African Languages and a Missionary's Experience

Throughout high school, I visited an elderly, disabled woman in my community named Margaret. My brother had visited her before me, until he went to college.

Although I would help her with anything she needed around the house (the left side of her body is paralyzed), mostly I just kept her company and played games with her.

Margaret’s life story is pretty amazing. Her parents were missionaries in Liberia, but she grew up in the United States, where she went to a boarding school and then college. Then she, too, became a missionary in Liberia. She spent her life living three years there and one year here until she had a stroke around age sixty and she moved permanently back to the United States.

While in Liberia, Margaret was a missionary with the Lutheran Church. She was in charge of language program, where she taught new missionaries the local language (Loma) and a literacy program, where she supervised a group of African teachers, who were teaching their own people to read. Once a month she led a teacher meeting and she also helped write stories in Loma for students to read.

She said that her life was different from the way it is in the United States because she had servants to cook for her and wash for her. People in the Peace Corps objected to the idea of hiring African servants. However, Margaret contended that they had a limited opportunity to make money and that working was better than not having a job. She added that the best thing that you could do was to provide jobs, pay fair wages, and respect your workers.

She described the native people had friendly and hardworking. They had a highly structured society with very strict gender divisions (women worked some jobs and men worked others). Men cut brush to make farms and women cleared low brush, planted seeds, weeded, and did the harvesting. They farmed rice and women also kept small vegetable gardens where they grew hot peppers, sweet potatoes, and cassava, which they usually ate with their rice.

Margaret also mentioned the polygamy in their society. She didn’t object to it on any grounds of immorality, but she said that it was not a good system, because there was unhappiness and jealously among the many wives of each man. Men had to be careful and get equal presents for all their wives and eat the food that they had cooked for them in equal parts. Of course, people are people, and men often picked favorite among their wives, causing a great deal of contention.

When I asked her if anything surprised her about Africa, she said that she had been surprised by how intricate the grammar in Loma was. She explained that anthropologist may have found primitive tools, and primitive weapons, but they had never found a primitive language. Every language has been fully formed with complicated grammar and all parts of speech. She said that it was a great experience to learn an African language, because they are so different from any Indo-European language. Loma is a tonal language, and she described how while supervising missionaries in language study she had noticed that many of them tried to indicate a high tone by raising their eyebrows and a low tone by lowering their eyebrows, which obviously didn’t work when they tried to talk to the native people.

While many people find the society where she lived very chauvinistic, Margaret argued that women actually have a great deal of freedom and respect there. She explained that women had control over whatever money they earned from what they grew in their vegetable gardens and that they were able to become witch doctors, just the same as men. The witch doctors have the power to heal and the power to kill, and Margaret said, “If you have the power over life and death, then you’re pretty powerful.”

I’m not sure the inner-feminist in me can agree that a polygamous society (even one where infidelity is high and men don’t mind their wives sleeping with other men) and where women have to bow to all the men that they encounter is very respectful of women, but I see her point.

Also, I found her note about the lack of primitive languages to be intriguing. Perhaps it is one of the best pieces of proof that no group of humans is inherently more developed and superior than any other. Although, characteristics of individual languages can be affected by people’s surroundings, the idea of having a language is not, unlike, say, the crops that people eat, or the weapons they can make, or the diseases they develop. And we humans all do have language.

One of the fundamental questions that my world history class addressed (when we weren’t busy coming up with historically inspired band names or watching my teacher knock a stapler off his desk when he started ranting about neo-cons) was why some nations are so rich and others are so poor. Of course, part of the explanation that Europeans used to convince themselves that they were able to conquer the world because whites were inherently superior, not because, as Jared Diamond would say, because they guns, germs, and steel. But the fact that there are equally complex and complete languages across the world from the most primitive, remote village in Africa, to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, helps show how ridiculous racism and the idea that any group of people is inherently superior is.