Cruise O'Brien, Donal

English

SOAS Research Online

The Shadow-politics of Wolofisation

The relationship between language and politics in the African post-colony remains obscure and underexamined. Here we withdraw into a 
poorly lit area, an area of potentialities, where new political shapes
 may 
emerge as the outcome of half-conscious choices made by very large 
numbers of people. Language choices in the first place: the expansion 
of the Wolof language in Senegal, principally though far from 
exclusively an urban phenomenon, is to be seen in a context where the 
individual may speak several languages, switching linguistically from 
one social situation to another. Such multilingualism is general in 
Africa: the particularity of the Wolof case, at least in Senegal, is the
 
extent to which this language has spread, far beyond the boundaries of
 
core ethnicity, of a historical Wolof zone from the colonial or pre-colonial periods. And these individual language choices cast their 
political shadow.The political consequences of this socio-linguistic phenomenon are as
 
yet indistinct, but to see a little more clearly one should in the second
 
place relate it to the subject of the politics of ethnicity. Language is
 of 
course an important element in any definition of ethnicity, and there is
 
an evident overlap; but the politics of language is also a distinguishable
 
subject in its own right. Where the assertion of ethnic identity can be
 
identified as a possible weapon in the individual's struggle for power
 
and recognition within the colonial and post-colonial state, the choice
 
of a language is that of the most effective code in the individual's
 daily 
struggle for survival. Language choice in such a setting may be less a
 
matter of assertion, the proud proclamation of an identity, than it is
 one 
of evasion, a more or less conscious blurring of the boundaries of 
identity. And in Senegal the government itself by its inaction has 
practised its own shadow-politics of procrastination.</jats:p

Donal Cruise O'Brien

Crossref

The Journal of Modern African Studies