June 14
This last week (Tuesday-Saturday), I taught introduction to syntax to a group of nine English master’s students at the University of Lome. Two of the students were female, seven of them male. The participants also included Professor Essizewa, professor of English linguistics, and M., his assistant. Most of the time, there were 11 people present.
Prof. Essizewa was my student and collaborator at NYU. I wrote to him several years ago, and told him I would like to teach a short course at the university, but I had to delay several times. Finally, everything came together this summer. Without Professor Essizewa, it would not have been possible to organize this course.
I taught from 9am to 12noon, with a break from 10:30am to 11:00am. Then I met with one or two students each day for about half an hour after the course. During the meetings, I talked to them about their master’s projects, and also about studying in the United States. After that, Prof. and I went to the faculty cafeteria to eat. That meal cost exactly 3,500 CFA each day, which is less than seven dollars. This is where I learned of the fufu pounding machine. Then, on most days, I called Gozem to pick me up, arriving home by around 2:30pm.
One of the wonderful things about the course was the variety of languages present: We had Ewe (four speakers), Mina (related to Ewe, one speaker), Moba (three speakers, including M.), Kabiye (two speakers, including Prof.), and Fulfulde (one speaker). These languages came up in various ways during the course. In just a short period of time, I learned many things (including about Ewe).
My idea was to teach them introduction to syntax, using the minimalist framework, in particular the operation Merge, as a pedagogical tool. The basic schedule went as follows:
Day 1: What is syntax? UG, I-language.
Day 2: Merge and constituent structure tests.
Day 3: TP, CP, DP.
Day 4: practice tree drawing (the whole day).
Day 5: Internal Merge and then optional presentations.
There were three presentations: one on focus in Moba, one on VP-fronting in Ewe, and one on postpositions in Kabiye.
The students had a high level of English, but were a bit shy. So I learned all of their names and started calling on them by name. That helped. It also helped that they had some background in syntax, including some basic knowledge of generative grammar and some knowledge of Role and Reference Grammar.
I tried to focus on basic skills. For example, one basic skill is to have them look at a tree, and tell me what does not work in that tree (e.g., is the constituent structure correct, is the labeling correct, etc.). So everybody in the class had lots of opportunity to draw trees on the board, then we as a class would discuss them, and try to improve upon them. Instead of embarrassing the students, this exercise had the effect of empowering them. I told them that the only way to learn a topic well, is to make mistakes, and understand how to fix them.
On the last day, the students presented me with a beautiful piece of cloth that they had bought at the grand marche (asigame). It meant that they appreciated my effort, and that they wanted to show me their appreciation. I love that piece of cloth so much. I am going to have nice African style outfit made, and then I will wear it at NYU when I teach.
I want to run the school again next year. I already have ideas to make it better for the students: 1. I think it should be two weeks, instead of one. That way, we could go fairly deeply into a few topics, and consider them at leisurely pace. In a one-week course, it is very tempting to rush through material. 2. I will try to come up with stipends for next time. Even a small stipend would help the students with expenses associated with the school, such as food and transportation. 3. If I have two weeks, I can require a small project proposal in syntax by the end of the two weeks. Each student would write a three-page proposal on some topic in syntax. Then perhaps, some of them will pursue those projects for their master’s project.
June 14
On the zemijan, the wind rushing past us, I clasp the driver’s shoulders. He doesn’t object, even if it is unusual. The Togolese do not grab hold of anything while riding on the back of a zemijan. Their hands just dangle to side, or maybe hold a purse held in their lap.
I feel clearly that there is only a thin porous membrane between the reality where I live and the reality where I fall off the zemijan and hit my head on the pavement. As we drive, I can picture it. Just one bump, and I go down on the ground. So I am terrified.
Of course, we have helmets. If you are caught without a helmet, the charge is 5,000 CFA, for which you will not receive a receipt. So everybody, with rare exceptions, wears a helmet. But the helmet I have been given is too small for me. It barely fits on my head, and the strap does not reach around my chin. If I fell, it would just pop off, and I would be a dead man. But the driver says that even if the strap is not fastened, the soldiers are satisfied. So I jump on, and off we go.
June 14
Tragedy strikes. My cell phone fell into a bucket of water. No Gozem today. No Whatsapp. I am on my own with the zemidjan to get to school. I have no way to contact people. I am all of the sudden back in 1985, and in the Peace Corps. Roughing it.
I went to bathe last night around 6:30pm, by which time it is already getting dark out. The bathroom is nice, with a toilette and a shower stall, but there is no lighting there. Also, there is no running water. So I turned the light of my cell phone on, and perched it on the sink to take a bucket shower. Piece of advice: never perch your cell phone above the water bucket when you are taking a bucket shower.
I started digging around in my toiletry bag for my razor, and the bag bumped up against my cell phone, which then fell into the watery abyss. I snatched it our right away, and the light was still on, but it started to ficker, so I turned it off. My niece rushed the phone to the “depanneur”, who now has it. We will hear the verdict today at 3:00pm. Can it be repaired, or is it dead? If dead, then I need to buy a new phone.
Overall, I am proud of my response. When it happened, I said “shit!”, but felt no emotion at all. No anger, or frustration, or depression, or regret. It was as if my life was a train and it branched off on another set of tracks. I just felt, “OK, what now?”. Then I started to think of the next steps. I wish I could apply this model more generally.
June 11
Off to teach at the University of Lome. My mode of transportation is Gozem, which is a version of Uber used by the Togolese. It has the advantage of being able to locate your coordinates precisely, so the driver can find you. There are generally no street signs in Togo, and people do not know the names of streets. Within neighborhoods, there are thousands of nameless small streets and passageways, all of them are dirt roads filled with potholes. But if you call the taxi on Gozem, it generally arrives within 10-15 minutes, and you are off. Another benefit is that Gozem calculates the fare, in terms of distance travelled. So there is no haggling over price. Of course, the alternative is the ever present zemijan, which I described in an earlier post. But you risk head injuries with that, so the taxi is preferable whenever possible.
For all of my adult life, I have taken a stance against smart phones, never buying and never using them. I feared the presence of more technology in my pocket, drawing me in, like social media and the internet can draw one in. I have seen so many students obsessively attached to their smart phones, and I did not want that for myself. But Togo has finally broken me. Because of Gozem and Whatsapp, I need to have a smart phone in Togo. I guess it is the beginning of the end for my private individual mental life.
My taxi trip goes from Adidogme Wessome to the University of Lome, near the mosque found on campus. I have a very nice airconditioned classroom in a newly built building, with a whiteboard and markers. I am teaching a small set of master’s students in the English linguistics program. Evidently the notice was also sent to the French linguistics program, but none of their students showed up. My lectures are all in English, and the question are all in English too. Since the students are master’s students, their level of English is high, but they don’t get much of a chance to practice speaking English, since Togo is a francophone country. Also, the students seem a bit shy to me, but I am calling on them by name, so that brings them out of their shells.
I am teaching certain parts of my undergraduate linguistics course (we call it “Grammatical Analysis I”). I assembled the notes, and had them sent by e-mail to the students. I call it “A Minimalist Introduction to Syntactic Theory”, mostly because I make heavy use of Merge in introducing phrase structure and movement. But it is not meant to be a comprehensive introduction to minimalism, since I do not get into issues like Agree. The students mostly just read the notes from their phones or computers. I did not make any paper copies at all. There is no need to.
The students have learned syntax in their program, but it is Role and Reference grammar. I actually know nothing about that framework. It strikes me that it is not very widely used in the United States. Mentally, I associate it with Robert Van Valin and Buffalo University. Maybe it is more widely used in typology literature. I make a mental note to do some research on it later.
On the ride home from the university today, I got a Gozem and was charged 4,125 CFA (which is 7 dollars and 19 cents). Even though it is a ridiculously low price in the American system, it is just about double the usual price for my route. I told the driver that it was double the usual price, and he told me it was because it was raining, and there was a “marjoration”. I think he cheated me, but I cannot quite figure out how.
June 8
Yesterday, I went to church, Eglise de la Percee Divine, located just down the block from where I am staying (cartier Adidigome Wessome). The name translates to “Church of the Divine Breakthrough.” I cannot find very much information about them online, but apparently, they came to Togo just a few years ago.
They are what the Togolese Ewe call gbOgbOme tsOtsi (O = open “o”). Literally, this means “breathing church” (to indicate a "spiritual church"). It now covers the wide array of non-Catholic churches that all seem to be in the Pentecostal tradition. There is a lot of emphasis on the holy spirt, receiving the holy spirt (gbOgbO kOkOE), intense praying, people falling into trances, etc. There are many such little splinter churches.
This church in particular seemed to be organized around a kind of rock band, including two electric guitars, a modern drum kit, an electric piano and a trumpet. Singers used mics that were connected to two massive speakers off to the side. Most of the church involved that band playing music in some way or the other. Even when the sermon was being delivered, they played along as background music. The prayers seemed to be accompanied by even louder background music. Since the room was not that big, the sound resonated loudly everywhere. When I left the building, I felt like I was going deaf.
Off to the side, there were some traditional Ewe drums, but they were only used once when the traditional choir sang, otherwise, it was just the rock band that provided music. That is unfortunate, since I love the sound of traditional Ewe drums, which are played quite a bit in the EPP church that I go to in the US.
At other times, there were singers holding mics, leading the church in song. The songs got the whole congregation (around 200 people) dancing energetically. Finally, one large lady just in front of us raised her hands and started screaming and spinning. As she fell to the ground, she hit several rows of plastic chairs which were all quickly cleared away. Once on the ground she continued shaking and screaming. Eventually, after around 5 minutes, they whisked her off somewhere to the side. I did not see where they took her.
The room had fans everywhere, on the ceiling and on the sides, trying to diminish the Togolese humidity and heat. But for me, the fans added another source of noise, making it hard to hear the sermon. The sermon itself was delivered in English, French and Ewe. I think that they were speaking English because that day they had some American visitors. Once something is said in one language, it is immediately translated to another. Usually, the pastor will say something in Ewe, and it will be immediately translated to French. You might think this would be a great way to pick up Ewe and French, but the sound was distorted, and there was lots of other noise in the room (including the fan, and the band’s background music). So I hardly heard anything. Even when they spoke English, I barely understood it.
They had three large electronic screens hanging from the ceiling. When the sermon started, they projected a Bible verse onto the screens in French, which formed the basis of the sermon. Somebody would read what was projected, then the pastor would take over commenting on it. The verse was about feeding children before feeding dogs, and how dogs will still eat the crumbs that fall from the table. When the screens were not projecting verse, there was a picture of what seemed to be wheat fields, with clouds rolling over them.
The church started early the morning (around half past seven?) and ended after one in the afternoon. Apparently, it went on a bit long because of the visitors. I arrived at 9:00am and left at around 12:00noon, since I had a previous lunch appointment with a colleague. The length of the service may have also had something to do with the fact that today is Lundi de Pentecote, which is a national day off (jour ferrier) in Togo. Apparently nobody is going to work day.
That was my Sunday morning at church.
June 7
I took my first ride on a zemijan today. It is a motorcycle you pay to go places. I needed to buy some shampoo, so I took the zemijan from my residence in Adidogome, to the Champion in Adidogome. When I was in the Peace Corps, we did not have zemijan, nor did we have Champion. As for the latter, there was an SGGG in the heart of Lome that we as volunteers used to go to from time to time. It was basically a small modern supermarket, it is now been replaced by Champion and a few other chains (Ramco).
I seem to recall that public transportation in that epoch was arranged around taxis and small transportation vans. Am I misremembering? I don't recall ever taking a zemijan, so it is something relatively recent. I believe the term zemijan itself comes from Fongbe, and that the Togolese borrowed the concept and the term from Benin. It is basically a way for the many unemployed to make a little money, transporting people around on the back of a motorcycle. It is by far the main form of public transportation now, with Gozem (a form of Uber) coming in second.
I hopped on the back, and put my feet on the little foot stands. I am 6'4'', over 300lbs, so I am a bit big for a comfortable ride. I kept thinking I would pop off the back and hit the street. As a result, I clasped onto the driver's shoulders, which Togolese never do: they ride without holding anything, just putting their hands to the side. The helmets that they have do not fit me, so I used my own biking helmet. It worked just as well.
The driver was chatty so he was asking me how I learned Ewe. Since the wind was blowing, and we were in traffic, I could barely hear him. As we were driving he said, "Should I run fast" in Ewe, since he wanted to accelerate. I told him "Don't run fast, please".
As with all purchases, the usual bargaining starts from Yovo prices. Yovo is "white person" in Ewe. The driver wanted 1000 CFA (two dollars), which I knew was not the price. So it took a few back and forths, and pleading on both sides, before I got him to a reasonable approximation of the right price 500 CFA. It does not bother me, I just count it as practice in Ewe.
That was my first ride.
June 7
When I was in Botswana, I lived in Block 6, which is a middle class neighborhood of Gaborone. It is no different from many other such neighborhoods. In fact, I would say that more than half of Gaborone looks like Block 6. Every house in Block 6 has the following items: AC, TV, wifi, geyser (water heater), running water, security fence, security door. Inside the house, there will be a kitchen and a nice bathroom (with a porcelain toilette and shower stall). People do not take bucket showers in those houses. Many of them have garages or places to park the car, and a large number have beautiful rock and tree gardens.
These houses belong to professionals of various kinds, including government workers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, business people. The neighborhoods often contain a mix of Batswana and other nationalities, especially Indians. Everybody seems to get along fine.
But then, there id a street that dividesBlock 6 from Mogoditshane (a town on the outskirts of Gaborone). On one side of the street there is a nice middle class neighborhood, and on the other there are the lower income households of Mogoditshane.
The point of this message is that in Lome, it is very rare to find neighborhoods like Block 6. Rather, most of Lome (with a few exceptions) is like Mogoditshane. To me, this suggests that the middle class in Lome is not very big, as compared with Gaborone. I am not talking about absolutes -- there are wealthy people in Lome and poor people in Gaborone. Rather, I am talking about statistics. A significant fraction of the people in Gaborone live a middle class life, whereas the vast majority of the people in Lome are struggling to get by day by day, week by week. I definitely could be off in this assessment, but that is the impression I have.
Bottom line: Botswana is a relatively wealthy country in Africa, and Togo is a relatively poor one. Living in one is a completely different experience from living in the other. In some ways, living in Botswana is a lot like living in the US. To get food, one goes to a supermarket and buys food. In fact, most of the Botswana shop in places like Choppies in Gaborone. But very few Togolese shop in supermarkets in Lome (even though they are becoming more and more common). Rather, they buy their food in open markets and from vendors and small shops dotting the city.
June 7
After the Togolese have welcomed me this last week with open arms and their characteristic sense of humor, to learn of this travel ban is a shame for me. I am ashamed of my government.
June 5
The biggest problem I encountered arriving in Togo was the loss of my luggage. I left the US on May 31 and arrived in Abidjan on Sunday June 1st. Then I left Abidjan June 1st to go to Lome. As I mentioned previously, my flight in Abidjan was delayed twice, so we left at around 11:00pm, and arrived after midnight. To my horror, my luggage did not arrive with me, and so I left the airport with the clothes on my back. Monday, I went back to the airport to check, but I forgot to bring the "declaration" of loss with me, and so they would not let me into the airport. I told the man: "Ca, ce n'est pas bon.", and he responded: "Donc, il faut aller fair ce qui est bon." On Tuesday, I went back with the declaration in hand, driving back and forth to the airport in an Uber, at least an hour each way. Still no luggage. Finally, I just called them up on Wednesday, and they said my luggage was back. So I collected it. I feel that what I have learned in Togo so far is the skill of retrieving lost luggage from the Lome airport.
June 5
In Togo with an internet connection! Everything is a lesson now. Everything is new again. First impressions of Lome, before I forget. Once you get on to the streets, it is swarming with people. The country is small, but the population per area is large (compared to Botswana, for example). So Lome is packed. What magnifies the impression is the terrible presence of the zemijan. Most people get around nowadays by hiring a motorcycle. You ride on the back, and it takes you wherever you want to go for a small fee. Unlike Botswana and Ghana, there do not seem to be any combis or trotro (small vans that transport people to different locations). The public transportation section is basically the zemijan. So the streets are a total mess. There are some cars and taxis driving around, but they are surrounded by a throng of zemijan. And this means there are lots and lots of accidents, as I know from personal experience now. Driving from the market to my relative's house, a motorcycle hit the back of our taxi, smashing the window and blowing it out. THUMP! There was glass all over the place. Luckily none of us got hurt, nor did the motorcycle driver. But it just shows how congested things have become.
June 1
Saving grace, silver lining, hidden gem: The airport at Abidjan has a shower! I just took a shower. This nearly makes up for everything, including the double delay and 10 hour layover. What a refreshing treat. The air conditioning is weak. The storm clouds are overhead. The tropics press against the windows, and I have had a nice shower.
I am supposed to leave at 10:00pm and arrive at 11:30pm. But they have changed times twice already. The people picking me up have had to be notified twice, and they are now skeptical themselves. They are asking questions.
The journey enters its final stage.
June 1
I am in the business class lounge in Abidjan. The flight went without problems, and I even got some sleep in. Believe it or not, even business class feels a little tight for me, since I am tall and heavy at the same time. When I tried to change money in the airport, they directed me to the pharmacy, which is where you change money in the airport. In my broken French, I tried to express to the pharmacist that the usual situation involves a special store/shop whose function it is to change money. She was completely unimpressed, and just said something about being able to change "en bas" if I had a police escort. Now, I am here until 10:00pm at night. So I just need to pass the day in the lounge.
June 1
Guess what! I am flying business class. Part of the reason is that it is a bit cheaper on Air Ethiopia, so I can afford it. I believe this is the first time I have purchased a business class ticket, instead of being given an upgrade for one reason or the other. What do you get for it? First, check-in is shorter. You have your own line, and nobody is in that line. So instead of waiting an hour, it is instantaneous. That is a perk, right? Then there is the lounge, which is fully stocked, dinner, snacks, wine, beer, comfortable chairs, wifi, just a level of comfort up. BTW, these people in the lounge they look like regular people to me. So we are all just here, having found some way or the other to creep onto business class. Then on the plane, the business class cabin has fewer people and is spacious, with its own restroom. The seats are wider and bigger, and lie flat at night for a nap. So the sharp edges of long distance travel are dulled just a bit with business class.
May 31
I am having problems with my computer, so I will keep this short. I am in the T7 Horizon Lounge at JFK, awaiting my Air Ethiopia flight at 10:00pm. Check-in was a breeze, but security took half an hour in a slow line. Now, I rest up a bit in the lounge. Air Ethiopia has created a network all over Africa. They fly to all the countries, and are cheaper than their American and European competitors. I know they fly to West Africa quite a bit, and they were also in Botswana. So they are kind of like the combi/trotro service for all of Africa. I fly into Abidjan after a 10 hour flight (compared the usual 16 hour flights to SA), then I have a long layover of about 10 hours in Abidjan. AIr Cote-d'Ivoire has already changed by flight time twice. The original layover was a reasonable 2 hours, not it is 10. From what I have heard, this kind of delay is common for them. But there is no other way I am getting to Lome, so I must abide.
May 30
My last full day on US soil, until tomorrow I am on the road again. "On the road", the great American novel, captured the spirit in-detail, but add to that a sense of scientific discovery, and it is really a heady trip. To go to a foreign land, and by doing so, to learn something about yourself that you could have never known otherwise.
My only goal: Set things up for an Ewe research project lasting the next three to five years. Keep my expectations low, and then I will be sure to meet them. Enjoy the moment, enjoy the process. Live on the road and let beautiful wondrous things happen to me.
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