I Begin Work At Last
p. 17-37
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A Linguist Who Needs To Attune His Ears
1State Hotel, Azare, 10:00 A.M. I start work with Eski on “basic vocabulary” and conjugation paradigms. Progress is slow. My ear begins to get used to it; I hear tone contrasts better, but I don’t have much confidence in myself. I ask Eski to repeat himself, to whistle and to whistle again. I go over again and again the previous day’s work.
2After reading Shimizu’s and Schneeberg’s articles1 again, I take the decision to do the description all over again by myself.
3Schneeberg’s work is seen as a system of rules for generating Zaar phonological forms. It is a very complex system, and is strictly along the lines of The Sound Pattern of English. Moreover, Schneeberg’s transcription of Zaar tones in the article is different from what she did in her thesis. Both pieces of work were published at about the same time and no mention was made of the difference in the two tone transcriptions. Furthermore, no explanation was given by the author. Moreover, many of the rules described by Schneeberg had a very restricted domain of application. Beginning with a few theoretical principles, the work then takes the form of a series of specific rules, which are intended to explain the numerous exceptions to these general principles. At the end of this description one has the definite feeling that Zaar grammar is no more than a collection of exceptions without coherence. Add to this the paucity of the corpus used in the description, and you will understand why I had grave misgivings about relying on Schneeberg’s work to begin the study of this language. Discouraged, I could not believe that a language could be so complicated. I tended therefore to have more confidence in Shimizu, who marked only two tones with downstep (“faille tonale” in French) in his list of 200 words drawn from the basic vocabulary.
4At the beginning of my work with Eski, I had come to the conclusion that the language operates a tonal system of two distinct tones. I soon discovered that the system was much more complex, and that it probably had three significant pitches (High, Mid and Low), with a possibility of a combination of two tones on a single syllable. Things were complicated because of vocalic length. Since length was significant, tonal modulation was theoretically possible over both short and long vowels.
5Let V represent short vowels, VV long vowels and C consonants. The syllables that are theoretically possible are of the type CV and CVV (open syllables), CVC and CVVC (closed syllables). The tonal modulations are heard relatively easily over the long vowels, the closed syllables ending with a voiced consonant (only sonorous segments carry melody). But they are difficult to hear over syllables with a short vowel, whether they are open (CV) or closed with a voiceless consonant (CVC).
6At this stage of the research work with Eski, I had not yet defined these problems. I was simply hearing the tonal changes, which I was just beginning to pick up. Over the long vowels, I was hearing and distinguishing contrasts between three significant levels and two modulations: one rising and one falling. I could not say whether it was a Low‑High modulation, Mid‑High or Low‑Mid for the rising modulation, nor whether these three modulations were present and had meaning in the language. The same thing was applicable to the falling modulations, with the registers High‑Low, High‑Mid and Mid‑Low. With regard to the difficult syllables (CV or CVC with a voiceless final consonant), I could not say whether I was dealing with a flat or a modulated tone.
7Tonal contrasts are found to be very important in this language. The conjugation paradigms are an illustration of this. As in many Chadic languages, conjugation comes in the form of prefix morphemes attached to the verb, to mark aspect, tense, mood, number and person.
8Some conjugation paradigms show contrast by their tone alone, with these tone differences being borne sometimes by the verbal prefix and sometimes by the verb itself. During the sessions with Eski, one point was particularly difficult to make out. This was the subjunctive. I had it repeated over and over again, whistled over and over again, and I heard no difference in the pronunciation, that is, until Eski drew my attention to the fact that the difference was marked only on the verb. I understood then that, for the subjunctive, the plural was marked by a floating low tone which appeared on the verb.
9Let us take the verb yel, and the form of the first person ma. If one compares the narrative and the subjunctive, one can have the following meanings for the same segmental sequence, depending on their tonal patterns2:
mŒ yél | I saw | Narrative |
mÉ yêl | we saw | Narrative |
mÈ yél | that I might see | Subjunctive |
mÈ yèl | that we might see | Subjunctive |
10I had not yet reached this point with Eski. Rather, he was answering my questions with his usual patience, while one of his “brothers” was flipping through the pages of a newspaper in a distracted manner. It was then that Ima arrived and I got acquainted with his dramatic talents.
Ima, at last!
11Ima burst into the sitting‑room of the bungalow now transformed into an office. He is a rounded-faced man of thirty‑five years, with an advanced stage of baldness, and he has a jovial, care‑free and pleasant personality. Work stops; I tell him how happy I am to see him at last, and apologise for the unnecessary journey he made. I express my hope that he was well received at my house in Ibadan. He had not stayed in my house, he says, but had preferred to take off immediately to Lagos where he had a cousin in the army he wanted to see. On his way back to Azare, at a point south of Kaduna, his taxi was attacked by highway robbers. We were all in a state of shock. It is at this point that he starts speaking in Zaar and goes into a long and lively discussion with Eski and their “brother”. I switch on the tape‑recorder which, for the first time, is put to work.
12A translation of the conversation is done for me, and so I get to know the details of the story. Having left Lagos that day and reached southern Kaduna in the middle of the night, the taxi driver had felt exhausted and so left the highway to find a garage in a small village where he could park and sleep in the taxi, probably one of those durable 504 station‑wagons, with three rows of seats, made in the Peugeot factory at Kaduna. At 5 o'clock in the morning a car arrives, parks near the taxi and three men emerge from it armed with revolvers and sticks. They order everybody out of the taxi and relieve them of their money, watches and jewellery. The driver, who had had the sense to throw away his car keys, gets a good beating. One of the robbers, angered by Emmanuel’s empty wallet, hits him with it and throws it to the ground after removing his identity papers from it. Once the collection is over, the robbers take off into the darkness of the night undisturbed. After finding the car keys in the bush, the taxi driver takes off again and drops his passengers off at Bauchi. There, a bread‑seller, a Yoruba woman that Ima knows, lends him taxi money for his trip back to Azare. The wallet incident and the generosity of the bread‑seller are of particular interest to the listeners.
13At Ibadan, six months later, curiosity pushed me to begin the transcription of my recordings with this tape: 45 minutes of spontaneous narrative interspersed with questions, queries for explanations, comments, etc.3. This particularly lively dialogue brought together three educated Zaar people, all of them English teachers in a Teachers’ Training College. The result is a discussion that is typically mixed linguistically: the basic language structure is Zaar, whereas a large proportion of the vocabulary, as well as many long expressions, comes from Hausa or English. Apart from the initial surprise that the discussion was mixed linguistically, the result of my work was positive. The borrowings made it possible for me not to spend too much time on the vocabulary and to tackle the grammatical problems from the corpus directly. This is not always possible at the beginning of the study of a language.
14With the return of Ima, Eski was able to resume a more normal rhythm of life, he and Ima relieving each other at the hotel for a week. The following Saturday, Ima and Eski were invited to the marriage of one of their friends in the hills overlooking Dawaki, an Angas village 15 km south of their own village of origin, Tudun Wada, at the other end of Bauchi State, 250 km from Azare. They asked me to drive them there. I was delighted because that gave me the opportunity to visit the Zaar country and to see the places which for one good week, I had heard being spoken about. I took advantage of the trip to try to carry out some projects: one was about the Bure language, which I had not forgotten, and the other was the recruitment of a full‑time informant to work in my house at Ibadan.
Tafawa ‘Balewa
15Early on Saturday morning, we left Azare, facing directly south. There were six of us in the Range Rover, as Eski was travelling with a nephew living in with him and Ima was with his latest female conquest. In addition, Eski was bringing along a goat as a gift to his parents. It sat quietly in the boot of the car throughout the journey. After a stop over at Dass for a refreshing and stimulating fura, we arrived at Tafawa Balewa where Eski’s parents live. I now came to a full realization of what had happened during “the riots of Bauchi” which had started at Tudun Wada. The centre of this very tiny village, which comes to life once a week on the market day, is completely devastated. All the houses are blown open, blackened by the fire. The incident happened the year before, and the physical marks had not yet been erased. There was silence in the car, and I refrained from asking questions.
Tudun Wada
16After waiting a few minutes for Eski, we take off again for Tudun Wada, 10 km south of Tafawa Balewa. The road is new and is not at all busy. It was constructed in such a manner that it was raised over the surrounding terrain, running over a small plain embedded in the hills of dark volcanic stone. The asphalt goes on as far as the bridge which bestrides a dry river, the boundary between Bauchi and Plateau States. The whole of this plain, from Tafawa Balewa to the river, on the left as far as the hills and on the right going back up the hills, is Zaar country. Ima announces to me the names of the villages on each side of the road. Each village is a very dispersed settlement where each compound is separated from its neighbours by at least a hundred metres. In each compound the huts are arranged in a circle and joined together by a wall. They open onto an interior courtyard which houses a grain‑store, a kitchen and, in one corner, a bathroom. Entry into this courtyard is gained through the front hut. The huts are built with clay and are rectangular in the Hausa fashion. In the past, the huts were circular, as is still the custom in the south among the neighbouring Angas. In contrast to Moslem Hausa women in the cities who stay shut away from society, Zaar women are free and very energetic. They fetch water from wells, grind millet and beans, cook, do the washing and work on the farms. The men engage in farming; they hunt, build their houses and take responsibility for providing money to buy clothing and drugs and to educate the children.
17We leave the tarred road to follow a very narrow track winding its way between the various fields of millet, hungry rice, beans and pepper. The dark‑red colour of the variety of millet that is grown around the settlements catches my eye. After about one kilometre, we come to the compound belonging to Ima’s father. He is sitting under a shade in front of the entrance‑hut and conversing with a neighbour. He has the same round head and the same stocky build as his son. Ima tells me that he is eighty years old. I have difficulty believing this. It must be said that in Nigeria, one tells you without blinking that this and that old man is 115, 120 or 135 years old. Ima’s elder brother, an ex-soldier with a big moustache, is introduced to me. Much slimmer than Ima, he has an intense gaze and looks as if he is gnawed inside by worries. We are quickly surrounded by a swarm of turbulent children wearing torn and dirty clothing. On another occasion, I will see the same children dressed in new and sparkling clothes for mass. A small boy begins to cry on seeing me and runs away to take refuge in the arms of his elder brother. As always, I cannot but suspect that I am looked upon as an ogre sent to threaten or punish him.
18Two chairs of metal frame and woven plastic seats are brought out and set out in my honour. The greetings and conversation are in Hausa. A calabash of kunu is brought out. This is a sour, light and refreshing cereal‑based drink. Ima explains in Zaar that I am looking for an informant who would come to live with me at Ibadan and be paid a full‑time salary (the equivalent of a minimum wage in Nigeria), including board and lodging; he sends for his cousin Sunday. Aged 25 years and with secondary school education, he lives in his father’s compound with his two wives and four children. He cultivates his own farm and on market days he goes to the next village, ‘Boi, where he repairs bicycles. He comes and sits facing me on the other chair, and we begin a conversation in English. I begin to ask him questions to give him an idea of the type of work he is going to do and to assess our level of communication. He is quick to understand but whistles much less efficiently than Eski because, intimidated, he has difficulty repressing his urge to laugh. One certainly has to be of a good disposition to be able to quickly take to performing this task before the whole neighbourhood and the children who are puffing and imitating him as he whistles. I very quickly conclude things there by saying that for me he will do fine. He himself accepts the job, while negotiating for additional conditions for his stay at Ibadan, namely, that I should pay for his driving lessons as well as the other costs for obtaining his licence. I accept these conditions happily, saying to myself that his stay with me will give him a chance to acquire an additional qualification. We agree to meet again in the month of September, when I will come to pick him up on my return from my vacation in France.
The Marriage at Dawaki
19Then we take off for the village in the hills overlooking Dawaki. We get back to the tarred road running south, in the direction of the bridge which we cross to enter a track that is full of bumps and stones. This is the beginning of Plateau State, and we branch off to the left to climb up the hills into Angas territory. The huts become round, the terrain abrupt and wooded, the roads narrow and difficult. At the end of the road, we come upon a plateau on which the village sits comfortably. We go straight to the church where we arrive just as the mass is ending and the married couple are coming outside.
20The married couple are about thirty years old. The groom is wearing a tie and a dark suit, and the bride a long white dress and an enormous lace veil. The rice is scattered by handfuls. Village women, their waists decorated with leaves, carry palm branches, sing and dance in a circle around the traditional orchestra. This orchestra is composed of drummers and trumpeters, the trumpets being made from huge bull horns. Their ankles disappear in a bush of rusty iron rattles that resound when they strike the ground rhythmically. Their costume is also traditional: a hair‑do of cowries, a pair of shorts and tunic of skin and fur. The rest of the village dance around tightly together in another circle.
21Everybody moves along singing and dancing in the direction of the school courtyard where arrangements have been made for the reception to take place after the church ceremony. A public address system connected to a generator, a platform with a microphone where the principal actor officiates: the Master of Ceremony, MC. On one side, for the special guests, a row of large upholstered armchairs that one is surprised to find outside in the open air, in the middle of such a big school courtyard. On the other side, a good many chairs for the remaining guests. In a corner the Treasurer installs himself at a table with his two assistants. The ceremony begins with a roll‑call and introduction of the guests who come forward with their presents, most of them in the form of cash. The amount is announced on the microphone with the applause of the crowd. The whole ceremony is slow, formal and dismal for the couple, who have to try and keep a straight face. The married couple, scowling, bear everything with patience. After some dances, the cake and the warm soft drinks are given out to the guests, and the treasurer announces the total sum collected for the couple. After presenting our small contribution, we disappear without waiting till the end of the ceremony. We take to the road again in the direction of Bauchi.
Unguwar Sayawa, Bauchi
22At Bauchi, we pass the night with Eski’s uncle, in the Zaar quarters known as Unguwar Sayawa in Hausa (the quarters of the Zaar). They insisted on preparing a small room for me alone where I sleep on a bed. At nightfall, we sit in the cemented courtyard. In the darkness, under the light of the stars, the night is refreshing. Eski asks his aunt to tell us a Zaar folktale so that I can record it. The exercise stops abruptly because, under the emotional stress, she loses her memory. All join in to try and reconstruct the story, which they do, not without difficulty, as we have to stop after ten minutes.
23The following morning, Eski and Ima go in search of story‑tellers so that I can do some recording. Eski goes to see the Elders whom he meets at mass. Ima, for his part, drags me along to an enclosure where women brew and sell traditional beer. The enclosure is at the outskirts of the town, and is surrounded by yam farms. We find there five or six of Ima’s friends, comfortably seated in the courtyard under a canopy of fruit‑trees. These give a really cool shade from the sun at these early hours of a morning that is already warming up. I sit down on a clay bench with my back to the wall and get out my equipment as Ima explains who I am and what I do. I place an order for millet beer for everybody, and a young man, about 25 years old, begins to tell his story. I switch on the tape‑recorder, look to see that everything is working properly and sip my millet beer slowly. It is both sweet and bitter at the same time: a beer that stands in the middle between our beer and cider. As soon as this first folktale is over, another one begins, and another one, all told without a break and without hesitation. After three hours, two tapes and three rounds of drink, we go back to the car, speaking in loud voices, more or less tipsy. A totally successful recording session, with which everybody expresses satisfaction. Some months later, during the transcription, I am able to attest that the technical quality is satisfactory and the content of the tapes very interesting.
24We take off again for Azare after picking up Eski as he comes out from mass. He has not succeeded in persuading the Zaar‑speaking Elders to help me.
Bure
25On the road to Azare, before Darazo, we branch off to the right in the direction of Bure. I do not want to forgo the chance to see what this village is like, a village where a few people still speak this mysterious language that R. Leger had spoken to me about in Frankfurt.
26The beginning of the track is not easy to find. After twice taking off in the wrong direction, we finally make our way across the bush along a path that is scarcely marked out by tyre tracks. The terrain is flat, the vegetation sparse: there are some bushes with a few scattering trees. We meet some Fulani shepherds, young men with braided hair, wearing leather and copper jewellery, a pole on one shoulder, and impassively watching us pass by, a little bit of astonishment in their eyes.
27We ask them for direction several times, worried that after an hour and a half of following the track, we were not already at our destination. At last, we see a big village with a modern well and a medical dispensary. We inquire from a group of girls sitting and chatting by the road‑side whether we are indeed in Bure. They say we are not, that Bure is further on. We are at Kubi. We inquire from them what language they speak: “Hausa”, they answer. Do people speak or have people spoken another language in the village? No. These people are Hausa, and they have always been Hausa.
28As a matter of fact, I will pass through this village again a year later, in the company of an old resident of Bure who will introduce me to a few people of his generation who, he knows, are in no way more Hausa than himself and speak a language that is different from his own, a language of which he understands only the greetings. I will carry out a short investigation of an hour and a half on Kubanchi, the Hausa name for the Kubi language. The only speakers that can be found are two old women and the Wakili of the village, a kind of spokesman of the Chief. The women have all but lost memory of their language, and the man has lost all his teeth, which was not helpful in identifying the consonants. From a linguist’s point of view it is evident that this language, though close to Bure, is sufficiently divergent from it for one to conclude that it is another small Chadic language belonging to the same North‑Bauchi group as Bure.
29We get back on to the road and, after crossing the bed of a dried‑up river, we arrive finally at Bure. This is a large village of more than 500 inhabitants of a compact community, with a market that is well‑known among their neighbours. We leave the car behind, at a little square, and continue on foot to pay homage to the village Chief. We pass near a butcher’s stall, located on the road‑side in the open air under a tree, surrounded by the usual cloud of humming flies. Eski remains behind to negotiate to buy a goat head. This peaceful village, all slopy, with its tortuous alleys, its walls of dark brown featuring paintings of geometrical motifs, pale, originally white, is a charming place. A large part of this charm lies in the silence in which it bathes. The few cars that venture to find their entry into the access road must stop at the gates of the village; the streets are too narrow for them.
30We come to the house of the Chief at the top of the village. We ask to see him. We are told that he has gone to pray at the mosque. We wait a little. When he returns, we introduce ourselves to him. He receives us under the canopy of a tree outside his house. We explain to him the object of our visit and tell him about Rudolf Leger. As a matter of fact, he did leave a good memory of himself behind, thanks to the small gifts he gave out. Unfortunately, his informant is dead, and the Chief can’t see who could replace him. I inform him of my intention to come back to the village for two weeks to carry out research on the language. He is not enthusiastic about the idea and he warns me of the risks of such a plan to my health.
31We leave, a little discouraged by this rather cold reception. We find Eski who has bought his goat head at a record low price compared with the prices charged at Azare. He is in the middle of a crowd of people who are curious to know who we are. After some discussion, in Hausa most of the time, it turns out that none of the people present speaks the language, apart from greetings and a few basic words. One of them, a young man, happens to be a student of Eski’s at Azare. He tells us about an old man who he thinks could be useful to us. He is a pastor of about 75 years, who lives at Misau, a small village 90 km south of Azare which we saw on our outward trip. He knows the language very well and would certainly be happy to answer our questions. Ima then says that he knows the pastor and that we could make a stop at Misau on our way back.
32We make our way back to the major road, which takes us two more hours. As soon as we reach the tarred road, we turn to face northwards.
Reverend AllaBurah, Misau
33We stopped at the hotel that had witnessed the meeting between Ima and Rudolf. Unfortunately, the town had been without electricity since the previous day, and the beer was not cool. It was towards evening that we arrived at Misau at the Pastor’s house. His house was beside the church from which the sounds of hymns could be heard. Ima found him in the church. He came to join us by the car. A smiling old man, in a large bubu and a Hausa cap, he appeared strong and had an impressive personality. He was enthusiastic and agreed to work with me for two weeks when I came back to Misau. The State Hotel was a hundred metres from his house, which would allow me to make the same arrangement as at Azare.
34That was what I was able to do the following year. I worked everyday, in the morning and in the afternoon, with the Reverend AllaBurah. He did not speak English. The language of research was therefore Hausa. I had sometimes to break the sessions to allow him to have a nap on the chair in the sitting‑room. But what a memory! What knowledge! After a little reflection this man, who has lived at Misau for the past 25 years, and had not therefore had any occasion to speak his language, recollected the technical and cultural vocabulary of that language. The flora, the fauna, everything was there. I asked him for the names of plants and animals I knew in Hausa. He could describe them to me: their colour, their habitat. He stated what the plants were used for, how to hunt animals. He himself had hunted them when he was young and was living at Bure. He remembered the hunt for the hippopotamus in the Gongola River. Of course, these animals have now disappeared. With the exception of the Yankari Game Reserve, all the woods of these regions of Northern Nigeria were rid of animals. (This is not far from the truth. In my two‑year stay in Nigeria, I saw only one monkey near Tudun Wada. For “bush meat”, Nigerians are reduced to hunting rodents).
35Day in day out, I cross‑checked the data but the memory of the old man was never found wanting. From time to time, as his memories came back to him, he himself was surprised at his knowledge, and a childish joy lit up his face. His eyes twinkled. He liked to walk about with me in the market, to introduce me to milk sellers and to ask them to prepare me the best fura with the purest milk. It was funny to see him, a pastor, being addressed as Alhaji by the sellers. (This Hausa word, which designates someone who has gone to Mecca on pilgrimage, has now become a term of respect for addressing an old man). He affectionately brushed aside the young beggars, telling them that they would do better to go to school than to loiter about in the streets. The children ran away crying and saying that it was the devil’s school and that they preferred to go to a koranic school. I felt a strong sense of respect, and even affection, for him.
36I found in him a feeling of deep sadness. If he had brought up many children, and if he was still bringing them up, he and his wife were without descendants. At the age of 35 years, he had been one of the first converts to Christianity in his village, but it is Islam that has won. All Bure is now Moslem. He told me that when he returns to the village to visit his family or to do some shopping, the children run away from this insane old man who insists on speaking to them in a language they don’t understand.
37We went together to Bure one market day so that he could buy beans. It was the middle of the rainy season, the harvest period for millet and beans. But the Pastor’s harvest was a disaster, and he wanted to buy some beans at Bure while prices there were still low. The market was not well supplied that day. There was no beans, and the only bag of rice was sold out as soon as it was put down on the ground. The Pastor had to go home empty‑handed. I was intrigued by the sheer number of stands brimming over with beautiful rose fuchsia flowers with lily‑shaped corollas everywhere. The reverend gentleman explained to me that they were tobacco flowers that were bought by Fulani shepherds. They dab their teeth with the pistil to paint them orange with the pollen.
38He took me to the house of his brother, a good Moslem with two wives and five children. The reverend gentleman wanted me to tape a conversation of real‑life Bure and not just of lists of words and made-up sentences. On arriving at his brother’s we sat down and conversation started with greetings, but it very soon came to an abrupt end. His brother took off and left the two of us there. He no longer wanted to be associated with this language of the pagans. He was now a good Hausa‑speaking Moslem. I saw how deeply the pastor had been hurt. It was then that I came to understand that he was no more than a figure on the sidelines that Bure village had rejected. He could only live at Misau, and it was there that he had taken refuge. He was still living there when I passed through again at the end of 1993.
39This is how a language dies in Africa, within a period of two generations. In Northern Nigeria, conversion to Islam means the complete adoption of a whole mode of life: education, dress, daily activity given rhythm by prayers, Hausa language, confinement of girls and women, private law and business law. In a word, integration into a vast social community which exposes the villagers to the outside world while, at the same time, giving them a proper African identity: they become Hausa.
40What happens to the language ultimately? Russell Schuh has published a short description of some of the Chadic languages of this area.4 I have compared Bure with these languages, for example, Kirfi which is spoken in a village (Kirfi) that stands facing Bure on the other side of the Gongola River. The Bure language is indeed very close to it, and I am tempted to say that Bure and Kirfi are probably two variants (dialects?) of the same language.
Yohana Tonj and Gus
41We arrived at Azare by nightfall. The next morning, I went back to my cruising rhythm, working in relays with Eski and Ima in the sitting‑room of my bungalow at the State Hotel.
42I soon learnt that the manager of the State Hotel, a friend of the Zaar, was in fact from a village, Sigidi, near Tudun Wada. Of course, in this village, the people speak yet another language which the Zaar call Sigidi. The inhabitants of this village call themselves Gus, which means “man” in their language. If one adopts in this case the same mode of naming as for Zaar, the correct name of this language or of this speech ought to be Gus. Shimizu mentioned the Sigidi language in his writings without saying anything more about it. This language is spoken in the hills to the west of Tudun Wada, within the borders of Plateau State, in an area barely accessible by modern means of transportation.
43The manager, whose name is Yohana Tonj, agreed to give me a bit of his time to answer my questions. He stayed altogether one hour during which we were constantly interrupted by his employees. I was able to do no more than begin a lexical questionnaire with him in the presence of Eski and Ima. It was very instructive. They, who did not know this language and did not understand it, recognised the words as Yohana Tonj pronounced them. They saw them as deformed variants of their own language.
44I put forward the hypothesis that Sigidi is probably a dialect of Zaar, with no less validity than the Zaar of Kal, a village situated between Tudun Wada and Sigidi. This dialect of Kal is described by Schneeberg as conservative compared with the one that she and I also describe. What is called Zaar seems to be a variant that developed in the Tafawa Balewa plain from a conglomerate of speech‑forms, mid‑way between language and dialect, but forming a single linguistic unit within the family. The Zaar on which our work is about to confer the status of “standard” is probably the result of the evolution of the language as it was spoken when the Zaar came down from their hills to cultivate the plain, and in the process of which they came into contact with and assimilated part of their neighbours: the Angas, the Jarawa, etc. There is room here for systematic, extensive research to reconstitute the history of the languages of this region.
Good‑bye Azare
45Soon came the time to take to the road again back to Ibadan. I bid good‑bye to the Zaar community in the bar of the hotel. I paid Eski and Ima what I owed them for their work as informants. Everything went very well with Eski. He accepted what I offered to give him: the equivalent of his salary for two months for the two weeks he had worked half‑time for me. It was more delicate with Ima. He demanded ten times more, supporting his case with the claim that that was what a friend of his was receiving for working for the German mission at Maiduguri. I later learnt from Rudolf Leger that this colleague of Ima was a student of geography, a map specialist who did surveys for the German archaeologists, and that the amount he had talked about represented what he had received for a collaboration of one year and for very specialized work requiring precise professional competence.
46I told Ima that I was paying for my research from my own pocket and that I did not have access to that kind of money. If he insisted on his terms, I would have to end our collaboration. He persisted, and after giving him an amount equivalent to a quarter of what he was demanding, plus a little additional sum that he wanted on behalf of his friends who had welcomed me on my arrival, I swore never to work with him again. That is exactly what happened, and he went thereafter to offer his services to Maiduguri where Professor Jungraithmayr, who was in charge of the project, hired him to collect and transcribe recordings on oral tradition. Being more flexible than I in his dealings with people and money, this great Africanist knew how to make full use of Ima’s capabilities.
47For my last evening at Azare, I had accepted an invitation to eat the goat head brought in from Bure. This is a delicacy in the south of the country, prepared with a lot of pepper (also called pepe soup), which promotes the drinking of phenomenal quantities of beer. This generally takes place in a bar, a sort of inverted Norman hole, where the solid aids the digestion of the liquid. I nibbled an ear in a distracted manner, and in the company of Ima, his girl‑friend and Eski, I ended the evening in one of the two bars of the town.
48In a vast, dimly lit, courtyard dislocated chairs and metal tables were set out in groups here and there. A deafening sound system, saturated and distorted, rolled out cassettes of American music. One drank there very many bottles of Nigerian beer served ice‑cold (The importation of beer, as well as the raw materials used for its production, is banned). One could order a pepe soup to go with the beer. Having already had ours, we contented ourselves with beer for Ima and myself, Eski and Ima’s girlfriend opting for a non‑alcoholic malt drink, which I had tasted during my first stay in Nigeria and which almost made me sick. I allowed the conversation to become languid, not having much to say to Ima. The music filled up the gaps in the conversation and I preoccupied myself with the activities of women entering and leaving through a door different from the one by which we had come in. It was explained to me later that there was a “hotel” nearby where these ladies lived and entertained their customers. This “hotel” depended on the bar. One could go in from the courtyard of the bar or directly from outside. I came to understand then why my driver had refused to join us and instead went to sit in a corner from where he had a good view of what was going on in the annex of the bar. He never lost time to find good addresses.
49I still feel a soft spot for a song that caught my attention during this period and which I was impatient to hear played each time I went into that bar. I pricked up my ears to hear the voice of a white woman humming, over cool and haunting music, words speaking of a cafeteria, of rain and the bells of a cathedral. It was indeed unreal, way out of touch with the American production which normally played in Nigeria, way out of touch with the situation in which this music was broadcast. This song, Tom’s Diner, like the other songs of Suzanne Vega, is now associated with the nostalgia I have for Azare, its shabby bar and my work with Eski on Zaar.
50The next day I took to the road again for Ibadan, very much disturbed by the final episode with Ima. Everything taken together, the result of this trip was positive. For the following year I had hired an informant, Sunday, who was going to join me as soon as I came back from my holiday in France. I had promising recordings to feed my work with him. I had a very good contact in the person of Eski, who did not support Ima’s attitude and who had great interest in our work. And I had another contact for Bure in the person of the Reverend Allaburah. I could look at the future with confidence and hope in my second year in Nigeria to make up for the time I had lost during the first.
Notes de bas de page
1 op. cit.
2 I give here the definitive tone marks adopted much later in my work. On a vowel, the grave accent marks low tone, the acute accent high tone, the circumflex accent falling tone, the chevron a rising tone and the absence of an accent mid tone.
3 This work of transcription, translation, linguistic analysis will be done with Sunday. See infra.
4 Schuh, Russell G., Bole‑Tangale Languages of the Bauchi Area (Northern Nigeria). Berlin, Dietrich Reimer, 1978.

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