Do You Speak French in Africa?
Abstract
Who is allowed to feel at home in French, and why is African writing still treated as foreign inside a supposedly shared language?
Language, literature and identity · Full reading edition
‘What language do Africans speak?’
Asked in Strasbourg what languages the peoples of Central and West Africa spoke, I answered: French. The laughter that followed was not fictional. Many French people judge foreigners through the way they speak ‘their language’ and discover with surprise that other peoples also speak it.
My answer merely stated a historical fact. French accompanied the republican school and the colonial ‘civilising mission’ so thoroughly that African pupils were taught ‘our ancestors, the Gauls’ and sang the Marseillaise before African soldiers were sent to European battlefields.
Equality denied through accent
My interlocutors struggled to accept that French-speaking Africans and French citizens could stand on equal ground before the language. They searched my African accent for proof of an essential difference. Arguments about French as an international language, and about the immense contribution of Africa and the Caribbean to writing in French, changed little.
I eventually understood that the so-called ‘French language of Africa’ is not merely a question of style. It concerns ownership, legitimacy and the borders drawn within a language said to be shared.
A language beside the language
Proust’s foreign language within literature and Derrida’s critique of linguistic purism illuminate part of the problem, but African literature written in French faces a distinct barrier. Flaubert’s stylistic deviations could eventually be absorbed into French; African writing is still treated as a language beside French—the language of the Other and of the formerly colonised.
A French reader is assumed to be at home with a Provençal writer such as Marcel Pagnol. The same reader may approach African or Caribbean writing as unknown territory requiring translation into ‘French from France’. Literary difference is converted into cultural distance.
Unequal names for literature
Adding ‘African’ to literature reduces a continent to a culture and implies a separate mentality or worldview. Terms such as ‘Negro-African literature of French expression’ attach geography and skin colour to one tradition, while ‘French literature’ retains the noble, apparently neutral name of the language itself.
The asymmetry becomes obvious if one imagines speaking of ‘white literature of French expression’. Such a label would appear scandalous because French literature presents itself as the natural owner of the common language.
A language always has an owner
The Francophone world celebrates a shared treasure, but boundaries and enclosures remain around it. The African writer may use French fully and transform it creatively while still being positioned outside its legitimate centre.
The question ‘Do you speak French in Africa?’ therefore exposes more than ignorance. It reveals that a language may be spoken by several peoples while institutions, classifications and habits continue to assign it a privileged owner. In France, language still functions as a Maginot Line behind which national identity shelters.
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