Number 1, 1984
Numéro
JAFTA
Journal of the Association of French
Teachers in Nigeria
1984
Revue de l’Association des Professeurs de
Française en Afrique
SOMMAIRE/CONTENTS
AFTA Executive Committee/Bureau Exécutif de l'APFA
Editorial Board/Comité de Rédaction
Editorial
Articles
Okoli, S.S.
Chuku, E.C.O.
Page
i
ii
iii
Raisons et nécessité de l'enseignement
du français au Nigeria
1
Quelle grammaire faut-il enseigner
dans les Collèges d'Education au
Nigeria?
13
Ajiboye, T.
Local Resources and Foreign Languages;
A Case for Yoruba Proverbs
30
Edebiri, U.
L'influence de Molière sur Guillaume
Oyono-Nbia
41
Documents relatifs au congrès constitutif de l’AFTA Communications
Tidjani – Serpos
Elaho. R.O.
Maury-Perera
Discours
Momoh, R.
Raimi, M.
Dougan, I
Okeh, P. I.
L'enseignement du français en
Afrique orientations et
Perspectives
52
Perspectives d'une politique de
coopération culturelle et technique
56
Pour une méthode unifiée d'enseignement
du français dans l'Afrique de
l’Ouest anglophone.
60
Ministre de l'Education du Bendel
Président du la MAFT
Représentante de la SLAFT
Vice-Président de la NAFT du Bendel
67
70
74
78
30
LOCAL RESOURCES AND FOREIGN LANGUAGES:
A CASE FOR YORUBA PROVERBS IN THE FRENCH
DISCOURSE
By Tunde Ajiboye
It is now more than obvious to state that the proverb is part
and parcel of almost all languages of the world. There is hardly any
language that provides standard communication which does not
have a layer, however thin, of heightened speech which inspire
proverbs. Even in ordinary conversations, some languages are
found to be so rich in proverbs that those proverbs are easily seen
as the welcome salt of these conversations Sometimes, it is not the
richness of the language alone that makes proverbs acceptable in
day-to-day conversation: the cultural expectations of the owner of
the language often impose the way to speak at certain times. For
example, among the Yoruba, it is not accepted that you speak
without restraint or caution. In other words, to quote Oyekan
Owomoyela (Introduction, Yoruba Proverbs vide Bibliography) "to
speak with the whole mouth" is against the language use of the
Yorubas. So, discretion, prudence, oratorical precautions, diplomacy
are some of the inherent factors that dictate the use of proverbs
especially among the indigenous practitioners of the Yoruba
language. Of course, when examined critically and objectively,
proverbs from other languages may reveal similar, if not Identical
determining factors, at least at the surface level.
What then is a proverb? A major issue in language expression
is that of the definition of easily identifiable objects and easily
perceptible ideas. A literary scholar- Samuel Johnson was once
asked by James Boswell• What is poetry? And Johnson's reply was
said to have been that it was easier to know what poetry is than to
tell what it is. "We all know what light is” he added," but is not easy
to tell what it is".
Dr Ajiboye est du Department of French, College of Education,
Ilesha Nigeria.
31.
(James Boswell, "Life of Samuel Johnson", G.B. Hill and L.F.
Powel, Oxford 1934). While it is granted that definition is not the
province of man, it is at least useful to have a framework for our
imagination to work on. Thus, Webster's New International
Dictionary 2nd Edition lists five major plains covered by the wordproverbs. Also, in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Third
Edition) prepared by William Little, H.W. Fowler and Jessie Coulson,
five areas are identified as coming within the compass of the wordproverb. However, contemporary usage lends support to an attempt
to define proverb as: truth or wisdom, a truth expressed in a
sentence that is given added beauty through its consciousness or
pithiness.
It would appear then, that the proverb, to the extent that it is
often a certain wisdom, has within it, a quality of universal appeal,
that ought to transcend the language which has inspired it and given
it formal recognition. It is in this regard that the local languages as
opposed to the so-called languages of wider communication have a
lot to contribute to the vigour, however long established, of
international languages such as French, English, German and
Russian. Today, it is quite comfortable for us to think of idiomatic
exchanges and lexical loans between one international language
and another, whereby, coup d'etat, and tete-a-tete pass from French
to English and 'football' and 'snack' pass from English to French,
identity is found to exist between the "sagesse'5 of one advanced
nation and another, through nothing but comparative paroemigraphy.
If proverbs are agreed to be or to signify the embodiment of the
"sagesse" of a. people, it is worth examining whether igbo
"sagesse", for example, cannot be of value to advanced peoples of
the world, specifically to the French people whose language has
been in Nigeria for two decades now. It may well be observed that, in
the case of English which is a second language to Nigeria, and in
fact her official language, laudable effort is
32
already being made towards bringing the aesthetics of local
proverbs to bear on the aesthetics of English language. Authors
have been making so significant a contribution to the development of
English language in a manner that has started to reflect our cultural
essence that little or no case need be specially made in this regard.
The case of French becomes necessary at this point when the
need to know how to speak French runs the risk of making one
forget that French is not as static and highly ritualized as not to admit
of any local influence. The point one should make here is that once
French has been acquired to the level of mastery of sounds, syntax
and morphology, then the student should be encouraged to use local
proverbs in their productions: conversations, essays, debates,
private letters and so on. Don't we insist that teachers of French
make use of local environment and materials to motivate the
teachers learning of French among the students? If yes, it should be
equally necessary and indeed advantageous to make use of local
environment and materials to advance such learning. While it is
agreed that neither syntax nor morphology can be transferred,
proverbs if transferred, will provide the foreign language an
additional visitor to determining its dynamic essence. It is in fact, not
to the foreign ear that the aesthetic dainty of local proverbs is
intended. Very often (and the case of French amply clarifies this) the
owner of the language is really seen or heard by less than 5% of the
people learning the language in this country. Very often contact is by
imported audio-visual methods to which a highly selected few have
constant access. The reality of the French language learning in
Nigeria is that output of learning is in very many cases mutually
tested among the learners of the same linguistic background. In 9 of
10 cases, the mutual verification of learning output is in fact among
33
learners of the same mother tongue. The essence of this
observation is that when local proverbs are sandwiched into
discussions and conversations, the conceptual framework with in
which the listener is required or invited to operate provides "valuable
insights and perceptive dimensions to other world views'". J. Walter
preface; Yoruba Proverbs (vide Bibliography).
In what specific ways can local proverbs justify the claim to
"valuable insights" if there are going to be such insights, in what
specific directions do the insights work? Of course, it is important for
us to emphasize that the Yoruba learner of French, for example,
unlike the English pupil learning French5 often feels a kind of
"language complex" in his attitude towards developing his French, To
him, developing his skill in French means his flawless mastery of the
syntactic order and "the delicate interplay between form and usage",
Tunde Ajiboye : Preface: "Common Errors in French". To him (and
perhaps without realising it), French language is best learnt when
you use words as the owner of the language uses them, when
idiomatic expressions are not recognized as such unless they have
been found duly "ordered" by Grevisse or by Quillet and clearly and
officially authorized by the Academic Francaise. While the respect of
the .rules of the French language is in itself good and desirable, it
must be pointed out that the foreign language cannot claim to have
been learnt to the point of personal possession until the learner can
scoop out from the entrails of his own language system a few
transferable concepts and lore’s that would serve to revitalize that
language. Among the concepts and lore’s that are readily
transferable are proverbs. (Others are songs, stories and tales
gestures). Rather than besmear regrettably the face of the foreign
language, proverbs if well used color the language beautifully in a
way unexpected by the owner of the foreign language. Let us look,
for example,
34
at the following proverbs: "La-poule mangeait quelque chose avant
1'arrivee du mais"- This is a Yoruba proverb which leaves clear
message when introduced on the right occasion. When so
introduced, it warns against people who think that without them the
world would collapse, that matters would suffer. But the message
becomes clear more readily to a Yoruba speaker of French because
he has little or no difficulty in establishing the link between this
proverb and the Yoruba custom, of feeding chicken.
Comparative paroemigraphy.. it has been rightly observed by Jerzy
GLUSKI, (vide Bibliography) has revealed that many apparently
different languages of the West have a lot in common, from, the
Doint of view of the "sagesse et 1'esprit" of the various nations which
these languages have brought to focus. Many proverbs from one
Western language have, for instance r, been found to have undiluted
equivalents in another. Consider the following pair of proverbs taken
from English and French:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Fr.
Eng.
Fr.
Eng.
Fr.
Eng.
Fr.
Eng.
Fr.
Eng,
II n’y a pas de fumée sans feu,
There is no smoke without fire.
Tout ce qui brille n'est pas or.
All that glitters is not gold.
Tel père, tel fils,
Like Father, like son,
Rome n'est pas bâtie en un jour.
Rome was not built in a day.
Pierre qui roule n'amasse pas mousse.
Rolling stone gathers no moss.
Even a superficial understanding of both French and English
will reveal that in each pair of sentences, one is dealing with the
same proverb. What is more, both languages conserve not only the
same structural -pattern but also draw from the conceptual
resources to execute the proverb. For instance,
35
pair 1 uses the image of smoke and fire and impersonal locution as
grammatical subject. In pair 2, the process of 'relativation' is the
same in the two sentences that form the pair. Of course, the other
three pairs admit of similar comments,
A major contention here is that when French proverbs have
unshackled equivalents in the other languages of wider communication, there might be a centle tendency for African, say-. Yoruba
practitioners of the French language to set their imagination at work
in an attempt to finding out whether such un-shackled equivalents
are linkable with such 'big' languages of the world to the exclusion of
other less known languages of the world. Are such 'big' languages
also languages of wiser communication in addition to being
languages of wider communication? A little reflection will show that
the Yoruba language, for example., has in store many proverbs that
go hand in hand with French proverbs as far as their syntactic order
and semantic interpretation go. On this score, it is interesting to note
the following:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Yor.
Fr.
Yor
Fr.
Yor.
Fr,
Yor.
Fr.
Yor.
Fr.
Yor.
Fr.
Yor.
Fr.
Yor.
Fr.
Eni to yoo joyin ori apata ko ni wo enu aake,
Pour avoir l'amande il faut casser le noyau.
Agbajo owo la fin nsoya,
.:
L’union fait la force.
Egbinrin ote ba ti npa okan lookan nru.
Mauvaise herbe croit toujours.
Ilera l'ogun oro.
Santé passe richesse.
Warawara ni a nyaro ina,
La vengeance est un plat qui se mange chaud.
Ai si nile Ologini ile di le ekute.
Le chat parti,, la souris danse.
Maalu ti o ni iru, Oluwa ni iba a le esinsin.
A brebis tondue., Dieu menage le vent.
A ki i ti oju elese mesan ka a.
II ne faut pas parler de la corde dans la maison dsun
pendu.
36
The foregoing serves to illustrate, in a way, the closeness of
the 'Weltanschauung' of the Yoruba to the French, But it remains to
be said that this set of proverbs can lead meaningfully to a better
understanding of the French proverbs and hence to a clearly juicy
use of them;, because psychologically each French proverb that
finds a quick and unbelaboured equivalent in Yoruba has a double
mental stamp on the Yoruba speaker of French, provided, of course,
he is familiar fairly thoroughly with the Yoruba version.
It is however not on this score alone that Yoruba proverbs
have a positive role to play in the development of one's skill of
expression in the French language. Note, for example, that, by their
sheer originality^ some Yoruba proverbs open a new vista to
existential conceptualisation. To this extent, a people that has
hitherto been found to be used to a particular way of "seeing life" is
brought to see it through a fresh„ often unsuspected philosophical
window,, This is what happens when a new (i.e. different) set of
images are used in the local proverbs:
Yor.
Fr.
K'a rin k'a po, yiye I'o nye ni.
La. compagne fait la siaiete.
Standard images in French that celebrate the same idea as
expressed in the above proverb are those of 'madness' and
‘laughter'. Thus, we havePlus on est de fous, plus on rit.
Yor. Aguntant'o ba aja rin yio je !gb„
Fr.
Le mouton qui fréquente le chien mangera la merde.
To the above French translation can be opposed the standard
French counterpart1 Qui se couche avec des chiens se leve avec
les puces, where in the place of 'moutons sheep and 'merd' faeces
'chien' = dog and puces 'lice' are substituted respectively without the
basic moral philosophy being affected.
There is also the possibility of a local proverb being in "rapport
semantique" with the proverb of the foreign language..
37
without the benefit of formal correspondence. In other words, it is
not necessary for there to be formal or structural correspondence
before semantic correspondence is established. As a matter of fact,
this is the whole essence of interlingual communication through
translation. Yoruba proverbs can sometimes be used/found to fulfil
the role of bringing to focus the hidden similarity of the Yoruba world
view with that of the French„ Consider the following examples1.
2.
Yor,
Fr.
Yor.
Fr,
Alejo puro si ibi t5oju o to.
A beau mentir qui vient de loin,
Oro ki i gba aaro k'a soo dale.
II ne faut pas mettre a demain ce que 1'on peut ' faire
auiourd'hui.
These two examples demonstrate to a reasonable extent that
the proverbs derived from the two languages' Yoruba and French,
different structurally though they may seem, hide a common
philosophical artefact, In' this connection., it is pertinent to ask where the real proverb has a similar philosophical connotation with
that of the foreign language,, do we opt for the format we laid - down
in the foreign language or/we fashion out something equivalent to
the local version? There is no doubt that if the proverb is rendered
as it is rendered in foreign language origin, the message is
immediately clear to the owners of the language. However, it may
produce such an uninspiring effect that a type of cliche feeling may
result. It is therefore desirable for an attempt to be made at
advertising the local equivalent provided that it is done intelligibly in
the foreign language. For instance, the proverb:
Oro ki igba aaro ki a so dale, can be rendered thus. Le
problems qui se" traite le matin' n'a aucune raison pour attendre le
soir? Or, taking an example from the Hausa language, we can avoid
the monotony of "Le chat parti, la souris danse" by introducing a
near literal equivalent of the following
38.
Yoruba proverbs:
'Rashin farin wata tauraro ke heske’ - that is, Quand il n'y
a pas de lune, les etoiles brillent fort.
Local proverbs like local tales, also present a body of ideas
that capture the foreign language into a watchful and more dignifying
appraisal of local social habits and institutions. In the specific case of
Yoruba versus French, it is refreshing to note the amount of social
lessons that French stands to learn from such Yoruba proverbs as
the following"
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Yor.
Fr-.
Yor.
Fr.
Bi a se ri omo 1'a se nse ana re.
Comme on trouve 1'epouse., on paie la dot.
A dagba ko ila, siso ni i so,
Circoncision retardee (jusqu'a l'age adulte) laisse des
cicatrices
Yor. Owo ko si eniyan ko sunwon,
Fr.
Sans argent3 1'homme n'est rien.
Yor. Omo ose ri i ko ponpo ba iya re,
Fr. Les fruits du baobab attirent des couds de baton a leur
mère.
Yor. Epon alejo orun lo mo.
Fr.
Les hôtes après 5 jours, puent.
Yor. Ojo aaro ti onb’olowo nnu b’olowo gele te, iwofa
agelete,
Fr.
La pluie matinale agace les riches : les riches restent
inoccupes, et les serviteurs aussi !
On the whole.' I think it need be stressed again that for the proverb
to bring home the desired message, owners of the foreign language
would not have his mental powers be laboured beyond the need to
penetrate the society from which the local proverb has issued. The
standpoint of the present writer is therefore that local proverbs well
rendered in French can be of stimulating appeal to the user and the
reader. Written compositions, whether intended exclusively for the
local eye or not, would make tremendous stylistic impact on the
message being delivered
39,
if one or two proverbs of the local language are introduced. It may be
argued that the introduction of such proverbs would bastardize the foreign
language, bearing in mind the countless number of words and expressions
that would creep into the foreign language as a result. The present writer
is of a different opinion. The moment a foreign language is introduced into
a community which is known to have its own legitimate means of
communication, the foreign language should be prepared to pay the price
of language contact , It is then that the foreign language comes to a full
realisation of its own internal fecundity o The English language has been
so used, in West Africa by writers committed to helping their ''Afri canite '
through the foreign medium.. And with particular reference to French, it is
interesting to note that Olympe Bhely - Quenum and S.A.M., Pratt have
adopted a rather 'proverbials stance in at least one of their text-booksNew Practical French Book III, “Ce qui frappe par dessus tout, c’est
l’usage entierement nouveau qui est fait de la meilleure langue francaise
… Et soudain une sève inconnue circule les images fulgurantes d! un
autre monde fleurissent en désordre , le français se dodouble et devient
langue d'Afrique?:,
This penetrating comment was made by B, Poirot - Delnech in the
French journal “Le Monde” of 12/5/65. The critic was reacting not to the
use of local proverbs to enrich the French language,, but to Aime
Cessaire's total imposition of his .African personality and psyche on his
use of French to convey his ideas in the play "La tragedie du Roi
Christophe". However the comment is quite adequate as a synoptic
appraisal of what by sheer influence of local proverbs. the French
language stands to become : langue d'Afrique,
40
BTBLIOGRAPHY
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
AJIBOYE, T. Common Errors in French. University of Ife
Press.
AREWA & DUNDES, Proverbs and the Ethnography of
Speaking Folklores". American Anthopology. Nol. 66, No. 6,
1964.
BHELY-QUENUM, O, and PRATT, S.A.M: New Practical
French Book III, O Longman, 1974.
BOSWELL, James Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. G.B. Hill and
L.F Powel, Oxford 1934.
BURTON, Sir Richard Francis: Wit and Wisdom in West Africa
or a book of proverbial philosophy: idioms, enigmas and
laconisms.
GLUSKI, Jersy Proverbs, Sprichuorter – Proverbi, Proverbios,
II0CJI0BNIIBI. A comparative book of English, French,
German: Italian, Spanish, and Russian proverbs with a Latin
appendix: Amsterdan, Elsevier 1971.
HULM Frederick Deward : Proverb Lore 1968.
LINDFORS., Bernth: Yoruba Proverbs (Translation an
annotation by Birnth Lindfors and Oyekan Owomoyela), Ohio
University Center for International Studies Africa Program,
1973.
MERRICK, George: Hausa Proverbs Negro University Press.
1965.
RATTRAY, Robert Sutherland: Ashanti Proverbs ( the primitive
ethics of a savage people), Garendon Press, 1916.
THOMAS; Jacqueline M. Contes, proverbes, devinettes et
enigmes. Chants et pieres Ngbakama’ bo, New York, 1965.