22 October, 2008
12 October, 2008
11 October, 2008
White Lightning Strikes University of Ghana. 37 Escape, Barely.
That's the top headline in all of the national media outlets today. Yesterday the University of Ghana held its interhall 12 kilometer cross-country race. Though I live in a graduate hostel, I've been training early, early in the morning with a group from an undergraduate dormitory, Akuafo Hall, laboremus et sapiamus.
I am proud to report that despite difficult conditions including heat, hills, and many faster, more athletic runners I persevered and came in first. First of all international students running in the race. First of all masters students running in the race. First of out of the 10 runners who finished last. So just 37 other runners barely finished ahead of me by only a matter of tens of minutes. So you can see my hearty dinner of fufu and goat meat was well deserved. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my fans and to announce my retirement from long distance running while I am at the top of my field - my field consisting of other slow, American, African Studies students.
I am proud to report that despite difficult conditions including heat, hills, and many faster, more athletic runners I persevered and came in first. First of all international students running in the race. First of all masters students running in the race. First of out of the 10 runners who finished last. So just 37 other runners barely finished ahead of me by only a matter of tens of minutes. So you can see my hearty dinner of fufu and goat meat was well deserved. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my fans and to announce my retirement from long distance running while I am at the top of my field - my field consisting of other slow, American, African Studies students.
09 October, 2008
Parlez vous francais? Non. Wote Twi? Daabi. Do you speak English? I thought so…
I’m learning as I go on a number of fronts, not the least of which is language. Soon after arriving, I learned my first Twi phrase: eti sen? (ehtee sayn, how are you?) to which the appropriate response is eye (ay-yay, fine). I can’t reproduce Twi orthography on this keyboard so you’ll have to accept the anglicized version. After starting strong, my Twi vocabulary building entered a drastic recession, which was especially unfortunate given how little there was to recede from. At the university, everyone speaks English. You hear people conversing in Twi and other languages with regularity, but no one has trouble understanding you or (seems to) holds it against you if you use English. So instead I focused on French.
French will serve a few purposes. Most practically, I’m planning on traveling to Cameroon over the winter holiday. I may want to work in Francophone Africa at some point, so brushing up my very dusty French skills which were never very well polished to begin with seemed like a logical strategy. Additionally, the French Club is very active here, so I’ve used that as an opportunity to meet and interact with other students. My French is improving slowly, but I was reminded that I still have a long way to go the other night when I attended a lecture on writers of the African diaspora delivered by a professor from the Sorbonne. I thought I understood or had at least previously heard 75% of the words he was using, but I was considerably less successful in piecing together their meaning. So I have a few more hours to devote to Radio France Internationale and the works of Leopold Sedar Senghor.
Recently, I’ve realized that although I may not require Twi to survive in Accra, by not studying it, I’m missing something important. My catalyst to start learning was the woman who sells me porridge in the morning. Every day, she would greet me in Twi and then throw out a few extra lines with an expectant look on her face. I felt like she was testing to see how serious I was about being here. I’m serious about being here, so I tracked down a copy of “A Comprehensive course in Twi (Asante)” with the accompanying cassette. I’ve been devoting a little time each day to teaching myself. It’s already made me feel much more connected to this place. The benefits have been, and I expect will continue to be, small, piecemeal, and realized over the long term. And that’s ok with me.
My biggest linguistic surprise has come from the language with which I expected the least trouble. English is English, or so I thought. I’m realizing more and more that even when I’m communicating in English there are subtle gaps in meaning that can often bedevil the conversation. So I’ll think that I’ve scheduled to meet one of my friends at a certain place only to find that he’s somewhere else. Or I’ll plan a route to run with one of the guys on the cross country team only to find out that we meant radically different courses. It’s hard to explain because I don’t understand what’s going on myself. Part of the story is that the vast majority of homes do not speak a European language as their first language. But I don’t want to imply that the gaps in communication are emerging because the people I’m talking to somehow have an inferior grasp of the English language. Quite the contrary. To hazard a terribly speculative guess, I think that languages are systems of meaning and that you impose your mother tongue’s system of meaning onto your new language, but the overlap isn’t perfect.
One final thought on language. Ghana has about forty different ethnic groups. Although a strong plurality of them speak Twi, linguistic fragmentation is a fact of life here as in much of the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa. English as a national language is problematic, but I wonder if without it, would the nation even be possible?
French will serve a few purposes. Most practically, I’m planning on traveling to Cameroon over the winter holiday. I may want to work in Francophone Africa at some point, so brushing up my very dusty French skills which were never very well polished to begin with seemed like a logical strategy. Additionally, the French Club is very active here, so I’ve used that as an opportunity to meet and interact with other students. My French is improving slowly, but I was reminded that I still have a long way to go the other night when I attended a lecture on writers of the African diaspora delivered by a professor from the Sorbonne. I thought I understood or had at least previously heard 75% of the words he was using, but I was considerably less successful in piecing together their meaning. So I have a few more hours to devote to Radio France Internationale and the works of Leopold Sedar Senghor.
Recently, I’ve realized that although I may not require Twi to survive in Accra, by not studying it, I’m missing something important. My catalyst to start learning was the woman who sells me porridge in the morning. Every day, she would greet me in Twi and then throw out a few extra lines with an expectant look on her face. I felt like she was testing to see how serious I was about being here. I’m serious about being here, so I tracked down a copy of “A Comprehensive course in Twi (Asante)” with the accompanying cassette. I’ve been devoting a little time each day to teaching myself. It’s already made me feel much more connected to this place. The benefits have been, and I expect will continue to be, small, piecemeal, and realized over the long term. And that’s ok with me.
My biggest linguistic surprise has come from the language with which I expected the least trouble. English is English, or so I thought. I’m realizing more and more that even when I’m communicating in English there are subtle gaps in meaning that can often bedevil the conversation. So I’ll think that I’ve scheduled to meet one of my friends at a certain place only to find that he’s somewhere else. Or I’ll plan a route to run with one of the guys on the cross country team only to find out that we meant radically different courses. It’s hard to explain because I don’t understand what’s going on myself. Part of the story is that the vast majority of homes do not speak a European language as their first language. But I don’t want to imply that the gaps in communication are emerging because the people I’m talking to somehow have an inferior grasp of the English language. Quite the contrary. To hazard a terribly speculative guess, I think that languages are systems of meaning and that you impose your mother tongue’s system of meaning onto your new language, but the overlap isn’t perfect.
One final thought on language. Ghana has about forty different ethnic groups. Although a strong plurality of them speak Twi, linguistic fragmentation is a fact of life here as in much of the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa. English as a national language is problematic, but I wonder if without it, would the nation even be possible?
02 October, 2008
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
Eid Mubarak, a few days late. Tuesday was Eid al-Fitr, the conclusion of the month of Ramadan, which means that many of my friends on campus (Yes, I do have many friends) can now partake in food and water during daylight hours. President Kuofor declared Eid al-Fitr a national holiday just a few years ago.
Speaking of the President, I just learned that he was an active member of the Rotary Club of Accra, my very own host club. Continuing the free association, I just joined two other Ambassadorial Scholars in giving brief presentations on our backgrounds and respective cultures to the club. I exchanged the flag of the Downtown Greenville Club with the President of the Accra club.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading since I arrived. I just completed Ayi Kewi Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Armah (b. Takoradi, Ghana 1939) penned this scathing critique of political corruption in post-independence Ghana just eleven years after the country attained independence. The novel’s setting straddles the end of the Nkrumah regime and the first military government, so circa 1966. Images of pollution and filth permeate the work. It is a book about life after the death of hope, of a dream rotting on the vine. I highly recommend it.
I was startled to come across such a direct indictment of Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party. Dr. Nkrumah is afforded a great deal of respect throughout Africa. In a BBC poll a few years ago, Africans rated him as the continent’s Man of the Millenium. He is often referred to with his honorary title, Osagyefo, “the victorious one.” The new African Studies building, my academic home, at the University of Ghana is called the Kwame Nkrumah Complex. An informal survey of my classmates generated an acknowledgement that ministerial corruption was a black mark on the CPP reign, including one minister who notoriously purchased a golden bed. However, they were quick to stress Dr. Nkrumah’s unparalleled contributions to the nation’s infrastructure. They told me that he was also something of a progressive in terms of gender. He established a quota system that resulted in the election of a number of female MPs, and he secured places for the training of several female fighter pilots. Nkrumah’s role in the struggle for independence and his commitment to forging Ghanaian and Pan-African identities secure him a prominent place in the history of the continent.
The political science literature, at least until recently, has not been so kind to Dr. Nkrumah. It tends to stress the flaws in the CPP’s state-directed development policies and points to a creeping authoritarianism in the administration’s attitude toward political opposition. At least one of the works that I read, however, referred to something of a revisionist movement of late that sought to rehabilitate the former leader’s image.
Regardless, my impression is that the legacy of Nkrumah and the tumultuous years that followed his ouster is a complicated one. That’s about as deep as my assessment goes for the moment.
Speaking of the President, I just learned that he was an active member of the Rotary Club of Accra, my very own host club. Continuing the free association, I just joined two other Ambassadorial Scholars in giving brief presentations on our backgrounds and respective cultures to the club. I exchanged the flag of the Downtown Greenville Club with the President of the Accra club.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading since I arrived. I just completed Ayi Kewi Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Armah (b. Takoradi, Ghana 1939) penned this scathing critique of political corruption in post-independence Ghana just eleven years after the country attained independence. The novel’s setting straddles the end of the Nkrumah regime and the first military government, so circa 1966. Images of pollution and filth permeate the work. It is a book about life after the death of hope, of a dream rotting on the vine. I highly recommend it.
I was startled to come across such a direct indictment of Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party. Dr. Nkrumah is afforded a great deal of respect throughout Africa. In a BBC poll a few years ago, Africans rated him as the continent’s Man of the Millenium. He is often referred to with his honorary title, Osagyefo, “the victorious one.” The new African Studies building, my academic home, at the University of Ghana is called the Kwame Nkrumah Complex. An informal survey of my classmates generated an acknowledgement that ministerial corruption was a black mark on the CPP reign, including one minister who notoriously purchased a golden bed. However, they were quick to stress Dr. Nkrumah’s unparalleled contributions to the nation’s infrastructure. They told me that he was also something of a progressive in terms of gender. He established a quota system that resulted in the election of a number of female MPs, and he secured places for the training of several female fighter pilots. Nkrumah’s role in the struggle for independence and his commitment to forging Ghanaian and Pan-African identities secure him a prominent place in the history of the continent.
The political science literature, at least until recently, has not been so kind to Dr. Nkrumah. It tends to stress the flaws in the CPP’s state-directed development policies and points to a creeping authoritarianism in the administration’s attitude toward political opposition. At least one of the works that I read, however, referred to something of a revisionist movement of late that sought to rehabilitate the former leader’s image.
Regardless, my impression is that the legacy of Nkrumah and the tumultuous years that followed his ouster is a complicated one. That’s about as deep as my assessment goes for the moment.
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