Today, I actually had my meeting with that professor who canceled the meeting on Monday. (Tuesday was a holiday, so he wasn’t in his office then.)
It’s hard to know how specifically I should talk about the things I do here and the people I talk to; especially since, when I talk to people like university professors, the readership could deduce exactly who they are—and they themselves may well find this blog and read it—I think I should stick to general terms about individual events.
My research topic is my own, though; it is a major reason I am in Rwanda, and my blog is about what I do with my time in Rwanda. Also, I think it’s interesting, so in my posts about it I will try to walk the line between overly revealing and unnecessarily vague.
Last year, I wrote a grant proposal for fieldwork to examine dialectal variation in Kinyarwanda, on the assumption that this had not been done. Indeed, in my proposal, I wrote that “little academic work has been done on Kinyarwanda. […] [S]tudies of its dialects and history are, to my knowledge, absent.”
Now, this was not an unfounded claim: after discussing dialects of Kinyarwanda with my teacher in class, I scoured the Harvard library—the largest academic library in the world—and the Internet for information about these dialects, and found only passing references. I assumed that this was another case of an African language being ignored by the academic community, and I determined that I would try to ameliorate that problem.
However, after arriving and talking to a linguist or two in the process of getting my research permit, I learned that there was, in fact, a large body of research on Kinyarwanda dialectology, and Kinyarwanda linguistics in general. A scholarly article that I have since found opens by saying that “Ikinyarwanda … is certainly one of the most richly documented Bantu languages”!¹
I had not been able to find any of this research, though, because almost none of it is available outside of Rwanda! These journal articles and dissertations are stored in the Archive Nationale and in academic libraries at various universities in Kigali, Butare and elsewhere, but have completely gone under the radar of the international linguistic establishment.
What this meant, as I understood it then, was that the project I had proposed would not be very useful, as it would be rehashing previous work. Additionally, by the time my research permit came through, I only had two weeks to do my fieldwork (my first fieldwork ever, by the way). Under different circumstances, I probably would have abandoned the project and changed my focus, but I knew that I was required by the Ministry of Education—which had granted me the research permit—to submit a report on what I did.
So I bumbled my way through six interviews (though I should have gotten a lot more, even in the short time I had). Then I went home, and kind of forgot about the report. I wrote it shortly after returning to Rwanda, and sent it to the organization supervising my research.
The meeting I had this morning was to talk about the report, and also to ask some questions I had. Without going into much detail, I think Rwandan academics—and perhaps African academics in general—get quite understandably worked up about foreigners who come into their countries without adequate understanding of the language or culture, do some research with no supervision to make sure it is valid, and then publish it back home to obtain prestigious degrees and appointments, while the actually high-quality work is done by locals who go largely unrecognized.
I think I made clear that I had only even written that report because I was required to, and would never dream of trying to publish it; nevertheless, it bore many of the hallmarks of that type of project: shaky, questionable conclusions; inadequate and misdirected fieldwork that rehashed existing scholarship.
The conclusion we came to was that I should, before trying to do any other independent research, take some time to read the scholarship that exists. This was convenient, because it happened to line up exactly with what I had wanted to do anyway! My personal angle is a bit different: to learn about dialectal variation as a way of reconstructing the history of the language; functionally it is the same, though, as in I’ll be reading the same sorts of things that I would if I were interested in the dialects for their own sake.
So I got an idea of where this research was located and accessible, and the names of a couple of professors who could help me track it down. I felt like that was a good outcome.
The next day, I decided to try to start working: I had noticed that my time in Rwanda was already half over, and yet the project that I came here to do was only just getting underway! There was some question about whether I would be able to get into the Archive Nationale without a research permit—mine was at home, and about to expire—so I didn’t go there just yet. I did, however, think of a place that probably wouldn’t turn me away.
I visited the Kigali public library last year; this is what I wrote on the blog:
Much more inviting was the recently opened National Library of Rwanda. It was only about two blocks away, so I went over and looked in. It is a very nice building, all shiny and glassy and modern, and it looks like a library. The shelves were kind of spare: most of its books, I think, come as donations, and in general they were a little bit old. Still and all, it’s pretty cool that Rwanda even has a public library, right? People were using it, too: many were using the free Wi-Fi, and some were reading. I hope it will continue to grow.Those observations largely still hold. I think the shelves are quite a bit fuller than they were a year ago, though they are still populated in a large part by older books that are often bordering on irrelevant. (The section with books about computers, for example, doesn’t have much that is less than a decade old.) I noticed, walking around, a few places with a lot of shiny new books, though; for example, someone must have donated about 200 thesauruses. (I assume they were donated, because why would a library ever need 200 thesauruses?)
I took a guess, though, that regardless of the quality of its general collections, the library might have really interesting material about Rwanda in particular. And I was right! It took awhile to find, but there were a solid three aisles worth of Rwandan material. Much of it was about the Genocide, and thus usually foreign, but a lot was locally published work that you probably can’t find many other places.
Included in the local publications were Rwandan academic journals, and theses and dissertations that numbered in the hundreds. Most of these were not professionally published—i.e. either typewritten or printed from Microsoft Word, and then informally bound. Most of these did not have labels on their spines.
This made navigating the collection very difficult, but at the same time just great fun. I could pull out a book and have no idea what it was until I opened it, and then having invested that much effort already I would read a little, learn something interesting, then put it back and move on.
I could have done that for hours, and I did do it for a couple of hours, though I ultimately left because the sun had set. In my searching, I found a number of interesting things, a couple of which were actually useful. The library had an incomplete collection of issues of Études Rwandaises, the research journal of the former National University of Rwanda, and there were a few language-related articles that aligned with what I was interested in.
I also found an awe-inspiring, almost 3,000-page-long bilingual Kinyarwanda-French dictionary. It occurred to me that this was a reference that I could really use: not only was it comprehensive, and with reliable marking of tones (unlike most other dictionaries I have found), it contained French translations of everything. Now, Kinyarwanda-English would have been ideal, but translating French to English is no difficult task, and this bridges the gap better than anything else I have found.
With some searching, I found that it is actually available for purchase online through the co-publisher, the Belgian Royal Museum for Central Africa—and, moreover, there is a C.D. version that makes 2,895 pages substantially lighter! The price is steep (€75, plus shipping from Belgium), but I do have a research grant, and this seemed like a good use of some of that money.
See, this is why libraries are great. Even apart from having what you need for free when you need it, you can just browse around and find awesome things. And even this library, still in its infancy and still largely donor-supported, has the ability to do that. Kigali is lucky to have it!
¹ Nkusi Laurent, “Un Problème de Glossonymie : Les Appellations du Kinyarwanda.” Études Rwandaises 1.2 (1987), p. 153–168.
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