Professor Adams Bodomo delivered his Inaugural Lecture as Chair Professor of African Languages and African Literatures at the Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna, on 10 June 2015. The topic of his lecture was: “African Languages, Linguistics and Literatures: Exploring Global Interdisciplinary Research Trends in the Humanities”.

As expected there was a large audience of colleagues from the university, members of the African Community in Vienna as well as members of the general public who had heard about the lecture from the mass media or had been invited. African musicians were also in attendance to lend an atmosphere of celebration to the historic event.

Prof. Adams Bodomo, University of Vienna, Austria.

Adams Bodomo is obviously a man of his times and appeared in a flashy suit as well as having had all his hair shaved as the young ones of today are wont to do. The professor with grey hair in popular imagination is no longer existent.

The professor approached his subject with modern methods including the use of power-point presentation, other devices and a number of diagrams and statistics to illustrate or underpin his points.

Bodomo argued for the study of African languages not only for the languages themselves, as important as they are and for the cultures associated with them but also from linguistic and literary perspective; he used the study of African languages to argue for interdisciplinarity as a “issue in the larger humanities and general academic and intellectual research in our 21st Century era of globalisation.”

The lecturer first gave a general survey of the language situation in Africa and the nature of African languages while indicating some major structures of African languages. He pointed out interdisciplinary ways of collaboration and drew some conclusions.

Bodomo explained that Africa is rich not only in mineral resources but also a “linguistic resource rich continent” where many persons in the urban centres speak 4-5 languages. A clear diagram indicated the language families of the 2,138 languages that Africa has, compared to 2,301 in Asia and 286 in Europe.

This rich diversity of languages is of great interest to linguists and other scholars. On the other hand, the rich diversity poses problems for the countries of Africa. The problem, Adams emphasized, does not lie with the languages themselves; however they present problems in the African States for the formulation of national language policy. Which languages should be used in national institutions - in the parliament, in the law courts, in mass media and in educational institutions?

This diversity of languages has led to a situation where the former colonial languages still dominate the linguistic scene and we have terminologies such as Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone countries. The linguistic reality of most African countries is distorted by these terminologies since the majority of Africans use African languages.

“The truth masked by these terminologies is that we indeed have clearly Afriphone countries in Africa since the vast majority of the population actually speaks African languages as mother tongues and lingua franca - languages of wider communication - but hardly able to use these languages in formal education, especially at the higher levels, and in other official settings,” he said.

Bodomo’s own proposal in this respect emphasizes the use of African languages in the educational system in what he calls localized trilingualism. (See: On language and development in sub-Saharan Africa: The case of Ghana”, in Nordic Journal of African Studies.5 (2):31-53, University of Helsinki Press, Finland)[PDF">Article in PDF format - Nordic Journal of African Studieswww.njas.helsinki.fi/pdf-files/vol5num2/bodomo.pdf )

Professor Bodomo illustrated his proposal with a diagram to show the progression in language acquisition as follows:
Primary/district level - mother-tongue
Regional/secondary level – mother tongue + regional African lingua franca
(Inter) national/tertiary – mother tongue + lingua franca + world language.

In addition to the importance of African languages for the development of African countries, Bodomo also explained that African languages have contributed to the advancement of linguistics:

“Whereas the study of African languages has benefited from advances in Linguistics, African languages have also contributed a lot in providing descriptive and theoretical frameworks for analyzing the world’s languages,” he noted.

We leave out for the specialists other topics Bodomo discussed in his lecture such as click sounds, concept of double articulation, morphophonology, syntax-semantics, serial verb constructions, ideophone construction and others. Bodomo clearly won the audience with his examples of proverbs from various African languages, explaining that “Proverbs and other idiomatic constructions are salient features in the structure of African languages and in African literary and general cultural discourse as a whole.”

We appreciated the proverb from Dagaare: ‘Ngmaadakóré bá yinné teeré dúóbu.’ An old monkey never forgets how to climb trees= Experience is the best teacher.

We also liked the Akan proverb: ‘Oba nyansafo wo-bu no be na wonka no asem’=We speak to the wise man in proverbs and not in plain language. There is no need to talk at length to an intelligent person.

We would also add that the use of proverbs is a reflection of the reluctance in many African societies to speak directly to an individual, especially if other persons are present and the matter is somewhat delicate.

Bodomo presented as an objective of interdisciplinary studies, the Global African Diaspora Studies (GADS). “This research platform aims to build a centre of excellence in the study of Africa and its relations with the rest of the world, particularly focussing on how diaspora African communities impact their host countries and the socio-cultural and socio-economic development of their countries of origin in Africa.”

Since no questions were allowed during the inaugural lecture, those attending had time during the subsequent reception and buffet to question Bodomo about his ideas whilst African musicians, from Guinea and Mali, provided African music on the balafon and the djembe in the background.

* Kwame Opoku is in an independent scholar and commentator on African cultural affairs.

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