Educational-Linguistic Autobiography

I'm Jacques Akoi Onivogui.

My country of origin is Guinea (Francophone Africa), a small country of about 7 million people who share in some 32 native languages and one official language, French, in this case. I grew up speaking Loma, but when I went to school at the age of 7, I soon picked up Manyan, which is a dialectal variation of one majority language called Maninka. Manyan and Loma are the two major languages people speak in my birth town, Macenta. In other words from that tender age I was not only speaking Loma and learning to use Mayan with school and play mates, I was also learning to count in French, sound the French alphabet, read and copy French words from the chalkboard.

We spoke Loma at home at all times but I would usually speak the other two outside of home either with friends, their family members, or with teachers and other acquaintances. Halfway through my secondary education I moved to a different city where my older brother was teaching. During the one academic year I was there I learned to speak Kpelle, the most spoken language of the area. Coming from a Loma speaking background it was much easier to learn this new language given that, at least for the most part, both languages did sound somewhat similar and I was only sixteen, which is a good enough age for language learning, they say.

For my High School education, I moved this time to the capital city as a cousin of mine who had my dad as her guardian at some point of her school years, offered in turn to be my guardian in appreciation of what my father did for her. There I was made to attend the Language Institute with English and German as major because there were no more seats in the biology stream I so much wanted. So alongside with French as the language of school, administration, and business, I had to study two additional foreign languages until graduation from my undergraduate studies 8 years later.

For German we usually had native speakers such as Herr Gerard, Herr Neueman, or Frau Fofana who happened to be the wife of a Guinean national. Unlike German, our English language instructors were not as so native. They often came from Haitian, Swedish, or Egyptian backgrounds and only towards the end were they Guinean nationals coming home from Western universities in America, or England.Similar to previous language experiences as mentioned above, I had learned to speak Soso as my fourth native spoken language by the end of my second year at university.

A year prior to my graduation, a major event similar to what Barnhardt describes in his article occurred. All university campuses throughout the country closed down as students went to live with, help, and learn from, rural communities while trying to problem-solve the many countless daily issues facing these populations and ranging from environmental, water and food supply, health & sanitation, agricultural practices, accessibility problems but also education. Ten months away from electricity, entertainments, and so-called modern facilities and infrastructures was truly a life-altering experience. It became common to sit side by side often in open fields with local peasants but also with government Ministers and other high-serving civil servants during mandatory regular visits, to examine some of these issues using the native tongue of that particular locality.

One tangible outcome among many from this grass-root learning experience was my mastery of one additional majority language of my country: Maninka. Interestingly enough, this experience paved the way to a future union with my wife who happened to be from that particular culture and language background. Needless to say that all our children grew up speaking their mother's tongue. However, to help with their identity formation process I set up a rotative two-year visit for each one of them to my other side of the family so that they could learn to speak Loma, meet and interact with their grand parents, uncles, aunts, cousins, as a way of learning about themselves, their customs and traditions, their own history, but also of forming fond and enduring childhood memories that will keep them connected to their social roots at all times and places.

My graduate experience at foreign institutions in Europe and America, far away from what I know to be home, will nail this point as the remainder of my account unfolds. In 1982, soon after our first son turned 3 ½ while her immediate sister had just turned 1 ¼ , I embarked on a nine-month program for a post-graduate diploma in England. At first the experience appear to be stressful, demoralizing, and in many ways self-demeaning. After the 4 days we spent in Dakar (Senegal), I felt cut off from my universe whether it was language (in spite of my 13 years – or so – of textbook English), appearance of people everywhere, food habits, weather conditions, even the sun didn't seem to be the same any more. I had lost any bearings whatsoever, and felt so disoriented and almost at the mercy of each and every daily event. I was in England, and yet no English I heard was identifiable to the one I was given to learn. I felt worthless, betrayed by previous learning experiences, and ultimately outraged.

One of my furies came from the fact that I had just realized that I couldn't speak nor understand a language I was made to learn the hard way and for so many years of my life. To make matters even worse, I couldn't avail myself any opportunity to speak any of the many other languages I knew how to speak so well. No one spoke any and home was inaccessible by phone due to the lack of adequate infrastructures. The first and only time I spoke Loma, my language of birth, was when I called my uncle, who was then in Germany, from a phone booth in Paris. Although brief like most phone conversation, it was all the same so satisfying! The feeling of loss and chaos dropped considerably after the first two months as I got to connect with many other international students on campus but also a few native students from the college chapel and through them my integration process to my new community became a lot easier and even faster.

Coming home to my own culture, language, and family after such a long period of linguistic severance, cultural trauma and readjustment, but also a laborious, though successful, social integration, I became wary of the necessity to help re-value my own cultural heritage and started to have a better sense of what it means to be in the comfort of home. From one event to another this led to a perception of myself as a cultural being with shifting identity according to settings and circumstances. In addition, the power politics as mediated through the role of the media in the formation process of nationhood, as seen from various cultural and language policies be it in education or elsewhere, puts many native cultures and languages at risk.

Owing to the pervasive practices of such hegemonic cultural and language policies, and having come to the realization that no language survives its speakers, I got involved in a form of community activism for the revitalization of the Loma language and traditions in 1997 till my departure for the US in July 2000. The overall goal for the organization was to empower the community for its own development by putting to use the human resources from all walks of activity and all sorts of talent that are available within the community itself which is broadly defined to include even those of its members who happen to have immigrated to foreign lands across the globe in search of a better life. Some such members, for example, were asked to contact institutions in France, and families of former missionaries in that part of the country who may have known about, or still possess rudiments of the original Loma print. In the same vein I created a web page for the Loma print thanks to the collaboration of Dr. McVey from ITF. And Depree is also willing to contribute to the project with her own technological touch some time soon.

In conclusion, I would like to say that if only the Loma print could lend itself to some form of interactive computer program whereby speakers including children could move symbols around in different combinations to form new sounds, or at the very least, if genuine Loma font could come to existence as a result of such concerted efforts, chances are good that the children of our children will pass a whole universe of cultural beauty to their own children. By fixing language one would have helped its preservation from fatal decay.

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