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 The African Palimpsest
Indigenization of Language
in the West African Europhone Novel
C ross
ultures
Readings in the Post / Colonial

Literatures in English

4
Series Editors

Gordon Collier Hena Maes–Jelinek Geoffrey Davis

(Giessen) (Liège) (Aachen)
 The African Palimpsest

Indigenization of Language
in the West African Europhone Novel

Second Enlarged Edition

Chantal Zabus

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
“ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for
documents - Requirements for permanence”.

Second Enlarged Edition

ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2224-9
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2007
Printed in The Netherlands
To the Walloon language of Belgium,
the tongue of my mother
but not my mother tongue

And to Ken Saro–Wiwa, 1941–1995

In Memoriam
 Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ix
Introduction xi
Paradigms Lost xi
Writing with an Accent xv
1 (M)Other Tongue and the Third Code 1
A Indigenization in the Text 4
B Indigenization in the Context 8
List of Linguistic Informants 12

2 Glottopolitics and Diglossia in West Africa 13

A The First Glottophagi 18
B Official Languages and Lingua Francas 25
C Media of Instruction and Curricular Subjects 28
D Media of Literary Expression 35
E Decolonization at the Crossroads 47

3 Pidginization and Multilingual Strategies 51

A Joyce Cary: “Crocodile Writing” and Pidginization 59
B Beyond the Levity of Pidgin: Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana 68
C Pidgin in Stasis: The Nigerian Illiterati 76
D Acts of Identity and Code-Switching ‘Over the Ragged Fence’ 84
E (M)Other Tongue Code-Switching: Scriptural Aporia 93
F Extinct and Surviving Species: Pitineg and Ẹnpi 101

4 The West African Palimpsest:

Case-Studies in Relexification 111
A The Ancestor of Relexification:
Calquing in Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard 120
B Bound to Textual Violence:
Gabriel Okara and Ahmadou Kourouma 135
C The Logos-Eaters: The Igbo Ethno-Text 148
D The Ethno-Text Fragmented:
Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments 165

5 The Visible Trace and Beyond 175

Two Ways of Shadowing:
Cushioning and Contextualization 175
A Naming the Gap in the Anglophone Novel 175
B Naming the Gap in the Francophone Novel 183
C Ken Saro–Wiwa’s Sozaboy: Pidgin In Vitro 193

6 Towards Othering the Foreign Language 201

Works Cited 213

Appendix: Tables and Figures 233
Index 253
 Acknowledgements

F
OR THE ORIGINAL P A L I M P S E S T , I remain indebted to Alain
Ricard, who sparked it off, to my life-long friend Thomas
Cassirer of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, as well
as Sally Lawall and Bill Moebius of the Comparative Literature De-
partment at UMass, and Joan Dayan.
Warm thanks also go to the three mentors who have shaped my
critical thinking over the last three decades, Hena Maes–Jelinek, the
late Albert Gérard, and the late Jacques Derrida. I also wish to thank
James Gibbs and Sada Niang for their timely insights, and Gareth
Griffiths for praise and encouragement over the years, as well as all
the people who kindly acted as informants: Patience Gibbs and
Joachim (Yandaw) Bayah for their help with Akan/Fanti; Papa Samba
Diop, Souleymane Faye of the C L A D at the University Cheikh Anta
Diop in Dakar, Senegal, as well as Gabriel Guèye, for Wolof; Victor
Manfredi, Philip Nwachukwu, and Oko Okoro for Igbo; Kay
Williamson for Ijọ; Moussa Diaby, Jean Derive, Claire Grégoire, and
Karim Traoré for Maninka; Yiwola Awoyale for Yoruba.
I also wish to thank the writers who discussed their work with me
on several occasions: Cyprian Ekwensi and Gabriel Okara for answer-
ing (almost) all my questions, Jean Gerem Ciss, for his help on Ndût,
as well as the late Bard of Nigerian poetry in Pidgin, Ezenwa–Ohaeto,
and the late Ken Saro–Wiwa, man of the world and trusted friend.
For the reprint of this book, I am particularly indebted to the editors
of Cross/Cultures. I also wish to extend my gratitude to Françoise
Ugochukwu for her prompt support and to Christian Channard for
providing last-minute technical help with Yobo (Igbo), Yoruban and
Bambara fonts (SILDoulos), which were developed by L L A C A N ,
C N R S , Paris (©S I L - L L A C A N ).
Last but not least, I wish to thank most warmly the indefatigable
Gordon Collier for his minute and patient work in helping me bring
out the remnants of this palimpsest.
 Introduction

S
INCE I W R O T E The African Palimpsest in the early 1990s, a lot of
changes have taken place in the status of English and French.
While French is in decline world-wide and one French critic
wonders why ‘they’ want to kill the French language,1 English is a
controversial world language, which may be challenged by Chinese in
the years to come. “By 2007 Chinese to become web language No. 1,”2
claimed the chief advertisement of the technology consulting firm
A C C E N T U R E . If the future is “made in China,” then by 3007 all our
paradigms will be lost. But, to some extent, they are already lost now,
well before the apocalyptic Sino-American war for hegemony.
It is impossible to outline here the avatars of French or English in
the last decade and a half; suffice it to say that English is now a jugger-
naut (itself a Hindi word to designate one form of Krishna). This
should remind us that if language was once “the shaper of ideas,” as
Benjamin Lee Whorf once put it,3 it is now changing shapes and
world-views.

Paradigms Lost
The Whorfian triad Language, Thought, Reality, which is the title the
editor John B. Carroll gave to Whorf’s Selected Writings (1956), is one
paradigm that is definitely lost. It used to stand for the interdepen-
dence of language, culture and identity, known more commonly as
the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, whereby “we dissect nature along lines

1 Bernard Lecherbonnier, Pourquoi veulent-ils tuer le français? (Paris: Albin

Michel, 2005).
2 New York Times (3 April 2001).
3 See Benjamin Lee Whorf, Collected Papers and Metalinguistics (Washington

D C : Foreign Service Institute, Department of State, 1952): 5.

xii THE AFRICAN PALIMPSEST ´

laid down by our native languages.”4 This hypothesis, which Edward

Sapir further elaborated, holds that one’s world-view depends on
one’s linguistic frame of reference and that the world is organized by
the linguistic systems in our minds: “The worlds in which different
societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with dif-
ferent labels attached.”5
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis has now been ousted by a new con-
ception of language as a human construct available to ‘real’ people in
‘post-national’ nations. In other words, a language no longer points to
one world-view and, what is more, it no longer expresses the interests
of a particular state. Robert Phillipson concurs thus in his Linguistic
Imperialism (1992). In the case of English, it is no longer the language of
one specific community or ethnicity. It is now spoken by more non-
native speakers than native speakers; it has been appropriated by the
barbarians, as it were, and I am one of them. But these members of
what the Indian linguist Braj Kachru popularized as the “Expanding
Circle” (English as a foreign language) have to conform to the norms
of the “Inner Circle” (English as a first language).6 Seidlhofer and Jen-
kins conclude their 2001 article somewhat temperamentally about the
linguistic Human Rights of non-native speakers: “No right to ‘rotten
English’ for them, then.”7
Regardless of the fact that non-native and near-native speakers
have to conform to the rules that apply to native speakers, unless they
create a grammar of their own, the new users of French and/or Eng-
lish are no longer culture-bearers of French or English ‘civilization’.
This process of disaggregation of language, culture and identity was
sharpened by the process of colonization and the concomitant intro-
duction of European chirography. In the case of West Africa, such an
alien writing system as the Roman script thwarted any possible flour-
ishing of indigenous scripts like Nsibidi, Vaï and, to some extent, the

4 Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, Reality: Selected Writings of Ben-

jamin Lee Whorf, ed. John B. Carroll (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1956): 212.
5 Edward Sapir, Culture, Language and Personality. Selected Essays (1949), ed.

David G. Mandelbaum (Berkeley & Los Angeles: U of California P 1964): 69.

6 The Other Tongue: English across Cultures, ed. Braj B. Kachru (Urbana &

Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1982).

7 Barbara Seidlhofer & Jennifer Jenkins, “English as a Lingua Franca and the

Politics of Property,“ in The Politics of English as a World Language: New Hori-

zons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies, ed. Christian Mair (A S N E L Papers 7;
Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2003): 142.
´ Introduction xiii

later ajami Arabic-script literary tradition in West Africa.8 We will

never know how they would have fared, had colonization never set
in. This is one additional tragic aspect of the colonizing process: an
aborted future.
Colonization has, for better or for worse, contributed to the expan-
sion of European languages such as English and French. If English did
change at all in the process of colonization, it did not move overnight
from good to bad to worse or from the elegiac innocence of the homy
English cottage to the hyper-communicative experience of the ‘global
village’. Most of its contemporary plasticity as an international lingua
franca was already inscribed in its own hybrid beginnings. Whether
by the original owners of the language or by its postcolonial co-own-
ers, English has always been put to various uses. It is now both local
and global – ‘glocal’, to use the now fashionable word.
Another paradigm that is forever lost obtains in William Labov’s
pioneering studies on language variation (‘Black Vernacular”) in New
York City. The German linguist Christian Mair points to the shortcom-
ings of the classic Labovian sociolinguistic model, as applied, for
instance, to the Caribbean: “Nobody in Jamaica or in the Caribbean
diaspora speaks Jamaican Creole today in its consistent pure and basi-
lectal form.”9 Language-variation theories therefore fail to work in the
postcolonial context, including that which preoccupies us here: i.e.
West Africa. This holds true especially in the ‘anglophone’ part, where
pidgins thrive. In some parts that are no longer conveniently ‘anglo-
phone’ or ‘francophone’, such as Cameroon, the resulting pidgins like
Camfranglais will not easily be holed.10 What is more, even the concept
of ‘African’ literature itself has been challenged.11
Yet another paradigm or pattern, which formed part of the basis of
my argument in the late 1980s, has had to be adjusted somewhat: lan-
guage policies and literacy. Although data from 1988 on language

8 There is a substantial Pulaar (Peuhl/Fulfulde) and Zarma/Zongha litera-

ture in ajami in Senegal, Nigeria, and Guinea, the orthography of which has
been one of the tasks of the Islamic Organization I S E S C O . For more detail, see
Abou Touré, “Littérature peule écrite en ajami,” Études littéraires africaines:
Littérature peule 19 (2005): 31–33.
9 Christian Mair, “Linguistics, Literature and the Postcolonial Englishes: An

Introduction“ (2003), in The Politics of English as a World Language, ed. Mair, xii.
10 See Rajend Mesthrie, “Pidgins that won’t easily be holed,“ The Guardian

Weekly (25 September 2003): 3.

11 See Adele King, “Introduction“ to From Arfica: New Francophone Stories, ed.

Adele King (Lincoln & London: U of Nebraska P, 2004): x.

xiv THE AFRICAN PALIMPSEST ´

education provided in the first edition (Table 1) can still be considered

as valid today, access to literacy in sub-Saharan Africa has declined
since the 1990s, and predictions are dire. In the 1990s, thirteen African
countries cut their education budgets under I M F programmes. In
1999, more children in sub-Saharan Africa were out of school than in
1990. Also, there are marked disparities in access to primary education
within countries by income, urban/rural location, and gender (see
Tables 2, 3, 4, and 5 for Ivory Coast, Senegal, Ghana and Nigeria). For
every 100 boys there are 83 girls enrolled in primary education.12
By 2015, the watershed date for the E F A (Education for All) Project
in sub-Saharan Africa, three out of four of all the school-age children
in the world not attending school will be African. As Helga Ramsey–
Kurtz, who runs an Austrian-funded project on the representations of
illiteracy, cautions, English as a world language might well constitute
an immediate and “serious existential threat for [Africans].”13 Another
serious threat is the H I V / A I D S pandemic, which is having an in-
creasingly severe impact on education. Yet, since 2002, many govern-
ments have launched courageous reforms to promote education even
though improvement in quality has not matched the progress in
access. These reforms are likely to have an impact on the cultural and
literary production of West African nation-states, but World Bank pro-
jections up to 2030 leave undisturbed my previous conjectures about
West African writers’ experimentations with the European language
from roughly the 1950s to the 1990s.
On the other hand, the Belgian Africanist linguist Jan Blommaert
has pointed out on two occasions that the main issue in the use of
English or French in Africa is not so much their indigenization
through language contact as their acting as media for “grassroots lite-
racy.”14 He is, admittedly, writing about Shaba, Congo, where French
prevailed along with its dirigisme linguistique. But in his book with Jef
Verscheuren, he wishes to debunk two ideas: that of language bor-

12 See http://www.worldbank.org, http://devdata.worldbank.org /edstats,

http://www.newafrica.com/education/articles/afr_illiteracy.htm (accessed 22
June 2005).
13 Helga Ramsey–Kurtz, “Beyond the Domain of Literacy: The Illiterate

Other in The Heart of the Matter,Things Fall Apart and Waiting for the Barbarians“
(2003), in The Politics of English as a World Language, ed. Mair, 322.
14 See Jan Blommaert, “Reconstructing the Sociolinguistic Image of Africa:

Grassroots Writing in Shaba (Congo),“ Text 19 (1999): 175–200, and “The

Other Side of History: Grassroots Literacy and Autobiography in Shaba,
Congo,“ General Linguistics 38 (2001): 133–55.
´ Introduction xv

ders, delimiting the habitat of a language creature; and the idea that
“acquiring the local language is the simple, necessary and sufficient
condition for guaranteeing smooth communication.”15 West African
texts, like other postcolonial texts written in European languages, tes-
tify to the fact that “communicative diversity persists, even if one lan-
guage is used,”16 which prove Blommaert and Verschueren right, but
that one language is no longer the sole organizer of one world-view,
as in the Whorfian era, all the more so in the subjective texture of the
literary text. What is more, over time, these Belgian linguists may
prove to be wrong if, as I believe, African languages are rehabilitated
and start vying with other world languages. Early paradigms, both
linguistic and extra-linguistic, are, at this point in time, irretrievably
lost.

Writing with an Accent

When “the Empire writes back to the centre,”17 it does this not so
much with a vengeance as ‘with an accent’, by using a language that
topples discourse conventions of the so-called ‘centre’ and by inscrib-
ing postcolonial language variants from ‘the margin’ or ‘the periphe-
ry’ in the text. Such variants result from the transformation of lan-
guage through local use by ‘real’ people, itself the result of social
change; but, as we shall see, they are also shaped by the writer’s
imaginative use of the European language in an attempt at literary
decolonization.
More generally, literary texts, radio scripts, films and any postcolo-
nial text, for that matter, cannot exist outside of the world. The written
text is therefore a social situation and is ‘wordly’. It is this very world-
liness, to borrow from Edward Said,18 that brings together literature,
linguistics and postcolonial theory. This is very much the main point
Bill Ashcroft is making in Post-Colonial Transformation when he em-

15 Jan Blommaert & Jef Verschueren, Debating Diversity (London & New

York: Routledge, 1998): 131.

16 Blommaert and Verscheuren, Debating Diversity, 106.
17 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin appropriated Salman

Rushdie’s well-known phrase, ”the Empire writes back to the centre,“ itself a
clever reworking of the popular American space opera, The Empire Strikes
Back, in their seminal book, The Empire Writes Back (London: Routledge, 1989).
18 Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge M A : Harvard

U P , 1983): 39.
xvi THE AFRICAN PALIMPSEST ´

phasizes again and again the fact that “the language is a tool which
has meaning according to the way in which it is used.”19
Yet the inscription of variants within a text often goes beyond the
mere recording of such a transformation. The writer no longer imitates
what is happening as a result of social change but uses language vari-
ance as an alibi to convey ideological variance. The methods used to
‘write with an accent’ and to convey ideological variance cover a
whole panoply of devices, generally designated as ‘indigenization’ or
‘nativization’, which are themselves part of larger, conscious strategies
of decolonization or what the authors of The Empire Writes Back (1989)
called abrogation and appropriation.
The Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand has used Indian locutions that
are rendered directly into English, and his way of writing has been
described in terms of a fast, galloping ‘tempo’, which Raja Rao in his
preface to Kanthapura (1938) defines as “the tempo of Indian life,”
which “must be infused into one English expression […] we, in India,
think quickly, we talk quickly, and when we move, we move quickly;
there must be something of the sun of India that makes us rush and
tumble and run on.” Upon closer scrutiny, away from the “sun,” it
turns out that Anand’s ‘Indian English’ is made up of transliterations
or calques from Urdu and Punjabi. Raja Rao in The Serpent and the Rope
(1960) has, for his part, attempted to employ Sanskrit rhythms in Eng-
lish, but his experiment has been deemed a failure, possibly because it
is an overly conscious, nationalistic nativization of English that finds
no tangible echo in the sociolinguistic arena.20
Raja Rao’s sanskritized, Kannada-flavoured English or Anand’s
Punjabi rhythms are textual antecedents of Salman Rushdie’s relishing
concept of the ‘chutnification of English’. Such rhythms undermine
the authority of English, which is here minorized to the point that, in
novels staging cross-cultural encounters as in Amit Chaudhuri’s After-
noon Raag (1993), English people “form a somewhat strange minority
whose alterity is confirmed by their accents.”21 Yet, in India, English
has come to stay and is, after the official language, Hindi, an ‘associ-

19 Bill Ashcroft, Postcolonial Transformation (London & New York: Routledge,

2001): 56–82, esp. 57.
20 See my chapter “Language, Orality, and Literature, in New National and
Post-Colonial Literatures: An Introduction, ed. Bruce King (Oxford: Clarendon,
1996): 29–45.
21 Vera Alexander, “Cross-Cultural Encounters in Amit Chaudhuri’s After-

noon Raag and Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies“ (2003), in The Politics
of English as a World Language, ed. Mair, 378.
´ Introduction xvii

ate’ language in a multilingual state, which has the second-largest

number of English speakers in the world.
“Writing with an accent” is how the Iranian-born Taghi Modaressi,
who lives in the U S A , described his ‘translation’ into English of his
own Persian novels, such as The Pilgrim’s Rules of Etiquette (1989).
Modaressi’s literal translations of Persian idiomatic expressions leave
a tangible trace of the foreign in the English text. Phrases like “nobody
chopped any chives for him,” “dust be on their heads,” “trying to be
the bean in every soup” or “he didn’t possess any more than a sigh”
clearly suggest another language than English. It has a different
‘tempo’, a different ‘rhythm’. The type of ‘translation’ – rather, indige-
nization – at work here is a process that any postcolonial writer en-
gages in to some extent.
What The African Palimpsest did and does is to ask what constitutes
an African rhythm. What makes a text sound West African and, more
particularly, Igbo or Mandinka when it is written in English or
French? There is obviously a metonymic gap between English and
Igbo, French and Mandinka. English words that have an Igbo flavour
(“You have unfortunate legs”) or French words that have a Mandinka
tinge to them (“des jours suivirent le jour des obsèques jusqu’au sep-
tième jour”) are, like the African words themselves studding a euro-
phone narrative, the part that stands for the whole; they ‘stand for’ the
colonized culture. Bill Ashcroft has argued that “language variance is
a synecdochic index of cultural difference which affirms the distance
of cultures at the very moment in which it proposes to bring them to-
gether” and, later, that “the most fascinating and subtle aspect of the
transformative function of post-colonial writing is its ability to signify
difference, and even incommensurability between cultures, at the very
point at which the communication occurs.”22 Beside this subtle defer-
ral between the distant and the near, a (contact) language like Nige-
rian Pidgin (ẸnPi) in Nigeria or the nascent Sheng in Nairobi, Kenya
point, even more concretely, beyond Ashcroft’s conjectures, to the
simultaneity of the distant and the near. The distant and the near trav-
el in the same linguistic circles.
Such a (creolized) pidgin is a bit like the grinning Cheshire cat in
Alice in Wonderland, who disappeared, leaving its grin behind him.
The grin can exist without the cat. Pidgin can exist without the Euro-
pean language while suggesting it in a ghostly way. This is the point

22 Bill Ashcroft, Postcolonial Transformation, 76, 81.

xviii THE AFRICAN PALIMPSEST ´

where cultural incommensurability and communicability occur -- in

one single moment of recognition, in an epiphany of understanding.
I feel distinctly like the Cheshire cat – but fading away without a
lingering grin. I see myself as a mutant critic between two species –
universalism and cultural relativism, eurocentrism and afrocentrism
and other binarisms.23 By the same token, I see my own text at an
interface, between the Western critic’s task as a decipherer of the
European-language palimpsest and that of the critic embracing the
study of one or several African languages and therefore redefining
his/her relation to linguistic informants.
Other gaps, interstices, and interfaces also need to be explored in,
for instance, the writing practices of the West African and, for that
matter, any postcolonial writer-in-exile in Western metropolitan cen-
tres. These various metonymic gaps have also been complicated by the
issue of gender. Poised between repetition and change, loyalty and
betrayal, reassurance and elusion, female writing has generally been
characterized by an oscillation, the results of which, in the words of
Lidia Curti, are “palimpsests that are continually written.”24 To indi-
genize a text is to make it ‘a text of one’s own’.
Although the language of post-patriarchy is not linguistically tan-
gible as yet, African women writers have tried to reconnect with the
‘mother tongue’: i.e. the tongue of the ‘mother-culture’, and develop
some sort of ‘voice-print’ within a system that denied their sisters ac-
cess to functional literacy.25 Alternatively, they have come up with
linguistic strategies that attempt to name and speak the unspeakable.26

23 See my own article, “Criticism of African Literatures in English: Towards

a Horizon of Expectations,“ Revue de littérature comparée 1 (1993): 129–47, and

André Brink, Reinventions (New York: Delos, 1996).
24 Lidia Curti, Female Stories, Female Bodies (New York: New York U P , 1998): 53.
25 This is the case, for instance, with Buchi Emecheta and her igboization of

English and simultaneous manipulation of the female Ifo performance tradi-

tion in her novels. Also, two Hausa/Fulani women poets, Hauwa Gwaram
and Hajiya Yarshehu from Northern Nigeria, have published Alkalani A Han-
nun Mata (A Pen in the Hands of Women) (1983), a collection of Hausa verse or
wakoki that are broadcast on local radio stations in an attempt to reach se-
cluded Muslim women without requiring them to leave their homes.
26 I touch on this problem regarding excision a.k.a. ‘female circumcision’,

‘female genital mutilation’ or ‘female genital cutting’ in my book Between Rites

and Rights: Excision in Women’s Experiential Texts and Human Contexts (Stanford
U P , 2007).
´ Introduction xix

The language of post-patriarchy in (West) Africa would be inchoate

if sexual minorities were not busy forging a literary language that cap-
tures their sexual dissidence, between tongues, in a text that dares not
speak its name.
These are the new paradigms against which future uses of language
will be gauged in the postcolonial text and upon which future palimp-
sests will be inscribed.

´
 1 (M)Other Tongue
and the Third Code

Is it enough we dream in foreign languages?

— Kofi Anyidoho, “Earthchild With Brain Surgery” (1985)

T
HE QUESTION that the Ghanaian poet asks here somewhat
rhetorically betrays both the lassitude and the urgency with
which West African europhone writers and critics have dealt
with the language issue in postcolonial years. The postcolonial writ-
er’s ambivalence towards the European language is symptomatic of
his1 desire to be both truly local and universal, to reclaim and rehabil-
itate the indigenous languages, while seeking international viability.
In West Africa, the medium of literary expression is not the writer’s
mother tongue but the dominant, foreign European language imposed
over the indigenous African languages2 in the process of Euro-Chris-
tian colonization.3 With independence in the 1960s, a paradox has set-

1 As noted in my Introduction, the present study is restricted to male

writers, with occasional reference to female writers, for the deconstruction of

the colonial and phallogocentric discourse in female writing deserves a sepa-
rate treatment altogether. Hence the use of ‘he’ and ‘his’. ‘S/he’ has been used
whenever appropriate.
2 The ‘indigenous’ African language (e.g., Wolof) is here opposed to the

‘exogenous’ African language or exolect (e.g., Arabic). I have avoided using

the term ‘vernacular’ to describe African languages because of its negative
Latin etymology (vernaculus ‘slave’) and the general sensitivity surrounding its
use in African linguistics.
3 One should bear in mind the fact that, well before the British conquest,

Arabic was also imposed as a lingua franca. For instance, it became the lingua
franca of the Sokoto Caliphate in nineteenth-century Nigeria during the Mus-
lim revivalist movement of Uthman Dan Fodio. Hence the use of ‘Euro-Chris-
tian’ as opposed to Muslim colonization. Throughout this study, colonization
is understood in terms of domination or subjugation, and the establishment of
an oppressor/oppressed relationship that forces the colonized into depen-
dence.
2 THE AFRICAN PALIMPSEST ´

tled in: the European language has insidiously penetrated the realm of
dreams and some of the inner recesses of African societies while re-
maining foreign to the population at large. Mother tongue and other
tongue are therefore at odds in the sociolinguistic arena, where the
one other tongue has triumphed and is still triumphing over the thou-
sand and one mother tongues.
For the West African writer, the mother tongue4 is either a medium
that has not yet been reduced to writing or one that is in the process of
being standardized, or a written tongue he knows little of. Conversely,
the other tongue has been perfunctorily force-fed through the Euro-
pean-language education system, more or less properly digested and
churned out as a literary medium. Thus, ironically (for language im-
position is effected through a dissembler or eiron), the West African
writer finds himself writing in a language he subsequently wishes to
subvert and insert in the larger project of decolonization.5
This paradox is best expressed as a struggle waged against, yet via,
the foreign language. A similar paradox or irony is entailed in the
scholarship of those who posit English as a killer language, such as
Tove Skutnabb–Kangas, and who predict that, by 2100, 90% of the
world languages will be dead or on Death Row.6 Yet, the propounders
of linguistic human rights soon become tangled up in an inevitable
dialectic, since any attempt to subdue the global reach of English is
made... in English.
As African writers articulate methods of making the foreign lan-
guage their own, the paradox soon dissolves into a Barthean ce-qui-va-
de-soi or naturalness that makes the oxymoronic phrase “a europhone
West African writer” and his product, “[West] African literature in
European languages,” acceptable. A similar process would validate

4 Throughout this study, ‘mother tongue’ has to be understood as the

writer’s first language, or what linguists call L1. In the sociolinguistic arena,
the ‘mother tongue’, especially in mixed families, is very often the father’s
tongue. See Louis–Jean Calvet’s 1984 sample surveys in Bamako, Mali, recor-
ded in his La Guerre des Langues (Paris: Payot, 1987): 98.
5 Decolonization refers to the shedding of colonial relics inherited from colo-

nial history in all spheres (not only the socio-economico-political one), accom-
panied by an inward-looking, autarkic movement that will lead to the decolo-
nization of mentalities and is tied to economic de-linkage from the Western
powers.
6 See Tove Skutnabb–Kangas, Linguistic Genocide in Education—or World-

wide Diversity and Human Rights? (Mahwah N J & London: Lawrence Erl-
baum Associates, 2000).
´ (M)Other Tongue and the Third Code 3

such a ludicrous phrase as “Chinese literature of bantoid expression,”

were the Bantus of Africa to colonize mainland China. The naturalness
of “African europhone literature” should not be belittled, since “Afri-
can literature,” in non-African university curricula, most often refers
to African literature in European languages. What interests us here is
the paradox that subtends this naturalness and how this paradox is
gradually being subsumed under the search for a third code. In at-
tempting to locate this literary third code in the overlapping space
between other tongue and mother tongue, the critic and reader are in-
vited to uncover the cultural layers and contesting worlds in ferment
behind the apparently homogeneous English or French of these
works. What, indeed, lies behind the seemingly odd statement ‘Ma
sœur, je suis en vous’, or the more poetic ‘on the evening of the
brother of tomorrow’?
The book’s metaphor is that of the palimpsest. Being a writing-
material, the original writing of which has been effaced to make room
for a second, the palimpsest best describes what is at work in the West
African texts under scrutiny. They are indeed palimpsests, in that,
behind the scriptural authority of the European language, the earlier,
imperfectly erased remnants of the African language can still be per-
ceived. When deciphering the palimpsest, what is recovered is the
trace in filigree of such African (source-) languages as Wolof, Ndût,
Mandinka, Fanti, Yoruba, Igbo and Ijọ. .At the same time, one can
catch a glimpse of linguistic stratification: i.e. the multi-tiered system
that differentially distributes the European language, the African lan-
guage(s), and the languages in contact.
Indigenization7 refers to the writer’s attempt at textualizing linguis-
tic differentiation and at conveying African concepts, thought-pat-
terns, and linguistic features through the ex-colonizer’s language. The
present study provides a contrastive examination of the methods the
writer has elaborated to ‘indigenize’ the European tongue in the post-

I have rejected the term ‘africanization’ because of its association with the
7

sharing of the booty of vacancies created by the departure of colonial officials.

I therefore favour the term ‘indigenization’ (also called ‘nativization’ by lin-
guists), because of its general applicability to any literary work written in a
postcolonial situation of ‘diglossia’ (see Chapter 2), within and beyond Africa.
‘Indigenization’, as it is used in this study, is devoid of the pejorative conno-
tations that the French noun and adjective – indigène – has acquired. On indi-
genization in lusophone Africa, see, for example, David Brookshaw, “Da orali-
dade à literatura e da literatura à oralidade,” Angolê: Artes, letras, ideias 1.1
(1990): 31–34.
4 THE AFRICAN PALIMPSEST ´

colonial West African novel of French and English expression. Of

interest here is how indigenization is achieved. How can a europhone
text incorporate in its linguistic and referential texture the languages
autochthonous to West Africa? For, when indigenized, it is no longer
metropolitan French or English that appears on the page but another
register reminiscent of the dominant European language, whether it
be a Nigerian pidgin vaguely suggestive of a variety of English or a
French that has ‘something African about it’. The study therefore also
provides a literary-aesthetic assessment of the new West African regis-
ter(s) wrought from the other tongue.

A Indigenization in the Text

If one posits that language, in its tropological and epistemic structure
(as langue and langage), is an expression of culture, to make the foreign
language one’s own entails using the European language as the con-
veyor of African culture. The West African writer of English or French
expression has thus superposed two apparently irreconcilable sets of
elements – foreign and indigenous – which in vivo have remained
separate; he has ‘indigenized’ the foreign language, thereby redefining
and subverting its foreignness. In the process, however, an ‘interlan-
guage’8 has come into being. This new, indigenized medium con-
ceived in vitro holds out promise that the imported language can carry
the indigenous culture. The question is whether this interlanguage or
third code can ‘successfully’ explore the space between – the hyphen
between mother tongue and other tongue.
Indigenization works in the text – but what text(s)? The discussion
is here limited to the postcolonial West African novel of French and
English expression; such a confinement is not fortuitous. West Africa
is a linguistic crucible which, unlike North Africa and the southern
bantoid areas of broader affinity, is part of the zone of linguistic frag-
mentation that extends west to east from Guinea to the Horn of Africa.
It is also the only area in Africa where cultural diversity has found ex-
pression in a literature in two originally European languages – English
and French.

8 ‘Interlanguage’ is a term borrowed from Larry Selinker to designate the

“approximative” linguistic system used by second-language learners. It is here

used in its broad acceptation as third code. See Selinker, “Interlanguage,”
International Review of Applied Linguistics 10.2 (May 1972): 209–31.
´ (M)Other Tongue and the Third Code 5

The europhone novel provides an adequate testing-ground for the

practice of indigenization – the novel being a flexible, polysemic form
that can, as Mikhail Bakhtin amply demonstrated,9 incorporate other
genres and other registers as well. As such, the analysis of its language
poses interesting problems valid for other genres and other postcolo-
nial literatures. One could describe the novel as a bourgeois genre
borrowed from the European literary tradition and instrumental in
splitting up the West African collectivist mind-set to accommodate a
Western European brand of individualism and its Umwelt born out of
market production. On the other side of the watershed, it can also be
seen as the inevitable offspring of the oral art or ‘orature’ of Africa.
Although the origins of that species remain controversial, the euro-
phone African novel is best described as a hybrid product which is
looking ‘inward’ into African orature and literature and ‘outward’
into imported literary traditions. It is its language, however, that has
deflected the African novel from its inward course.
The novels selected are by anglophone and francophone West Afri-
can writers from Senegal, the Ivory Coast, Ghana and Nigeria. They
cover about three decades of the postcolonial period in West African
nation-states: that is, from roughly 1960 to 1990, with occasional in-
cursions into the 1990s and beyond. For contrastive purposes, refe-
rences will also be made to works published as early as the turn of the
twentieth century and to writers from other countries such as Mali,
Guinea, Cameroon, Kenya and South Africa, on the basis of the fact
that these writers all face a similar postcolonial predicament and are
grappling with more or less the same linguistic issues. The case-stu-
dies required for the proper assessment of indigenization (i.e. ‘relexi-
fication’) bear on units sampled from African languages, from Sene-
gal’s Wolof to Nigeria’s Central Igbo. In my effort to ascertain the
degree of indigenization in the works selected, I consulted linguistic
informants whose expertise, offered me during the late-1980s, remains
valid at the beginning of the twenty-first century. A few names have
been added. They were and are native and/or expert speakers of
these languages, and were solicited at that time and later on the basis
of their expertise and availability. A list of these informants is appen-
ded to the present chapter.

9 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Hol-

quist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1994): 301–
31, especially “Heteroglossia in the novel,” and Julie Kristeva, “Recherche
pour une sémanalyse,” in Sémiotique (Paris: Seuil, 1969): 112.
6 THE AFRICAN PALIMPSEST ´

Chapter 2 presents the West African europhone writer as a pro-

ducer of hegemonic literature at an historical, psycholinguistic and
sociolinguistic interface. He is, in fact, straddling two eras: a colonial
past of what one sociolinguist has called “glottophagia” and a future
of promotion and full rehabilitation of his language(s). Because both
dynamics are at work in the writer’s act of indigenization, Chapter 2
examines in detail the two facets of the writer’s dual background, with
paradigmatic reference to Nigeria and Senegal. Because indigeniza-
tion is primarily an attempt to subvert the dominance of the European
language, the chapter investigates the origins of that dominance and
the three main functions in which the European languages have estab-
lished that dominance: as official languages and lingua francas; as
media of instruction and curricular subjects; and as media of literary
expression. Although only the last function is directly related to our
argument, it is crucial to examine the other two functions, for they all
constitute the politics (including the policies) of language or the
‘glottopolitics’ of West Africa that are going to determine the degree of
indigenization in the europhone West African novel. (More detailed
consideration will be given to French glottopolitics, as the policies of
language repression here are structured in an unprecedented, sys-
tematic fashion, and because they account for the seeming under-
representation of francophone texts in the present study.) It is against
the europhone writer’s dual background that the subsequent chapters
must be understood. Chapters 3 and 4 examine two methods of in-
digenization: ‘pidginization’ and ‘relexification’.
Chapter 3, on “Pidginization and Multilingual Strategies,” de-
scribes the indigenization of the europhone text (especially dialogue)
by two of the auxiliary languages which resulted from the language-
contact situation in West Africa: pidgin English and ‘Pitineg’. While
concentrating on Nigerian Pidgin English, the chapter studies the
movement from early colonial efforts at (re)presenting pidgin, as in
Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson (1939), on to the creation of a ‘pidgin per-
sonality’, as in Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana (1961), through its various repre-
sentations as ‘baby-talk’ and ‘bush talk’. ‘Code-switching’ between the
European language, the African language and the languages in con-
tact is then discussed in terms of ‘acts of identity’ and ‘illocutionary
speech-acts’. Some scriptural problems emerging from the representa-
tion of code-switching will also be discussed, along with the gradual
erosion of the pidginized medium, a later development which sets the
stage for the subsequent discussion of Ken Saro–Wiwa’s novel in “rot-
ten English.”
´ (M)Other Tongue and the Third Code 7

Chapter 4 identifies the indigenization of the European language by

the indigenous African language(s) as ‘relexification’ and accordingly
develops case-studies from novels demonstrating relexification from
Igbo, Ijọ, Mandinka, Wolof and Yoruba. The end-result is a new regis-
ter of communication which asserts itself as a third code located out-
side of the European language/African language dualism and linguis-
tically epitomizes the conceptual interface between two systems of
patronage, to which I referred earlier. The case-studies aim at reveal-
ing the mechanics of relexification as this differs from interpretative
translation, verbatim translation, auto-translation or calquing result-
ing from poor or approximate second-language acquisition. Thus,
calquing from Yoruba in Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard
(1952) is contrasted with lexico-semantic and morpho-syntactic relexi-
fication and its resulting textual violence in Gabriel Okara and Ahma-
dou Kourouma. The site of relexification being generally a subset in
the novel, which is rooted in a specific ethnicity, the ‘ethno-text’ is
discussed with paradigmatic reference to the Igbo ethno-text, and its
fragmentation with reference to the Fanti substratum in Ayi Kwei Ar-
mah’s Fragments (1969).
In the process of decolonizing the language of literature, the West
African europhone writer has used, misused, and abused the Euro-
pean language, fusing it with other registers. Such wide-ranging
responses constitute strategies in potentia. Indeed, by elaborating such
methods (‘pidginization’ and ‘relexification’), the West African writer
is strategically seeking decolonization and liberation from the vast
colonial discourse in which writing was previously rooted. But, as in
the war-like ritual of fighting the enemy according to one’s own rules
and conditions, strategies can backfire. Indeed, although indigeniza-
tion provides a temporary solution to an artistic problem, the enforced
proximity of foreign and indigenous elements may result in a mutual
cannibalism which belies the purpose of indigenization and invali-
dates its premise. As such, Chapters 3 and 4 hint at the counterpro-
ductiveness of the decolonizing process or its ‘backfiring’ – its recoil-
ing on the originator.
With reference to Igbo in anglophone texts and to Dioula, Wolof,
Mandinka and Ndût in their francophone counterparts, Chapter 5
examines two methods of indigenization which aim at naming and
identifying the – metonymic – gap between mother tongue and other
tongue without necessarily bridging it: ‘cushioning’ (the fact of tag-
ging a European-language explanation onto an African word) and
‘contextualization’ (the fact of providing areas of immediate context so
8 THE AFRICAN PALIMPSEST ´

as to make the African word intelligible without resorting to transla-

tion). These methods, which have their roots in early ethnological
characterization and its informational use of language, antedate and
will survive other methods as long as the europhone writer posits the
untransferability of the African logos. Whereas some texts attempt to
name the gap and harbour the visible traces of the mother tongue (as
opposed to the quasi-invisible traces left in filigree in the relexified
text), other texts aim at closing the gap between mother tongue and
other tongue, both of which are ousted by a pidgin of sorts, as in Saro–
Wiwa’s first-person narrative Sozaboy (1985). This novel embodies the
move beyond the original trace towards a potential, albeit experimen-
tal, tertium quid.
By way of conclusion, Chapter 6 outlines the conceptual stages to-
wards new outlets for the expression of African culture beyond the
europhone text, such as film. The conclusion further investigates the
possibility of a temporal (and possibly qualitative) progression from
europhone to African-language writing, as it parallels the recent glot-
topolitical movement towards ‘othering’ the European language in
West African nation-states. Along with the emergence of a tiny pidgin
corpus, the ultimate ‘othering’ takes place in the practice of auto-trans-
lation, which redefines the dichotomy between mother tongue and
other tongue. The result may be that dreaming in foreign languages,
to echo the epigraph, will be supplanted by a lucid vision of a new
African-language writing, the actual translation of which will reveal
other palimpsests.

B. Indigenization in Context
As already hinted in the first part of this chapter, indigenization be-
longs to a tradition of literary and linguistic revanchism that is as old
as conquest itself and is inscribed in vengeance and violence. Already
in the myth of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9), the multiplicity of languages is
conceived of as a divine punishment or curse confounding the ambi-
tious, monolingual men of Shinear and dispersing them all over the
earth. Language variance results from divine punishment, which
humans were going to perpetuate by cursing the Other’s language as
a hopelessly inferior jabber or, as the Greeks or Romans would have it,
as the ‘non-language’ of barbarians.
Such outright denial of one’s language has understandably led to a
counter-curse. As is well-known, Shakespeare’s Caliban was denied a
´ (M)Other Tongue and the Third Code 9

language of his own and he appropriated the colonizer’s language in

order to curse him with it. By envisioning linguistic subversion and
native insurrection at a time of colonial expansion, Caliban has be-
come the inexhaustible symbol of the colonized insurgent.10 The post-
colonial discourse of decolonization is thus branded by both the
Babelian curse and the Calibanic counter-curse. By the same token,
this discourse is also heir to the Prospero/Caliban and post-Enlighten-
ment dualism of Self/Other. This traditional dualism continues to
overdetermine postcolonial writing and criticism, as in Chinweizu’s
The West and the Rest of Us (1975) and, admittedly, in the psycho-
linguistic cleavage between mother tongue and other tongue.
Indigenization, at least at a first remove, is decolonization in the
third register. It is third because it is neither the one nor the other. This
search inexorably marks the ruptured postcolonial text as the site of
the pull between mother tongue and other tongue. In discursive
terms, this translates into what David Moody, referring to Soyinka’s
The Road (1965), has called “the ideological pull of the steeple and the
palm-wine shack” with, in-between, “the ragged fence,” a metaphor
for “the ‘hybrid’ margin itself.”11 Whether the West African euro-
phone writer is writing a text glutted with relexifying devices or in a
vibrant pseudo-pidgin, he is trying to fill a gap or a void by building a
fence or a bridge between two poles. The critic’s task is to locate this
gap (which, in sociological terms, may well be a great divide for the
population at large), in order to read between the layers of the palimp-
sest, which are metonymic of the mixture of discourses and affiliations
in the postcolonial text.
Indigenization of language in the europhone novel is not an iso-
lated phenomenon. The callisthenics of such an enterprise are funda-
mentally the same as the dynamics involved in the knotty poetry of
Négritude, the Québecois Gaston Miron’s attempt to décoloniser la
langue, Maghrebian terrorist writing, or any other attempt at forging a
literary language out of the elements of the dominant culture. Interest-
ing parallels can, indeed, be drawn between the europhone literatures
of West Africa and the Maghreb, although the Maghreb is both far and
near: that is, topographically close to sub-Saharan Africa while lying
at the westernmost edge of the Orient. The Moroccan Abdelkebir

10 See my own Tempests after Shakespeare (New York & Basingstoke: Macmil-

lan/Palgrave, 2002), esp. Part One: 9–103.

11 David Moody, “The Steeple and the Palm-Wine Shack: Wole Soyinka and

Crossing the Inter-Cultural Fence,” Kunapipi 11.3 (1989): 103 & 99.
10 THE AFRICAN PALIMPSEST ´

Khatibi is engaged in a similar quest for a code tiers. He defines that

third code as a bi-langue, which transforms the alterity of the foreign,
dominant language (i.e. French) into ‘hospitality’. The concept of bi-
langue, which is worked out in Amour bilingue (1983), is to be under-
stood against the background of decolonization redefined as
‘thinking-otherwise’ (pensée-autre).12
If one ventures across the geographical borders and ideological
margins of the old Mare Nostrum, one is confronted with a similar
quest for the third code. The Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, in his
campaign to revalorize demotic Greek (vs. katharevousa), took up the
challenge of making the third koine (rather than the spoken koines of
Hellenic or of Byzantine times) the medium of sophisticated writing.13
Whether looking across geographical borders or across disciplines,
one is confronted with the same violence or revisionist spirit, for lan-
guage domination has also preoccupied women, Third-World film-
makers, and Western deconstructors. The contemporaneity of such
enterprises with indigenization of language on African soil should not
be surprising. They all belong to a twentieth-century trend which
aimed at subverting the linguistically codified and which also cham-
pioned Lacanian and other post-Freudian ‘anti-interpretative’ prac-
tices as the fertile ground for crossing psychoanalytic and literary
concerns.
The element of undecidability or the deconstructive practice of
‘split writing’ posited by Derrida et al. is functionally similar to lite-
rary decolonization in the third register. Both practices consist in
“marking the mysterious and disorienting play of hitherto invisible
concepts that reside, unnamed, in the gap between opposing terms.”14
Decolonization is therefore also deconstruction.15 There is, indeed, a
correspondence in terminology between the European and American

12 Abdelkebir Khatibi, “Bilinguisme et littérature,” in Maghreb Pluriel (Mont-

pellier: Fata Morgana, 1983). For an elaboration of this point, see my article
“Linguistic Guerrilla in the Maghrebian and Sub-Saharan Europhone Novel,”
Africana Journal 15 (1990): 276–92.
13 Peter Bien, Kazantzakis and the Linguistic Revolution in Greek Literature

(Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1972): 264.

14 Vincent Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism (London: Hutchinson, 1983): 180.

15 See my own “Encre blanche et Afrique originelle: Derrida et la postcolo-

nialité,” in Passions de la littérature: Avec Jacques Derrida, ed. Michel Lisse (Paris:
Galilée, 1996), 261–74. See also, for instance, Karin Barber, “Yoruba Oriki and
Deconstructive Criticism,” Research in African Literatures 15.4 (Winter 1984):
497–518.
´ (M)Other Tongue and the Third Code 11

deconstruction of the logocentrism of Western metaphysics and the

West African deconstructive use of European languages. If under-
stood not in terms of destruction but as meaning ‘to undo/analyse’ a
given order of priorities in language, deconstruction becomes an inter-
esting way of reading and writing West African texts, and of eluci-
dating the motivation or justification for such linguistic experimenta-
tion and the indigenization of language-as-system.
As we move towards global cross-fertilization or métissage of cul-
tures and languages, writers and other rhetors are inevitably drawn
into and engaged in an overall search for a third code. The ‘Third
World’, as the site of this third code, may well turn out to be the privi-
leged site for the artful coexistence of postcolonial syncretism, the
increased ‘diversification’16 of its literatures and the valorization of its
‘inter-national’ languages, which will vie with their ‘international’
European counterparts. This conflict is already being waged in the
palimpsest, which is here heralded as the major icon of cross-cultural
syncreticity and linguistic métissage in non-Western literature and
criticism.

16 Albert Gérard contended that African literatures in European languages

are now moving towards increased “differentiation,” “diversification” and the

fragmentation of the literary corpus into smaller, if not “tribal” “sub-sub-sets”;
Gérard, European-Language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa (Budapest: Aka-
démiai Kiado, 1987): 1263. I believe this still holds true.
12 THE AFRICAN PALIMPSEST ´

Linguistic Informants (as consulted in 1986–88, with

additions marked by an asterisk*)
FANTI
Mrs Patience Gibbs, Department of Drama, University of Bristol, U.K.;
*Mr. Joachim (Yandawa) Bayah, Canada.
IGBO
Mr Victor Manfredi, Department of Anthropology, Harvard Univer-
sity, USA;
Prof. Philip A. Nwachukwu, Department of Linguistics, University of
Nigeria at Nsukka, Nigeria;
Mr Oko Okoro, Department of English, University of Lagos, Nigeria.
IJO
Dr Gabriel Okara, Diobu, Port Harcourt, Nigeria;
Professor Kay Williamson, Department of Linguistics, University of
Port Harcourt, Nigeria.
MANDINKA
Professor Jean Derive, Université de Savoie, Chambéry, France;
Mr Moussa Diaby, Direction Nationale d’Alphabétisation Fontionnelle
et de Linguistique Appliquée, Bamako, Mali;
*Dr. Claire Grégoire, Linguistique africaine, Musée Royal de l’Afrique
Centrale, Tervueren, Belgium;
Dr Karim Traore, Lehrstuhl für Romanische Wissenschaft und Kom-
paratistik, Universität Bayreuth, West Germany.
NDÛT
Mr Jean Gerem Ciss, Théâtre National Sorano, Dakar;
Mr Gabriel Gueye, Département de Linguistique, Université Cheikh
Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal.
WOLOF
Professor Papa Samba Diop, Lehrstuhl für Romanische Wissenschaft
und Komparatistik, Universität Bayreuth, West Germany;
Professor Souleymane Faye, Centre de Linguistique Appliquée de
Dakar, Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal.
YORUBA
Professor Yiwola Awoyale, Department of Linguistics, University of
Ilorin, Nigeria.

´
 2 Glottopolitics and Diglossia
in West Africa

La destinée de l’homme est d’être confronté

aux langues et non pas à la langue.
— Louis-Jean Calvet, La Guerre des langues

T
HE MULTIPLICITY OF LANGUAGES and the concomitant
language-contact situation in West African nation-states have
always been a fertile soil for the germination of linguistic con-
jectures but also a source of challenge and discomfort for those euro-
phone writers eager to render this post-Babelian complexity in their
novels. Indeed, such writers produce a europhone literature in a very
complex and stratified context in which linguistic practice and usage
are distributed differentially in the social arena. That context is best
defined as ‘a situation of diglossia’.
The term ‘diglossia’ was first used by the American linguist Charles
A. Ferguson after the Greek word meaning ‘bilingualism’. Yet it dif-
fers from the latter, as Joshua Fishman argued later, since diglossia
can exist without bilingualism and vice versa.1 A situation of diglossia
is generally understood as one in which the linguistic functions of
communication are distributed in a binary fashion between a cul-
turally prestigious language spoken by a minority and with a written
tradition, and another language, generally widely spoken but devoid
of prestige. The latter is, in numerous cases, a dialect of the prestige
tongue.2 The French Marxist-influenced sociolinguist Louis–Jean Cal-

1 See Charles A. Ferguson, “Diglossia,” Word 15 (1959): 325–40, and Joshua

Fishman, “Bilingualism With and Without Diglossia, Diglossia With and

Without Bilingualism,” Journal of Social Issues 32 (1967): 29–38.
2 This is an adaptation of Alain Ricard’s definition in his “Introduction“ to

Diglossie et littérature (Bordeaux–Talence: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme

14 THE AFRICAN PALIMPSEST ´

vet has re-read Ferguson’s notion of prestige as power, for a language

devoid of prestige is a language which carries a culture that has no
power conferred by history and is therefore not recognized.3
For our purposes, the sociolinguistic concept of diglossia needs to
be expanded to include not only Ferguson’s genetically linked ‘high’
and ‘low’ varieties (to which he erroneously attributed scripturality
and orality, respectively) but unrelated languages as well. Indeed, in a
country like Ghana, Ewe is not a dialect of English and has a written
literature of its own but, functionally, Ewe is to English what a domi-
nated or subordinate language is to a dominant or superordinate lan-
guage. It is thus functionally what, for instance, Haitian Kreyòl (Ayi-
syin) is to French or what colloquial Arabic or Berber are to French,
classical Arabic and modern official Arabic. Also, the West African
auxiliary languages resulting from languages in contact such as
pidgins have a diglossic relation to the dominant European language
that is similar to the more conventional relation between a prestige or
power language and its regional dialect. Conversely, a statistically
dominant language like Wolof in Senegal can be considered as being
hegemonic like French and would thus be in diglossia with a minor
language like Ndût. We can therefore advance the notions of ‘tri-
glossia’ or even ‘polyglossia’, and ‘intertwined diglossias’,4 although
the term ‘diglossia’ has here been retained for convenience.
Just as diglossia covers many declensions, the relationship between
dominant and dominated language has taken on many forms. A case
in point is Basil Bernstein’s dialectic of ‘elaborated’ vs. ‘restricted’
codes.5 A situation of diglossia can be further complicated by the
power-relationship between oral and written languages (and, one
might add, between the oral and written forms of one language) as
well as by the political privileging of one language over another. What
is more, the dialectic underlying this situation can readily be trans-

d’Aquitaine, 1976): 13. See also his Texte moyen et texte vulgaire: Essai sur
l’écriture en situation de diglossie (Doctorat d’État, 27 February 1981, Université
de Bordeaux III; in microfilm: Lille-Thèses, I S S N 0294-1767).
3 Louis–Jean Calvet, La Guerre des langues (Paris: Payot, 1987): 44–46. He re-

vises the notion of diglossia as defined by Ferguson and Fishman and elabo-
rates a French-based five-tiered typology (49–59).
4 Calvet, La Guerre des langues, 47.

5 Basil Bernstein, “Social Class, Language and Socialization,“ in Language in

Education, A Source Book, prepared by the Language and Learning Course

Team at the Open University (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul in association
with the Open University Press, 1972): 62–78.
´ Glottopolitics and Diglossia in West Africa 15

lated into the dialectical relationship between class groups within a

bourgeois class-system.6 Regardless of the taxonomy used, the fact
remains that, whether it is English, French or Portuguese, the Euro-
pean language derived its power from colonial history and had little
trouble imposing itself on the African language(s) because of its three-
fold power: (1) it is a written language and therefore a modern lan-
guage, since, in popular awareness at least, writing is associated with
modernity; (2) it has a literary tradition articulated around the concept
of authorship; and (3) it is a ‘textualized’ or chirographically control-
led language: i.e. a language tied to the text.7
Translated into literary and cultural terms, this linguistic diglossia
imbues the rapport between the highly prestigious literature in Euro-
pean languages and the early ethno-literary, epic and folkloric modes
of African orature (as opposed to the more modern emanations of
writing in African languages). This overall diglossia persists despite
the overwhelming number of African languages (roughly 1,250) used
in sub-Saharan Africa, which make up over 25% of the 4,000-or-so
world languages used by the five billion people who are currently
living on the planet.8 Needless to say, the Babel of African languages
has often been evoked to deter efforts at promoting these languages
and organizing functional literacy campaigns and to further justify the
rule of the one God-given European language over the post-Babelian
tongues of Africa.
If one postulates that writing binds the imaginative, authorial con-
sciousness to society in a special kind of symbiosis, then writing is the
result of a transformation: the transmutation of literary language by
its social objective.9 If one further posits a ‘political unconscious’, cul-
tural artifacts and literature are laid bare as “socially symbolic acts.”10

6 See, for instance, H.E. Newsum, Class, Language and Education (Trenton N J :

Africa World Press, 1990).

7 See Walter Ong, “Orality, Literacy, and Medieval Textualization,” New

Literary History 16.1 (Autumn 1984): 1–11. Incidentally, it is the threefold power
of Learned Latin in medieval Europe which helped it triumph over the “low
vernaculars.”
8 See François Ndoba Gasana, “Les Langues en Afrique: carte commentée,”

Le Courrier 119 (January–February 1990): 48-50.

9 Cf “L’écriture est le langage littéraire transformé par sa destination so-

ciale,“ in Barthes, Le degré zéro de l’écriture suivi de Eléments de sémiologie (Paris:

Gonthier, 1969): 17–18.
10 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic

Act (London: Methuen, 1981): 20.

16 THE AFRICAN PALIMPSEST ´

The imaginative oeuvre of the West African writer who writes in a

European language will thus inevitably be affected by the situation of
diglossia and will reflect, to some extent, the stratification of lan-
guages in West Africa as well as their warring and overlapping ten-
dencies.
As already alluded to, diglossia is the result of a social situation,
whereas bilingualism and polyglottism are individual practices. A
writer may thus be monolingual yet live in a situation of diglossia.
The West African writer, for his part, is a polyglot writer writing in a
situation of acute diglossia in a multilingual state. The language of the
literature such a writer produces can thus be either the result of the
interplay of linguistic codes or registers in the social arena or a lite-
rary-aesthetic medium that bears no relation to the current use of the
European language in the social arena, or both. Whereas the first prac-
tice is ‘synchronic’ and arises out of a need to ‘represent’ linguistic
usage and differentiation as it is found to exist in West Africa (see
Chapter 3 below), the second practice is ‘diachronic’ and corresponds
to an artistic need to forge or create a new literary medium (see Chap-
ter 4 below). The discrepancies between the synchronic and the dia-
chronic practices will be touched on in due course, but only a thor-
ough analysis in applied linguistics can reveal more fundamental di-
vergences.
Both practices are subversive, in that they shatter earlier premisses.
The synchronic practice, with its representational thrust, seeks to re-
vise the improbable use of metropolitan French or English in early
West African literature. It does so by accounting for West African lan-
guages (including pidgins) in a European-language narrative. The
subversiveness of the diachronic practice lies in the forging of a new
language out of the elements of a dominant culture. In the light of the
traditional Saussurean opposition, one could argue that the writer, in
his synchronic practice, uses a langue (i.e. the social facet of language),
whereas he uses a parole (i.e. the individual manifestation of language)
in his diachronic practice. As we shall see, the Saussurean opposition
dissolves as the two practices overlap.
The fact remains that, however subversive such practices may be,
the West African europhone writer’s oeuvre is hegemonic. Ngugi wa
Thiong’o has even labelled the whole of African literary production in
European languages an “Afro-European literature” paying lip-service
to neocolonialism. Indeed, by writing in a European prestige language
that is not spoken, let alone read, by more than a few million speakers
in Africa, the writer participates, however inadvertently, in the further
´ Glottopolitics and Diglossia in West Africa 17

canonization of European-language literature. In this respect, he dif-

fers from the writer who writes in the dominated languages (e.g., D.O.
Fagunwa in Yoruba, or Gakaara wa Wanjau in Kikuyu). He also
differs somewhat from the popular self-taught writer who struggles to
establish the normalcy and literariness of his work in the dominant
language through the use of archaisms and the ostentatious flaunting
of the signifier, as with the Onitsha Market pamphleteers or Félix Cou-
choro from Togo.11
Even if the writer has no alternative to writing in a European lan-
guage, his act of writing in the dominant European tongue is political
or, more precisely, glottopolitical – that is, tied to language politics.12
The writer’s decision to indigenize that language, however personal
that choice may be, is glottopolitical as well, for he thereby questions
the historically and politico-socially established authority of the Euro-
pean language. By textualizing language differentiation and diglossia,
he tries to close the gap between culture and language and defies the
colonial tyranny of linguistic homogeneity. Indigenization will thus
vary in type and degree, depending on the writer’s psychosocial rela-
tion to the dominant language. This relation is shaped in part by that
influential branch of glottopolitics called ‘language policy’. Indeed, the
sociopolitical, hegemonic importance of the European language does
not exist in esse, in that the European language does not have in its
morphology an innate ability to dominate. Its dominance is conferred
by colonial history, cultured in vitro, and perpetuated by state-bound
language policies.13 Language-policies being markedly different in
‘francophone’ and ‘anglophone’ West Africa, indigenization of literary
French and English will vary in degree and scope accordingly. Char-
acteristically, references to the repressive European-language educa-

11See Alain Ricard, Félix Couchoro (Paris: Présence africaine, 1987).

12I shall use the term ‘glottopolitics’ and its derivatives to refer to language
politics or what is called in French la politique linguistique and its pragmatic
application in language planning (a term first introduced by Einaar Haugen in
1959) and language policy (first introduced by Joshua Fishman in 1970). Here,
it also refers to the relation between language politics and the hegemonic act
of writing in the dominant language. See J.D. Palmer, Glottopolitics and Lan-
guage Ecology, cited in Henri Gobard, L’Aliénation linguistique (Paris: Flamma-
rion, 1976): 60; and the many ‘glotto’-based coinages such as Glottochronologie
und Lexikostatistik by Johann Tischler (1973) and Glottologia Indeuropea by Vit-
tore Pisani (1971).
13 Calvet, La Guerre des langues, 153–60.
18 THE AFRICAN PALIMPSEST ´

tional system are more numerous in the francophone novel than in its
anglophone counterpart.

A The First Glottophagi

In many ways, glottopolitics in West Africa has been an extension of
divine punishment by adding the colonial and postcolonial pheno-
menon of ‘glottophagia’ to the original curse of multilingualism. The
term ‘glottophagia’ was first introduced by Louis–Jean Calvet in Lin-
guistique et colonialisme (1974) to refer to the linguistic colonization of
Africa. Linguistic imperialism is presented as the most insidious and
pervasive aspect of colonialism, for, more efficiently than economic or
political imperialism, it depersonalized the colonized to the extent of
estranging him from his own language and linguistic group. This was
achieved by demoting African languages to the status of ‘patois’ or
‘dialects’ in a way analogous to the Victorians’ demotion, in their
vocabulary, of African kings to chiefs and of non-Muslim priests to
“witch-doctors.” This process of linguistic alienation normally culmi-
nates in the colonized’s belief in the innate superiority of the colo-
nizer’s language.
Glottophagia thus refers to the fact that many West African tongues
were ‘devoured’ by the colonizing powers and supplanted by the
European languages:
Le premier anthropophage est venu d’Europe. Il a dévoré le colonisé
[…] il a dévoré ses langues; glottophage donc.14

Calvet pushes the argument even further by suggesting that the prac-
tice of linguistics before the turn of the century inexorably completed
the process of glottophagia in the colonies under European rule:
La linguistique a été jusqu’à l’aube de notre siècle une manière de nier
la langue des autres peuples, cette négation, avec d’autres, constituant
le fondement idéologique de notre “supériorité”, de la supériorité de
l’Occident chrétien sur les peuples “exotiques” que nous allions asser-
vir joyeusement.15

In the latter part of the twentieth century, linguistics had a much

nobler purpose, which was to serve world development, as the many

14 Louis–Jean Calvet, Linguistique et colonialisme (Paris: Payot, 1974): 10.

15 Calvet, Linguistique et colonialisme, 10.
´ Glottopolitics and Diglossia in West Africa 19

functional-literacy campaigns attest, from Mali’s rebellious Ban-

manankan to the Seychelles’ Seselwa. Literary stylistics or, for lack of
a better phrase, the linguistics of the novel can, in turn, help unearth
the negated African tongues living in the fibres of indigenized French
or English. Ironically, as will be illustrated later, the African language
can itself be ‘devoured’ in the process of indigenization.
If we omit the linguistic peripeteia of the slave-trade era, we may
trace the beginnings of institutional linguistic imperialism in Africa
back to the colonizer’s taxonomic enterprise following the scramble
for Africa by the European powers. By the time the partition was
settled at the 1884–85 Berlin Conference, already designated areas had
been re-baptized, and ethno-linguistic borders were artificially created
that were later to hinder the development of national unity and thus
of national cultures. This colonial process of un-naming and of sub-
sequently re-naming was extended to the postcolonial era and affected
all fields: language terminology (e.g., Guinea’s Bassari, re-named
Onëyan); toponymy (e.g., Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe); and even anthro-
ponymy, as in Zaïre, formerly the Congo and now Democratic Repub-
lic of Congo, where ‘citoyen/citoyenne/maman’ replaced ‘madame/
monsieur/mademoiselle’. This process is slow and never final, and
the colonial terminology is sometimes retained for convenience (e.g.,
Peul[h] for Pular).
The two main factions of European ‘glottophagi’ – the French and
the English – enforced different language policies that were to have a
markedly different impact on the postcolonial administrations of
modern West African nation-states and on those novelists who wrote
in the imposed European medium.
The French policy of centralism and assimilation in West Africa re-
pressed the writing and the teaching of African languages to such an
extent that some of them have been reduced to writing only very
belatedly. They were “condemned to orality,” as Olympe Bhêly–Que-
num from Benin put it,16 in a world where papyrophagic Europeans
had forcibly introduced the Enlightenment notion of writing as the
visible sign of Reason. This “glottophagic Malthusianism,” as Gérard
termed it17 after the British economist Malthus, who advocated the

16 Olympe Bhêly–Quenum during the first International Convention of

Francophone Literatures at Padua in 1983; quoted by Albert Gérard, “Oralité,

glottophagie, créolisation: Problématique de la littérature africaine,” Bulletin
des séances de l’Académie Royale d’Outre-Mer 34.2 (1988): 263.
17 Gérard, “Oralité, glottophagie, créolisation,” 265.
20 THE AFRICAN PALIMPSEST ´

slowing-down of (re)production through moral constraint and the

population checks of war, famine, and epidemic, resulted in a meticu-
lous form of dirigisme linguistique in French-ruled West Africa. Conse-
quently, literature in African languages has been less considerable
than that produced by its counterpart under British rule, although
Senegalese Muslims had a written literature in Arabic, Peulh and
Wolof, and a few Togolese authors were influenced by the example of
Ewe writers from Ghana.
In francophone Africa, the classroom becomes the seat of linguistic
imperialism, and the school curriculum enforces the norm and its
canons. The example of Senegal best illustrates what Louis–Jean Cal-
vet refers to as the glottophagic practice of linguistics. As inspector of
primary schools in Senegal, A. Davesne planned to “franciser toute
l’A O F [Afrique Occidentale Française],” and his French-language pri-
mary reader, Mamadou et Bineta, went a long way towards doing just
that. His doctrine was expounded in La Langue française, langue de
civilisation en Afrique Occidentale Française,18 which was written to
counter a statement made by M. Brachet about the utopian impossi-
bility of frenchifying the school system in Indochina. In this fifteen-
page-long booklet, French is presented as an ‘instrument of civiliza-
tion’ and a language of interethnic peace in the Babel of African lan-
guages. As Calvet appositely remarks, Davesne’s discourse rests on
the dichotomy between language and dialect, crystallized in eigh-
teenth-century France, and on the concomitant dichotomy between
civilized and primitive so dear to nineteenth-century thinkers like
Gobineau.19 Behind Davesne’s use of the dichotomy French language
vs. African dialect lies a certain linguistic and cultural evolutionism,
whereby dialectal and weaker species are doomed to extinction.
Along similar lines, abstract thinking and sophisticated terminology
are conventionally ascribed to the users of the ‘language’, whereas
cognitive deficiency verging on mental arrieration (usually associated
with the peasantry and rural folk) is ascribed to the users of a ‘dialect’.
To the Ivorian Jean–Marie Adiaffi, the institutionalization of that false
dichotomy is a political, hence extralinguistic, choice. Much more than
does its anglophone counterpart, the francophone novel effortlessly

18 By A. Davesne (Dakar: I F A N Library, 1933). See also M. Brachet,

“L’œuvre scolaire de la France en Indochine,” in L’Enseignement public (1932),

and Louis–Jean Calvet, Langue, corps, société (Paris: Payot, 1979): 128.
19 Calvet, Linguistique et colonialisme, 78–79.
´ Glottopolitics and Diglossia in West Africa 21

harbours the writer’s rhetoric in the way a manifesto would. Thus

Adiaffi writes in La Carte d’identité (1980):
Il existe une différence fondamentale entre un dialecte et une langue.
Et si l’on réduit nos langues nationales à de simples et pauvres dia-
lectes, c’est que déjà un choix politique est opéré. Et le choix politique a
signé leur condamnation à mort.20

More so than English, French emerged as the most eloquent instru-

ment of cultural domination and eradication. In his ardent franco-
philia, Léopold Sédar Senghor extolled French as the only medium
capable of conveying the African contribution to the Civilisation de
l’universel. In 1954, he was unreservedly lauding the richness of the
Senegalo-Guinean group of languages, flaunting their extensive
vocabulary, the complexity of their syntax and ‘tool-words’ as well as
their innate rhythm.21 But, in 1962, he presented these same languages
as invertebrates in need of a backbone and spinal discs to be borrowed
from the French language. In the grand manichaean field of Hellenic,
Cartesian Reason and Negro Emotion, he deemed that the French
“syntaxe de subordination” could alone carry the weight of reasoning
or active thought, unlike the Negro-African “syntaxe de juxtaposition
[…] de l’émotion,” thereby ignoring the fact that the tonal system
often marks the distinction between independent and subordinate
clauses.22 Evoking the universality of the French language, as Antoine
Rivarol did in 1782 and as Edgar Faure would in 1983,23 he never-
theless concluded that “il n’est pas question de renier les langues afri-
caines“ and consoled himself with the thought that “pendant des
siècles, peut-être des millénaires, elles seront encore parlées.”24 In the
meantime, the African language was regarded as a stagnant pool
where the Negro-African poet would fish for “les poissons des grandes

Jean–Marie Adiaffi, La Carte d’identité (Paris: Hatier, 1980): 46.

20

Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Langage et poésie négro-africaine,” Poésie et lan-

21

gage (Bruxelles: Éditions de la Maison du Poète, 1954), repr. in Liberté I: Négri-

tude et humanisme (Paris: Seuil, 1964): 159–72.
22 François Ndoba Gasana, “Les Langues en Afrique: carte commentée,” 48.

23 Antoine Rivarol, “Discours sur l’universalité de la langue française“

(1784) in Pensées diverses, suivi de Discours sur l’universalité de la langue française,

et Lettre sur le globe aérostatique, ed. & intro. Sylvain Menant (Paris: Desjon-
quières, 1998): 122. See also Léopold Sédar Senghor & Edgar Faure, Discours de
remerciement et de réception à l’Académie française (Paris: Seuil, 1984): 45–46.
24 Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Le français, langue de culture,” Esprit 311 (Nov-

ember 1962): 837–44; repr. in Liberté I, 358–63.

22 THE AFRICAN PALIMPSEST ´

profondeurs,” the archetypal icons that would enrich a French poetry of

African inspiration – diamonds nimbed in blood and sap.
A partisan of cultural métissage, Senghor was also a master of con-
tradictions. In 1934, he failed to appreciate the africanization of educa-
tion, but later supported the École Rurale Populaire, thereby scandal-
izing the elite.25 He also supported the Ghanaian educational experi-
ment by which the medium of instruction in primary schools was the
mother tongue until the fourth year. Senghor likened the young
Ghanaian to a palm-tree with its roots firmly anchored in tradition
and its head in the sun. He then extended the metaphor to the trans-
plant: “l’exemple d’une greffe parfaite, le scion européen étant planté
dans le sauvageon […] africain.”26
The West African ‘wild shoot’ thus grafted onto the European
‘scion’ is bound to suffer from the transplant. Early West African lite-
rature of French expression amply testifies to that enforced trans-
plantation, and not only on the linguistic level. In the Ivorian Bernard
Dadié’s Climbié (1956), the protagonist Climbié tells of the tribulations
of the young pupils and of his own, after the school inspectors, ex-
asperated by the students’ laxity towards French, outlawed the use of
African languages in the primary schools. The students would have to
wear, usually around the neck, the ‘token’ (Fr témoin) or ‘collar of
shame’ for speaking Agni or N’Zima.27 The ostracized pupil could
only get rid of the ill-fated token – a stick, a chicken bone, or an old
match-box – by passing it on to a fellow-student who would use the
mother tongue. Generally, the punishment for being left with the
token at the end of the schoolday was to do further exercises in the
language that the student had so irreverently flouted. Ironically, Dadié
in Climbié persistently refers to the “N’Zima dialect,” which confirms
the colonial dichotomy between language and dialect. Although he
denounces the oppressive educational system and the false dicho-
tomies and equations established by that system, he still falls prey to a
terminology that belies his enterprise.

25 See Martin Steins, “Black Migrants in Paris,“ in European-Language Writing in

Sub-Saharan Africa, ed. Albert Gérard (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiado, 1986): 377.
26 L.S. Senghor, “Le Problème des langues vernaculaires, ou le bilinguisme

comme solution,” Afrique nouvelle (3 January 1958), repr. in Liberté I, 159–72.

Let us note that Senghor’s proposal for an Afro-French biculturalism has little
to do with and even precludes hybridization and creolization.
27 Bernard B. Dadié, Climbié (Paris: Seghers, 1956): 11–16.
´ Glottopolitics and Diglossia in West Africa 23

This repressive system was also in force in anglophone Africa and

in other parts of the world.28 Recalling the corporal punishment the
culprits were given, Ngugi wa Thiong’o remarks that the Kenyan
children were thus taught how to be traitors to their immediate com-
munity. Subjected to such methods and exposed to the written litera-
ture on Africa by Europeans, the colonial child came to associate his
native or local language, as Ngugi remarks, “with low status, humi-
liation, corporal punishment, slow-footed intelligence and ability or
downright stupidity, non-intelligibility and barbarism.”29 To promote
local languages thus means restoring the individual’s pride in his lan-
guage(s); as a consciousness-raising endeavour, it is therefore politi-
cally dangerous.
Unlike the French policy of centralism and assimilation, British in-
direct rule in West African colonies allowed the African languages to
blossom to some extent even though their growth took place, as in the
A O F , within the borders of the Roman script30 and under the aegis of
Christian missionaries and the advocates of a Western-oriented lite-
racy. In addition to teaching English to ‘the natives’, the Protestant
missionaries committed about fifty African languages to writing and
translated into most of these the Bible, hymn books and other material
pertinent to their ‘civilizing mission’. Incidentally, the phenomenon of
translating from the European into the African language was reversed
in the 1980s when some African writers took it upon themselves to
translate their original African-language text into a European lan-
guage (see Chapter 6). Also, some ethnic groups under British rule
were suspicious of the alleged primacy of English. This is particularly

28See Guy Héraud, L’Europe des ethnies (Nice: Presses d’Europe, 1963): 72.
29Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, 18.
30 Prior to Arabic (ajami) writing and later franco- or anglography, Emma-

nuel Obiechina mentions the existence of proto-literate “ideo-diffusion“

scripts like Bamum, Vaï and Oberi Okaime as well as the Yoruba “Aroko“ sys-
tem, Ewe ideographs and Igbo chalk marks as underdeveloped ideographs,
unlike the Nsibidi script, “the only true ideographic script in West Africa,”
whose development, he speculates, was arrested by the introduction of West-
ern writing in West Africa; “Growth of Written Literature in English-Speaking
West Africa,” Présence africaine 66 (1968): 58–60. See also S.W. Koelle, Grammar
of the Vaï Language (London, 1854); on Nsibidi and Noum, D. Westermann, Les
Peuples et les civilisations d’Afrique (Paris, 1970); and D. Dalby, “The Indigenous
Script of West Africa,” African Language Studies, 8 (1967); 9 (1968); 10 (1969).
For a history of Arabic writing in West Africa, see Albert Gérard, African Lan-
guage Literatures (Washington D C : Three Continents, 1981): 27–47.
24 THE AFRICAN PALIMPSEST ´

true of Muslim groups with strong oral and literate traditions like the
Hausas of Northern Nigeria, who resisted Christianity and, to a cer-
tain extent, westernization.31 Thus, under British indirect rule, the
phenomenon of glottophagia did not have so strong a hold on West
African languages as it did in the colonies under French rule. It has
also been argued that this lesser degree of alienation has made Afri-
cans in British-controlled Africa more reluctant to accept the abstract-
ness of the intellectual cult of Négritude, although they themselves
had carved their own fetish– ‘the African personality’.32
Despite the relative absence of dirigisme linguistique, English (to
which has, of late, been added the American variety) remained a con-
veyor of Anglo-Saxon culture. It was and still is, like French, the
official language, the medium of instruction at the secondary and
tertiary levels, the language of government, the administration, and
the elite. Yet the very flexibility of the English language, a result of its
own linguistic development, allowed for its pidginization, a phenom-
enon that, on the French side, could barely bend the intrinsic rigidity
of the French language into Pitineg (see Chapter 3). This inherent
flexibility was, in turn, to facilitate the indigenization of English in the
West African novel of English expression.
The dominance of English and French nevertheless made itself felt
in two of their major roles: as media of instruction, and as official lan-
guages. Hence, what West African linguists and policy makers call a
politique linguistique (which is the necessary prelude to language-plan-
ning) aims at reducing the importance of these two colonial and post-
colonial functions. All efforts to raise the once-demoted status of
African languages rest on the idea that they can be rescued from colo-
nial domination and glottophagia and that their rehabilitation will
lead to the liberation of the African people. As spelled out at the 1971
Dar-es-Salaam meeting, the promotion of African languages aims at
reversing the inequality between African languages and the colonial
languages that continue to remain the official languages of most Afri-

31 See Albert Gérard, African Language Literatures, 39–45. On the sub-Saharan

Muslims’ suspicion of English, see Ali A. Mazrui, “Islam and the English
Language in East and West Africa,” in Language Use and Social Change, ed.
W.H. Whiteley (London: Oxford U P , 1971): 179–97.
32 See Ezekiel Mphahlele, The African Image (London: Faber & Faber, 1961):

25–26, and, for a counter-argument, Abiola Irele, “Negritude and African Per-
sonality,” in The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (London: Heine-
mann, 1981): 89–116, and “The Negritude Debate,” in European-Language
Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa, 387–88.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 CHAPTER XV
BUSTER DROPS OUT

The following day the team went to Crawford Mills and played a
nine made up of the youths of that small but busy town. About half
of the members were high school boys and the rest were from the
offices of the steel mills, many of the latter youths of twenty or even
twenty-two years. In the field the Crawford Mills aggregation
presented a peculiar spectacle, for their shortstop was a chubby
youth of no more than fifteen, while their catcher was at least
twenty-one, and their pitcher, a sort of human bean-pole, wore a
mustache! Lack of practice, however, was against the “Millers” and,
although Amesville had difficulty with that pitcher, she nevertheless
won out in the seventh inning with a mixture of hits, daring base
running, and errors, the latter by the opponent.
Joe, who had had hopes since the day before of getting another
chance at first base, was considerably disappointed at being left idle
on the bench until the eighth inning, when he was put in to run for
Tom Pollock, that youth having turned his ankle at first base. That
was all the playing Joe did, and he sat disgruntledly during the rest
of the game and watched Amesville hold her lead and ultimately
emerge the victor, eight runs to six.
The “Millers” were good losers and cheered the visitors heartily
when the contest was over, and their captain, the tall, mustached
pitcher, shook hands with Tom Pollock and hoped his ankle wasn’t
hurt much. Tom was able to reassure him. Then a request was made
for a second game at Amesville, and Sam Craig agreed to see what
could be done about one. High School journeyed home at dusk, very
well satisfied with an almost errorless performance—Buster Healey
had alone sinned—and very hungry. Joe was wedged in between
Jack and Walter Cummings in the trolley car going back, with Frank
Foley directly in front on the next seat. Jack, who had outshone
himself that afternoon in left field, was feeling especially cheerful
and, before they had been buzzing across country very long, began
to heckle Handsome Frank, to the amusement of the others within
hearing.
“Say, Frank,” he began, leaning over, “we’ve got a fellow working
for us at the news-stand who makes you look like a faded leaf, old
top. Honest, Frank, he’s got it all over you as a swell dresser. You’ll
have to look to your laurels right smart. That’s no josh, either. Why,
that fellow’s got a pink-and-green-striped shirt that would simply fill
you with envy!”
“Hello, Jack,” was the response. “You jabbering again?”
“Yep, jabbering again, Frankie. Listen. You’re months behind the
style, old chap. They’re not wearing those all-leather shoes any
more. You want to get some with cloth tops. They’re the only proper
dress for the Johnnies. I’m afraid you haven’t read your fashion
journal this month!”
“The trouble with you and Faulkner,” replied Frank over his
shoulder, “is that you dress so like tramps that when you see a
fellow with a clean collar on you don’t know what to make of it!”
That produced chuckles from the nearby seats. Jack smiled
serenely. “Yes, there’s something in what you say. That’s where you
have it on the rest of us, Frank. Your collars are so plaguey high that
no one can see whether they’re clean or not on top! But what I’m
telling you about the cloth-top shoes is right as rain. They’re
positively the last cry. Get after ’em, Frank.”
“Don’t worry about my shoes,” was the reply. “Look after your
own, Jack. There’s a place down town where you can get them
shined for a nickel. You and your partner had better drop in there
some day.”
“They’d never do Jack’s for a nickel,” remarked Buster. “His feet
are too big.”
 “Oh, I shine mine at home,” said Jack cheerfully. “I save a nickel
every week or two, you see. When I get a quarter saved up I’m
going to get one of those manicures like Frank’s. They’re great!
Every time he puts his hand up you get blinded.”
“Every time you put your hand up,” chuckled Frank, “I think
someone’s dead!”
“Now what’s he mean by that?” asked Jack, as the others laughed.
“You’d better dry up,” advised Joe amusedly.
“Good advice, Faulkner,” Foley commented. “Wash his hands when
you get him home. Your own, too.”
“I’ll leave it to the crowd if my hands aren’t clean,” exclaimed Jack
indignantly, holding them up for inspection. “I washed them only
yesterday. Frank, you’re almost insulting. For two cents I’d
disarrange your scarf and break your heart!”
“Oh, cut it out,” growled Foley. “You’re not smart; you just think
you are. I wear whatever clothes I please, and it doesn’t concern
you.”
“Doesn’t it, though? My word! It concerns me a lot, old chap.
Many’s the time I’ve got up in the morning feeling blue and
depressed and then seen you glide by in a pink shirt and a green hat
and white spats and perked right up, Frank! Why, you’re our little
blob of local colour, that’s what you are. We’re all better for you,
Frank. Amesville would be pale and commonplace without you. Why,
just the other day I walked along a block or two behind you inhaling
the aroma that floated back, and life seemed different right away.
That was the day everyone was calling up the gas company and
complaining of leaks!”
This sally brought a burst of laughter that dissipated the final
remnant of Foley’s good-temper, and he turned to face Jack with an
angry countenance. Unfortunately, he caught the grin on Joe’s
features and straightway transferred his attention to that youth.
 “What are you smirking about, you fresh kid?” he demanded. “You
go and sell your five-cent cigars and let me alone. You’re a joke,
anyway, and you’re the biggest joke when you try to play ball. You
grin at me and I’ll reach back there and wipe it off!”
“Cut it out, Frank,” said Tom Pollock from the seat behind Joe’s.
“Keep your temper, old man. No one’s hurting you.”
“Well, those cheap guys can keep their mouths closed, then. I
wasn’t saying anything to them, was I?”
“You began it,” retorted Jack mendaciously. “You’re jealous
because I told you there was a fellow in town with cloth-top shoes. I
only said it for your own good, and——”
“Dry up, Jack,” commanded Tom. “You’re tiresome.”
“All right,” grieved Jack. “That’s all the thanks I get for trying to be
kind and helpful!”
Just then they had to pile out and change to another trolley, and
when they were reseated Jack discovered that Foley had placed
himself the length of the car away. He sighed. “No more fun,” he
murmured. “I shall go to sleep.”
That incident, unimportant as it seemed, bore results. Frank Foley
evidently reached the conclusion that it was Joe and not Jack who
was at the bottom of the heckling, for whenever they met Joe was
regarded with scowling dislike. It didn’t bother Joe much, but it
amused Jack immensely. “Honestly, Joey,” he would chuckle, “you
oughtn’t to put me up to saying things about Frank. It isn’t nice. If
he speaks to me about it I’ll just have to tell him that I don’t
approve of it a bit.”
“I wish you and your Frank were at the bottom of the river,”
replied Joe vigorously. “It’s bad enough being after a fellow’s
position without having a lot of ill-feeling besides. If I should beat
him out, either this year or next, he’d always think I did it unfairly, I
suppose.”
 “I’m afraid he would,” grieved Jack. “Try and be decent to him,
Joey. Don’t make fun of him the way you do. The things you say
——”
“Oh, dry up!” muttered Joe. Jack obeyed, chuckling wickedly.
High School continued to win most of her games, coming a
cropper now and then, however, as when she received a decisive
beating at the hands of Lima. Amesville was shut out for the first
time that season, while her opponent managed to get seven runs.
Toby Williams started for Amesville, but lasted only three innings. By
that time Lima had four runs to her credit. Tom Pollock kept her at
bay until the sixth inning, when an error by Healey, coming on the
heels of a dropped fly by Cummings, let three more runs across.
Amesville was utterly unable to bunch the few hits she managed to
make off the Lima pitcher and so travelled home with banners
trailing. The direct outcome of that game was the replacing of Buster
Healey at second base with young Farquhar. Farquhar, however, only
lasted through three days of practice and was then relegated to the
Scrubs. In his place Coach Talbot requisitioned George Peddie, and
Peddie was tried at third while Hale went to second. Healey was
heartbroken. It was understood that he was to have his position
again as soon as he recovered from his present slump, but Buster
viewed the situation hopelessly.
One afternoon when he and Joe were together on the bench
during the first inning of a game with the Scrubs he confided his
perplexities. “I don’t know what the dickens is the matter with me,
Joe,” he said. “I didn’t use to have any trouble. Last year I played
through with only fourteen errors all season, and that’s not so bad,
is it? But this spring”—he shook his head puzzledly—“I can’t even
seem to bat any more. It’s funny, too. I hit where the ball looks to
be and never touch it. Same way in fielding. I see the old thing
shooting along to me and make a grab for it and as often as not it
gets clean past. The other day, when I plugged to Frank that time, I
aimed as straight as you please and got the ball away all right. I
know that! But when it got to first it was two yards to the left!” He
examined his hands as if seeking a solution to his trouble there. Joe,
interested in the new batting arrangement that Mr. Talbot had
introduced that afternoon, heard Buster’s lamentations with but half
an ear. He nodded sympathetically, though, when young Peddie had
been retired at first, making the third out.
“It’s too bad,” he said. “What do you suppose the reason is?”
“I’m telling you I don’t know,” replied Buster a trifle impatiently.
“Maybe I’m not well. I—I have headaches sometimes.” He made the
acknowledgment rather shamefacedly. Buster didn’t have much
sympathy for fellows with ailments.
For the first time Joe’s interest was really aroused.
“Whereabouts?” he asked quickly.
“Whereabouts what?”
“Whereabouts are the headaches?”
“In my head, of course! Oh, you mean—Well, sort of up here.” He
placed his hands over his temples. “Maybe,” he added with a grin,
“maybe I’m studying too hard.”
“You get a ball,” said Joe, “and come over here with me.”
“What for?”
“Never mind what for, Buster. Come on.”
Buster borrowed a baseball from the bag and followed Joe across
to the stretch used by pitchers when they warmed up. “What’s the
big idea?” he asked.
“Shoot it to me,” said Joe. He held his hands in front of his chest.
“Don’t curve it, Buster. Just put it to me straight.”
“It’s got to curve some,” objected Buster. “Here you are.”
Joe made a stab well to the left of him and saved himself a trip
down the field.
“Try again,” he said, throwing the ball back. “Try to hit my hands,
Buster. See if you can’t throw right into them.”
 “Come a little nearer. I can’t see your hands so well. That’s better.”
Buster sped the ball off again, and again it went wide, although
not so wide as before. When the ball came back to him he made
rather an awkward task of catching it. Joe followed the ball.
“Let’s have it,” he said quietly. Buster yielded it, troubledly.
“Catch,” said Joe and tossed the ball to the other from some four
feet away. Buster put up his hands quickly, his forehead a mass of
wrinkles and his eyes half-closed, and the ball tipped his fingers and
struck his chest.
“What are you scowling for?” asked Joe.
“Scowling?”
“Yes, your forehead’s all screwed up. Your eyes, too. Can’t you
catch a ball without doing that?”
“I don’t know. I guess so.”
“Try it.” This time Buster caught, but, as before, he frowned and
squinted terrifically over the operation.
“That’ll do,” said Joe. “You go and see an oculist, Buster.”
“Oculist!”
“Surest thing you know. Something’s wrong with your eyes. You
can’t see, Buster!”
“Great Scott!” murmured the other. “I—I believe you’re dead right,
Joe!”
“I know I am. I had headaches like yours a couple of years ago
and my mother sent me to a doctor. He snipped a couple of muscles
and I was all right.”
“Snipped! Say, didn’t it hurt?”
“Mm, a little; not much. Maybe your trouble’s something else,
though. Maybe you need glasses, Buster.”
 “Glasses! Gee, wouldn’t I be a sight with glasses? Do you really
think that’s what’s wrong, Joe?”
“Positive! You can’t throw a ball straight because you don’t see
what you’re throwing at plainly. Now, can you?”
Buster considered a moment. Then: “I don’t believe I do, come to
think of it. Things are—are sort of indistinct at a distance. You don’t
suppose”—Buster faltered—“you don’t suppose I’m going to be
blind, do you?”
“Blind your granny! You go and see an oculist and he will fix you
up right as rain. Do it tomorrow, Buster. I’ll wager you’ll be playing
second again in a fortnight.”
“Honest, Joe? Say, why didn’t I think of my eyes? Why, now when
I think of it, I know mighty well that I don’t see like I did a year ago.
Why, last Spring I could see to the end of the field as plainly as
anything!”
“Can’t you today?” asked Joe.
“No, I can’t. I can see, all right, but things are sort of hazy. What’s
a cataract like, Joe?”
“I never had one. Neither have you. Don’t be an idiot, Buster. Just
do as I tell you.”
“You bet I will!” They were back on the bench now. “What gets
me, Joe, is why I never thought it might be my eyes!”
“I guess a fellow thinks of his eyes the last thing of all,” replied
Joe wisely. “I know when I was having those headaches——”
But a further account of his experiences was interrupted by the
coach.
“Faulkner, you take first. That’ll do for today, Foley. Hale, you go
back to third. Peddie, see what you can do at second.”
Joe played four innings at the first sack that afternoon, conscious
all the time of Frank Foley’s malevolent glare from the bench. But he
didn’t allow that to worry him much and covered the base in good
shape. The following afternoon it was Joe who started at first and
Foley who took his place later on. Perhaps the fear of being
superseded began to wear on Foley, for he played poorly during the
three innings he was on duty, and Jack exulted on the way home.
“You’ve got him on the run, Joey,” he said. “Keep it up, old man!
Remember that bat-case is yours every Sunday!”
“Hang your old bat-case, Jack! I wish they’d put me on the
second. This thing of taking a chap’s job away isn’t funny.”
“To the victor belong the spoils,” replied Jack untroubledly. “Frank
won’t let sentiment interfere with getting his place back if he can,
Joey, so why should you——”
“But he had it first.”
“And couldn’t keep it!”
“Just the same, I don’t like it. I think I’ll quit.”
“You think you’ll quit!” exclaimed the other in horrified tones.
“You’re crazy underfoot like a radish! Quit nothing! What about that
bat——”
Joe turned on him menacingly. “If you say ‘bat-case’ again I’ll
punch you,” he threatened.
“Oh, all right. I won’t. I was only going to ask what about that
receptacle for——”
Joe chased him half a block. When peace had been restored Joe
asked: “Have you seen Buster Healey today?”
“No, he wasn’t out,” replied Jack.
“I know he wasn’t. I’m sort of worried about Buster. I didn’t say
anything about it yesterday, Jack, but I’m afraid he’s got something
wrong with his eyes.” He told of the incident of the day before,
ending up with: “I don’t know much about cataracts, Jack, but I
wouldn’t be awfully surprised if that was the trouble.”
 “You’re a cheerful little chap, aren’t you? Fellows don’t have those
things, Joey. Old ladies have ’em when they’re about eighty. My
grandmother had ’em, and I know.”
“Well, maybe. I hope you’re right. Anyway, I’m going to call him
up and find out what the oculist said.”
Events, however, proved that unnecessary, for when they turned
into the Adams Building there was Buster leaning against the
counter in conversation with the sprightly Mr. Chester Young.
“I was waiting for you, Joe,” he announced. “Thought you’d like to
know you were dead right yesterday. I went to the doctor man this
afternoon and he says I’ve got my—my——Oh, thunder, I’ve
forgotten it!”
“Myopia?”
“That’s it! He says I’m so blamed near-sighted that’s it’s a wonder
I can blow my nose! But it isn’t cataracts, anyway. Say, honest, Joe,
I was scared blue last night. I told my mother what you’d said and
she was certain sure I had cataracts!”
“I’m glad you haven’t. What’s the oculist going to do about it?”
“He says he can cure me in a few months. I have to go every day
for a while and look through a sort of machine he has. And I may
have to wear glasses, too. And”—and by this time Buster’s
cheerfulness was ebbing fast—“he says I can’t play ball any more for
a while. Isn’t that the limit?”
“Too bad, Buster. But if he can cure the trouble——”
“He says he can. Says when you catch them young, these
myopias, you can chase ’em out of the system, or words like that. I
suppose I oughtn’t to kick, because it might have been a heap
worse, but it’s hard having to give up playing baseball.”
“No use troubling about that,” said Jack, who had joined them.
“You couldn’t play anyhow, Buster, until you got your eyes fixed up
right. Much better give it up this spring and go back to it next.”
 “I suppose so. I haven’t any choice, anyway. Say, Joe, I’m
certainly much obliged to you for tipping me off. What gets me——”
“Joe’s a wise guy,” said Jack. “What he doesn’t know isn’t worth
knowing.”
“Yes, but what gets me——”
“Oh, that was nothing for Joey! Solomon in all his glory had
nothing on Joseph!”
“For the love of mud, Jack, shut up! Buster’s trying to tell you——”
“I was going to say,” began Buster patiently again, “that what gets
me is why I didn’t realise myself what the trouble was. That’s what
gets me! You’d think that when a fellow couldn’t see decently he’d
take a tumble and——”
“Sure, it’s a wonder you haven’t tumbled lots of times,” agreed
Jack solicitously.
“Oh, you make me tired,” grumbled Buster. “You can’t be serious a
minute. If you had my—my——Say, what is it again, Joe?”
“Myopia, Buster.”
“From the Greek, Buster; myo, close, and opsis, sight. My word, I
wish old Dennison could have heard me!”
“Yes, you’re a swell Greek scholar!” jeered Buster. “Well, I just
thought you’d like to hear about it, Joe. And I hope you get my
place at second—if you want it.”
“Give it to Foley,” said Jack. “Joe doesn’t need it. But, honestly,
Buster, I’m dead sorry you’re out of it this year. We’re going to miss
you, old man. But you’ll be in better shape for next, eh?”
“If Frank’s going to have my place,” replied Buster dismally, “I’m
sorrier than ever!”
 CHAPTER XVI
FOLEY IS WORRIED

The next day Joe found himself playing third base. Gordon Smith
was changed from shortstop to second and George Peddie was at
short. But this arrangement lasted only a few innings. Peddie was
out of place at short and Joe was equally miscast as third baseman.
Then Steve Hale was put in at short and Joe and Frank Foley were
instructed to change places. The game with the Scrubs was finished
with that arrangement of the infield, and, while it produced better
results than any previous combination, still it was far from perfect.
After all, Hale was a third baseman first, last, and all the time, and
Foley was not fast enough to fill his shoes. Joe secretly hoped that
the arrangement would last, for he was in possession of his coveted
position at first, and, in order that it might, he played the very best
he knew how that afternoon and won applause more than once.
Now that there were no wild pegs from Buster Healey to be stopped
the position was far easier.
But the next day Foley was back at first in practice and Hale was
once more cavorting around third. Gordon Smith was reinstated to
his old position at short and the task of covering the middle bag fell
to George Peddie. That, of course, put Joe once more on the bench,
and once more Joe gave way to discouragement and Jack about
made up his mind to lose that wager. But neither Coach Talbot nor
Captain Craig was satisfied with a line-up that left out the hitting
possibilities of Joe Faulkner, and when the two teams had battled
through four innings Foley was taken out and again Joe went to first.
By now the school in general, or as much of it as followed the
fortunes of the baseball club, was watching the struggle for first
base position with much interest. It seemed as though Coach Talbot
had decided to give the two contestants equal chances and let them
decide the matter themselves! Every day Joe and Frank Foley
divided the position. It is not to be denied that Foley was still a more
brilliant first baseman than his rival. Foley had a long reach that
helped him considerably, had more experience, and was, in fact, a
first-class man for the position. It was at the bat that he was forced
to play second fiddle. Joe could outhit him two to one. Not only that,
but on bases Foley was awkward and slow. He had a positive genius
for being caught off the bags, and his attempts to slide were sad
failures. Each of the boys had his following amongst the “fans” and
whether Faulkner or Foley was to play first base in the Petersburg
game became a question that was hotly argued.
Foley had at last realised that, contrary to his early season
conviction, he did not hold the position securely; that if he meant to
retain it he had to play his hardest and, if possible, improve his
batting. It was something of a blow to Foley’s self-conceit, for last
year he had faced no real rival and had come to look on the place as
his. He was no “quitter,” and he made a hard fight of it. He tried his
level best to increase his batting average, but without much success.
He had heretofore considered that it was enough to field his position
and leave the hitting to others, and now he discovered that batting
was not a trick to be learned in a few short weeks.
Amesville played every Saturday save one until the middle of May,
reaching that period with a showing of seven wins, three defeats,
and one tie. The missed game was with Curtis School, rain
prohibiting. Of the regular schedule of seventeen games nine
remained, and after the middle of the month Wednesday afternoon
contests began. The “Millers” secured their return game, coming to
Amesville on less than a day’s notice when Arkwright High School
announced its inability to fill her date. The “Millers” were again
beaten, 9 to 3, Tom Pollock pitching most of the game for the home
team. Joe played five of the nine innings at first, getting six put-
outs, an assist, and no errors as his share, thereby bettering Foley’s
record for one less inning by two put-outs and an assist. At bat Joe
had a gala day, being up three times and securing as many hits.
Foley, as usual, failed to come across with anything. It was after that
Wednesday contest that Joe’s stock arose appreciably and Jack got
Tom Pollock to put that bat-case on the counter for him to examine!
Perhaps, however, that game with the “Millers” was mainly notable
for bringing into prominence young Peddie. Peddie, now regularly
established at second, performed in a way that was little short of
marvellous, taking part in two doubles and working with Smith even
more smoothly than Buster Healey had ever done. He also secured a
timely hit to add to his laurels. George Peddie, in short, was the hero
of that encounter.
The weather settled down to warm days that made playing a
delight and that brought out the best in everyone. High School’s
batting improved remarkably during the last two weeks in May, and
the pitchers began to come into their own. Toby Williams showed
more improvement than either of the others, but was still far from
being the pitcher that Tom Pollock was. Carl Moran went through six
or seven innings occasionally without misadventure, but was not yet
equal to twirling a full game. Behind the bat Sam Craig was still the
same reliable, heady player as ever, while Jack Speyer was rapidly
getting experience as a substitute. Amesville had a fine outfield in
Sidney Morris, Jack Strobe, and Walter Cummings. Sidney and Jack
were especially clever players, with Cummings promising to be quite
as good with more experience. On the whole, the school looked
forward to the Petersburg game on the twenty-first of June with
more confidence than usual. Petersburg had won a scant majority of
the annual contests to date and was always considered dangerous.
But this year, with a fast, smoothly-working infield, two first-class
pitchers, and an outfield of proved excellence, Amesville considered
that she was more than the equal of her old rival. Someone,
however, has said that baseball is two-thirds skill and one-third luck,
and that one-third has often upset the wisest calculations.
So far Jack and Frank Foley were nip-and-tuck in their race.
Neither had missed a game. Jack tried to say that since Foley
scarcely ever played an entire contest through he was already
defeated, but Handsome Frank—more handsome than ever now that
Summer was at hand, with its better opportunities for sartorial
display—reminded his rival of the terms of the wager. “I said I’d play
in more games with outside teams than you would. I don’t have to
play a game through from start to finish.”
“It’s a good thing you don’t, then,” laughed Jack. “If you did I’d be
carrying my bat around in that nice leather case right now! All right,
old chap. Go to it. But you’ll have hard work stealing a game on
me!”
“Oh, I don’t know. You might break something or have measles,
Jack. I hear there’s lots of measles around town.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve had ’em.”
“I know, but some folks have them two or three times.” Foley
grinned exasperatingly. “Haven’t you got a sort of rash on your
forehead there now?”
“No, I haven’t! That’s sunburn, you idiot!”
“Well, take care of yourself, Jack. You never can tell what’s going
to happen.”
Foley sauntered away, a picturesque figure in immaculate blue
serge and a pale yellow shirt, and Jack watched his departure with
mingled sentiments of admiration and contempt. “Of all the high-
faluting dudes,” muttered Jack, “he’s the high-falutingest! Did you
see that brown straw hat, Chester, with the pleated silk scarf around
it? Say, he’s gone you one better, hasn’t he?”
The encounter had taken place in the lobby of the Adams Building
on a Saturday morning. Foley and Mr. Chester Young, doubtless
drawn together by their mutual fondness for startling attire, had
become very good friends, and Foley was quite frequently to be
found at the news-stand. Mr. Chester Young, flicking the ashes from
his cigarette, smiled untroubledly.
“Old stuff,” he said. “They were wearing those in the East last
Summer. The latest straws are higher and just off the straw-colour.
I’ve got one on the way. You have to send to Chicago for them.”
 Joe, who was taking stock of the cigars on hand, smiled and
winked at his partner. “Oh, those are too cheap for Foley,” he said
carelessly.
“Cheap!” exclaimed Young. “Oh, yes, they’re cheap like anything!
Ten dollars is what they stand you, Faulkner.”
“For one?” gasped Jack.
“Well, you didn’t think it was for a dozen, did you?” asked Young
pityingly. “That lid Foley’s sporting cost about six. He thinks he’s a
pretty swell little dresser, Foley does. Well, he ain’t so bad, only he
just sort of misses it about every crack he makes. See his socks?
Dark blue they were. They ain’t wearing colours this season.”
“He thinks he’s a pretty swell little dresser, Foley does”
 “They’re not? Help!” Jack regarded his own brown stockings in
dismay. “I’ve got to go home and change, Joe. Honest, this thing of
keeping up with the styles is killing, isn’t it?”
“It don’t trouble you much,” said Mr. Chester Young indulgently. “If
it did you’d call in that collar you’re wearing.”
“What’s the matter with my collar?”
“Nothing, only they don’t wear ’em like that now.” Young put a
hand to his throat and pulled his terra-cotta silk scarf into place.
“More like this.”
“Oh, I see,” said Jack. “Sort of low and rakish, eh? All right. Live
and learn. Say, Joe, that thing you’re wearing is worse than mine. I
should think you’d be ashamed of yourself!”
“I’d be ashamed to be seen in one like his,” answered Joe. “Get
Meyers and Fink and tell them to send us a hundred Adams Building
conchas and two boxes of Vistas panatellas, will you? Don’t forget to
give these returns to the news company, Young, when they come
today. I’ve been falling over them for two or three days.”
“We’re out of City Hall post-cards,” said Young. “And we’re getting
short on some of the others.”
“They’re on order, thanks. That reminds me, Jack. Those
chocolates aren’t as good as they sent us first. Guess we’d better
switch back to the Cleveland folks. Their packages aren’t quite as
dressy, but the chocolates are a lot better.”
“There was a fellow in here just before you came,” observed
Young, “trying to sell us candy. I told him to come back later. He had
some new stuff, all right; glazed boxes with crimson ribbons across
’em. Pretty good-looking line, I thought.”
“Tell him we don’t want anything when he comes again. How are
you off for magazines there, Young?”
“Pretty fair. We’ve sold about twenty of those Murray’s. Ought to
order more, I guess.”
 “All right. How many are there there?”
“Four—no, five. They’ll sell today, I guess. And we’re short of Mid-
Wests. Only two of those here.”
“I’ll order twenty more Murray’s and ten Mid-Wests.” Joe reached
for the telephone with one hand and searched for a nickel with the
other. “The telephone company is after Mr. Adams to put in a couple
of booths here, Jack. If he lets them do it it’ll make this ’phone cost
us money. Hello! Amesville 430! As it is we’re making about seven
dollars a month on this thing. Hello? News company? This is Adams
Building. Send around twenty Murray’s Monthlies and ten Mid-Wests
this noon, will you? I beg your pardon? No, that’s all. Murray’s and—
Yes, I think you’d better. Make it fifty Murray’s and twenty-five Mid-
Wests after this. Good-bye.” Joe hung up the receiver and put the
instrument back in place, and when Mr. Chester Young had served a
customer, remarked:
“By the way, Young, you don’t seem to be keeping that gang of
yours out of here much better. Yesterday there were six or seven
hanging around. We’ve spoken two or three times about it, you
know. We don’t want this to become a loafing place. Mr. Adams
doesn’t like it, and we don’t, either.”
“Well, you can’t turn away custom, can you? Those guys spend
their money with you, don’t they?”
“Not a great deal, I guess,” replied Joe drily. “Anyhow, they don’t
pay rent for this lobby, Young. Keep them moving, please.”
“All right. But you’d better hire a ‘bouncer,’ Faulkner. I don’t get
paid for insulting my friends.”
“You tell your friends to come and see you somewhere else,”
replied Joe tartly. “This place looks like a hog-wallow after that
crowd has been standing around a while.”
“Meaning my friends are hogs, eh?” Mr. Chester Young laughed,
but not with amusement.
 “If they’re friends of yours, Chester,” said Jack, “you’d better shake
them. They’re a cheap lot of corner loafers. They used to hang out
around Foster’s until they got on to the fact that they could come in
here and keep warm. We don’t want them. Get that?”
“Sure! After this as soon as a customer gets his change I’ll duck
out from here and throw him through the door! That’s fine!”
“Don’t talk sick,” said Jack shortly. “You know what we mean. If
you don’t encourage them by talking with them they’ll go along, I
guess. We don’t want Mr. Adams putting us out of here, you know.”
Mr. Chester Young forebore to reply, but there was a world of
eloquence in the way in which he puffed his cigarette and winked at
the elevator attendant across the lobby.
Later, when the chums were on their way to the field for the game
with Morristown High School, they reverted to Mr. Chester Young.
“What do you know about his paying ten dollars for a straw hat?”
demanded Jack.
“He’s probably adding about five to the price,” said Joe. “Where
would he get that much to pay for a hat? He certainly can’t do it on
the wages we’re paying him.”
“You said he was having things charged, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but he told us he was getting the hat from Chicago.”
“Having Keller send for it, I dare say. Keller’s is the place he buys
hats, because I saw him in there one day looking at some. The first
thing we know, Joey, the sheriff or someone will be descending on
us and taking away the stand!”
“They can’t do that. We’re not responsible for his debts, thank
goodness! What is pretty certain is that he must be getting near the
end of his rope. We’ll have to be looking for a new clerk pretty soon,
I guess.”
“If he will hang out until school is over we won’t have to have
one. You can take the stand half the day and I can take it the other
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