The name on the wall
Namu AI Lab
Every evening in Niamey, friends sit around a teapot and talk for hours. Often the one thing a fada writes is its name on a wall, and that name is almost never in a local language.
On a wall in the Aviation neighbourhood of Niamey, a group of young men painted their name: Jeunes Frères Inséparables. In Yantalla Bas, another group painted 50 Cent, after the rapper. The geographer Florence Boyer photographed both, and in her study of ten such groups, made in October and November 2012, she noticed that their names are very rarely in a local language. French is common, and English more common still. A group with a name usually leaves no other writing in the street. Beneath it, every evening, they talk.
The groups are called fadas. From half past seven, once night has fallen, they settle in small streets with no motor traffic, backs against the courtyard walls. The first to arrive lights the brazier, sets out the tray, the teapot and the glasses, and waits for the others. Chairs and benches come out of the nearest courtyard. Someone brings a low stool. Everyone sits in a circle or half circle around the tea, and passers-by walk around it.
The word itself has travelled. In Hausa a fada was a chief’s council, the advisers who spent the day in his courtyard, talking. It passed into Zarma, the lingua franca of Niamey, and people more often give it a French plural, fadas, than the Hausa one, fadodi. A member is a fadantché, a word the anthropologist Adeline Masquelier calls a unique formation. Her book Fada: Boredom and Belonging in Niger, drawing on the fadas of Dogondoutchi, describes young men who borrow crew from English, meuf from French and farotage, showing off, from Nouchi, a vernacular of Côte d’Ivoire, and who coin idioms of their own.
The tea has a keeper, the teaman, or shaiman, a name built on the Hausa word for tea. He measures tea and water, sets a small teapot on the coals and adds sugar once it boils, then pours it back and forth between the pot and a metal cup before it reaches the small glasses. A pot usually gives three rounds, drunk slowly over an hour or two. Some find the first too bitter and the third too weak for a man. The second, the fadantchés agree, is the one for talking. In a fada in Talladjé, Boyer heard the tea called a flag: “as long as there’s no tea, it’s not a fada.”
Masquelier says the best talking happens while the tea brews. A Le360 reporter found one fada in Niamey taking turns to argue about the Africa Cup of Nations. It can be football or money, or a heartbreak, a job that never came, a quarrel with your parents. Members of a fada in Karadjé told Boyer they would sooner confide in their fada friends than in their parents, or even their brothers and sisters. Wit counts. Whoever handles humour and irony well, Boyer writes, earns a special place as a speaker. And what is said around the tea mostly stays there.
The writing points somewhere else. Boyer reads the names as signs of a global urban culture, drawn above all from American rap, full of references that earlier generations do not share. A young man in Talladjé told her that at eleven or twelve he wrote Far West on the walls, because he loved cowboy films. People called him John Wayne. He gave it up later, he said, because writing on the neighbours’ walls is not right.
Asked how she had done her research, Masquelier said that in the end she did a lot of waiting and listening. That is roughly what a fada does every night.
In the morning the street is empty. The chairs are back in the courtyard and the stools have gone home. Once the young men leave, Masquelier says, nothing shows they were there, except the name of the fada on the wall.
So much of life here moves this way, by voice, slowly, around a teapot. What gets written goes to English and French, to a rapper and the Far West. The language the young men keep reinventing, the borrowed crew and the idioms they coin, lives in the voices around the tea and leaves no mark on the wall. That is the part we work on at Namu: technology that listens to the languages of the Sahel, learned from the voices of the people who speak them. A machine that could only read would come by in the morning, find the name on the wall, and know nothing of the evening.