I think I finally understood a couple of Lenny Henry’s characters after talking to Kole Ade-Odutola about the Yoruba language. Kole is from Nigeria, currently living in the US and teaching Yoruba in Florida. I hadn’t realised that it was a requirement of all university students in America that they should spend some time learning a foreign language. This is a fairly recent requirement to enable the US to more rapidly understand what is going on around the world. So as Kole said, it is a security issue rather than or in additon to a cultural education issue. Any foreign language will do. So Kole teaches Yoruba and I wondered why students chose that language over some of the other more common options. One common reason is apparantly the rumour that it is an easy language to learn, mainly because word stems don’t alter so much as they do, for example, in English. But then there are the tones. Yoruba is a tonal language and Kole gave me an example of ogun which has three different meanings depending on the way it is said. I realised after recording our conversation that it would be easy to see this on Audacity and sure enough the three different ways of saying ogun look completely different in Audacity. You can find out more about the Yoruba language by going to http://www.abeokuta.org/
Kole is a polymath and I’m hoping that I can explore more of his interests including environmental activism in future shows. The show also includes African Footprint, a group from Ghana which toured Denmark in the summer. They use African drumming and dancing as a way of including disabled people in society.
The current Absolutely Intercultural show also includes further extracts from my conversation with Minhaaj ur Rehman who is from Pakistan and who has recently arrived in Sweden to do an MBA. In chatting about his first impressions he mentioned that he particularly noticed environmental awareness in Sweden such as the tin and bottle recycling systems and the fact that many people, ‘even professors’, use bikes instead of cars. But on the other hand Minhaaj feels that Swedish conversations lack passion and that Westerners generally may think that people in his country don’t get on with each other judging by the loud tone of voice. What a difference a tone makes!