African joy, language and identity with Dr. Moradewun Adejunmobi
“ Ask Dr. Fourshey for all them Praises to give background information about our interviewee ”
“Ma chérie fait tes valises, on va quitter la street, J’ai fait du bénéf’ qu’on va investir en Afrique.”
-Dadju and Tiakola
In English : My darling, pack your bags, we’re going to leave the street, I made a profit that we are going to invest in Africa.
To listen to the full song: Dieu Merci – YouTube
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in·vest /inˈvest/
provide or endow someone or something with (a particular quality or attribute)
We are always careful about when and where we are going to invest our time, money, skills, curiosity and energy.
There is talk amongst the African Diaspora about investing in Africa.
For a long time, we have had investments by foreign capitalist, communist, or socialist societies and institutions, which come with contracts that may not be friendly to the residents.
In the past this was colonial governments and now, big corporations.
What I am saying is investing is not always monetary, and here we have a conversation about investing in joy and language as a future tool
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Miss Interviewer: Since we are more attuned to Africa’s pain and suffering, what does a world that doesn’t overstimulate the pains of Africa look like?
Dr. Moradewun: … I don’t want us to sweep real pain under the rug, or sweep real suffering under the rug … To be human is to have the capacity for pain but also capacity for joy and to present any group of people as if they have one but not the other is to represent an incomplete picture of that group of people…
Miss Interviewer: Would you say it dehumanizes the people?
Dr. Moradewun: It becomes a caricature of who they are: they are always doing “x” and always enduring “y.”
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The African Identity
It really depends on who you are asking, and here is why.
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Miss Interviewer: What do you think of the identity African?
Dr. Moradewun: For your generation, compared to the other generation, there is a greater inclination for people to think of themselves as African. The fact has a history… people considered themselves bound to a specific locality, and the encounter with the wider world, that the term African has become useful.
Dr. Moradewun: What we consider an African identity today, it doesn’t consist of one thing and what we call African from what circulates outside Africa is not necessarily the same as what we call African which circulates in Africa. It tends to be associated with popular culture in particular places…. Being African is not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing.
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Language
“Africa is really not the continent of a solo language”, Dr. Adejunmobi. Even within families you will find a myriad of languages, which speaks to the multilingual nature in the continent. In these families you can even see an emergence of a lingua franca unique to that family. With the global dominance of English and French, as the more dominant European languages, we see some loss and some survival of the African languages, keeping the dynamism of these languages and showing the adaptation and creativity of Africans as a whole. But of course the accents folded by our tongues have the benefit of telling these stories.
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Miss Interviewer: How would you advise a young African in a Eurocentric dominated world to embrace the use of their language especially because we deem them as inferior to European languages?
Dr. Moradewun: Social media has provided a medium to experiment with languages, especially young people tend to mix and match and do not always aim for purity or following all the language use rules. I see that as a sign of vibrance and dynamism that language captures.
If your grandparents are still around and you have a means of recording stories, you can ask them to recount their lives in their own language so that young people can build an archive for the future for people to go back to and know their ancestral languages and the life stories attached to and captured by those languages.
~Holiness Kerandi