Looking forward to the piece if it ends up being written!
Having lived in West Africa (albeit for only a few months, as a student back in undergrad, and in Senegal which doesn’t have a cocoa industry) I will say that going there in a non-(NGO or tour)-affiliated capacity and talking to people is an extremely high-value action.
There are many problems, and many solutions on offer, but executive summaries of non-local journalists’ interviews and GDP values produced by one guy working overtime can only tell you so much.
(Let the following not deter anyone from being charitable in a way they believe is net positive after research and consideration. I do not want to be the cause of any less charity in the world, or less research for that matter. I didn’t write this even as an objection to what you wrote, I kind of just started writing and much more came out than I thought.)
For example, an argument might look like this:
The schools in Senegal use French, and this is a disaster for learning.
Children are expected to learn to read and write in an entirely different language before they can begin learning the subjects at hand.
95% of Senegalese people speak Wolof fluently.
This is therefore an obvious demonstration of the long, brutal legacy of colonialism.
Here are some test scores. Bad news.
Here are some interviews with ten local experts in Dakar, they think the schools should use Wolof.
The Senegalese should reform their schools to use Wolof!
Tidy, convincing, obviously correct. Good for a think piece or ten. Go to Senegal, talk to a Diola person, and you might get a very different argument.
(Reproducing my TA’s opinions here as closely as I can remember, but augmented with background knowledge about Senegal we all would’ve had.)
Colonialism does—does—have a long, brutal legacy, but French is actually not too controversial here. If it didn’t exist, we would have had to invent it, much as Europe tried to create a Lingua Franca (ha!) with Esperanto, Interlingua, and so on.
There are dozens of languages in Senegal alone, let alone its neighbors, let alone the rest of Africa. Not standardizing on a few languages would have been a disaster.
French is used in professional contexts, which couldn’t meaningfully threaten the persistence of the Diola language and culture in the 21st century. The dominance of the Wolof language can, and does.
Westerners have a topsy-turvy view of how tribes and tribalism work here. A young Dakarois, asked what his ethnicity is for the census, might well say “my dad spoke some Sereer, and my mom’s Lebou, but I grew up speaking Wolof. I don’t know, just put Wolof.”
Only 40% of Senegalese are native Wolof speakers, but the Wolof-speaking parts of Senegal, including Dakar which is by far the largest city, are culturally dominant. You’ll find no shortage of people advocating that the schools switch to Wolof for your article, and I can nearly guarantee you they’re native Wolof speakers and probably Dakarois.
Diola is spoken mostly in Casamance, which is cut off from the rest of Senegal by Gambia. Movements aiming for an independent Casamance have existed for a long time now. Fringe groups have resorted to violence. It’s never really boiled over—ours remains a peaceful and safe country, and a delightful place to visit—but the potential is still there.
If the schools changed to Wolof by diktat, it would be a disaster for Casamance’s relations with the central government. I don’t know how bad it would get, but it would get bad.
So, in total, if the schools switched to Wolof, it would be a catastrophe to such a degree it might tank the economy and spark a war.
Meanwhile, you would have many—many—smart/informed/considerate Senegalese people, native Wolof speakers and not, strenuously objecting to the above, finding it absurd.
And then people come in with some flyers written in Wolof for charity work (“boy it was hard to find a translator! Machine translation for Wolof is apparently useless, even now”), not realizing that almost nobody can read the standard orthography except linguists, UN workers, and study abroad students, preferring instead to write jërëjëf as dieureudieuf as a French speaker would.
Even major corporations make this error: tons of advertisements and billboards in Dakar have Wolof text, which—and I asked multiple people this question directly—almost nobody can easily read.
Looking forward to the piece if it ends up being written!
Having lived in West Africa (albeit for only a few months, as a student back in undergrad, and in Senegal which doesn’t have a cocoa industry) I will say that going there in a non-(NGO or tour)-affiliated capacity and talking to people is an extremely high-value action.
There are many problems, and many solutions on offer, but executive summaries of non-local journalists’ interviews and GDP values produced by one guy working overtime can only tell you so much.
(Let the following not deter anyone from being charitable in a way they believe is net positive after research and consideration. I do not want to be the cause of any less charity in the world, or less research for that matter. I didn’t write this even as an objection to what you wrote, I kind of just started writing and much more came out than I thought.)
For example, an argument might look like this:
The schools in Senegal use French, and this is a disaster for learning.
Children are expected to learn to read and write in an entirely different language before they can begin learning the subjects at hand.
95% of Senegalese people speak Wolof fluently.
This is therefore an obvious demonstration of the long, brutal legacy of colonialism.
Here are some test scores. Bad news.
Here are some interviews with ten local experts in Dakar, they think the schools should use Wolof.
The Senegalese should reform their schools to use Wolof!
Tidy, convincing, obviously correct. Good for a think piece or ten. Go to Senegal, talk to a Diola person, and you might get a very different argument.
(Reproducing my TA’s opinions here as closely as I can remember, but augmented with background knowledge about Senegal we all would’ve had.)
Colonialism does—does—have a long, brutal legacy, but French is actually not too controversial here. If it didn’t exist, we would have had to invent it, much as Europe tried to create a Lingua Franca (ha!) with Esperanto, Interlingua, and so on.
There are dozens of languages in Senegal alone, let alone its neighbors, let alone the rest of Africa. Not standardizing on a few languages would have been a disaster.
French is used in professional contexts, which couldn’t meaningfully threaten the persistence of the Diola language and culture in the 21st century. The dominance of the Wolof language can, and does.
Westerners have a topsy-turvy view of how tribes and tribalism work here. A young Dakarois, asked what his ethnicity is for the census, might well say “my dad spoke some Sereer, and my mom’s Lebou, but I grew up speaking Wolof. I don’t know, just put Wolof.”
Only 40% of Senegalese are native Wolof speakers, but the Wolof-speaking parts of Senegal, including Dakar which is by far the largest city, are culturally dominant. You’ll find no shortage of people advocating that the schools switch to Wolof for your article, and I can nearly guarantee you they’re native Wolof speakers and probably Dakarois.
Diola is spoken mostly in Casamance, which is cut off from the rest of Senegal by Gambia. Movements aiming for an independent Casamance have existed for a long time now. Fringe groups have resorted to violence. It’s never really boiled over—ours remains a peaceful and safe country, and a delightful place to visit—but the potential is still there.
If the schools changed to Wolof by diktat, it would be a disaster for Casamance’s relations with the central government. I don’t know how bad it would get, but it would get bad.
So, in total, if the schools switched to Wolof, it would be a catastrophe to such a degree it might tank the economy and spark a war.
Meanwhile, you would have many—many—smart/informed/considerate Senegalese people, native Wolof speakers and not, strenuously objecting to the above, finding it absurd.
And then people come in with some flyers written in Wolof for charity work (“boy it was hard to find a translator! Machine translation for Wolof is apparently useless, even now”), not realizing that almost nobody can read the standard orthography except linguists, UN workers, and study abroad students, preferring instead to write jërëjëf as dieureudieuf as a French speaker would.
Even major corporations make this error: tons of advertisements and billboards in Dakar have Wolof text, which—and I asked multiple people this question directly—almost nobody can easily read.