Azare, June 1991
p. 1-16
Texte intégral
1The Range Rover gulps up the ribbon of asphalt that rolls out towards Maiduguri, straight out in front, as far as the eye can see. We have been driving since early morning when we set out from Kano. Scarcely a brief stop on the way to swallow, sitting on a mat, a bit of tuwo with a baobab sauce that has no taste but with enough pepper in it to quench our hunger. The landscape of peeled savannah, brownish at this time at the end of the dry season, is flat and monotonous, barely made more cheering by the few colonies of baobab trees.
2It is three o’clock in the afternoon when we leave the main road and branch off towards Azare. The sky is covered, the wind is blowing from our right, at first in gusts, then more and more violently, driving bundles of spine branches across the road. In the ensuing oppressive semidarkness, the light of the setting sun turns sulphurous, unreal, lighting up intensely trees, mud villages and men hurrying to take shelter from the tornado that makes boubous flap violently.
3Now the rain is beating hard on the car. We find Azare almost deserted with only a few children hopping in the puddles formed by the hard driving rain. There’s no‑one to ask for direction. We go round and round under the heavy rain in this little town planted around a cross‑roads right in the middle of the plain.
4We end up in a small hotel, the Central Hotel, where I rent a tiny room: toilet, sagging bed, some arm‑chairs, a little table, the whole thing sombre and not very clean. I take my rest there while waiting for the storm to stop. An hour later, the storm has ended. Drops of rain continue to fall on the town as a strong stench of humus rises from the ground. The earth sprouts again and holds its shoots towards a trembling light of the early morning sun. Here I am at last in Azare, in Bauchi State, to meet Emmanuel Ali, a Zaar speaker and an English teacher in a Teachers’ Training College.
In search of Emmanuel Ali
5A year earlier, I had been recruited to participate in a project to draw the map of the dialects of Hausa, a national language spoken over a wide area. The contacts I had made over the years with my Hausa colleagues whose collaboration was indispensable to me had made me doubt the feasibility of this study. Therefore, even before arriving in Nigeria, I started looking for another project as an alternative to the Hausa project, should it fail to take off. In fact, my Nigerian Hausaist colleagues, if they did not abandon the university for journalism, senior administrative posts or the bank, spent all their energy trying to survive from day to day in a continent that looks down on its intellectuals. What strength would they have for linguistics?
6I had therefore sought the opinion of Chadicist colleagues working in Europe or the USA, asking them the question: On which Chadic language not yet described should one work as a matter of priority in Nigeria? Without exception, everyone pointed to Zaar, the language accounting for the greatest number of speakers among those that constitute the West‑B‑III sub‑branch of Chadic languages. In fact, there was very little information about this group of languages, also called “Bauchi‑South”. This latter name arises from the name of the part of the state where these languages are spoken. I therefore proposed a project to write a monograph on the Zaar language in order to fill this gap in our knowledge of this group of languages.
7In November 1990, I took up an appointment at Ibadan, in the south of Nigeria. Ibadan is a big Yoruba town of more than 3 million inhabitants. The capital of Oyo State, it is mischievously described as the biggest native village in Africa. 850 km north of Ibadan, is Tafawa Balewa, a tiny town which is the administrative headquarters of the Zaar country, in the south of Bauchi State. Although now nearer Tafawa Balewa than when I was in Paris, the task before me was not any easier. I therefore set out on a hunt: I made people around me know that I wanted to meet Zaar speakers; I posted notices all over the university, where the quota system of admissions guaranteed that a certain number of students came from the North; I distributed handbills in the army barracks, where the population mix gave me hope for the presence of Northerners. Yet, five months later, I still did not have a single response to my notices and messages, which apparently did not reach those for whom they were intended.
8It was then that I took off for Frankfurt, in Germany, to attend a colloquium organized by Rudolf Leger and Dymitr Ibriszimov to assess ten years of research in various fields of study: geology, history, culture and the languages of the part of Nigeria around Lake Chad. This research was set up in Maiduguri under the directorship of Herrmann Jungraithmayr. The colloquium, a kind of high mass to which all the international Afroasiatic big‑wigs were invited, was organized to pay homage to him.
Bure
9In the papers read at the colloquium, mention is made of a language, Bure, which Rudolf Leger discovered the previous year in the north of Bauchi State. Out of curiosity I go to see him and to question him. This language, more or less dead, is only spoken in the village of Bure. He explains to me how, accompanying a geographer colleague of his in search of the old course of the River Gongola, he saw this big village in the middle of the bush, after two hours of going along a track that is used only during the dry season. Posing the usual questions that research linguists ask, he discovers that only a few people in this village still speak a language whose very name is unknown to us. He leaves his colleague to go on in the direction of the river, which is quite near. While waiting for his friend to pick him up on his return, he settles down with a speaker and takes advantage of the two hours he has before him to fill a questionnaire of linguistic enquiry. This questionnaire immediately confirms that he is dealing with a Chadic language most probably belonging to the West-B-II group.
10Rudolf then tells me that he does not intend to carry the study further and that he will be glad to hand over these documents to me. Since my Hausa project is at a dead end, and I have not found a Zaar speaker, I begin to dream of following in Dumezil’s footsteps, that is, to describe a language spoken by a single speaker…
11When I tell Rudolf about my lack of success in finding Zaar speakers he says that in the bar of the guest‑house at Daraza, where he had stopped briefly mid‑way between Bauchi and Maiduguri, he had met a Zaar Speaker- one Emmanuel Ali. This being the only bar within a radius of a hundred kilometres where one could drink a cold beer, their common passion for this drink had made them meet. He describes Emmanuel as pleasant, open, very communicative, and highly motivated to work as an informant for European researchers. He gives me his address at Azare, at the extreme north of Bauchi State, where he teaches at a Teachers’ Training College.
12I return to Nigeria full of hope. At last I am going to be able to do research on Chadic linguistics. As soon as I arrive at Ibadan, I send an express letter to Emmanuel. I take some time to settle my pressing problems and, at the beginning of June, I take off for the North ‑‑ two days of driving – expecting to either meet Emmanuel Ali or get to Bure, while hoping that I will be successful in achieving at least one of these goals.
13Meanwhile, in Nigeria, I have time to learn about the socio‑political situation of the Zaar language.
Zaar
14Zaar means “a human being” in the language of the same name, and this is how they call themselves as an ethnic group, in contrast to their Hausa, Fulani, Angas, Jara and other neighbours. The name Saya was given to them by the Hausa. This name has pejorative connotations linked to the fact that the Zaar had long ago in the past been reduced to slavery by the Hausa. The Zaar call their language vik‑Zaar, literally “the mouth of men”. Therefore, to the question “Who are you?”, they will reply “Men”, and to the question “What is your language?”, they will reply “The language of men”.
15In the vast Moslem entity of Northern Nigeria, dominated politically and linguistically by the Hausa‑Fulani, the Zaar constitute an ethnic group fiercely opposed to Islam. According to their oral tradition, the Zaar were driven away by the Kanuri from the banks of Lake Chad around the 16th century; they set out southwards in search of “the black rock”, where, according to an oracle, they were to found their new nation. After trekking some 250 km, they stopped at the approaches to the Jos Plateau, in a crater surrounded by mountains of black stone, and founded Puji (“The Black Rock” in Zaar). Puji was later renamed Tafawa Balewa by the Fulani. At the end of the 18th century, they fled from the jihad launched by Usman Dan Fodiyo and took refuge in the hills. To escape forced conversion to Islam and the slave expeditions of their Hausa-Fulani Moslem neighbours, they set up villages which they surrounded with stone fortifications. The peace secured by British colonization allowed them to come down from the mountains to the more fertile plain. About thirty years ago, they abandoned their original animist and clan cults for an evangelical form of Christianity (ECWA: Evangelical Church of West Africa, COCIN branch: Church of Christ in Nigeria).
16Since the 1980s, with the economic problems of Nigeria, ethnic and religious tensions have developed in various parts of the country, particularly in the North. At Zaria, riots unleashed by the Moslem preacher Mai Tatsine were bloodily put down by the army. Figures quoted at the time indicated that there were several hundred thousand fatalities. In Kano and Kaduna, brief but violent clashes occurred sporadically and caused hundreds, perhaps thousands of deaths. In 1990, at Tafawa Balewa itself, a very violent conflict broke out which spread as far as Bauchi, the state capital. This violence was capped by the destruction by fire of the whole centre of Tafawa Balewa; many villages were burnt to the ground, and hundreds of people were reported dead.
17I knew, therefore, that I was in danger of encountering difficulties with the political police of the Federal Government (State Security), who could take me for a religious agitator, or a French spy. The Zaar themselves, on the defensive in relation to the Federal Government, with its considerable power, could suspect me of coming to investigate the events of 1990 for the benefit of the police. Added to this was the fact that the Moslems of the North had developed anti‑Western sentiments arising from the Gulf War. It must be remembered that the Hausa listeners of the BBC World Service had, by an overwhelming majority, voted Saddam Hussein Man of the Year 1990. I got myself ready, therefore, to make use of all the treasures of tact and diplomacy at my disposal.
Exploration of Azare
18I leave Central Hotel to go to the Teachers’ Training College in search of Emmanuel. The Teachers’ Training College, a campus of the type one finds in the Anglo‑Saxon world, is situated about three kilometres outside Azare. New buildings are hidden away within an immense compound that is half bush, half yam and millet farms cultivated by the teachers and the administrative personnel accommodated on the campus. The classes over, I am taken to Emmanuel’s residence, the boys’ quarters of a three‑storey building in which the luckier teachers have their accommodation. Apparently, there is a serious accommodation crisis in Azare.
19The door is padlocked from the outside; there is no one at home. I scribble a note, which I place on the padlock. I come back in the evening and find myself face to face with Emmanuel’s neighbour, who tells me that he left that same day to see me at Ibadan. He is to arrive the following day. I am distraught just thinking about all these useless kilometres! And travelling is so expensive for Nigerians! Emmanuel’s neighbour offers to introduce me to other Zaar speakers living in Azare, and I decide to go to the NITEL (Nigerian Telecommunications) office first thing the following day to try to phone Ibadan to leave instructions for Emmanuel to be received as a guest in my house and to return to Azare the following day.
20The following morning. The NITEL office is a 5‑minute walk from the hotel. A pleasant walk under the acacias of the town, which enables me to benefit from the cool air brought in by the storm of the previous evening. I learn from the telephone operator that there is no direct line between Azare and Ibadan and that he must phone the Bauchi exchange, which will call him back thereafter. The operator at the Bauchi exchange to whom he will indicate the Ibadan number I want to call, will dial this number and will then connect the Azare operator if he gets it. I will then be called to lift the handset in a broken‑down cabin situated at one corner of the room.
21As is the custom in Nigeria, I prepare my mind to wait the whole morning, sitting on the sagging arm‑chairs of the NITEL waiting‑room, I plunge into Stendhal, which I had the foresight to bring along with me. I wait for scarcely five minutes and a miracle occurs: I am called and I hear the voice of my neighbour’s wife at Ibadan. She promises to do whatever is necessary to receive Emmanuel.
The researcher on the grill
22After that, I climb into the Range Rover and return to the Teachers’ Training College to meet Emmanuel’s neighbour. We climb two floors up the building and, as promised the day before, he takes me to Emmanuel’s “brothers”. I am welcomed by two people into the sitting‑room of a rather large modern apartment. One of them is a soldier in uniform; the other is a woman, the “Madam” of the house. We wait for the Master of the house, who has gone out to bring his friends for support. I am offered a seat and a Fanta to drink. Half an hour later, I am surrounded by about ten people and the session begins. I recount my research projects on their language (phonology, grammar, lexicon, collection of texts); I tell them about Rudolf and about Emmanuel, whom everybody calls Ima. They know about Ima’s trip to meet me at Ibadan and express their sadness at the unfortunate incident. I ask them if they want us to begin the research. They agree but soon become embarrassed and reticent.
23I have since learnt that you don’t say no in Africa. A yes does not commit you to anything and is often open to a wide interpretation. What is not started on the spot has very little chance of ever being accomplished. “Tomorrow” is, at best, more or less synonymous with “Yes, if I have time” and at worst, “Never”.
24My interlocutors want to know what my motives are; what kind of work I want to do; for whom; who is going to read it; what questions I am going to ask them. My University of Ibadan identity card reassures them only partially. The questions come thick and fast, some repeated several times. I have the impression that I am being cross-examined by a difficult jury. After more than an hour of questioning, they appear more or less convinced that I did not come to investigate the 1990 events at Tafawa Balewa, that my sole interest is the study of their language, and they finally agree to answer my questions. I bring out my equipment and I begin my first research.
First questionnaire
25I had brought my tape‑recorder, a research manual in three volumes, an exercise-book, a pencil and an eraser. In this climate of suspicion, I dare not bring out the tape‑recorder (a Walkman player‑recorder with a good independent microphone). I limit myself to the book, the exercise‑book and the pencil. Subsequently, for fear of making my interlocutors ill at ease, I will use the tape‑recorder on very few occasions in this phase of the research. I regret it bitterly today, because, constantly, when I go over my field notes, I lack recordings against which to do the checking.
26I had been advised to come to Nigeria with my own stationery (exercise‑books, pens, pencils, erasers)… I will realise later that this very stationery brought from Europe established a barrier between me and my interlocutors. In fact, only the stationery produced locally is within the reach of the purchasing power of my Nigerian colleagues, and it is of a very bad quality. Biro‑pens leak and flow onto the writing paper; the graphite of pencils is very hard, causing the writing to be pale and illegible; erasers are dry, and they scratch the paper without rubbing off the pencil markings; writing papers soak up ink and stick to pens and to the graphite of the pencils. Knowledge of all this enables me later on to give presents that are well appreciated.
27The documents on Zaar that I had then at my disposal, though very limited, were not negligible. Shimizu’s (1975) mimeographed field notes, deposited at the University of Kano, consist essentially of a list of basic vocabulary terms (about 200 words) collected for purposes of glottochronological comparison.1 Schneeberg’s 1971 and 1975 publications with a very theoretical phonological orientation based on a minimum of lexical and morphological data.2
28I have observed important differences in analysis between the two authors (two tones + “downstep” for Shimizu; three tones for Schneeberg). Even within the work of Schneeberg (in particular in the tonal modulations), I have observed differences between one publication and another. If these documents gave me some idea of the nature of the problems to expect (problems that are in any case familiar to any linguist working on Chadic languages), I had to do the work all over again from scratch, because of their contradictions.
29For my initial investigation, I had two questionnaires at my disposal. The first is the famous “Red Book” by LACITO.3 This is a research manual whose aim is to guide the linguist step by step in his field work. It covers all the domains of linguistics such as those conceived by Haudricourt as being capable of accounting for the essential link between the language and the environment in which its speakers live. And so in three volumes topics such as the following are covered: phonology, lexicon, morphology, syntax, socio‑linguistics, ethnology, oral literature. You will also find in it an extremely restrictive descriptive outline, where the discovery procedures take the place of the theory of language, and where the deep structure of language, and, in particular, all hierarchical representations of that structure in constituents are rejected. Having previously come across these problems at the initial stage, when I was engaged in the description of Ader Hausa (Niger Republic), I had quickly decided not to use this manual, except as a reminder in the area of cultural lexicon. It was therefore for that purpose that I brought it: to build up for myself a basic vocabulary that would enable me to tackle what I considered as my truly productive and intelligent research, work from the corpus. On the other hand, and this was purely psychological, it enabled me to give myself a countenance and to project before my interlocutors the image of a professional. In this way I hoped that I would be quickly taken seriously. The second questionnaire, elaborated in Frankfurt, was an investigation of the cultural lexicon of the Sahelo‑Sudanese region a copy of which Rudolf Leger had given me. I wanted to test it against the basic questionnaire of LACITO, which compared to it is longer and more complex. When used, Leger’s questionnaire turned out to be both more specific and more complete.
30That day, following the principles of a good methodology, I begin with a short sociological questionnaire on the people present. In order not to make anyone uneasy, I do not write down their names but only their sex, age, place of birth, ethnic origin and the place of birth of their parents. They are all Zaar, married to Zaar women, descendants of Zaar parents originally born in one or the other of three neighbouring villages.
31The research turned out to be very difficult, difficult because of me, since my ear was not trained for this language. I hear the sounds incorrectly, and I am not sure of the tonal heights. The choice was between recording the sounds, having them repeated ad nauseam, or making the speakers whistle the tonal heights. One of the techniques for making the melody of a phrase, a sentence or a word more perceptible is in fact to make the speaker whistle the tones. But, this is out of the question because the people before me are distracted, overwhelmed by their domestic preoccupations. They really want me to be patient and wait for the return of Ima, but the type of work I am asking them to do appears really ridiculous to them. In any case, they are too many for the work to be done efficiently.
32After half an hour, I stop and ask who would be willing to come to the hotel the following day to work with me. I would need one or two people. Two men volunteer. I then explain to them that my hotel room is very small. They offer to help me find a room in another hotel where they know the manager very well. The two men climb into my car and we drive to State Hotel.
From Central Hotel to State Hotel
33State Hotel is a hotel that belongs to the Bauchi State Government, which has established a similar hotel in each town of some importance. This is generally what happens in the North of Nigeria. At Azare, the State Hotel is two kilometres away from the centre of town, in the opposite direction to the Teachers’ Training College. This not- -very-active town is an administrative centre in which the buildings are widely scattered. The inhabitants cover long distances on foot, on motor‑cycles or, when they are lucky, at the back of small taxi‑motor‑cycles driven by youngsters. Almost all the taxi-motor-cycles belong to a single owner.
34Like the Teachers’ Training College, the State Hotel is situated in a vast compound, which long ago must have been a park. Beautiful acacias can still be seen there, but every part of it that can be cultivated has been transformed into a farm by the manager. Following a narrow tarred road, which meanders between the bungalows, we go towards a one‑storey central building housing the reception, the office of the manager, the bar, the restaurant and the kitchen. Each bungalow consists of two suites. Each suite has a sitting‑room (with arm‑chairs, sofa, low table, reading table, refrigerator and fan), a bed‑room (with a huge bed which can take at least four people, an air‑conditioner, cupboards), a bathroom and W‑C. Everything must have been new twenty years ago, but was never maintained. The painted ceiling is ripped open, the wall‑to‑wall carpet comes off ungummed; so also does the tiling in the bathroom, where there is no running water and two buckets of water are placed as substitutes and a bowl for scooping water is a substitute for the shower. The air‑conditioner makes more noise than it cools, and a fan is provided to support it. Fortunately, and contrary to what happens at Ibadan, electricity supply at Azare is relatively constant. The sitting‑room attracts my attention; I think of transforming it into an office for the informants. The price of the suite is derisory. I am stunned by the absolute calm and the country‑side scenery. A motorized vehicle passes on the distant road barely every half‑hour. I will understand later that the clientele of the hotel is mostly made up of government functionaries sent on a mission by the Bauchi State Government, which, of course, never pays its bills. This explains the state of decrepitude of the suites. In addition to the fact that the hotel is quite a distance from the centre of town, this makes it unattractive to its potential clientele. The manager is happy when I arrive, because it gives him hope for immediate payment in cash. After emptying a whole can of insecticide in all the nooks and corners of the rooms, as well as on the mattresses (a painful experience of cohabitation with bedbugs has taught me to be prudent) and demanding that the suite be cleaned, I pay for some days in advance and I go back to pick up my baggage from Central Hotel.
Tsohonkurah Eski Gus
35In the morning of the following day, at about 9 o'clock, my two volunteers appear. We take our seats in the sitting‑room, and we begin work. Very quickly, it becomes apparent that one of the two is clearly less motivated. At the end of this first session, he tells me that he will not be able to come again, and I find myself with only one informant, who will later come constantly and punctually to appointments, sometimes accompanied by one curious person or another. That is the beginning of a collaboration with Eski which continues till today.
36Eski is a remarkably patient man, who laughs heartily over nothing, with an infectious joy. He has a clear and beautifully resonant voice, and he whistles the tones with a power and a consistency, which are explained by his early childhood spent in the field guarding his father’s goats. All this, in addition to his honesty, his serious‑mindedness, his kindness, his tenderness, makes me believe that I will never have a better friend among the Zaar.
37Eski is a colleague of Ima’s at the Teachers’ Training College and is also an English teacher. His name, Tsohonkurah, was given to him to pay homage to his grandmother, an apparently famous woman, and means “old hyena” (s’ohon kura) in Hausa. Although he is attached to it, it is probably a difficult name to bear. From it he took only the initials (S‑K), which gave rise to “Eski”.
38Eski has some linguistic ideas and is really interested in my work. He tries to understand the procedure I want to adopt, how I transcribe what he says and, above all, he wants to know how an orthography can be devised quickly. A devout Christian, he regrets that the Bible has not yet been translated into his language, and he cannot stand the fact that the language of worship, in the church is Hausa, the language of people the Zaar consider their enemies. He has therefore conceived of a project to translate the Bible into Zaar.
39Like the people I met on the first day, he is a member of an association for the promotion of Zaar history and culture. For the moment, their main activity consists in the publication of an annual calendar showing the photographs of members of the executive committee of the association, and the printing of posters in honour of their famous elders. These elders are heroes of the resistance against Hausa power, and Eski says, without blinking that they are between 120 and 145 years old.
40Let me quickly, define my position vis‑à‑vis the religious and political goals of the association, even if it is at its embryonic stage. My objective is to write a monograph on the Zaar language and to advance our knowledge of Chadic languages in general. As for the creation of an orthography for the publication of pedagogical, religious and other texts, that cannot come except from the Zaar themselves. My role could be that of a technical consultant, not that of an initiator or of a sponsor.
41I had worked with Eski for two days and, one beautiful morning, Ima burst into our sitting‑room now transformed into an office.
Notes de bas de page
1 Shimizu, K., Boghom and Zaar: Vocabulary and Notes. Kano, 1975.
2 Schneeberg, N., “Sayanci verb tonology”. In P. Newman (ed.), Special Chadic Issue, 1971; (pp. 87-100). Schneeberg, N., Sayanci Phonology, Ph.D., Indiana University, 1975.
3 Bouquiaux, L. & Thomas, Jacqueline M.C. (eds.), Enquête et description des langues à tradition orale. I L’enquête de terrain et l’analyse grammaticale. II. Approche linguistique (Questionnaires grammaticaux et phrases) III Approche thématique (Questionnaire technique et Guides thématiques). Paris, SELAF, 1976. LACITO (or Laboratory of Languages and Oral Tradition Civilisations), is a C.N.R.S. laboratory founded in the good old days of structuralism. In France, this manual was for a long time the reference book for field linguistics, especially in the African domain.

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