This is Jules with this year’s banana harvest. You can tell when a hand of bananas is ripe because it gets so heavy it touches the ground. We’ll eat some and sell the rest in the local market.
Archives for category: Togo
A huge grasshopper appeared on the veranda this morning and stayed a while. The Kabiye word for it is nakaʋ, pronounced with a high-low-high tone pattern. It’s one of the six animal keywords I use to teach Kabiye tone. The others are fetiye (toad: high), kozoŋa (hare: low), kpaŋaɣ (donkey: high-low), kpeluu (sparrowhawk: low-high) and kɩlakʊ (monitor lizard: low-high-low).
I woke up recently with acute stomach pains, and an ultra-sound revealed that my gall bladder needed removing.
This unexpected news presented a dilemma. I knew that I could get out-patient keyhole surgery for free in England. But I didn’t feel well enough to fly, and I was concerned that, with the NHS in crisis, I would be faced with long waiting lists.
The alternative was to have traditional in-patient surgery at one of the hospitals in Kara, which would leave me with a permanent 10cm scar on my abdomen. It would cost a lot, but I could reclaim it later on my health insurance.
In fact the choice wasn’t difficult. I admitted myself to Kara hospital and was operated on later that day. Any previous doubts I had about the standards of hygiene and patient care were dissipated and I have nothing but praise for the hard-working staff and medical students who treated me.
Another huge advantage of staying in Togo was that, in African culture, a sick person must never be left alone. So for nine days, Faustin, Rodrigue and Jules took it in turns, day and night, to sleep on the floor by my bedside and attend to my every need.
Many thanks to all those who’ve been in touch. I’m back to full strength and regular diet now.
This week I have been using the Jesuit prayer app Pray As You Go for my morning meditation. The music sometimes comes from Africa – Ladysmith Black Mambazo or the Abbey of Keur Moussa – which transports me back to my life in Togo. It is now a full year since I lived in my own house…
The Pray As You Go website also contains a new section called Pray as you stay, a series of meditations for self-isolation during the coronavirus crisis aiming to support listeners during this time of self-isolation, uncertainty and fear and underpinned by the Ignatian practice of finding God in all things.
Faustin informs me that our old adversaries the termites are merrily chomping their way through the roof beams of my house in Togo. We need to act fast on this: Imagine woodworm on fast-forward, and you’ll get some idea of how destructive they can be.
We’re quite used to having to replace windows and doors, but this is the first time they have climbed this high.
The trouble is, Mandahewa, the roofing carpenter I really trust to do this job, is based in Lomé, 415 kms away, and he can’t travel north because there’s no public transport during lockdown. So Faustin will have to find someone local instead.
It’s exciting to watch this project moving forward from afar. Six years ago, the village chief of Lama-Gnangbade, where I live in Togo, told me that his highest development priority was to build a small bridge to improve access to our neighbourhood during the rainy season. Thanks to generous donors, local and international, we are now able to begin construction. And thanks to Faustin who is in charge of the building site.
This week Hélène Pidassa, the great-grandmother of my adopted Kabiye family in Togo, died of natural causes at the age of 97. It is a merciful release for her, as she had been unwell and housebound ever since her husband died seven years ago.
Normally for someone of this ripe old age, the entire population of both villages – her natal village and the one she married into – would attend the burial. It is considered to be an occasion for celebration as well as mourning. But Togo is in lockdown like everywhere else, so only ten witnesses were allowed by the graveside and the police were present to enforce the restriction.
As Faustin, her grandson, poignantly commented, “We buried her as though she was a child”. In Kabiye culture, only the burial of a child would ever be restricted to close family members.
A fixture of the Kabiye calendar is the annual “funeral season”, when families organize a celebratory wake for anyone over the age of 70 who has died in the previous year. The next funeral season is February 2021, so we will have to wait until then to honor the passing of Hélène Pidassa.
Last week, Hénok Tchinguilou, 52, passed away quite suddenly following a short illness. He leaves a wife, Irène, and five children, three of whom are still at school.
Hénok was my very first language assistant. For the first seven years of my life in Togo we were always together. I taught him to drive so that we could share long journeys, and on two occasions he traveled abroad with me – to Ouagadougou and Yaoundé – to participate in linguistic workshops.
Hénok’s extraordinary intelligence placed him head-and-shoulders above most others in the village, even many with a higher level of education. It was Hénok who patiently helped me in my first faltering attempts to learn Kabiye. It was Hénok who first helped me investigate the tone system of the language. It was Hénok who introduced me to Kabiye culture: the rites of passage, the agricultural cycle, the ceremonies, the dances, the proverbs, the riddles… His skills in this area were coupled with an instinct for relating cross-culturally to my expatriate colleagues and friends. Hénok was wise, perceptive, insightful, generous, kind, artistic, intuitive, funny, but also – as anyone who knew him would admit – turbulent.
Eventually, for reasons that no longer matter, I had to sack him. It was one of the most painful choices I’ve ever had to make, and was followed by fifteen years of estrangement during which I only saw him a few times.
I visited the family early on the morning of the burial and spent a long time by the open coffin, trying to take in the enormity of his parting and glad of one last opportunity to be together.
After he was buried, I had one more visit to make. Tragically, Hénok’s oldest son, Edinam David, is currently in prison for theft, having already served 18 months of a two-year sentence. He is named after me, as I was the first to hold him when he was born. When he was three we used to be such good friends. So last Saturday, I went to visit him. He talked freely and openly about being unable to attend his father’s funeral and all I could do was listen, hold his hand, and weep. I’m hopeful that we will be able to raise the funds to pay for a three-year apprenticeship for him when he’s released so that he has the opportunity to put the past behind him and earn an honest living.
It’s with a heavy heart that I have to announce that Emmanuel Pidassa, my faithful Kabiye research assistant, died yesterday, age 46, following head injuries sustained in a serious motorbike accident on 27 June.
I’ve known Emmanuel for over twenty years. He came to me with a deep knowledge of Kabiye language and culture, and over the years I trained him as a writer, editor, translator, and teacher. He helped me check tens of thousands of Kabiye verb conjugations for my book on that subject. He proved to be an efficient administrator for several classroom literacy experiments. He added hundreds of articles to the Kabiye Wikipedia. He was my coach whenever it was my turn to do the Kabiye Bible reading at church, adding tone marks to the text and training me sentence by sentence. He taught written Kabiye to a new generation of teenagers at Lama-Soumadè secondary school.
The last work we did together was a study of Kabiye verbal extensions. Emmanuel was in his element for this kind of project: hard-working, a good ear for tone, a quick learner, patient to a fault, humble, insightful, and gently over-ruling less experienced team members when necessary. The article has just been accepted for publication in the Journal of West African Languages.
Emmanuel was also our team’s scribe: For years, I’ve never had to write my own administrative letters because of Emmanuel’s particular talent for this. He knew exactly the correct politeness formulas to use when writing formal French, and had the most elaborate, florid handwriting this side of the 18th century. Whenever he asked me to add my signature it felt as though I was vandalizing an exquisite work of art.
He leaves his wife, Prudence, and six children, five of whom are still at school.
See my Facebook page for a photo tribute.
PIDASSA Dadja Makiyè Emmanuel, 20 octobre 1973 – 23 September 2019.
Tɛtʊ ɛɛwɛɛ hunjamm – May the earth lay lightly upon him.
At the recent SMA annual meetings, we had a picnic at the amazing new Statue of Christ the Redeemer perched on the cliff top in Défalé with stunning views of the valley below. Rio de Janeiro comes to northern Togo.
Cornishmaninafrica 