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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Visible, not audible: the language of literacy in urban Gambia
| Panel |
58. Language in African cities
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| Paper ID | 284 |
| Author(s) |
Juffermans, Kasper
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | My paper begins with the observation that both urban and rural Gambia are tremendously multilingual spaces at both community and individual level. This multilingualism, however, is functionally distributed: local languages (Mandinka, Wolof, Fula, Jola, et cetera) dominate the audible public sphere whereas the international languages English and Arabic dominate the visible public sphere.
In this paper I investigate the use of English on signboards and billboards in two sites in urban Gambia: the Sayerr Jobe Avenue and the Banjul-Serrekunda Highway. I argue that this kind of public literacy is both multimodal and grassroots literacy, thereby combining two previously held incompatible concepts of literacy studies (cf. Papen 2006). The signboards and billboards have all the characteristics of grassroots literacy, i.e. instable orthography, non-standard language in writing, problems with (or localised) genre conventions, and are typically produced under poor conditions of literacy production (Blommaert 2004a, 2004b). At the same time, the signboards and billboards make sophisticated use of both text and image to construe meaning. Multimodality (e.g. Kress & Van Leeuwen 1996), I argue, is not exclusive for literacy in the ‘new media’ (Kress 2003) of high-tech societies (think of the internet and CNN), but occurs at the same time in so-called 'developing countries' as The Gambia. I subsequently ask what it would mean for African societies where illiteracy rates are still higher than anywhere else, if indeed 'language as writing will increasingly be displaced by image in many domains of public communication' as Gunther Kress (2003:1) foresees as the future of literacy.
I further demonstrate that the signboards and billboards are places where shopkeepers and literacy artists negotiate identities that break out of the locality of this 'very small place in Africa' (Wright 2004) and link up with globalised cultural products and identities.
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