5 December 2008

Sign scala in Ghana

It’s 6 A.M. I walk outside to commence the daily village habit of ‘greeting people’. Immediately, I come across a hearing man, and I greet him. He signs: “How are you?” I answer that all is well, and how is he? I sense the next question coming before he even speaks: “Be my partner, I want to marry you because you are so beautiful, with your white skin”. I decline: “No, I already have a partner”. “Dump him and marry a black man! He’s not here anyway, so marry me!”

I already explained that because of the large presence of deaf people in this village throughout generations, a lot of hearing people know and use the Adamorobe sign language (=AdaSL). Parents, children, brothers and sisters, people in the food stalls and people you meet on the paths of Adamorobe, thus communicate in signs with the deaf people who live here, and also with me. The conversation mentioned above is a standard one with (sometimes very annoying) hearing men :p

A few weeks ago I went to Accra, where people evidently do not know Adamorobe sign language. Still, it wasn’t always the case that I had to fall back on written communication. In my blogpost ‘Scala’, written two months ago, I already discussed the phenomena of hearing people who do not know sign language, but who naturally use simple signs (‘gestures’) in their communication style. A lot of people tend to know the example of the Italians with their vast number of ‘gestures’. That’s exactly the case here in Ghana (and at least a large part of Africa) too, but of course with gestures which are extremely different from those used in Italy.

Well, when I went to Accra after having been in Adamorobe for a couple of weeks, I clearly noticed that simple interactions with hearing Ghanese people in Accra went much more smoothly once of a sudden. I’m talking about using gestures like ‘coming’, ‘going’, ‘do you come from far?’. In a youth hostel: “go there to get your name registered and then come back here” and “for how many nights are you staying?”. Also communication with taxi drivers, bus drivers and street vendors went easier. I picked up these gestures in Adamorobe and they worked much better in Accra than my European hand- and footwork. So, while people outside of Adamorobe do not know Adamorobe sign language, my background in Adamorobe sign language helped me – interesting enough – to also communicate a bit better in Accra.

In a far end of west-Accra I was visiting, I witnessed a conversation between Joseph, a deaf man, and a hearing woman who came from her farm. They knew each other. She wanted money from him and a teasing conversation followed. He made several signs which I recognized from Adamorobe: ‘cheating’, ‘partner’, ‘man’, ‘farm land’, ‘money’ etc. When the woman had left, I noted that that and that and that sign also is used in Adamorobe. He explained that once in a while, he speaks to deaf people who have never been to school and that he then also uses these signs, that they are ‘gestures’ which many Ghanaians know and use.

All of this got me thinking. I remembered a conversation with Sam, a deaf African academic, who once told me that it felt strange to him, to treat village sign languagues like AdaSL as completely separate languages, because AdaSL incorporates a lot of ‘gestures’ which hearing people use too. However, AdaSL is not merely a collection of gestures like those the Italian use, but it is way more complex and contains specific signs which an outsider does not understand. Joseph, the deaf man mentioned above, has been to Adamorobe. He said that he did not understand a lot of AdaSL, in opposition to most hearing people who have been brought up in Adamorobe.

About the strict opposite of AdaSL and everyday Ghanese gesture, is GSL (Ghanaian Sign Language), the Ghanese sign language which is taught in the school for the deaf. This sign language has been strongly influenced by ASL, the American sign language, because a Afro-American, Andrew J. Foster, set up the deaf education in a large part of Africa, with Ghana as starting point. GSL has very plain facial expressions, minimal mouth gesture and does not use the Ghanese gestures mentioned above. It’s a completely different language. By many Ghanese deaf people, GSL is seen as ‘real sign language’, a language with status, linked to literacy, because it is the school language. ‘Village signs’ are ‘common’ in their eyes and ‘not real’ and according to the educated deaf which I met in Accra, the deaf (and hearing) from Adamorobe therefore cannot ‘really’ sign.

Two years ago I spent 3 months in Bolgatanga, north-Ghana, for my volunteer work in such a deaf school. There I got a basis in GSL. For me, GSL was a thousand times easier to learn than AdaSL because the grammar had more resemblances with western sign languages. But even though AdaSL was a lot harder to learn, I feel that living in Adamorobe gave me a mini crash course in Ghanese culture-and-language-integration, much more than my stay at the deaf school in the north.

2 comments:

  1. Hoi Annelies,

    Wij hebben elkaar 1x ontmoet, in Amsterdam toen ik Sujit interviewde. Jouw blog kwam ik toevallig tegen. Eerlijk is eerlijk, het is heel boeiend om te lezen! Een blog van dove antropoloog ;)

    Succes met je onderzoek! Hoelang blijf je daar eigenlijk?

    Take care,
    Linde

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  2. hey, ja ik herinner me je nog! :) ben dus net vertrokken uit ghana... terug in mei :-)
    groetjes
    annelies

    ReplyDelete