Ghanaian English

So, they speak English in Ghana.  That’s what the guidebooks say.  Well, the reality on the ground is a bit different – at least, here in the far north.

English might be the official language of Ghana, but it is not the day-to-day language of most Ghanaians.  There are probably well over a hundred local languages and dialects here.  Apparently there are about five major “language groups” (I think a language group in Europe might be French, Spanish, Italian, Catalan, Rumanian etc – ie the “romance languages”, which are all closely descended from Latin).  Some of the languages in the same group are mutually comprehensible up to a point. 

The number and distribution of these languages undoubtedly says something about the ethnic origin and subsequent dispersal of the different peoples who live in the land now called Ghana – for example, there are pockets of people who speak a language which is totally different from everyone around them, who presumably must have settled there after migrating from somewhere else.  I suspect it is a pretty complex story and I haven’t seen an account of it in any detail. 

Life is conducted in these local languages.  When you live here in Zebilla, you have a clear sense of not knowing the language that ordinary local people speak, and being able to communicate with them only in the tiny smattering of their language that you know, and the slightly (but not much) larger smattering of English that they know; plus lots of gestures and smiles.  It’s sufficient to survive but it doesn’t allow for much conversation or cultural and intellectual exchange.

Here in Bawku West District the local language is Kusaal – which means “the language of the Kusasi people”.  The Kusasi live in Zebilla, Bawku and the surrounding villages, extending over the borders into Burkina Faso in the north and Togo in the east.  Travelling west from Zebilla, by the time you reach Bolgatanga you’re into Frafra territory, and Frafra is a significantly different language, with few words in common with Kusaal.   Of course there are Kusasi in Bolga, who presumably speak Kusaal among themselves. 

I estimate that Kusaal is spoken as a first language in, roughly, a circular area with a radius of 20 – 30 miles centred somewhere between Zebilla and Bawku.  It can’t be spoken by more than a few of hundred thousand people.  Zebilla isn’t a major centre for immigration from other parts of Ghana but there are people from other regions here and some of these (and particularly their children who are growing up here) speak Kusaal as an additional language.  Kusaal isn’t yet a written language, though people are working on a standardised orthography and eventually teachers will be trained to teach it; and there is already a bible in Kusaal.  Personally I think it’s a huge pity that the children can’t learn to write it at school (or indeed the adults).

There will be other small local languages like Kusaal all over Ghana, alongside some much bigger ones.  The “biggest” language is Twi (the main Akan language of the Asante and related people).  I think the experience of living as a European foreigner anywhere in Ghana, possibly with the exception of Accra, will be as Jane and I have enjoyed it in Zebilla. 

Despite the undoubted importance of the local languages, English is the main, and in many places the only written language. It is the language in which education is delivered and received (during the first five years of school, teaching is supposed to take place in the local language with English being progressively introduced for full-time use from Primary 4 onwards); it is the official language for all formal things (for example the health service functions in English, your electricity and water bills come in English, and I think legal documents, contracts etc are all in English); it seems to be the dominant language for business (though business between speakers of the same local language is presumably more likely to be in the local language than English); it is one of the main broadcasting languages (alongside Twi); it is one of the linguae francae that enable people who speak different local languages to communicate; and there seems to be a general assumption that white people speak English, and as such English has status.  As far as I can tell, even Ghanaians who can’t speak or understand English still realise that English is an important part of Ghanaian life.  Interestingly, despite the fact that Christianity was presumably introduced by white English-speaking missionaries, English is not the language of Christian worship, including funerals.

Ghanaian English is certainly a form of English and I wouldn’t characterise it as a different tongue.  But it is at least as different from UK English as American or Australian, and probably moreso.  If you turn up in Ghana and speak your usual English at your usual speed and with your usual smattering of slang etc, there’s every chance that you won’t be understood at all.  Maybe you shouldn’t be surprised when a sentence like “and I’m like, whoa!” meets with completely blank looks!

Unless you’re listening carefully and sensitively, there’s also a good chance you initially won’t understand much of what most Ghanaians say to you.  Those last few sentences probably aren’t applicable to the small percentage of very well educated and well-travelled Ghanaians who might speak and understand English as well as you do; or to the staff of expensive hotels, who have a good command of the English that they need to do their work (though not necessarily extending far beyond that).  If you’re travelling on business and sticking to the big cities, you might be mingling with such people for most of your time and miss the fact that they are a small linguistic minority.  But you’ll discover it if you take a taxi or look for somewhere to eat out local-style.

Perhaps the first thing to say about Ghanaian English is that it sounds “African” – by which I mean that if you have ever heard native African people speaking English, you will hear clear similarities.  However, it doesn’t sound at all like the English spoken by white people from, for example, South Africa or Zimbabwe – whose language bears a strong influence from the original white settlers’ native tongues.  It also doesn’t sound Caribbean.

In the main, the vowel sounds in Ghanaian English are broadly the same as in UK English.  This is in marked contrast to USA English, Australian English, New Zealand English and South African English – when you try to imitate speakers from these places, the main change you make from your UK English is to use different vowels.  The qualification “broadly” is important though – the vowels are not exactly the same, Ghanaians approximate some of the UK English vowels so that when you hear words in isolation they can be confusing.  Short “o” and short “u” are examples – as in “hot” and “hut”.  The same happens with some short and long vowels – for example “hit” and “heat”.  I think that in general Ghanaians pronounce the long vowels a bit shorter than in UK English.  Ghanaians tend not to use the "neutral" - the "uh" sound which, for example, is often the last syllable of "brother".  They often use an "a" vowel instead. 

Regarding the consonants, as a general rule Ghanaians pronounce these rather softly (ie rather indistinctly).  For example, “b”, “p”, “t” and “d” are a lot less “plosive” than in UK English and thus less distinct to our ears.  Ghanaians also tend not to pronounce the consonants near the ends of words at all, or so softly that you don’t hear them.  "R" isn't pronounced at the end of words - for example "brother" sounds more like "brada".

For example, consider the two sentences “I can come” and “I can’t come”.  In UK English, there will generally be two differences.  The first is that the vowel in can’t isn’t the same as the vowel in can – it might be a different vowel (eg if you’re speaking “cut glass” English where the a in can is almost an e); or it might just be longer (compare “cat” and “cart”).  The second is that you can (usually) hear the t (even if, for example, in Estuary English it has turned into a glottal stop).  In Ghanaian English, you can’t hear the t at all – the only difference between the sentences is the length of the vowel.  (The short a vowel isn’t cut-glass – a cat is a “cat” not a “ket”.)

In like fashion, “don’t” comes out as “doan” (or “doa/doh”), “went” is “wen”, “walked” is “walk” (or “waw”), “because” is “beco” etc. “I will walk” actually sounds pretty close to “I wi waw”.  This tendency is so strong in Ghanaian English that when they are writing they often leave off the “t” or “ed” at the end of verbs in the past tense.  Only yesterday I saw “march pass” instead of “march past” in a document.  The tendency to omit final consonants seems to be a bit less strong in some longer words – for example, “impregnated” comes out intact as “impregnated”.

Ghanaians also simplify some consonant combinations.  The classic is the “sk” in “ask” – which comes out as "ax" (or "aks").  (Given that this is a feature of most black American and Caribbean English too, one suspects that there might be a something generic about African languages which makes this combination difficult – there’s probably a PhD or two on this somewhere, though I haven’t hunted for it/them.)  This feature appears in words like “desk” (“dex”) and “text” (“tex”).  Interestingly there is a word “text” – it’s the past tense of the verb “to tex” (as in “I text (teksed) you yesterday”).

Other consonants that Ghanaians mangle are “th” (both unvoiced and voice - as in “thing” and “the”, which come out respectively as ting and de).  The word “three” is pronounced “treh” with a trilled “r”. “Tree” is “tree” (with trilled “r”).

Combinations like “xth” (in “sixth”) and “rch” (in “March”) also suffer.  The anniversary of Ghana’s independence, which is celebrated annually on the sixth of March, is talked about as the “seef mahsh” or “seef mahs”.  (I’ve spelt March that way to represent a long vowel with no hint of an r).

Another example which floored Jane and me for a while and then had us in stitches was “johnson” – which is what our interlocutor said when he meant “junction” (see above re confusion between short “o” and short “u”).

Ghanaian English sometimes pronounces “g”, differently from UK English.  For example your motorbike has “jears” not “gears”; but if you are waving your arms you will be making a “guesture” (hard “g”) not a “jesture”.  If there is a logic to this, I haven’t worked it out yet.

Next, Ghanaians pronounce some words with unexpectedly precise respect for their spelling.  The most common are “listen” (where the "t" is pronounced) and “plumber” (where the "b" is pronounced).  Another example is “circuit” – which is pronounced “sir-kute”.

Jane and I can’t understand why this should happen, because we have found absolutely no evidence of English being taught in school via phonics (and plenty of evidence of ridiculous things such as a class of KG2 children being drilled in 2-letter words, chanting “ess – oh – so”).  We haven’t heard “see-ay-tea-cat” or “dee-oh-gee-dog”, but we have no doubt they are being chanted by small children, up and down the land.

An interesting extension of this “rule” is that “lettuce” here is known as “lectus”. 

Another example is that the words “flower” and “flour”, which in my version of UK English sound exactly the same, have quite different pronunciation in Ghanaian English.  “Flower” is more or less the same as UK English, but “flour” is “flaah”.  I can only explain this as an attempt to reflect the spelling in the pronunciation – even though UK English is quite happy to have these two words as exact homophones.

Leaving pronunciation and moving onto vocabulary, I suppose you would expect there to be local words that you have not heard before – and there are!  Examples are “spot” (or “drinking spot” for a small street-side bar (often serving the local tipple, pito, in rural areas), and sometimes “eating spot” (also “chop-bar”) if it serves food); “tro-tro” (or “tro”) for the cramped and dilapidated minibuses which are the bus network in Accra and other big cities (this is alongside “lorry” and “car”, which often mean “bus”, with “lorry fare” meaning what you pay for the journey (even if nobody refers to the vehicle as a lorry); a tyre is a “cover”; the handlebars on your bike or motorbike is the “steer”; your motorbike is a “motor” (pronounced “motoh”).

Another thing that you notice early on is that Ghanaians often use words which feel surprisingly formal, technical or precise to a UK English speaker, who would use something more casual.  Ghanaians are generally unaware of the alternative casual options, and they have no sense that they have (for us) dipped into a different register when they use these words.

An example you will discover early is that Ghanaians urinate.  They don’t wee or pee, or pinkle or tinkle or piddle or widdle, or have a pit-stop or a slash, or take a leak, or powder their nose or freshen up.  They don’t know these euphamisms - if you use them you won’t be understood.  On a long-distance bus recently the driver made some general practical announcements to the passengers, one of which was that if you wanted to urinate please ask him to stop the bus.  Ghanaians also defecate, and they know that both people and animals produce faeces.  Defecate isn’t an especially common word and doesn’t seem to be talked about all that much, but the others are, and aren’t accompanied by any sniggering or tittering.  They are simply the words for these things; and I don’t think we have heard any other words for them, despite the long list of available options in UK English.  I’m not sure whether this lack of euphamisms is a linguistic feature or simply reflects the fact that Ghanaians get on with natural processes with the minimum of embarrassment.

Other examples, among surprisingly many, include:

·        A bicycle pump is a “tyre inflator”;

·        A man who gets a girl pregnant “impregnates” her;

·        When you want to get out of a shared taxi, you “alight”;

·        A hole punch is a “perforator”;

·        A staple remover is an “extractor” (and staples are “pins”, for some reason);

·        “Reduce” means both to make something smaller (eg to tighten the waist of your trousers); and also to lose weight (and “increase” means to put on weight);

·        When Adam took his trousers to have them reduced, and returned without them, he explained that he had “remained” them at the tailor’s;

·        The person who repairs a puncture in your tyre is a “vulcaniser”;

·        Anything which is broken (bust, knackered, worn out etc) is “spoilt”; you get it “repaired”;

·        When the baker has sold all his bread, the bread is “finished”;

·        If someone tells you something, they “inform” you.

These kinds of words don’t create a problem when you hear them, they just take you rather by surprise, and remind you that in our everyday UK English we use an awful lot of little, casual words in place of bigger, grander ones.  It’s more difficult when you want to use them because, unless you have heard them before and remembered them, you simply use the usual UK English word and then feel foolish when your interlocutor doesn’t understand.  (Of course, you get used to this experience and you learn to say it again, slower and more clearly, to point and to gestures.)  It doesn’t help that many of the UK English equivalents of this sort of vocabulary use those useful little idiomatic words like “get” and “put”, which are words I have seldom heard Ghanaians use in this type of combination.

Ghanaian English uses some words in specific, different ways from UK English.  One that you encounter early on is “pick”, which is often used where we would expect “take”, “collect”.  Hence, recently the Director announced that we had had a delivery of chalk for schools, but it was too heavy to expect the office car to take it round to all the schools, so the head teachers should come to the office and "pick" it.  Pick also has other specific meanings – for example “I called you and you didn’t pick” means that you didn’t answer your phone (a serious faux pas here).

“Take” is a less common word in Ghanaian English and often has a specific meaning.  For example, “the plumber will take 30 cedis” means that’s how much he will “charge” you.

The wonderfully economical verbs “to on” and “to off” mean, perhaps obviously, “to switch/turn on/off” – as in “I have forgotten to off the fan”.  I think these words might also be used for taking clothes on and off.

“Lights” here means “electricity” (for which you are charged via a “lights bill”); and a “lights out” is a power cut.

“Fast” means clever and dishonest - perhaps similar to the idea of “making a fast buck”, but with a stronger sense that it isn’t legal.  We’ve been told that the people in Nigeria are “fast” (that was after a conversation involving a man who makes his living installing a bit of Nigerian software into people’s satellite TV, which means they can watch unlimited TV without paying).

You might have guessed from “chop-bar” that “to chop” means “to eat”, though “eat” also exists here.  On Zebilla market they sell a vegetable which looks a bit like a green tomato and is known as a “garden” egg.  We didn’t know how to cook these, so I asked the seller – she looked a bit confused initially and then said “you only chop it” (see later on for “only”).  I think that meant that you can simply eat it as it is (something I would contest, incidentally, having tried it – they are barely palatable even if you cook them for so long that they turn into mush, and raw they are horrid in both taste and texture – bitter and tough!)   I’ve wondered if it is a coincidence that the sticks people eat with in China and Japan are called chop-sticks in English.  Was there a time when there was an English word “chop” which meant “to eat”?  I haven’t yet found it in a dictionary, and I’m separated by a few thousand miles from my trusty OED.

There is a set of oddities in Ghanaian vocabulary is words which seem to be direct translations of the local language.  Here are just two examples from Kusaal.  A person once told us that he had taken what he thought was enough to pay his sister’s school fees, but the head teacher said that “the money was not up”.  After a bit more questioning we understood that this meant that there was not sufficient.  When we were working with some pupils at school on a description of the head teacher, one pupil said that his complexion was red.  The head teacher has quite pale skin, and it seems that the word for this in Kusaal is the same as the word for the colour red.  I imagine that there are different examples for other local languages, but I don’t have any examples to offer.

A related example, which could perhaps equally fit in the section about grammar and syntax, is that at least in Kusaal, the local language doesn’t appear to distinguish between he and she, him and her – so it’s very common to hear men referred to as she and women as he.

The common expression “I will go and come” probably arises in the same way.  It means “I am leaving now and I will come back when I have run my errand”.  Last weekend Adam said “I will go and buy the local porridge and come”.  There is also a phrase “I’m coming”, which a person says when he/she is being interrupted and means “I want to keep talking and I’ll get onto that point soon” – this might also be a literal translation of a Kusaal expression.  The phrase “I’m coming” meaning “I know you’re waiting for me and I’ll be there sometime in the next ten hours or so, give or take, unless something more interesting comes up or I get a better offer” probably doesn’t reflect the Kusaal language, just Ghanaian culture.  It has amused me that the Ghanaians in our office say “come again” when they want you to repeat something.  I don’t know whether that’s because in the past they’ve had a VSO volunteer from Yorkshire!  Another way of asking you to repeat something is “you say?” (with rising intonation).

My last, and actually all-time favourite under the vocabulary section is the Ghanaian word for “thingumy-jig”, “whatnot”, “doofer” etc.  It is “this-thing”, pronounced “disting”.  You regularly hear people say something along the lines of “where is de disting?” (where’s the wotsit?) – it never fails to make me smile.

Ghanaian English is subtly different from UK English in its grammar and syntax, though this is not easy to illustrate.  If you have read Alexander McCall-Smith’s wonderful books about the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, which is set in Botswana, you’ll perhaps have a sense of what I mean.  The dialogue in those books is absolutely recognisably English but it is somehow different, in a way that isn’t easy to put your finger on.  I sometimes think of it as being more careful.  When they did a short TV series of the first book, that aspect came across wonderfully for me.  Ghanaian English has a similar quality.

Some examples of the grammar/syntax of Ghanaian English are:

·        The verb “to be” can be omitted.  A Ghanaian will introduce someone to you saying “this my junior brother”.  (A “junior brother” is any male relative, no matter how distant, who is younger than the speaker; actually there might be no blood relationship at all.  A “senior brother” is the equivalent person who is older than the speaker.  It has tickled me that one of the BECE exam questions that I have seen more than once asks candidates to pick the correct adjective qualifying “brother” from “senior”, “junior” “older” and “elder” – and they are ever so proud of knowing that the correct answer is “elder”.  I’ve not heard anyone actually use the word “elder” when referring to brothers though!)

·        Ghanaian English uses the present continuous much more than UK English and doesn’t seem to recognise the subtle differences between it and the simple present (“I am eating fish” as opposed to “I eat fish”).  So, you might hear someone way “my uncle is owning fifteen cows”; and someone might easily say “ah yes, Mr Abugri, he is wearing a smock” – meaning that Mr Abugri is never ever seen in anything except that traditional north-Ghanaian male garment.

·        In complex questions, the word order is different.  In UK English you might ask “Is that fat friend of yours who lives down the Brompton Road near the chip-shop with the pink vinegar coming to your anniversary party next week?”  In Ghana that might come out as “that fat friend of yours, he lives down the Brompton Road…, next week he is coming to your party?”  The intonation in this sentence is also different – Ghanaian English doesn’t generally go up at the end of a question and sometimes goes down.

·        Ghanaians are much more likely to say “this person”, “that place” than “him”, “there”.  They also use this construction to buy them thinking time in a sentence – for example “you will go to that place, Bolgatanga, with that man, the Education Director?”.

·        Ghanaians mainly form their negative sentences as “I have no dog” rather than “I do not have a dog”.  Also, if you ask a non dog-owning Ghanaian if he has a dog, you might easily get the answer “I don’t have” (not “I don’t have one” or “I don’t have a dog”, and neither will be preceded by “no”).

·        Where UK English would say “there are many boys and few girls in this class”, Ghanaian English would have “in this class the boys are many and the girls are few”.

·        The words “only”, “rather” and “even” are used quite a lot in Ghanaian English, and in a slightly different way from UK English.  They tend to appear at a different place in the sentence, usually just before the verb.  “Actually he is even coming” would carry the implication that this might be slightly against your expectations or someone else’s.  “Mr Abugri will rather take banku” or, quite possibly, “Mr Abugri will take rather banku”)  (banku is one of the many porridge/dumpling-like carbohydrate foods in Ghana) carries a slight implication of “in contrast to other people”, though often that contrast might only exist in the speaker’s mind and hasn’t been mentioned before.

·        The word “too” doesn’t occur in Ghanaian English.  “Also” is used instead, and is placed before the verb.  So, “I will also come” means “I’ll come too”.  “I should also come?”, or “that I should also come?” (both without the rising intonation they would have in UK English) are questions meaning “Do you want me to come too?” – the version with “that” would imply that your interlocutor might have said something like that and you are seeking confirmation (see next bullet but one).

·        “Also” also appears in sentences like “I have not also seen him”, which means “I have not seen him either”.  I don’t think I have heard Ghanaians use “either” or “neither”.

·        It is very common to hear sentences that begin with “that” – “that you should come now”; “that the printer is spoilt”.  It’s as if a preceding clause has been omitted – “the Director says…” or “I want to mention to you…”

None of these grammatical/syntactic differences is a big issue in its own right, but the cumulative effect is actually surprisingly powerful, I think.

Moving briefly now onto paralinguistic items… if you have done any homework at all before you arrive in Ghana, you will know that people here greet, and that you will give great offence if you don’t greet too.  “Greeting” means saying good morning etc to everyone when you arrive in the office, or when you enter a shop, or before you attempt to buy something from a market trader, and random people in the street if they catch your eye (though the adults, as a rule, don’t catch your eye and wait for you to make the first move).  There is quite a bit of ritual to greeting, with set phrases which are batted back and forth.  It’s quite common for the person you have greeted to respond (for example to "good morning" with “you are welcome”), and among themselves Ghanaians may then ask about each other’s family.  You score huge brownie points if you can do some of this in the local language, and if you can, you quickly realise that your Ghanaian friends are using the English equivalents of their standard local language phrases when they greet you.  People will phone you up just to greet you, and they will make a trip (or at least a short detour) to you house to greet too. 

For us, as we cycle to work in the morning, we might typically have a conversation (multiple times) along the lines of:

·        Toma toma toma

·        Yaou, toma. Doh awela?

·        Lafubay.  La-awela?

·        Lafubay.

In Kusaal this is a bare minimum - we tend to preempt it by wishing people “good morning”, to which the response is often “fine morning”.  In the office, if we start with “good morning”, people are likely to say “how was the night” (a rough of equivalent of doh awela, which seems literally to mean something like “how was your waking up?”).  On Mondays you tend to get “how was the weekend?”.  It seems to amuse people slightly, but in a “this boy is a fool” kind of way, if I respond “it was rather too short” or (referring to the night) “I don’t know, I was asleep”.

Another thing which hits you when you first arrive in Ghana is that people are very direct.  It’s not exactly impolite, but those smoothing, lubricating phrases like “if you wouldn’t mind”, “could you” etc generally aren’t used.  Even “please” is quite a rarity.  When a Ghanaian means “please, would you mind coming with me”, he/she will say “you come”, or “you should come” (possibly “that you should come”).  The tone of voice is also very direct.  Jane and I cringe a bit sometimes when someone is being told off – but at least here there is no risk of a person being reprimanded in such a round-about way that they don’t even realise they’re having a telling off!  

All Ghanaians are capable of producing a strong, loud, carrying voice; and they are quite happy to conduct a conversation over a distance of up to 30 metres, even at 5.30 in the morning, right next to your house. 

When Ghanaians take their leave of you, they tell you where they are going and then go.  They don’t say goodbye.  On the phone they just hang up when they have decided that the conversation is finished.

There is a range of gestures here, some of them accompanied by specific words.  As this is an aspect of UK English that we are perhaps not terribly conscious of, I’m not sure if it is really the case that there is more of this here than at home – but that is certainly how it feels. 

An example is a gesture where you put your right hand in front of your body, palm towards your chest, then flick you wrist over so that your palm is further away from you, facing upwards.  It means something like “I told you so”, and is accompanied by a distinctive “ah-ha!” (emphasis on the “ha”). Another involves clapping the back of your right hand against the palm of your left, then bringing both hands in quite a wide circle down to your sides, with the palms facing forward and fingers down.  The accompanying words are “a-ba”, and it means something like “oh, for goodness sake”.  Putting your hand out in front of you, palm down, then flicking the hand over so the palm faces up, is a silent way of asking a question - which question will be obvious (to a Ghanaian) from the context. 

I should now add that there are Ghanaians who have spent a lot of time in the UK or USA and who speak with the pronunciation, vocabulary and syntax of those places.  But most Ghanaians haven’t, and although there is a very wide range of competence in English (from those who can barely say more than “good morning”, to those who are fluent and have a wide and sophisticated vocabulary), the things I’ve described come over as general trends.

At the beginning of this post I said that most daily life is conducted in the local language.  I think that is generally true, but maybe a few more comments are called for. 

Big cities are worth a mention.  Tamale, the biggest city in the Northern Region, is mainly populated by Dagbani speakers and as far as I can tell, Dagbani is spoken there except by sub-communities from other regions, who speak their own local language among themselves.  Tamale has a population of between half a million and one million, so it’s big rather than huge.  Dagbani seems to be a second language for many of the people in Tamale who don’t have it as their first language, so, oddly, even for such a big place, it has perhaps unexpected linguistic homogeneity.

Kumasi is the capital of the Ashanti Kingdom.  There are a lot of other people in Kumasi, including a lot from the north, but even so it is mainly populated by Akan speakers, the main dialect of which is Twi.  According to one guidebook, Twi is spoken by 50% of the population of Ghana, though it that is true, I think a lot of these people don’t speak it as their first language.  I think in Kumasi what’s normally spoken is each group’s local Akan language, or Twi, with English only after that.  Kumasi sprawls into some of the neighbouring towns – taken together it is well over a million people.

Accra is in Ga territory but the proportion of people from other places is bigger than Kumasi, so Ga doesn’t seem to be the main local language except among Ga speakers.  There is a lot of Twi.  And other groups will speak their local language when they are in their own company.  English also serves as a lingua franca, particularly at work.  There is also a “pidgin English” which seems to exist in Accra and all along the coast – it isn’t used to attempt to communicate with foreigners, it’s another lingua franca which Ghanaians talk among themselves, and I get a slight sense that they do it just for fun – particularly those who also speak English well.  Accra’s population is 3 million or more, and growing.  There is an amusing and slightly enlightening story about a large sign at Accra airport, which apparently was put up when President Obama visited.  The sign says “Akwaaba” – which means “welcome”.  It caused a row because “akwaaba” is a Twi word – and Twi isn’t the language of Accra.  I don’t think any blows were struck about this but it got quite heated, apparently.  The sign was there when we came through the airport; it will be interesting to see if it is still there when we leave (but if it is, that might simply mean that they have agreed to remove it but haven’t got round to doing so yet).

There is a language called Hausa, which is spoken as a native tongue by a large portion of Nigerians, and also serves as a lingua franca particularly among Muslims (who are much more numerous in the north of Ghana than further south).  It seems to be a Muslin/North & West African equivalent of Swahili.  I’ve not encountered many people who have even heard of Swahili.

The countries bordering Ghana – Togo, Cote d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso – are all French-speaking (probably to the same extent as Ghana is English-speaking).  I do occasionally hear French spoken, but exclusively by people from Burkina or Togo when addressing me.  I’ve never heard a Ghanaian speak French.  Just four of the 45 Junior High Schools in Bawku West District offer French to BECE (ie a 3-year course leading to a standard which is a bit below GCSE).  Almost nobody takes it seriously; only about 5% of pupils even pass, and those who do get the lowest possible pass grades.  My advice is, if you only speak French, pick somewhere else to visit!

I’ve wondered how Ghana got into this position from a historical perspective.  I’ve wondered less about how it will evolve, because I think it’s fairly clear that the number of people in Ghana who speak English confidently and well will increase as time passes – though I think it will be a long time before a baby born in one of the villages around Zebilla hears English as his first language.  That might happen sooner in Accra.

English was the colonial language – though that is a statement which requires clarification.  The first European people to come to Ghana were the Portuguese, who landed on the coast in 1471.  Over the next 300 – 400 years the Dutch, the Swedish and the English were all here in addition, though not in large numbers, not necessarily continuously and not all at the same time.  Most of the Europeans stayed at the coast – they set up trading posts with the agreement of the tribes who lived on the coast (principally the Asante and the Ga) and traded with those people, who in turn managed the trading of goods – both import and export – with other tribes who lived further inland.  Possibly some of the more adventurous Europeans might have made small expeditions into the interior during this period so might have come into brief contact with local people who didn’t live directly on the coast – but my guess (I haven’t researched this point) is that such contact will have been brief and will not have resulted in any significant numbers of local people acquiring any significant knowledge of or fluency in any European language. 

Eventually, in the later part of the 19^th century, England became the “colonial power” and from this point onwards one assumes that they did begin to make inroads further into the country and this presumably resulted in more local people acquiring some English language competence.  The British weren’t necessarily loved universally during this period – there was some significant armed conflict between the British and the Ashanti kingdom (in the middle of the southern half of modern Ghana), and I have seen references to fighting between detachments of British troops and the people who lived in the Tongo hills (just outside Bolgatanga – so over five hundred miles north of the coast) – and I imagine that there were other instances of localized unhappiness which will have resulted in a brush between the local people and the military wing of the colonial administration.  But, as far as I know, these were isolated problems.  The British didn’t emigrate to Ghana in huge numbers; those who were here were either functionaries of the colonial administration (plus presumably the associated households and support infrastructure) or traders; and they lived mainly on or close to the coast – the capital of the British Gold Coast colony was Cape Coast initially, then Accra from 1877. 

As mentioned in previous blogs, the colony was subjected to “indirect rule”, meaning that the country was actually ruled/run/administered by the local people under the control (I’m not clear how real or notional this control was) of the colonial authorities.  It strikes me as possible in these circumstances that many of the local people never even saw a European, let alone interacted with them sufficiently frequently to acquire competence in their language.

Another group of who came to Ghana, possibly quite early on, were missionaries.  These came with the direct intention of interacting with the local people and “bringing them to God”, and in the process educating them.  I haven’t researched the activities of the missionaries but it seems likely to me that because of them there will have been some places where English was present continuously over periods of years and that local people will have learnt to understand and speak it.  But having travelled the length of Ghana (though not its breadth yet), I can’t help feeling that in linguistic terms the missionaries’ influence must have been small and isolated.

Ghana’s independence came in 1957.  The borders of Ghana were drawn up at a relatively late stage and it’s worth noting that some parts of the north and east had previously been part of French or German-speaking colonies.  I have seen absolutely no evidence of a legacy of linguistic competence in either French or German in those communities.  I think it’s fair to conclude that if Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, had chosen a language other than English as the national language, the legacy of English might have disappeared equally completely Ghana from by now.

But Nkrumah chose English – and with hindsight I think it was a good choice.  Entirely by chance, Ghana is already using what seems to be the emerging global language.

By 1957 there was a backbone of road and railway infrastructure in Ghana; at least some Ghanaians (Kwame Nkrumah for one) had obtained access to education and travelled widely outside Ghana; cities were growing inside Ghana; radio was well established in the developed world and the wealthy had televisions, and mass communication was beginning to be possible even where the majority of the population lived in small rural communities.  The British had made a decent fist of making education available to the colonial subjects, though it was by no means universal, and the new Government of Ghana would expand the education more than five-fold in its first few years.  And, since education was carried out in English, by this means more than any other, a substantial number of Ghanaians will have acquired some knowledge of English.  But it was far from the case that most Ghanaians spoke or understood English well – the majority didn’t at all, and most of those who did speak or understand English had only a rudimentary grasp.  

That starting point for the country of Ghana was 57 years ago.  It’s a short time and I think a lot has happened with regard to Ghanaian English – not least, it has developed an identity of its own.  There is no doubt in my mind that the expansion of education in Ghana is the force which has led to the position where guide books can write that Ghanaians speak English – even if it perhaps isn’t quite true yet.  In wishing Ghanaians every success with the ongoing process of developing their country (which I think is still a rocky road ahead), I have every confidence that English will flourish here – and if I get the chance to come back in twenty years I’ll be fascinated to see how it has changed.

       

Education Part 4

 

This is my fourth consecutive blog on education and I realise that I’m running the risk of boring you – so I promise this will be the last one on education for a while.  This blog has been a while in the writing and I’ve struggled to get the balance right.  I’ve decided to stop tinkering and publish – but this version is possibly a bit on the harsh side, and maybe you should bear I mind that I might just be in a bit of a grumpy mood!

A few weeks ago, a VSO colleague asked Jane and me for some comments about education, so that she could include them in her blog (she takes blogging a bit more seriously than I do).  Of course we had to qualify our comments by pointing out that they are based on our work in just one District in the Upper East Region; and that we have only had the opportunity to visit a small number of the 115 schools in the District.  So it really is a very small sample.  We do also know that educational standards are lower in rural regions than in urban centres.  It is also possible that attitudes are more traditional and less progressive in rural areas and in places where the population is sparce – both of which apply to Zebilla.  Nevertheless, we do think that a lot of our experience is likely to be common at least to the more rural parts of the country.  This is what we sent her:

“Question 1 – What’s wrong with education in Ghana?

Ghana offers universal, free basic education to all its citizens and deserves huge praise for this – it is more than many countries manage.  (Basic education means up to BECE – very roughly the equivalent of GCSE.)  Nevertheless, the short answer to this question is “almost everything”.

·        Many children do not even go to school.

o   Paul estimates that in Bawku West District 20% of all children do not attend school at all.

o   Fewer than 50% of children take the BECE exam, so leave school with no recognised qualification.

o   Only 20 - 25% attend Senior High School.

o   A good-news story is that in kindergarten and primary school, roughly 50% of pupils are girls.  However, there is less gender equality in the higher classes – less than 45% of the pupils who take BECE are girls, and only 40% of pupils at Senior High School are girls.

·        The schools are over-crowded and poorly equipped. 

o   Many kindergarten and primary classes have 50 – 70 children (and some have over 100) in classrooms which would be comfortable for 40. 

o   In some schools, classes take place under trees (to give some protection from the powerful sun) because there are not enough classrooms.

o   About a third of the schools in our district have inadequate toilet facilities.  Most have no running water (water is brought in buckets from local boreholes), and no electricity.

o   Most classrooms only have a blackboard – compared to a UK classroom with its bright displays, projector, smartboard etc, here there is no high-tech equipment at all, there are no pictures on the walls, no books, no toys for the youngest pupils or learning materials beyond, sometimes (and certainly not universally) the most basic (eg stones or bottle tops for counting).

o   Almost all schools are short of textbooks.  Recently government has provided more English, maths, science and ICT textbooks but these have not been enough even for 1 between 2 in most schools, and considerably less than this in some.

o   Apart from textbooks, there are almost no other books at all anywhere in schools.

o   Recently the government has been able to provide laptops for some (but not all) Junior High Schools – typically there will be one computer for 4 to 5 pupils, with software such as Word 2003, Excel 2003.

·        There are not enough teachers.

o   Another reason why classes are so over-crowded is that there are not enough teachers.

o   Fewer than half the teachers in Bawku West District are fully trained; most of the others are only qualified to the equivalent of A-level.

o   Teaching is not well paid – many teachers also have other work, which means that even if they are enthusiastic and committed they have to devote some of their energy to another job.

o   Teachers have very few resources – in the main they don’t have access to the internet to find up-to-date teaching materials and ideas for stimulating lessons, and they have to improvise equipment (for example making measuring cylinders out of old plastic bottles in science).

o   Teachers are not well respected in the community and even though some teachers are enthusiastic and committed, there is a serious lack of professionalism overall.

·        There is very limited provision for children with disabilities.

o   There are special schools for deaf and blind children but these are often a long way from where the children live, so they have to board away from their families with no chance of a trip home or a visit from their parents.  Many deaf and blind children don’t go to school at all.

o   There are a few day schools for children with other disabilities, but most of the children who would benefit from these live too far away to be able to attend.

o   Although it is Ghana’s policy to include children with “mild to moderate disabilities” in mainstream schools, in practice the schools are not equipped to cope with them and the teachers are not adequately trained (and couldn’t give them the attention they need in such large classes).  There are no classroom assistants to help.

Question 2 – What does this have to do with poverty?

·        The lack of school buildings, textbooks, and learning materials clearly reflects Ghana’s relative lack of money as a nation.

·        Likewise the low rate of pay for teachers, the shortage of teachers, the lack of infrastructure for children with disabilities etc.

·        Even though education is “free”, families still have to provide quite a lot for their children at school (uniform, exercise books, pens etc) and whilst the sums involved are small by UK standards, they are often more than families here can afford.  Most families are short of money most of the time.

·        But on top of that, Ghana’s population is largely uneducated and there isn’t a history or tradition of valuing education, or seeing schooling as one of the highest priorities for a family’s children.  This is more a case of “educational poverty” than simply being short of money.

·        At the moment, Ghana’s economy is not strong enough for people to see a good education leading through to a well-paid job.

Question 3 – What do you think the solutions are?

There are no quick or easy solutions to these problems.  Obviously, Ghana needs a lot more money to be able to run a better education system, and so it needs to grow its economy to the point where it can afford this.  Ghana also needs to learn from other countries, both by receiving help from volunteers like us, and also by sending its own teachers to see what education is like in more developed countries.  We know of some teachers and head teachers who have been to the UK on educational visits, and some of them come back inspired to do things differently and can make real improvements in their schools.  Of course, it’s a huge challenge to improve the education system of a whole nation – but every little helps.  Ghana is a very positive country with what seems to be a soundly-based democracy, so there is hope that they can sustain their country as the long, slow process of development continues.  Without ongoing development support from countries like the UK, progress will be much more uncertain and inevitably slower.

Question 4 – How do the projects we are working on help?

Jane’s work is specifically about children with special needs – disabilities of various types.  Ghana has good policies in this area but the implementation is almost non-existent and awareness of the policies is low.  Many families with a disabled child are ashamed and stigmatized, and they keep the child out of the public view.  Any work that raises awareness, overcomes stigma, and helps individual children is obviously valuable and can be absolutely life-transforming for a small number – but it is only a drop in an ocean.  The volunteer who was working here last year probably achieved that sort of change for two or three children.  If I can do the same I will be very proud, but it won’t be enough.

Paul’s work is about the organization and management of education.  Ultimately this is about ensuring that as much as possible is achieved with the resources available, and that there are robust and realistic plans for improvement in the future.  There is plenty to achieve in this area and as a volunteer I can see that there is scope for me to help the Ghana Education Service provide a better education for thousands of children just in this District.  At times the task does seem daunting – but there is lots of scope to make a real and lasting difference.”

That’s the end of our reply.  It will be interesting to see if any of it eventually appears in the ether.

Over the past month some work I have been doing on the age of school pupils has been slowly maturing.  It isn’t complete yet but the emerging trends are now clear I think, and it isn’t exactly what I was expecting.  The main points are:

·        It seems that between 80% and 90% of all children aged 3 – 19 are enrolled in “basic school”.  I was expecting a figure in the range 50% - 60%, so this is quite a surprise; the main reason for this is that I had misunderstood the child population figures for Bawku West District.  “Basic school”, you will recall, is that part of Ghana’s education which is “universal, compulsory and free”.  It is aimed at children aged 4 – 14, and culminates in the BECE exam (which is a bit like GCSE and is taken at the end of the third year in Junior High School, in theory at age 14);

·        There is no under-representation of girls in the system except that:

o   Only 45% of the pupils in JHS3 (the pupils who sit the BECE exam) are girls; and

o   There are fewer girls than boys aged 17, 18 and 19 in basic school (and there are also fewer girls than boys in Senior High School, which is intended for pupils aged 15 to 17 – approximately 40% of SHS pupils are girls);

·        Most of the children entering education in KG1 (over 80%) are the “correct” age – 4 or 5.  But in the subsequent Primary School classes the proportion of pupils who are the correct age gets smaller and smaller – 50% in Primary 3 (age 8 – 9 in theory) and 30% in Primary 6 (age 11 – 12 in theory);

·        At age 12 – 13, when in theory pupils should have entered Junior High School, fewer than 5% have actually done so, and a few percent are still in Kindergarten!;

·        There are substantial numbers of pupils aged 15 – 19 (and older) still in Primary School, and very large proportions of pupils aged over 14 still in Junior High School.

I’m still making up my mind what I think of this.  On the one hand, I am very encouraged to find a larger proportion of children attending school than I previously thought.  Eighty to ninety percent enrolment still means that one or two children in every ten are missing out on education, but to be honest I think any developing country would be very proud of those figures.

On the other hand, it’s clear that a lot of young people are only receiving a very rudimentary education if they never progress beyond Primary School.  Also, I suspect that pupils of genuine Primary School age suffer a significant educational detriment as a result of there being large numbers of much older children in their classes; to say nothing of gaining quite the wrong expectations about the education they should be receiving when they are 15 – 19.

I still haven’t got to the bottom of why there are so many pupils who are “too old” for their class.  If they enter school at the right age, why don’t they progress?  It is part of the system here that a pupil only progresses to the next class if he/she has reached an adequate standard in the previous class.  However the data I have seen on this suggests that only small numbers of pupils repeat a year.

I do also need to say a couple of words of caution about the data. 

The honest truth is that very few people in Ghana know their actual date of birth.  Birthdays are not celebrated.  There doesn’t seem to be a meaningful process for registering births, so there is a lack of official records, and date of birth doesn’t seem to be regarded as an important piece of information.  Consequently, when parents are asked for their child’s date of birth (which, will either be when they come to register their child for a Health Insurance Card, or when they first enrol at school), they and the official who needs the information will “agree” on a realistic-seeming date.  That will then become the child’s official date of birth and birthday.  There does seem to be a need for consistency in official dates of birth, and problems arise when a person discovers that their parents “agreed” one date for school enrolment and a different one for the health insurance card.   First note of caution: the dates of birth quoted might be wrong.

I’m also not entirely convinced that all head teachers, who are the source of my data, have deployed the desirable degree of thoroughness in supplying it.  Some have recorded that the year of birth (which is what I asked for) is unknown in up to a third of cases; others seem to know them all.  Some appear to have worked out that all the children in, say, P1, should have been born in 2007 or 2008 and recorded them all in those years; others report that they have P1 children born in every year between 2000 and 2010.  It’s possible that all these data are totally accurate, but they seem strangely inconsistent to me and I’m considering trying to get a look at some registers to check up on the more unlikely-looking ones!  Second note of caution: I might be working with a high proportion of garbage data.

I’ll post more information about this if anything meaningful emerges during the rest of my placement.  I’m hoping to encourage the Ghana Education Service to form an opinion about whether they are happy with the current situation, and if not, what they think they can do about it.  It’s an interesting question whether they are aware of it already, and the answer is “yes and no”.  When I report to senior GES people that I have discovered there are lots of pupils in Primary School who are way too old to be there, they reply that of course they know that already and they launch straight into explanations of why it happens and factors that justify it (or make it inevitable).  But they don’t have a quantified understanding of the phenomenon and it seems to be a surprise that the proportions of over-age pupils are as high as my figures indicate, or that the numbers of really old pupils (19+) who are still in Primary School really are that big.

There are two things that we didn’t write in our reply, and which aren’t easy to put into words without sounding seriously negative and politically incorrect.

The first is that the whole set of culture and attitudes surrounding children just isn’t conducive to a decent, successful education system.  The teachers are part of Ghana’s culture and seem to have these cultural attitudes.  To be brutally honest, as long as that continues, education is going to be poor.  The second is that compared to the UK, many teachers here almost totally lack what we would regard as professionalism.

Expanding on the first of these points, I’d say that it would be easy for a casual observer to think that Ghanaian children enjoy the idyllic childhood which people of my age perhaps think we used to have in the UK and have lost.  Ghana is a safe place for children.  They get up in the morning and they are free to be children all day until they go to bed.  There is no molly-coddling of any sort, the weather is splendid virtually all the time, there is nearly no traffic, nobody seems to have heard of or worry about paedophiles, there are no gun or machete-wielding madmen who massacre children and teachers in school, there’s no TV or computer games to stop them from playing out (though TV is arriving…).  Parents don’t generally both work, so there is no system of farming children out to child-minders; and working parents generally haven’t commuted more than a mile or so to their place of work, so they can be got hold of quickly if needed (though quite a lot of parents work a long way away and are absent during the week or sometimes for longer).  And in the community, the extended family system and the fact that there is very little population mobility means that wherever a child is, even one who can barely toddle, there will be an adult who knows roughly who they are and where they belong.  What could be more wholesome?

All the above is true.  But the other side of the coin is that this is a world where family planning isn’t much more than a theoretical concept (and one that many people haven’t heard of); where fathers take very little notice of their children and mothers don’t seem to have either the time or the inclination to nurture them; where there are more polygamous marriages than monogamous ones (which I think helps fuel Ghana’s rate of population increase at over 2.5%); where children are generally regarded positively in the sense of being a useful asset as a worker (and male children as someone to inherit the estate); where child labour is rife (absolutely huge numbers of children are engaged in economic activities of some sort, even if it is “only” selling at the market); where male offspring are valued more highly than female; where, apparently, many mothers don’t cook on market days (every third day in Zebilla) so the children go hungry that day; where laws about physical punishment are ignored by most people, where nobody would dream of reporting someone to the police for mercilessly beating their offspring (or pupil), and where the police don’t do anything either to enforce the law generally or in response to the non-existent complaints… and I could go on.   

In the cultural pecking order, children are at the bottom.  In certain circumstances they come below the family’s animals.  They should be seen and not heard, they must do what they are told or face a beating, they are required to “respect” adults to the extent that, for example, when we show up at school carrying any sort of bag there is a crowd of children offering to carry it for us (and the general rule is that one of them will be taken up on the offer).  It isn’t a country where I could say that children are loved, or respected, or nurtured, or particularly well cared-for.  From my own observations, they certainly aren’t seen as the family’s and the society’s most valuable treasures. 

This translates into a total lack of what a UK teacher would recognise as child-centred education.  At school, children are punished for their misdoings but not praised for their achievements.  They are expected to make the best of a standard “chalk and talk” style of teaching with no account taken of their individual learning style or learning needs.  It is difficult for them to tell their teacher that they don’t understand something, as it risks being taken either as an admission of stupidity (meaning that they are not worth another attempt at explanation) or as implied criticism of the teacher – which would display a serious lack of respect..  Nobody asks whether the children are happy at school, or like school, or would do better if school was different – these are thoughts that seem totally alien to the culture here.  Of course,  if they were asked, the children would say that they like school just the way it is – because to say anything different would be to imply criticism of their elders and betters and thus highly disrespectful.

Expanding on teacher professionalism, obviously there’s a bit of an overlap with what I have written above, but it goes further.  Many teachers consider themselves to be underpaid and under-valued.  Consequently they seem to work grudgingly.  They don’t seem to feel under any particular pressure to turn up at school on time or every day; when they have turned up, they don’t seem necessarily inclined to do any teaching; and if they do teach, they don’t seem to want to plan their lessons well or evaluate the outcome, or ask themselves whether they are doing a good enough job, how they could do better, how they could contribute to a better educational outcome for their pupils.  They see nothing wrong with carrying out other business activities during school hours, and if some personal matter comes up (the most usual being a family funeral – there are loads of these because families are so extended) then it automatically takes precedence over school.  The same malaise affects head teachers and not unreasonably, the teachers follow the head teachers’ lead (I have found a clear statistical correlation between attendance levels of teachers and the attendance rate or their head teacher).

Now, there are conscientious teachers and head teachers in Ghana and we have met some, and it is wrong to tar them all with this brush, or to paint them all the same shade of abysmal.  It is also fair to point out that the standard of teacher training in Ghana seems to be quite poor, with trainee teachers emerging from college with a pretty inadequate understanding of what the job should be all about.  And it is fair to accuse the Ghana Education Service, which is the body that is in charge of the delivery of education, in compliance with the policies set down by the Ministry of Education, of having no vision and no deep understanding of education. 

The GES is also guilty of treating teachers in a highly peremptory fashion.  Their record of paying teachers on time is not good (though, to be fair, this is perhaps more of a Government of Ghana problem than GES).  But another example is that, over the Easter holidays, the GES in our district redeployed some 75 teachers - almost 10% of all teachers – to different schools in response to a directive from Headquarters.  There was no forewarning or consultation, no explanation of why the moves were needed, no asking for volunteers, and not even individual communication with the teachers affected.  All that happened was that a list of teacher deployments was put on the notice-board outside the GES office, and teachers were expected to know miraculously that it was there and consult it.  Nobody in the management here sees anything wrong with that – but obviously to western eyes it’s far from satisfactory.  

Ghana also seems to suffer from not knowing what good education looks like, and thus having no meaningful yardstick against which to measure its own achievements.  It lacks awareness of its own shortcomings and it lacks the inclination to search for them in order to improve.

So there are reasons to explain why teaching here is not as good as it needs to be – unfortunately those excuses don’t make the teaching any better. 

In summary, Ghana’s children don’t experience any education during a lot of the time they spend at school; when they are being taught, it’s in an unimaginative way which, for example, emphasises rote learning of facts rather than the acquisition of problem-solving skills (though even then, it manages to neglect the facts that they should learn (times tables and number bonds to 10 to quote a couple of obvious ones)); and there is nothing in their experience of education which could be expected to fire them with enthusiasm or a desire to learn, or find out where their potential lies and how to fulfill it, or have confidence in their ability to achieve great things. 

Perhaps the last word, though, should be that even the poor education on offer in Ghana is much, much better than nothing.  Ghana is on the journey, and there are signs of progress, particularly in terms of enrolment levels and female participation in education.  The next generation will mainly have parents who went to school, which might make a big difference.  Ghana needs our ongoing encouragement and support as they continue along the road.