African Languages and Societies Commons^™

A Bagful Of Locusts And The Baboon Woman: Constructions Of Gender, Change And Continuity In Botswana, David Suggs

David Suggs

No abstract provided.

Timbuktu: A Lesson In Underdevelopment, Riccardo Pelizzo

riccardo pelizzo

Th e purpose of the present paper is to investigate Timbuktu’s economic decline in the three centuries elapsed between 1526, when Leo Africanus reached the Mysterious City, and 1830, when the fi rst European explorers arrived in Timbuktu. It is argued that Timbuktu’s decline was neither an accident nor the result of inevitable natural conditions. Timbuktu’s decay was the product of historical and social forces. Specifi cally, it is argued that Timbuktu lost power and prestige because its market decayed. However, it is also suggested that no single factor can account individually for this event. Th e crisis of Timbuktu’s …

Kabou Dechire Le Certificat D'Innocence De L'Afrique? (Review Of Et Si L'Afrique Refusait Le Développement By Axelle Kabou), Kasongo Mulenda Kapanga

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Pourquoi I' Afrique est-elle sous développée? En repondant a cette question, Axelle Kabou fait d'une pierre deux coups. D'abord, elle émet une thèse d'après laquelle I'Afrique refuserait de se développer à cause de sa léthargie. Ensuite, elle fait un réquisitoire severe en désignant du doigt I' Africain lui-meme comme source de son retard. Le refus de développement, explique-t-elle, vient d'une fausse conception manichéiste qui voit en I' Afrique une antithèse de I' Europe. Par consequent, tout emprunt des valeurs européennes indispensables au développement est vu avec méfiance. C'est ainsi qu' «à peine sortie du monde manichéiste pré-colonial, I' Afrique a …

Book Review: Geometry From Africa: Mathematical And Educational Explorations By Paulus Gerdes, Claudia Zaslavsky

Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal

No abstract provided.

From Military Politization To Militarization Of Power In Guinea-Conakry, Mohamed S. Camara

Mohamed S. Camara

This historical analysis of state-military society relationship in Guinea focuses on Sékou Touré's political survival due in part to his political indoctrination of an army constantly involved in Pan-African battles and overshadowed by the National Militia. It also addresses this army's transition from a single-party regime to multiparty politics via a bloodless coup. Particularly underlined in the discussion, Touré's intelligent exploitation of Cold War localized manueuvers lays the ground for a conceptual framework envisioning the Guinean military as a revolutionary army. This theoretical argument is made in light of the sociological debate on the military and politics as sustained by …

African Film: A Dynamic Medium For A High School French Class Cultural Curriculum, Denise Elizabeth Dunn Barstow-Girel

MA TESOL Collection

Culture can be an integral part of the French foreign language class when students learn French language and Francophone culture through a content-based approach using the medium of African films. Founded on the pedagogical value of a thematic study of issues aimed at raising linguistic, cultural, and global awareness in adolescent, fourth or fifth year high school French students, I developed this cultural curriculum focused on Francophone African culture. While learning the French language, students will gain knowledge of West African cultures including historical aspects, and the role of the French language in this region.

Book Announcement: Women, Art And Geometry In Southern Africa, By Paulus Gerdes

Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal

No abstract provided.

Le Héros Sonyien À La Croisée Des Principes Sartriens Et Nietzschéens, Kasongo Mulenda Kapanga

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Sony Labou Tansi s'est créé une réputation de maître de la parole mordante par sa dénonciation des pouvoirs abusifs de l'ère postcoloniale. Que ce soit dans le théâtre ou dans le roman, «l'enfant prodige de Brazza» use d'une verve castigatrice et d'un style incendiaire qui lui ont valu dans les lettres francophones africaines une réputation de censeur. Même si on mettait cette agressivité verbale au compte de l'afropessimisme, le malaise que la pléthore d'écrivains africains ont décrié, il se profile dans la floraison langagière de Sony une tension entre deux modes de pensée et deux philosophies complémentaires. II y a, …

Press Law Debate In Kenya: Ethics As Political Power, David N. Dixon

Communication Educator Scholarship

Journalists in many African countries have long been caught between differing ideals i n their relationship between press and government. Two models vie for dominance-the western, libertarian and development journalism models. This article uses Walzer's (1983) theory of distributive justice to illuminate the ethical significance of this debate. A t issue is political power. A case study of the 1996 proposed press law i n Kenya illustrates the ethical arguments mounted for each press model and how the arguments are marshaled not necessarily for moral purposes but to gain political advantage. Finally, a viable third alternative avoids a false dilemma …

Predicate Clefting In Kisi, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper examines the focus construction of Kisi, an Atlantic language (Niger-Congo) spoken by some half a million people primarily in Guinea but also in nearby Sierra Leone and Liberia. The data come from work done in 1983-84 on the southern dialect spoken in the Foya area of Upper Lofa County, Liberia. Of particular interest is the presence of what has been known in the literature as "predicate clefting'', e.g., DeGraff 1996. Its interactions and complementarity with negation, an inherently focusing construction (Marchese 1983), evince some complexity. Despite some superficial similarity, however, substantial syntactic differences exist. More similarities exist in …

Where Have All The Ideophones Gone? The Death Of A Word Category In Zulu, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

The first step in the discussion is to demonstrate that ideophones constitute a word class, a relatively uncontroversial claim for Southern Bantu. The second is to show that native speakers of Zulu do not share equal knowledge of ideophones and how this knowledge correlates with social factors. Measured knowledge of ideophones is evaluated against the social factors of age, sex, education, residence patterns, and rusticity, a parameter to be elaborated below. The conclusion is that just as for pidgins and creoles (Childs 1994) the knowledge and use of ideophones serves as a reliable barometer for language typing and language change, …

Language Typology And Reconstruction: The Prenasalized Stops Of Kisi, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

The findings of language typologists can contribute to understanding synchronic variation where no diachronic facts are available. By establishing what happens universally, one can extrapolate as to the past and perhaps as to the future of a language on the basis of synchronic evidence. One approach within such a framework concentrates on a typologically unusual or marked feature on the assumption that its derivation may be established from less highly marked features. This paper discusses the typologically unusual prenasalized stops of Kisi, a Mel language belonging to the Southern Branch of (West) Atlantic. The approach adopted here is based on …

Coping Amidst Crisis: The Narrative Of Five Sudanese Women, Nada Mustafa Mohamed Ali

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Lexicography In West Africa: Preparing A Bilingual Kisi-English Dictionary, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper presents some of the issues involved in preparing a bilingual dictionary for Kisi, an underdocumented language spoken in West Africa. Because the language possesses little in the way of literacy materials, fundamental issues as to orthography, word division, etc., had to be considered. In addition, no grammar of the language (or its closest congeners) was available and thus basic grammatical analysis had to be performed simultaneously. I briefly consider some of these problems, discussing the use of the lexical data base programs known as LEXWARE. I then focus on the specific problems raised by the expressive word class …

Color Terms And Lexical Classes In Krahn/Wobé, Janet Mueller Bing

English Faculty Publications

Many West African languages lack a separate category of adjectives; Krahn and Wobé are also said to lack this lexical class. However, an examination of color terms in the Gborbo dialect of Liberian Krahn reveals a class of words which are neither nouns or verbs After describing the syntactic behavior of nouns and verbs and color nouns and verbs, it is shown that a third class of color words must be considered adjectives. The data supports proposals by Givón and Dixon that, universally, lexical categories are semantically based.

The Garifuna Journey Study Guide, Andrea E. Leland, Kathy Berger

Documentary Study Guides

Garifuna tradition bearers, artists, and technicians collaborated with filmmakers Andrea E. Leland and Kathy Berger to produce The Garifuna Journey, a documentary focused on the story of resistance and continuity of culture. The National Garifuna Council of Belize also worked on the project with the goal of cultural retrieval, as little had been documented and collected for its own archives.

With direction from tradition bearers in Belize, video footage and audio taped oral histories were collected, transcribed, and returned to the Belize community. The documentary was produced from these materials, focused on the Garifuna experience in Belize.

Nasality In Kisi, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper presents the various manifestations of nasality in Kisi, a Mel language belonging to the Southern Branch of (West) Atlantic. In this language, as in many West African languages, nasality plays a prominent role in the language's sound system and grammar. Nasality in Kisi is realized phonetically on both consonants and vowels and phonologically on consonants. There are even cases of 'spontaneous nasalization', situations in which there is no nearby nasal segment to contribute the nasal feature. Nasality may also function in the morphology and is used expressively for emphasis. The findings reported here will be of use to …

Where Do Ideophones Come From?, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper begins with an analysis of ideophones in Kisi (West Atlantic, Guinea). This examination leads to consideration of the diachrony of ideophones, but because of the lack of data with any real time depth, we are limited to finding clues in the synchronic data. This study looks first at verbs, the class of words which Kisi ideophones resemble most closely. Such is also the case in other African languages, where ideophones can often be analyzed as verbs, as has been done for several Southern Bantu languages. I then demonstrate how Kisi ideophones can be derived from verbs, illustrating several …

The Authorship Of Places: Reflections On Fieldwork In South Africa, John Western

Syracuse Scholar (1979-1991)

A social geographer takes a reflective view from afar of troubled South Africa, where he did intensive fieldwork. Issues of personal, academic, and social responsibility, plus those of the philosophy of social science, arise.

Literature And Law: How The Literary Quality Of A Political Statement Has Affected The Development Of Law In Tanzania, Robert L. Scott

IUSTITIA

The purpose of this inquiry is to demonstrate how the literary qualities of a political statement have contributed to the legal and economic development of an African nation.

It is my contention that a literary statement* is a useful tool in representing the process of events in a manner which reproduces the quality and character of the underlying reality. This more accurate reality is derived from the perspective of the artist who writes out of an experience common to his people, even though his expression is essentially a personal one: he writes according to his own sensibilities and is not …

Ua37/23 Whas Broadcast No. 5, Whas, Western Kentucky University, Earl Moore

WKU Archives Records

Script for weekly WKU broadcast on WHAS radio. This show included Earl Moore, West Richards and Arndt Stickles.