10 The Linguist Vol/60 No/1 2021
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Lucy Makepeace travels to the West African nation to help
W
hen I went to Senegal on a humanitarian
mission in 2018, the level of poverty among
the street children and communities I worked
with was heartbreaking but sadly not unexpected. What
really shocked me was that citizens were expected to
speak French like French people to pass examinations,
interact with the authorities, do basic administrative tasks
and get good jobs, yet the provisions for French teaching
were inadequate. Returning to francophone Africa the
following year, I found a similar situation in other countries.
I spent three months living in a village in Togo and
volunteering full-time at a local primary school with the
charity Assemblessan-Assemblessan. More than 40
languages are spoken by the 8.5 million citizens of this
small West African nation, but the education system
requires a level of French that is not currently attainable for
most children. Although there has been a recent push to
promote early education in the main local languages
(Ewe in the South and Kabiye in the North), exams and
lessons are generally conducted exclusively in French.
However, some students cannot even hold a simple
conversation in the language. I found that children fail in
areas such as maths and science, not because they
haven't mastered the academic principles but because
they do not understand the wording of the questions.
There is currently little research available on Togo's
linguistic composition, but the multilingual nature of my
fiancé's family is fairly typical: with the maternal
grandmother they speak Moba; with the dad they speak
Gourma; since they live in the capital city of Lomé they
speak Ewe when people come to the house; and in their
professional lives they speak French, which is used as a
lingua franca across Togo's many ethnic groups.
In September, I returned to Togo to work closely with
the school in Davie-Tekpo, 30 km from Lomé, while also
developing my business, The Language Agency. The
800 pupils at the school have no access to reading
books or media; they do not speak French outside the
classroom, as the common language is Ewe and most of
their parents speak little to no French. As a result, some
pupils have had to retake classes, while others drop out
before completing primary.
A class act for Tog
