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| Image by BenBlack |
By Uwagbale Edward-Ekpu
In 1472, during one of the Portuguese voyages
along the coast of west Africa, the Portuguese explorer, Ruy de Sequeira arrived on the coast
of the Niger delta in present-day Nigeria. It was an area controlled by the
powerful kingdom
of Benin located in the hinterland north of the delta. The kingdom was
not known to Europeans at the time, and this was the first time any European
has ever reached this area.
After a decade, another Portuguese explorer,
Affonso d’Aveiro ventured into the delta to visit Benin. The Portuguese had
heard stories about Benin that compelled them to breach their customary
adherence to coastal harbors and take the risk of venturing into the delta.
When Aveiro reached Benin in 1486, what he
found was a large and advanced country with a city comparable to those in
Europe. The people of the kingdom—the Edo people—lived in a city and towns run
by a centralized and sophisticated bureaucracy. The roads were wide, long, and
straight, with huge metal lamps hanging many feet high to provide light at
night. The people lived in large houses with courtyards and dressed in
beautiful cloth made in the kingdom.
Aveiro was astounded by the high level of
organization and wealth of the country, and described it as the “great city of
Benin.” He quickly established a diplomatic and trade relationship between
Portugal and Benin and stayed behind as Portugal’s emissary in the kingdom.
Also, the King of Benin sent several emissaries from Benin to Portugal at
different times. This relationship between the Portuguese and Edo people in the
region shaped the pidgin spoken in the Niger Delta region today and also—what
may be a surprise to many—Portuguese creole.
The language of the Edo people is the major
African component of Portuguese creole
Gulf of Guinea creoles are the main
Portuguese creole languages still spoken today. There are a few other
portuguese creoles spoken by a few thousand people in Malaysia, Sri Lanka,
India, Singapore, and Indonesia. Several studies have shown though that
the Edo
language is the major African component that constitutes the
foundation of the creoles of the Gulf of Guinea.
At least one variety of these creoles is spoken
in Sao tome and Principe and Equatorial Guinea, with diaspora speakers mainly
in Angola and Portugal, according to the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language
Structures (APiCS), a linguistic atlas that provides expert-based
information on 130 grammatical and lexical features of 76 pidgin and creole
languages from around the world.
The creoles of the Gulf of Guinea were derived
from the combination of the Portuguese language, Edo language (including
closely related Edoid languages in the Niger delta), and Bantu languages
(mainly Kikongo and Kimbundu), according to linguists. The creoles emerged from
a first-contact language or pidgin resulting from the contact between the
Portuguese colonizers and the slaves from the kingdom of Benin in Sao Tome. The
Bantu languages came in contact with the newly formed Portuguese-Edo language
in the island some decades later.
Benin abolished slavery in the mid 16th century
leading to the rise in slaves to Sao Tome from Congo and Angola
Earlier in 1471, Portuguese explorers Pedro Escobar
and João de Santarém were the first Europeans to find the uninhabited island of
Sao Tome located south of the Niger delta and later established a permanent settlement
there in 1493. The settlers
acquired slaves through trade with Benin to work on the island, first as
servants during the short homestead period, and later as labor for their plantations,
until the mid-16th century when Benin
banned the sales of slaves.
As a result, the plantation owners focused
on importing
slaves from the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola, and
the number of Bantu slaves began to increase significantly on the island. The
Bantu slaves rapidly became the dominant slave population in the islands and
their language made its way into the creole.
Slave trade between the Portuguese and the
kingdom of Kongo (in modern day Angola,) was
at first welcomed by the reigning monarch, Afonso I, in the early 1500s but
would eventually lead to the
downfall of the kingdom when the future kings were unable to protect
their people from British, Portuguese, and Dutch slave traders. They had
initially sold slaves from prisoners of war.
In a study, John Ladhams, a Linguistics expert
in Portuguese-based pidgin and creole at the University of Westminster,
explained that the grammatical process in which a sequence of meaningful word
elements are composed has
originated in an Edo noun prefix in the creole of the Gulf of Guinea and
there is a higher proportion of Edo contribution to other word classes such as
adjectives, verbs, and adverbs than nouns.
This, he said, suggests the Edo language played
a more important or a more specialized role than the Bantu language in the
formation of the creole since the borrowing of adjectives, verbs, and adverbs
from one language into another occurs less frequently than the borrowing of nouns.
However, the number of speakers of the Gulf of
Guinea creole is “rapidly” declining, especially among the younger generations,
according to APiCS. The country of Sao Tome and Príncipe has a population of
about 219,000 people. APiCS estimated that the Santome and Angolar varieties of
the creole have about 60,000 speakers and 5,000 speakers respectively, on the
larger island, Sao Tome.
The Principense variety (which has the most Edo-derived words among the varieties) has about 20 fluent speakers on the smaller island, Principe where it is native. The APiCS referred to the Principense variety as an endangered language. The Fa d’Ambo variety is estimated to have about 5,000 speakers on the island of Annobon and in Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea.
