African Languages and Societies Commons^™

Puzzles, Patterns Drums: The Dawn Of Mathematics In Rwanda And Burundi., D. Huylebrouck

Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal

No abstract provided.

Without A Name By Yvonne Vera, Pamela J. Olúbùnmi Smith

Goodrich Scholarship Faculty Publications

A relative newcomer to the literary scene, Yvonne Vera joins the rising ranks of Zimbabwean writers and African women writers, earning her place with promising credentials, academic and literary. Vera is the author of two previous works, a volume of short stories, Why Don't You Carve Other Animals (1992), and a poetic novel, Nehanda (1993; see WLT 69:i, p.212), which were shortlisted for the Regional Commonwealth Writers Award in 1993 and 1994 respectively.

Diedre Badejo. Òsun Sèègèsí: The Elegant Deity Of Wealth, Power And Femininity, Pamela J. Olúbùnmi Smith

Goodrich Scholarship Faculty Publications

The advocacy for African mother tongue source texts, translated or otherwise, has gone long unheeded and has been mired in a decade of academic debates about "privileged insider/arrogant outsider" approaches to and judgment of African literature in European languages. The Western feminist knowledge naming and claiming prerogative which has characterized much of feminist praxis in the seventies and eighties, especially in its self-assigned mandate to "speak" for "Third World" women, has forced the discursive territory to yet another level. The "damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don't" mediating position African feminist voices find themselves in lately is forcing a text/context­ conscious criticism of modern African literature …

Tapping The Wisdom Of The Ancestors: An Attempt To Recast Vodou And Morality Through The Voice Of Mama Lola And Karen Mccarthy Brown, Claudine Michel

William Monroe Trotter Institute Publications

The focus of this Research Report is on morality as a culture-specific and contextual phenomenon. It argues that Vodou, as a religion, has largely been misrepresented in the West and has been portrayed as having no legitimate basis for morality mainly because of its African origins. This paper attempts to interpret morality in Vodou by presenting a model of ethics construction grounded in the history of the people and based on the true meaning of the religion. It argues that Haitians have turned to their ancestral religion and to their African past to survive isolation and ostracism from the West …

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, …

'The Big Canvass": An Interview With Mazisi Kunene, Chukwuma Azuonye

Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series

In the present interview, recorded in his office, in July,1996, during an NEH Summer-long Seminar on the Literature and Culture of the New South Africa in which I participated, Kunene reflects on the challenges of the New South Africa and offers some illuminating insights into the impetus behind his choice of the epic as a mode of communication, his interest in the African world view and cosmology, the variety of his writing and interests beyond the epics for which he was best known, and his vision of the commonalty of all African cultures. In this, as in his creative writings, …

Nadezda Obradovic. African Rhapsody: Short Stories Of The Contemporary African Experience., Pamela J. Olúbùnmi Smith

Goodrich Scholarship Faculty Publications

African Rhapsody, an anthology containing the work of twenty-five contemporary writers, prides itself on its diversity of topics from sixteen countries of North, South, East, and West Africa. In this fine harvest authentic stories are told by African writers about African characters and the overwhelming realities of their lives in Africa. Where similar anthologies have focused primarily on stories written in English with a few token translations from the French, African Rhapsody gives breadth not only to stories written originally in English but also to translate stories - five from French, three from Arabic, and one Portuguese. The foreword by …

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 …

The Process Of Changed Meanings: A Study Of The Canadian Experience Of Somali Women In The Kitchener-Waterloo Area In Regard To Female Circumcision (Ontario), A. La Ferne Clarke

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This thesis tracks the process of changed meanings. My research tells the fictitious story of a Somali woman named mary. She has been in Canada for less than five years, and she moved to the Kitchener-Waterloo area, almost immediately. The narrative tells of her transition and the issues she had to handle. Female circumcision is the central issue in the story. mary's thought process as she moves from a country that supports female circumcision to a country that calls this practice female genital mutilation has to change if she decides not to circumcise her daughter. This Canadian story should guide …

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

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Heinemann Book Of African Women's Writing By Charlotte H. Bruner, Pamela J. Olúbùnmi Smith

Goodrich Scholarship Faculty Publications

African Rhapsody, an anthology containing the work of twenty-five contemporary writers, prides itself on its diversity of topics from sixteen countries of North, South, East, and West Africa. In this fine harvest authentic stories are told by African writers about African characters and the overwhelming realities of their lives in Africa. Where similar anthologies have focused primarily on sto­ries written in English with a few token translations from the French, African Rhapsody gives breadth not only to sto­ries written originally in English but also to translated sto­ries-five from French, three from Arabic, and one from Portuguese. The foreword by Chinua …

Oral Literary Criticism And The Performance Of The Igbo Epic, Chukwuma Azuonye

Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series

This paper is a continuation of a series of studies in which I have been looking at various aspects of the possible relationships between the poetics of oral epic performance among the Ohafia Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria and traditional aesthetic principles as voiced by local connoisseurs, ordinary listeners, and the bards themselves, either in the course of performances or in interviews recorded outside the various performance contexts. As I have pointed out in the earlier studies (Azuonye 1983, 1990a-d, and 1992), oral literary criticism is by no means peripheral to the Ohafia Igbo oral epic tradition. My field investigations …

The Author(Ity) Of The Text: The Dialectic Tension Between Fidelity And Creative Freedom -- The Case Of Wole Soyinka's “Free” Translation Of D. O. Fagunwa's Ogboju Ode, Pamela J. Olúbùnmi Smith

Goodrich Scholarship Faculty Publications

Partant de la premisse selon laquelle toute traduction est necessairement une inter­ pretation, on examine la traduction de Wale Soyinka d'un texte yoruba de D. 0. Fagunwa et on discute du probleme de la liberte en traduction en commenr;ant par bien situer l' auteur et le texte dans leur contexte culture! et politique.

The sense of an author, generally speaking, is to be sacred and inviolable. (John Dryden, Preface to the Translation of Ovid's Epistles, 1680)

Le traducteur n' est maftre de rien; ii est oblige de suivre partout son auteur, de se plier a toutes ces variations avec une …

African Oral Literature: Backgrounds, Character, And Continuity By Isidore Okpewho, Pamela J. Olúbùnmi Smith

Goodrich Scholarship Faculty Publications

Along with the publication of his two earlier scholarly works, The Epic in Africa (1979) and Myth in Africa (1983), Isidore Okpewho's latest book, African Oral Literature, seems to have completed the natural course of scholarship "in the field," as Afracanists continue their scholarly attempts ar (re)visioning/(re)writing African oral traditions and literatures from an "insider" perspective--from the horse's moth, so to speak.

Literary Translation And Culture Consciousness: The Experience Of Translating D.O. Fagunwa's Igbo Olodumare From Yoruba Into English, Pamela J. Olúbùnmi Smith

Goodrich Scholarship Faculty Publications

Le processus de traduction implique l'interprétation précise du sens contextuel du texte-source dans la mesure où les contraintes syntaxiques et associatives de la langue cible le permettent. À cette fin, le traducteur littéraire doit se poser les questions fondamentales suivantes avant de commencer la traduction d'une œuvre : quelle est l'essence stylistique de l'original ? quels en sont l'intention et le but ? Que faire lorsque le texte est culturellement marqué ? C'est en tenant compte de ces interrogations que nous examinerons la traduction du yoruba à l'anglais de Igbo Olodumare de D.O. Fagunwa.

A Cross-Cultural Comparison Of The Strategies Of 'Complaints' In Spoken Egyptian Arabic And Spoken English, Muhammad El-Hashimi Mostafa

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Review Of Isidore Okpewho's Epic In Africa (New Edition)., Chukwuma Azuonye

Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series

Review of Isidore Okpewho's The Epic in Africa: Towards a Poetics of the Oral Performance. [Revised paperback edition.] xvii, 288 pp. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

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 …

If God Was A Woman By Stanley Nyamfukudza, Pamela J. Olúbùnmi Smith

Goodrich Scholarship Faculty Publications

Written from a male point of view, If God Was A Woman is a book of ten contemporary stories about women's and men's lives and relationships, women's condition, their desires, wants, and needs.

Oedipal Identity And The Freudian Construction Of Orality In Okot P'Bitek's Song Of Lawino And Song Of Ocol, Paul Kent Oakley

Masters Theses

In Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, Ocol and Lawino, presenting themselves as a university-educated man and his non-literate village wife, argue the various merits and failings of traditional, Acholi village life and modern, Westernized life. Accompanying this sociopolitical argument is the personal, emotional conflict between the two: Ocol is rejecting Lawino in favor of a Westernized second-wife, but Lawino refuses to leave him, trying instead to coerce him into returning, body and soul, to her bed. The scenario seems straightforward. But below this superficial reading is a more complex one in which Lawino is Ocol’s …

The Nwagu Aneke Igbo Script: Its Origins, Features And Potentials As A Medium Of Alternative Literacy In African Languages, Chukwuma Azuonye

Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series

The present paper is a study of the origins, features and significance of the Nwagu Aneke Igbo Syllabary (otherwise known as the Umuleri Igbo Script), one of the thirty or so indigenous systems of writing which (re-)emerged in West Africa during the colonial period as a medium for challenging alien cultural values and for the re-assertion of the superiority of African spiritual and moral traditions and of the thought-patterns which lie behind them. Beyond the claims of a one-time prosperous land-owner and diviner, the late Ogbuevi Nwagu Aneke of the village of Umuleri in the Anambra Local Government Area of …

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.

Cultural Analysis Of Arabic Books Fot Teaching Arabic As A Foreign Language, Hala Yeheya Abd El-Wahab

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Buchi Emecheta : A Novelist's Image Of Nigerian Women, Kirstin Lynne Ellsworth

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta writes about the lives of twentieth century Nigerian women. Living during the post-World War II decades of British colonialism, and the subsequent move towards Nigerian Independence in the 1950s, Emecheta's women are affected by some of the most dramatic social and cultural changes in their country's history. Colonialism brings with it abrupt changes in the degree of political power held by Nigerians in their own country, and fosters the urbanization and expansion of market centers like Lagos, based on exploitative systems of raw material extraction for the colonial power. Imposing an increasingly western sensibility on Nigeria, …

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.

The Last Harmattan Of Alusine Dunbar By Syl Cheney-Coker, Pamela J. Olúbùnmi Smith

Goodrich Scholarship Faculty Publications

A reenactment of the Edenic plunder. The setting? Anglophone Anywhere, West Africa. The time? Pre- colonial, colonial, and postcolonial period. The action? The brigandage and plunder of Africa, the old yet new drama of the psychological and political effects of duplicity, and the near-genocidal tendency inherent in the lack of communal cohesiveness. What follows is all too familiar.

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 …

Fafa By Ebou Dibba, Pamela J. Olúbùnmi Smith

Goodrich Scholarship Faculty Publications

With the "coming if age" of African literature, a new generation of African writers are accessing publishing avenues such as the Macmillan Publishing Company's "M" series.

Funeral Rites Among Ashanti Immigrants In Toronto: A Case Study (Ontario), Paul Adjin-Tettey

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The Ashantis are well known for their strict observance and co-operation during funeral rites. I attempt to answer the following questions: To what extent do the Ashantis who have migrated to Canada still hold on to indigenous concepts and funeral practices? By virtue of their being in two worlds what difficulties come their way if they try to follow indigenous practice to its letter? What innovations have been introduced into their funeral rites? Can a symbol or procedure be radically altered and yet perceived as the same? In a foreign context does ritual retain its unifying function? The method for …

Igbo Names In The Nominal Roll Of Amelié, An Early 19th Century Slave Ship From Martinique: Reconstructions, Interpretations And Inferences, Chukwuma Azuonye

Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series

The names discussed in the present paper come from the nominal roll of “212 Africans, all Ibos, who constituted the clandestine freight of Amelié, a slave-ship commissioned at Saint-Pierre, Martinique, and captured by the royal corvettee, Sapho, on February 8, 1822, in the Caribbean Sea.” The list was forwarded to me as far back as 1985 through Abiola Irele (then of the University of Ibadan), at the instance of the great Martinique cultural nationalist poet, Aimé Cesaire (1913–2008), by Mme Thesée, a French scholar who was then completing a study of the secret passage of this particular group of slaves. …