(MENAFN- The Post) In my multi-part review of Dipo Faloyin's Africa is Not a Country: Breaking Stereotypes of Modern Africa, I have reached the point where the author begins to discuss colonial history and its part in forming or mal-forming the Africa of today. Before I review that part of the book, however, I want to discuss Faloyin's research and his grasp of detail.
An incredible amount of reading-up underlies in Faloyin's book; there are over 300 endnotes detailing the author's sources (most of these are newspaper and magazine articles and opinion pieces rather than scholarly accounts). Faloyin is not only witty and eloquent, he is very well-informed. There are some factual errors, which I shan't go into here, as this review is not for an academic journal.
(I do, however, have a contact address for Faloyin, so I shall list the errors for him, in the hope that his book will run to a second edition-it certainly should do, as it should be widely translated and placed on the tertiary curriculum all over the world).
One error I shall pick up here, however, as it relates to a stormy argument I once got into at the NUL staff club (an argument I won, I hasten to add) and it has an interesting application to Lesotho.
Hausa is one of West Africa's major languages, the first language of tens of millions of people in northern Nigeria and in other countries as geographically distant from each other as Ghana and Cameroon.
Elementary Hausa is also spoken by yours truly, as I lived for five years in that part of the world. Faloyin, however, describes Hausa not as a language but as a“dialect”. Later in the book he also describes Swahili-the most widely spoken language in East Africa-as a dialect.
Now the word“dialect” has an old, illegitimate usage, having been employed by colonialists and those who wrote up their exploits, to denote African languages, with the implication that-unlike English or French or Portuguese-these were not proper and fully-fledged languages, they were just native babble.
The word does, though, have a legitimate usage in modern linguistics, to denote a variety of a language, usually one spoken in a geographically remote part of a language territory. There are lots of dialects in the United Kingdom, for example, Scouse, spoken in Liverpool, and Geordie, spoken in Newcastle. There are also countless dialects of English worldwide, for example, Oz (from Australia).
Now for the local (Lesotho) application, Sesotho and Setswana, despite their very close kinship, are classified by UNESCO as distinct languages (this probably has much to do with their status as the national languages of Lesotho and Botswana respectively).
What, I wonder, about Sephuthi? Can that be regarded as a distinct language, or as a dialect of Sesotho, in the way that Serolong-Tswana (spoken around Bloemfontein) is a dialect of Setswana? I turn that question over to my readers.
Let me encourage one or a group of you to expand on and update the work Tom Lynn and Celinah Leboela did on the language map of Lesotho.
To be concluded
Chris Dunton
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