Nordic Journal of African Studies

The Educated African and Colonialist Myths in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North

Lynda Chouiten — 2024-03-28

Through the example of Tayeb Salih’s novel Season of Migration to the North (1969), this article argues that education as provided by the colonial school system is an “undecidable” (Derrida), at once empowering and disempowering the educated non-Westerner. On the one hand, the knowledge and language appropriated by Mustafa Sa’eed (Salih’s African prodigy) enable him not only to belie, through his own academic success, the derogatory clichés regarding the Black man’s intellectual inferiority, but also to denounce imperialism in the impressive number of books he has written. On the other hand, as a system which perpetuates traditional values and codes of thinking, rather than promoting originality and difference, the (Western) educational machine ensures that its products unconsciously absorb Western ‘truths’ about the passionate nature and sexual appetite of the native races. This article shows that Mustafa Sa’eed reproduces these ‘truths’ both in his lectures and in his lifestyle.

The Introduction of Sugarcane in West-Central Africa

Sifra Van Acker — 2024-03-28

Due to the extreme scarcity of archaeological and historical data very little is known about the introduction of Southeast Asian crops such as banana, sugarcane, taro and greater yam in Africa and the role they played in the subsistence and lifeways of ancestral African communities. Therefore, we closely examine in this article comparative lexical data as a source to reconstruct the history of sugarcane in West-Central Africa. We focus more specifically on one branch of the Bantu language family, i.e., West-Coastal Bantu, in conjunction with data from Bantu languages spoken in the Congo rainforest and further south. We argue that despite their shared origins, sugarcane and bananas were not introduced in Africa as part of one single Southeast Asian package. Sugarcane made its way through West-Central together with crops of American origin such as maize, cassava, peanut, common bean, and (sweet) potato as part of the so-called “Columbian Exchange”, i.e., not earlier than the sixteenth century CE, while the ancestry of bananas in the Congo rainforest area likely goes back to the Early Iron Age, i.e., about 2,500 years ago.

Ditransitive Constructions in Lugbarati

Peace Yikiru — 2024-03-28

This study examines how ditransitive constructions are realized in Lugbarati, a Central Sudanic language of the Moru-Madi subphylum. Lugbarati has both the double object construction (DOC) and what we refer to as the adpositional phrase construction (APC) configurations, with the former having two NPs as its non-subject arguments, and the latter having an NP and a complex NP – containing a suffixed adposition – as its non-subject arguments. However, for the DOC to occur in Lugbarati, the construction must meet a semantic criterion that requires ‘prior possession’ of the theme/patient referent by the recipient/beneficiary referent. Crucially, Lugbarati has three constituent orders in which ditransitive constructions manifest themselves, namely SVOO, SOVO, and SOOV, with SVOO corresponding to the SVO basic constituent order, while SOVO and SOOV correspond to the SOV constituent order. While the first constituent order accommodates only verbs in the perfective aspect, the other two only accommodate verbs in the imperfective aspect. Using the architecture of Lexical Functional Grammar, the study theoretically delineates the general syntactic properties of ditransitive constructions in Lugbarati, as well as the pronominalization of arguments in these constructions, since non-animate internal arguments in Lugbarati are grammatically realized as null elements. These are represented by a higher structure value (H-STR), whose grammatical specifications are retrieved from discourse referents congruently with the lexical entries of the predicate.

Effects of Multilingualism on the Use of Linguistic Spatial Frames of Reference in Dholuo

Awino Ogelo — 2024-03-28

The influence of multilingualism on the nature of spatial frames of reference remains largely unexplored in spatial cognition studies. The present study investigates verbal spatial representation amongst Dholuo multilinguals. It employs a photo-object matching game where participants were engaged in dyads. A total of 80 multilingual Dholuo speakers were involved across Dholuo and English language contexts. Findings indicate the presence of multiple linguistic spatial frames of reference across both language contexts. The findings further reveal a preference for relative and object-centred frames of reference, depending on whether the spatially related objects have inherent orientations or not. Given that the L1-Dholuo L2-English participants used the relative frames of reference system much more often than the monolingual Dholuo speakers in a previous study, the results may partly be explained in terms of the influence of English and its dominant relative frame of reference. The approach adopted herein is novel in the sense that it focuses on multilingualism, in contrast to the previous studies, which gave prominence to monolingual populations. This presents a different perspective on viewing and conceiving of spatial representation not used before in the literature on linguistic spatial frames.