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<donaldo@bwc.org> Kenneth Harrow's example of Sembene's _Xala_ in French highlights an aspect of use of former colonial languages in Africa that remains important even if one questions the accuracy of application of the labels "English-speaking," "Francophone," etc. to African nations. The former colonial / official languages do seem to have roots in Africa now, even if much more shallow than those of indigenous languages. Africa, of course, has contributed to the literatures and lexicons of these languages (European in origin but international in use), these languages have also contributed perhaps indelibly to local speech and expression in Africa, and they retain a functionality on much of the continent that goes beyond merely being administrative languages or media for commerce, etc. Yet English, French,... remain essentially foreign tongues (and arguably will always be so). A few years ago, Sonja Fagerberg noted that Fulaphones (Haalpulaar'en) in Senegal found that they got much more out of a Fula (Pulaar) translation of Kane's _Aventure ambigue_ than they had from reading the French original. So, the original version of _Aventure ambigue_ may be, like the French published version of _Xala_, part of a francophone heritage as Prof. Harrow suggests, but the existence and life of such literature in French does not make Senegal a "Francophone country" in any unqualified sense of the term. Senegal certainly participates in the French project of "la Francophonie" in both linguistic and political senses, and there is obviously something "Francophone" in or about Senegalese society, but we still come back to Fiona McLaughlin's question of why we need to use these linguistic labels for it and other countries in Africa when such labels are so clearly incomplete and potentially misleading in most contexts. As for my original question on this topic, I'm thinking that one must tailor the term(s) used to the specific contexts - a good practice anyway, but less convenient than just relying on familiar (or currently popular) labels.
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