The South Atlantic, Past and Present

ALEXIS DIAGN E TH EVENOD Linguistic Legacies and Postcolonial Identities in West Africa Cape Verde, Senegal, and the Western World abstract: Over the last two centuries, the western part of the African continent has been a place of dilution and reinvention of linguistic boundaries. This article consid- ers Senegal and Cape Verde as a whole to assess the pertinence of a language-based identity (Francophone or Lusophone) born out of the colonial relationship and ap- pearing in a contemporary globalized world. To apprehend colonial languages as legacies calls to emerge from too-restrictive spatial and temporal constraints in order to consider changes in its actual geographical, symbolic, and historical poros- ity. This article examine in parallel two territories usually studied separately and gives an account of a constantly changing postcolonial inheritance of which the South Atlantic is the first witness. keywords: linguistic legacies, cultural identity, West Africa. Linguistic Legacies in Africa: Time and Space Issues A historian working in a field traditionally dominated by linguists must pay con- stant attention to the relationship between the topic of study and the tools of research. The very notion of “heritage” in history implies a specific approach, which leads to an image of a contemporary situation influenced by previous events. In this prospect, postcolonial studies questions the multiple aspects of what can be apprehended as a colonial heritage and helps in understanding linguistic legacies in Africa. It guides the historian not in criticizing or judging what produced colonialism, but in focusing on the aftermath of the colonial (Young 2009). One difficulty here is to avoid considering the current situation in Cape Verde and in Senegal—and their inclusion both in a world culture and in a very Lusophone or Francophone universe—as exclusively the consequence of decades of colonial domination. Whereas it may be perceived as an oppres- sion as well as a valuable contribution, the presence of the Portuguese language 121 — PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES in Cape Verde or the French language in Senegal should be interpreted in their continuities and changes. To overcome the ideological caesura ofindependences 1 necessarily leads to work on processes of decolonizations. Both languages have been imposed in Cape Verde and Senegal, consciously ignoring the popu- lations’ mother tongues; paradoxically, the French and Portuguese languages also contributed to the political emancipation of these two countries. Since the independences, French and Portuguese have also perpetuated a de facto imposi- tion on national language(s); meanwhile, the presence ofthese two languages which acquired an official status in both countries—came to represent a geo- political strength in external relations and, more unexpectedly, a guarantor of linguistic diversity at the national level, conditioned by political choices and changes in global cultural transfers. Thus in term of linguistic legacies from a historical perspective, it is necessary to go beyond a radical approach considering the imported language only as an oppressive factor, as it is often analyzed by the postcolonial critic. But in the meantime we need to understand—following the emergence of postcolonial studies-—that the current situation is still partly shaped by political-ideological tendencies from the colonial era. Insofar as “the globe has undergone a linguistic revolution over the past centuries” (Macqueen 2007: 157), Africa has experienced the genesis of this upheaval within the few decades under colonial rule. Since it is detrimental for a contemporary and comparative study on Africa to — 2 approach its subject from a single language “linguistic inadequacy,” in the 3 words ofAchille Mbembe —it is equally prejudicial to study cultural inheritages in history without considering diachronic linguistics, language geography, or cultural anthropology. However, as Cecile Van den Avenne (2012) has pointed out, synergy between historians and linguists working on the linguistic aspect ofthe colonization is still poorly exploited. Moreover, spaces are usually studied following the contours of ancient empires, thus limiting a global and comparative understanding of the phenomenon. Here one must take a nuanced approach to avoid an excessive credulity in disciplines that are irrelevant for history. On the one hand, we would not interfere in debates about whether Cape Verdean society is in a situation of bilingualism or diglossia, or whether Dakar’s popula- tion gives a perfect example ofWolof-French code-switching. On the other hand, such concepts are useful to historians to put into perspective how effective as- similation theory has been in the Four Communes, or the extent to which the literary movement Claridade in Cape Verde reconsidered its insular specificity in 122 the south Atlantic, past and present Alexis Diagne Thevenod 4 contrast to, and on, the Portuguese and Brazilian models. Our purpose, then, is not to get into these cultural legacies through one or another historiographical tenet, but to consider broader perspectives provided by more interdisciplin- ary approaches of history—or, in other words, to use interdisciplinarity wisely for the benefit of history. Moreover, the very language in which the history of these spaces—Cape Verde and Senegal, but more broadly Lusophone and Fran- cophone Africa—has been written is of great significance, and research should be read and interpreted from this standpoint. 5 From all colonial legacies, the linguistic one is probably the most pregnant, and not the least ambiguous. Linguists Ali and Alamin Mazrui (1998: 9) saw in the complex linguistic situation on the African continent as a whole the combi- nation of a “weak linguistic nationalism and the non-expansionist history of much ofAfrica that made the continent vulnerable to increasing linguistic pen- etration by the more expansionist Western world, ” resulting over the decades in “an imbalance in the global flow of languages, creating in Africa a complex and dynamic linguistic constellation.” The authors concluded also that “Africa’s triple linguistic heritage essentially refers to the interaction of indigenous Africa, the Islamic tradition and the Western contribution” (ibid.: 70). This latter asser- tion can be true for most of continental Africa—and Senegalese society is well described by this triptych—but it cannot be applied to Cape Verdean society, where the Islamic tradition has not been relevant in language development and where interaction between Europeans and Africans took place under very spe- 6 cific conditions. Cape Verdean Creole may have been formed and progressively structured from the late fifteenth century over several subsequent centuries, but 7 linguists remain divided on the genesis of this Portuguese-based Creole. Ini- tially, relations between the two languages appear to have been less conflictual in Cape Verde than on the continent, where the Portuguese language came up against indigenous languages in situ and where Creole was used by both natives and settlers (reinois) without great prejudice until the nineteenth century (Veiga 1997). Although Cape Verde was not concerned about the indigenato regime, from the nineteenth century on, education was just as effective a vector of lowering the Creole language with respect to the Portuguese “standard” language of au- thority and power. Consciousness of this tension, of a vertical relation encour- aged by the belief in the unequal value of languages, lasted into the collective memory, beyond the end of the colonial era. This sort of dualism and proximity between languages is less pronounced in the linguistic patrimony on the conti- — PORTUGUESE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES nent. Today the Senegalese linguistic legacy has much more to do with West Africa’s triple heritage mentioned above. More generally, the complexity of a triple ascendency shaping modern Senegal has been notably studied for the period between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries by the Ecole de Dakar. Since the 1950s this historiographical movement has greatly revisited a Sene- gambian history highly warped by colonial officers who produced knowledge primarily useful for the governance ofthe colonies. Historians of Dakar focused their attention on Atlantic slave trade, the expansion of Islam, and the colonial conquest. 8 Besides, as significant as the European influence was on the coast of Senegal during the Atlantic slave trade, and then farther inland under the effective administration of the colony, the analysis of Arabic sources reveals an Islamization of Senegalese society greatly underestimated—indeed, completely 9 ignored—by the “colonial library.” Moreover, several vernacular languages were partially transcribed from the Arabic alphabet before they were transcribed into 10 the Latin alphabet. Studying linguistic legacies can bring methodological dif- ficulties to specialists, and one can establish a link between the language theory (Calvet 1979: 38) and historiography in Africa (Diouf 2000): both have been marked by persistent and severe ideology of hierarchy of cultures during the colonial era—linguistic as historical descriptions tended to form colonial relations, turning non-European alterity into inferiority—leading to serious ethical matters from the postcolonial period on, as scholars seek to avoid such a distorted per- ception yet are unable to move from their respective disciplinary methodology. A second

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