giftie said it’s also called a “boubou”, which might be a more familiar word. Anyway, they’re awesome, and they look great on practically everyone (especially my sisters ;)).

We also went out to the same Chinese restaurant our group visited the last time we all went to Takoradi, and then saw a live band in the evening. I even danced a little, though I was tired. The band was playing mostly High Life music, which is a distinctly Ghanaian style. It has sort of reggae beats, and was very popular over the past few decades. Now there’s also Hip Life music, which is Hip Hop on top of High Life style music, and I think it’s interesting. However, I can’t emphasize enough how different the dancing is here. I’ve always been taught that African Dancing emphasizes sinking into the ground, and maybe this is partially true for some of the traditional dancing. However, now at least southern Ghanaians seem to prefer reggae kinds of beats, and they pick up their feat more, and there’s more of an emphasis on going up on every beat. It’s tricky for me to copy (though it’s so ingrained here that you’ll see entire church congregations bouncing together) but I’m getting better at it. Also, it takes a lot of energy because their move at a quicker tempo than people from the US would use for the same song (we would usually move in half-time). But though that part takes more energy, I’ve also been lied to about the “dancing big” aspect ;) People don’t “dance big” in Ghana. When I start to get going they’re really surprised, and they approve, but there’s a serious conservation of motion in Ghanaian dancing.

Another mini-adventure of this week involved meeting the former (Episcopalian) Bishop of Los Angeles, Frederick Houk Borsch. I was sick with malaria when he first arrived in Cape Coast, but by Friday our paths crossed again at my house, and he was extremely nice. So was the other priest who was traveling with him, whose name I forget. We talked about being in Ghana, anti-malaria medicine, differences in schooling, and where I’m going to seminary. All in all, a very nice conversation. I’ve also finished reading one of his books that the Dean had lying around the house: Power in Weakness, which is an interesting set of discussions and retellings of many healing stories. I’ve just started the other one we have called “The Magic Word”, which is a collection of reflections. I like most of it a lot.

A particular issue that arose this week concerned the use of English and Ghanaian languages in schools. Technically, after the second year of school, teachers aren’t supposed to use Fante (or, one would assume, any other Ghanaian language) with their students. They only use English. In practice, this doesn’t always happen, but every time you visit a school, you’ll see posters and places where it’s just written across the wall : Speak Only in English! Katie tells me that this was encouraged by Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, who was at first loved, then hated and deposed, and is now appreciated yet again. He thought (probably rightly) that it was important for Ghanaians to be able to speak English so that they could communicate internationally. Most of Ghana’s neighbors, of course, are francophone (and I have reason to believe that in those countries people might speak more French than people speak English here), but English was chosen for Ghana because they had been most recently colonized by the British, so everyone had already been learning it, and the US was also a major world power in 1957. Now, in fact, even though education up to a certain point is required in Ghana, and even though the official government language is English, many people speak surprisingly little of it. In common parlance, people almost always use Ghanaian languages, maybe with a little bit of English spliced in for modern words or just for kicks. Most people don’t *write* Ghanaian languages, of course, because they’ve only recently (say, within the past couple hundred years) been given a written form, and this isn’t even taught as well as the other subjects in school, according to Katie. Now, this is not to say that it’s dying. No no no. I would say that Fante, at least, is doing just fine as a language, and that it will continue to be spoken for a long time. But it’s strange to me that a Research Assistant (who teaches my class the half of the time that the lecturer doesn’t come) would say “we don’t write papers in Fante, we write them in English”, as he was talking about a 3^rd year paper that had been written in shoddy English. Now, I know that what he says is true, but the way he said it, and the mindframe from which he said it is what really bothers me. Why couldn’t you write a paper in Fante? What would be wrong with it? Apparently Ghanaians don’t consider Fante (or likely any other Ghanaian language) to be scholarly. To me, this makes no sense. How could an entire language not be scholarly? I mean, it could be that a smaller group of people could read and critique a work if it’s in a less-widely-known language, but in many ways that’s a) a standpoint that could lead to opinions being suppressed, and b) an easily resolved issue. It’s frustrating that in a culture that values scholars, this simultaneously involves them devaluing their own language. Arg.

That said, there are other issues surrounding particularly Fante & Twi, the two branches of the Akan language family. More people speak Twi, but there are also region-specific forms of Twi. Twi and Fante, you will remember, are also mutually intelligible to good speakers of these languages. So, most people in Ghana speak Akan as their first language, but there are also lots of Ghanaians who don’t. Most of them learn Akan as a second or third language, though, so it’s debatably more universal than English here. For that reason, I’ve been told that no one can get mad at you if you’re speaking Akan in Ghana, because then they know you aren’t whispering secrets – your speech can be understood by practically anyone, and if they can’t understand it’s partially their own fault. This is interesting to me in light of discussions in the United States, particularly among asian immigrants who feel like they’re constantly asked what they’re talking about with their family or friends, and are annoyed that people won’t leave them their privacy. I feel like I’ve also heard Southerners complain that they feel like Latino immigrants are talking/laughing about them behind their backs in Spanish. Arg. So many misplaced tensions.

Also, I find it interesting that there are different opinions about whether Fante or Twi is easier or closer to English. Some people tell me that it’s easier for English speakers to learn Fante and vice versa because the Fantes spent so much more time with the colonizers that their language shifted to become more like English & include English. I think this might be true to a small degree. Others, however, argue that it’s easier for English speakers to learn Twi because Twi is more straightforward while Fante carries more embellishments. For example, whereas Twi people say “didi” (to eat), Fante people say “dzi dzi”. The person who said this claimed that studies had been done. Then yet again in the other direction, Twi speakers sometimes say in mock frustration, “Those Fantes! They shorten everything! Instead of Kofi, they sometimes use Fiifi!” In my mind this doesn’t amount to a shortening at all, though it does sound more like a pet name, but it’s interesting that people take it that way. In Fante (and probably Twi) there is a tendency to repeat certain syllables to make certain words. For example, the words for colors, and tall, and short, and many other descriptive adjectives use repetition. For example: Fufu (white), Tumtum (dark), Koko (red/fair).

I don’t fully understand it, but it’s completely true that young Akans don’t distinguish between red and fair. My Twi-speaking friends tell me that when they were little and saw Obrunis (technically spelled Obroni, though it doesn’t sound that way to me) they would yell “Obruni Koko!” I’ve tested it among my sisters, too. When they play the guessing game of red vs. black in a deck of cards, when they play in Fante they say “tumtum” or “koko”. And I’m not really sure how far the spectrum of “tumtum” ranges either, because the other day the little girl Maame called gray “tumtum”.

Anyway, sorry for the relatively short entry today. I promise I’m feeling much better, but my day’s become abbreviated by friendly circumstances ;)

I love you all very much! Thank you for caring!

love,

Rachel Rose