Where We Differ With Our French-Speaking African Brothers

My French is what you might call "passable." I can order food in the restaurant, though, as I discovered one day in Geneva, I had forgotten all names of juices, except juis-de-pomme, so I ended up ordering a type of juice I least like for the sole reason that it was the only one whose name I could remember. I can also ask for directions, negotiate prices and introduce myself. In my current office, I get some memos in French but I respond to them in English. I do not need a translator to convert French memos into English for me.

But that is as far as it goes. As already said, it would be a big exaggeration to paint the portrait of myself as somebody who knows the French language well.

However, the behaviour of French-speaking West African brothers baffles me, to be honest. When they come to Anglophone Africa, they speak heavily mangled English. Nobody laughs at the atrocius mispronunciations, terrible grammar and the French intrusion into the English language. All we do is to take out the chaff and get to the sense of what the person wanted to say. As long as there is enough to sustain conversation, we ignore the rest and proceed.

Not with the Francophone brothers.

I was embarrassed in Addis Ababa last year. A Francophone friend whom I struggled to teach English once took me to meet his family and friends. They were all French speakers. His wife and children spoke no single word of English. We were treated to a lovely lunch of le poulet locale. I struggled to speak French continuosly for 3 hours, first thinking in my Chichewa and Chitumbuka languages, then English before getting down to French.

Then, once, I made a mistake.

I was trying to explain that my grippe, which means flu, was reaching serious levels that needed a doctor's attention. I said, La grippe est tres grave. My friend roared with laughter. He went to his Francophone friends and said, in French of course, "Stanley says La grippe est tres grave." They joined in and the laughter turned into a choral boom of discordant voices, tickled, as it were, by my mistake.

I never got corrected. I still do not know how to say "My flu is becoming a serious case."

Later, I was to be told by a friend that while they do not care how much English they mangle, our Francophone brothers flinch each time an Anglophone makes a mistake when speaking French. I find this behaviour insufferable. These languages are not ours. I would complain if I saw a Chichewa speaker make serious language & grammatical blunders in the Chichewa language, but why should I take offence when a fellow African struggles to speak English or French?

Quel dommage!