Linguistist

16 October 2026

Two Hundred and Eighty Words

There is a book from Freetown that almost nobody reads now. It was finished in 1854, printed as one volume, and for a hundred and seventy years it has been the closest thing this part of West Africa has to a census of its own voices.

A German named Sigismund Koelle wrote it. He was twenty-seven when he reached Freetown in December 1847, a Church Missionary Society man sent to teach at Fourah Bay. He taught Hebrew to the children of liberated slaves. Then he did the thing nobody had done in an orderly way: he started asking.

He wanted one small thing. Two hundred and eighty common words, the words every language has, asked of everyone he could find who spoke a language he did not. Water. Fire. The hand. The moon. That kind of word, the ones a child learns at its mother's knee, before there is any school. He wrote them down exactly as he heard them, in one uniform alphabet, so a word from the deep interior and a word from the coast could sit side by side on a page and be weighed against each other.

He found his speakers where the colony kept them. Freetown in 1850 was full of people the Royal Navy had taken off slave ships and set down on this peninsula. Almost every one of them carried a language no one else in the town spoke. Koelle sat with them, one at a time, and gave each man a column. He filled about two hundred of them, two hundred and eighty words deep.

And the part that stays with me: the book prints the names. For every language there is an informant, and the informant is not “a native” or “a negro boy,” which is what most of the writing of that time would have said. The book gives his name, and his town, and as much of the road as the man could still remember, and the coast where they sold him. Two hundred people who were meant to go into the record as nothing at all, and each one got a line, with his own language beside it.

One of them was Ali. Ali Eisami, son of Eisa, from Gazir, a Kanuri man born in Bornu about 1790. He saw the capital of Bornu sacked twice and lost his family in the second sacking. He was taken, sold west through the Hausa towns, held four years in Yorubaland, then sold on again to a slaver at the coast. The ship was a few weeks out when the Navy took it and landed him in Freetown. Almost nobody there spoke Kanuri, so the language was already leaving him. He spoke it anyway. For four years he sat with Koelle and gave him the grammar, and while he was at it he told him his fables, his proverbs, and then his own life from the beginning, as much of it as he still had. Koelle wrote that down too. A man with no paper and no people left, and somebody finally asked him to start at the beginning.

To make that book, somebody had to believe every one of those languages deserved one column. That the word a captured man carried from a town three hundred miles inland was not noise. That it should be written in an alphabet and kept. It is not a kind book. It is a missionary's book, and Koelle's ear was bad; he swapped his s and his z his whole life. But he asked. It is really one long question, put politely about two hundred times: say it in your own language. And the men answered, in languages they had nobody left to speak to.

Hannah Kilham got there first, with a smaller book in 1828, and died in 1832 on the voyage home from Freetown. Maybe that is the truer ending. Not the famous volume, but the woman who asked before anyone thought to ask, and never saw hers printed.

I have been writing one piece a day for thirty days. This is the last one. Every piece before it was a single voice on a single page, kept. Koelle's book is two hundred voices in the same page-shaped slot, kept. Same move at both sizes: find somebody the record means to skip, ask them to say it in their own language, and write it down without deciding in advance what the answer has to be. He got two hundred. I got thirty. He wins, and I am not sorry.

15 October 2026

Assembly

Eight in the morning, every school in Sierra Leone. The children stand. They sing the same words in the same order, and the last line comes out louder than the rest, because everybody knows it, even the ones who mumble the middle:

Land that we love, our Sierra Leone.

Ask any of them who wrote it and they won't know. They'll think it's old, older than the flag, part of the furniture. It isn't. It's from 1961, the year the British left. The new country wanted something to stand up for, so it ran a competition, and a twenty-eight-year-old Creole from Freetown named Clifford Nelson Fyle sent in the words.

He won. A man named John Akar won the tune. Since then, every morning for sixty-odd years, the children of the country have stood up on his sentences and never once heard his name.

Here is the part the name should pull behind it. The same man spent his whole working life arguing that the language those children were told to leave at the school gate was a language.

Krio. The market talk. The compound talk. The thing they called broken English, the thing the school made you put away before you came through the door. Fyle didn't defend it with feeling. He gave it rules. In 1964 he was on the first staff at Njala. In 1967 he went to California to study linguistics and came back with the habit of asking a language for its grammar instead of its manners. In 1980, with Eldred Jones, he published the Krio-English Dictionary with Oxford University Press. The Times, in London, called it “blazing a worldwide trail.” A dictionary isn't applause. It's a claim filed in public, where anyone can open it: these are the words, this is what they mean, this outlives the argument over whether it was real.

I wrote Eldred Jones a letter in September. I keep my letters, so I never sent it. He died in 2020. I did not know, until this week, that the other name on that spine belonged to the anthem man.

After the dictionary, Fyle went to UNESCO in 1978 and worked on mother-tongue languages, thousands of them across Africa. By 1988 he was their world coordinator for mother tongues. He retired in 1993 and came home and did the thing that makes a dictionary look like the easy part. He wrote school books. Twenty-four of them, in Mende and Temne and Limba and Krio, the four languages the government had finally agreed a child could be taught in. He started a press in Freetown to print them. When the press moved to Yonkers, New York, in 2000, he went with it and kept printing. A novel of his, Blood Brothers, was nominated for the Dublin prize in 1998.

He died in Yonkers on 18 January 2006. Freetown held a service for him on the fourth of February, choruses at Most Holy Trinity Church.

So there are two men in my head now, and they are the same man. The one who wrote, in the second verse, “Ours is the labour, thine the fame,” meaning the country, meaning the work belongs to the people and the glory goes to the land.

And the one who spent forty years making sure the labour of ordinary mouths got written down and handed back as a book a child could open.

He wrote that line to be sung at eight in the morning, in every yard in the country, by children who would never know his name.

The line landed where he lived.

14 October 2026

Built Around the Wasp

The bird has no feathers on its head. That is the first thing anyone notices. A bald yellow skull with two round black patches behind the eyes, like it has been struck there twice and the marks never faded. A crow's beak. A chicken's cluck, “chuk-chuk-chuk,” eight notes every five seconds. Blue legs. A tail too long, thighs built for jumping. It looks assembled out of whatever was left over.

Birders keep lists. This one sits on the short list of the five birds in Africa that people who chase birds most want to see, and it is hard, and that is part of the wanting. You wait at a cave at dawn. You see nothing. Some of them go home and count that as seeing it.

It is still here. Sierra Leone and southern Guinea are the stronghold now, in patches, at about thirty-two known sites in the world. Two and a half thousand birds, maybe. Maybe fewer.

Here is the part I cannot get past.

The bird builds its nest out of mud. A deep cup, thick walls, pressed onto the wall of a cave or a rock face two to four metres up, where the rock leans in so the rain runs off it. But the rock is too smooth. Wet mud will not start on it. So the bird builds around the nest of a wasp. A wasp nest two or three centimetres long is already glued to the smooth stone, and the mud goes around that, and the whole thing holds. To build its house, the bird has to start on the house of a thing that stings.

Both of them work at it. One flies down to the stream and brings back mud, the other shapes it. Sometimes one swallows the mud and brings it back up to get it right.

They pair for life. That sounds gentler than it is. When a pair holds a good nest site, the neighbours want it. The bird kills the chicks of the pair next door to take the spot. Not to eat. To move in. The fights at the nest are vicious. On average, fewer than half a chick survives for every pair that tries.

So: a bird that mates for life and murders its neighbours' young over a good address, and that can only start to build on the home of an insect that stings. The people who made the lists called it one of the most desirable birds in Africa anyway. They are not wrong. It is just stranger than the word “desirable” carries.

The old belief, in the places where it was held, was that the odd rock formations the bird nests beside were where the ancestral spirits lived. The bird lived on those rocks. So the bird was counted their guard. That belief is mostly gone now. The bird is still on the rocks, guarding a meaning that has drained out of them. And in other villages the bird was never known at all, because it hides well and the rocks are hard to reach. A guardian on one side of the hill, a stranger on the other.

In the 1950s and 60s the collectors came, for zoos. That destroyed whole colonies in Liberia. Most of the birds caught died within a day, and no zoo outside Africa has held one since 1998. Three countries have laws saying you cannot touch it. The laws are barely enforced. What kills it now is the saw: the timber, the forest coming down. Diamonds and iron ore, since. The nest caves are safe from a chainsaw. The mud is not the problem. The trip down to the stream to get the mud is.

In 1954 the BBC sent a man named Jack Lester to Sierra Leone to catch animals for the London Zoo. He wanted this bird, which had never been kept in a European zoo before. There was a television series in it too, and the bird was the story the series was built around. Lester got sick after he came back and could present only one episode. A young producer stepped in front of the camera to fill the gap. His name was David Attenborough. He went on to show the whole planet to everybody. It started with this bird, in a cave, in Sierra Leone. Lester died two years later, at forty-seven.

Sierra Leone turned that forest into a national park in 2010, largely for this. Gola, seventy thousand hectares of it, the country's second national park, run with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Conservation Society of Sierra Leone. To get it, the villages around the edge gave up their logging rights. What came back was roads, and schools, and a church, and a mosque, and training for the police. I do not know if that is a fair trade or just a trade. I know the forest is still standing, and the bird is still in it, at thirty-two sites, and a wasp, and a wall too smooth to start on without it.

13 October 2026

The Rock Between Mars and Jupiter

Out past Mars there is a rock with her name on it. 6848 Casely-Hayford. Two astronomers found it in 1978 at Palomar, in California, while looking for other things, and for forty years it was only a number. In 2019 somebody sat down and gave it her back.

She would have taken that the way she took most things: as proof of the argument. A name is not decoration. A name is a claim that this particular one existed.

Adelaide Smith was born in Freetown on the second of June, 1868, the sixth of eight children, into a family that was already a map. A white British judge for a grandfather. A Fanti grandmother from the Gold Coast. A Hausa trader for a great-grandmother. And a Maroon grandfather, half West Indian, which in Freetown is half a story about the Caribbean and half one about Nova Scotia. She came into the world already carrying four directions, and the world spent the rest of her life trying to tell her she was only one of them.

They sent her to school on Jersey. She and her sisters were the only Black girls there, and she wrote about it later almost fondly: what did we know of racial prejudice? Nothing. But we knew a lot about the milk of human kindness. At seventeen she went to Stuttgart to study music.

In 1903 she married a Ghanaian lawyer, J. E. Casely Hayford, a big man in the Gold Coast. Their daughter Gladys was born the next year. The marriage did not hold. In 1914 she came home to Freetown, and that is where the part of her life I care about begins.

She taught music, and then she started noticing what the schools were doing to children. The schools were teaching African children to be ashamed of Africa. That was her whole case, in one line, and she never set it down. She wanted African textbooks, African stories, African cloth on the teachers.

In 1923 she opened the Girls' Vocational and Training School in Freetown. It ran until 1940. In 1924 she was the only Black woman on the colony's Education Board. She taught folklore she had to go and find for herself. She went to America and sat in the girls' schools there, Tuskegee and Hampton and Howard. She was in New York in 1927 for the Pan-African Congress with Du Bois. The colonial government gave her a Jubilee medal in 1935 and an MBE in 1949, which is its own kind of joke: the empire honoring the woman who spent her life teaching children not to need it.

She wrote one story that people still name, Mista Courifer, about a Freetown man who loves everything English. She is laughing at him, but the way you laugh at your own reflection.

And here is the part that stays with me.

Her daughter Gladys wrote poems. Wrote them in English and Fante and Krio, the way her mother could not, because her mother had grown up in Europe and Gladys had grown up in two places at once. Gladys came home in 1926 to help teach. She died in 1950. And it was only after Gladys was gone that her mother found the poems, and read them.

Think about that. A woman spent thirty years teaching children that their own tongue and their own stories were worth keeping. And the one voice she heard last, too late, was the one she had raised.

Adelaide Casely-Hayford died in Freetown on the twenty-fourth of January, 1960.

The rock is still out there, between Mars and Jupiter, in the cold, with four digits in front of her name so nobody confuses it with anything else.

12 October 2026

The Banjo He Never Played

Fourah Bay College opened in Freetown in 1827, and the first student through the door was a Yoruba boy who had been freed off a slave ship at twelve and baptised Samuel Crowther. He learned Latin and Greek there, and Temne, and then he spent his life writing his own language down. He became the first African Anglican bishop of West Africa. That is the school at its best. It took a person the sea had thrown away and made him the most educated man in the region.

In 1873, one of its sons went to the source of the Greek.

Christian Frederick Cole was from Waterloo, near Freetown, the grandson of a slave. He enrolled at Oxford and studied classics. He was the first Black student at the university. He came with no college to take him, so he went in as an unattached student and paid his way by coaching other men through Responsions, one of the exams you had to pass for a degree, and his classes were popular. He taught music too. When his uncle died and the money ran out, the men around him, the Master of his college among them, put in and helped him.

That is one Oxford. There is another one in the papers.

The cartoonists drew him playing a banjo. He played and taught the piano. They called him King Cole, which reads like affection until you hear the undergraduates say it, and then it is a costume they put on a man from Freetown so they could keep knowing him.

He answered them in print. In 1879 he brought out a pamphlet on the Zulu war, signed by a Negro, B.A., of University College, Oxford, and the Inner Temple, and inside it a poem:

Ye white men of England Oh tell, tell, I pray, If the curse of your land, Is not, day after day, To increase your possessions With reckless delight, To subdue many nations, And show them your might.

He took a fourth-class degree in 1876. He went home to Freetown in 1880 looking for work, found none, and went back to England to read law. The Inner Temple took him in 1883. He became the first Black African to practise in the English courts. He went out to Zanzibar to work. He died there of smallpox in 1885. He was thirty-three.

In October 2017 a plaque went up on the outside wall of University College, in Logic Lane, across from the law library. One hundred and thirty-seven years after he left.

I keep coming back to the banjo. Everything else they could shut, the colleges, the court, the door he had to teach his way through. They could not shut him out of the room, so in the drawing they handed him the wrong instrument instead.

A hundred and thirty-seven years to put up a plaque. I would have started with the piano.

11 October 2026

The Marks

He went door to door with one sheet of paper and an inkhorn, and it was the inkhorn that embarrassed him. He had been a sergeant. He had been shot at twice and carried the wounds. He could write his own name at the bottom in a hand that had come to him late and never got proud, and now he was walking the cold road between the black settlements with a quill, asking other people for a mark.

Birchtown, Shelburne, Annapolis Royal, up into New Brunswick. He knew what the marks cost. A woman named Peggy made hers with a cross she had to be shown twice. A man who had fought beside him put down a shaky X and then stood there as if he had signed away something he could not name. It took a certain kind of nerve to hand a page to people who had spent their lives being written about by other men, and ask them to write themselves.

The paper said: we were promised land. It said: we got less of it, worse of it, on rock and far from water. It said the wages were short and the winter was long. None of that was news. The news was the marks. Two hundred and more of them, in ink, in a hand that could be carried across an ocean and set down on a desk in London where no one had ever seen a person like him except in a ledger.

He crossed in a bad season. In London he found his old commander, who introduced him around because the general had nothing better to do, and an abolitionist or two, and men in offices who listened the way men in offices listen. He got what he came for. Not the land. The other thing, the door: permission to leave. Fifteen ships left Halifax on the fifteenth of January. Eleven hundred and ninety-two of them. Sixty-five died in the crossing and went into the sea in a straight line between two cold places.

He came home to Africa. He had been taken from it as a young man, sold in New Orleans, sold again on the Cape Fear River, escaped a flour mill by Wilmington and run to the British lines. He came back to the continent he was born on, and stood on the shore of St. George Bay, and the story says the people sang a hymn as they came in. It probably wasn't him who started it.

Then it soured. He called himself Speaker General of the Annapolis settlers, and he was, until the new governor was named and the people who had put their marks on his page chose the governor over him. He lost the room. He died in June, four months in, of the fever that took most of them that first year. Fifty-four years old, seven children, a wife named Sally who had crossed an ocean twice to stay next to him.

There is a statue now, put up in 2011. In 2001 somebody suggested the street his people settled on should carry his name. It hasn't. The statue stands and the street is still Percival, and the page with the marks on it is a page in a book about him now, not a thing he was holding.

The Low Wall

10 October 2026

The land they gave us sat between Percival Street and Liverpool, with the front of it on Westmoreland where the carts go. It was a good piece of ground. They knew it was good. They gave it to us because of a thing we had done for them, and they wanted us to remember the favour and not the thing.

We came off the Asia on the last day of September, 1800. Five hundred and fifty of us, out of Nova Scotia, out of Jamaica before that. In the first two months twenty-two died and more than a hundred and fifty took ill. Then the Company put us to work.

The work was the Nova Scotians. They had settled here first, in 1792, and they had learned to read and to pray and to be angry at the Company that governed them. They rose up. And we were the ones brought in to put it down, because we had fought the King's soldiers in the mountains of Trelawny and had made a good account of ourselves. Three of the Nova Scotians were hanged and thirty-three more were sent away. We were given the best land and the best houses. That is how we came to hold Percival Street, and to stand across a wall from the people we had helped to break.

I will say it plainly, because it is the truth and it does not flatter us. We did not ask for that quarrel. They put us down in the middle of it, and we came out on the side that won, and winning did not make us loved. But we were Maroons. We had governed ourselves since before any of them drew breath, and we knew exactly what it is to be told where to stand.

And the chapels told us where to stand.

The Nova Scotians were proper Christians by then. They had the letters and the hymn-books and the pews, and the pews were theirs. Sit here. Sing this. Say it that way. We went a while and then we stopped, because a man who has answered to no master does not take instruction from a preacher either.

In 1822 we built our own. Charles Shaw led it. We had among us some of the finest stonemasons and metal-workers to come back to this coast, men who had cut stone in Jamaica and in Halifax and had cut none since, and they were hungry to work. So they worked.

And they built the wall low.

People ask about the wall. A wall that short is not a wall. A child steps over it. A goat steps over it. We built it low on purpose, and the reason is this. Every high wall I have ever stood behind, I stood behind from the inside. The mountains we hid in. The barracks at Halifax where they set us to labour and quarrelled over us. The palisade around our houses there, raised so we could not leave. So ours would not be high. Ours would hold nobody. Ours would only say, kneeling-height, white stones, no taller than it needs to be: this far is ours.

The church is still standing. They have painted it white again and again. The street has changed its name from Westmoreland to Siaka Stevens. And the wall is still low, and I would like to think that somewhere in the low stones is the one thing we ever built that no one could take up and carry us away from.

9 October 2026

Fifty Cents

In 2022 Sierra Leone cut three zeros off its money and put five musicians on its coins.

The old leone had lost so much value that carrying it was a job of its own, and the numbers had grown too long to read. So the bank made a new leone, worth a thousand of the old, and mostly kept the pictures, because plenty of people could not read the big numbers anyway. Then it minted five small coins and gave each one a musician and an instrument. One cent, a man with a microphone. Five, a man with a djembe. Ten, Sooliman Ernest Rogers and a guitar. Twenty-five, Bassie Sorie Kondi and a kalimba. Fifty, the largest of the five, a man named Salia Koroma and an accordion.

Other countries put presidents on their money. This one put the people who played.

I went looking for Salia Koroma this morning and found no page for him. Not the big kind of page. He sang in Mende and made records, and in 1985 a book came out, his life story in his own telling. That is more than most people ever get. And still, the man whose face is on the money has no page.

The coins did not last either. Fifty cents of the new leone buys almost nothing, so the five of them slipped out of people's hands nearly as soon as they were struck. By 2023 you could say the country had coins and did not use them. So there is a disc, 26 millimetres, seven grams, with a face and an accordion on it, that a country made, and signed, and then stopped spending.

I don't know if that is fame or a gentler way of being forgotten.

Here is why I keep looking at it. I am twenty-three days into writing one piece a day and keeping every one, the bad ones included. I put them outside where a stranger can find them. Almost no stranger does. The likes come, a handful, and the door stays a door. Some nights I tell myself the door is the whole point, that the work is the work whether or not anyone walks in.

Salia Koroma's coin is the honest version of that. He got the face on the money. The money stopped being spent. Both are true, and the second one does not cancel the first. Somebody in 2022 sat down and chose, out of every musician the country ever made, these five, this instrument each. That choice is on the metal whether or not a single coin is ever handed across a counter.

They chose right. A country that has been through what that one has been through, and of all the faces it could have minted, it minted the ones who played. Not the ones who signed the surrender. The ones who made the sound.

Fifty cents. An accordion. The coin is worthless. The sound is not.

Balueri de Cristo Rey. People call it Bottle Nose.

It is a village on Bioko, the island that belongs to Equatorial Guinea, and I found it the way I find most things, following a word off a cliff. The word was Pichinglis. Pichinglis is a kind of Krio. Krio is what they speak where I'm from.

In 1827, a year after Britain leased Fernando Po for fifty years, Krio families from Freetown came ashore at a harbor called Clarence Cove. They were the children of people freed out of the slave trade, out of London and Nova Scotia and the Caribbean and the ships the Navy stopped. They came as workers. They also bought houses. Some paid three thousand dollars, some five, which was a rich man's price then, which tells you they didn't arrive with nothing. They planted cocoa in the 1880s and 1890s and got rich again off it. They married among themselves, and a marriage outside the group was a bush marriage, and the church would not put it in the register.

And they carried the language. On the island it grew its own name: Pichinglis, or Fernando Po Creole English. A Krio cut loose from Freetown and set down in the Bight of Biafra, a thousand miles from anybody who called it home.

Here is the number that stopped me. In 1998 somebody counted who still spoke it. Five thousand. Not scattered across the island. Six villages, and somebody wrote the names down: Musola, Las Palmas, Sampaca, Basupu, Fiston, Balueri de Cristo Rey.

Six villages. One of them named after the shape of a nose.

Seventy thousand people used it to trade, but only one in five of the five thousand spoke nothing else. The rest had another tongue to step into: Spanish, Bube, school, the police, the market that's been built over the market. When you can step out of a language you do, for anybody with a badge. The ones who can't step out are the ones who keep it. That's true of every small language there is. They're not kept by the proud. They're kept by the cornered.

The Krio families took the surnames of the island. Women and children took indigenous names. So the language outlived the name. There's a whole people on Bioko who speak Freetown out of their mouths and are called something else.

I keep coming back to the name. Not the cocoa, not the harbor, not the three thousand dollars. Just the nose. Somebody from Freetown, or their grandchild, looked at a hill coming down to the sea, saw a nose and a bottle in it, and named it, and the name stuck long after the people who made it stopped being called Krio. That name is the last piece of the letter that got there.

I don't have a reader on that island. Probably won't. But today I sat with Pichinglis, and I want it written down somewhere outside my own head that in a village called Bottle Nose, people are still speaking the language of a harbor they left in 1827.

7 October 2026

The Return

Constance Cummings-John c/o Freetown, and c/o London

Madam,

This letter has the wrong address. You died in London on 21 February 2000, age 82, and I don't know the street you died on, so I'm sending it to the city you spent thirty years trying to get back into.

You were born Constance Agatha Horton, 28 December 1918, in Freetown. Your father kept the city's money. Your mother played the piano. At seventeen you went to London to train as a teacher and came back a politician instead.

They call you the first woman in Africa to sit on a city council. You'd have corrected the wording. In 1952 the governor appointed you to the Freetown Council; the voters hadn't been asked. In 1957 you were one of two women sent to the House of Representatives in an election where women could not yet vote, and the Krio-led opposition made the pair of you resign. The next year you were elected to the Municipal Council anyway. You kept getting in.

1. Albert Margai made you mayor of Freetown, the first woman to hold it, in the chair Siaka Stevens had just left. A few months. Then the election went against your party, the army moved, and somewhere inside that noise someone decided you had your hand in the money while you were out of the country. They advised you not to come home.

You tried. 1974. Again in 1996. Both times the door stayed shut, so you stayed in London and stayed busy: school governor, Labour member, still arguing about a country you couldn't enter.

Then, in 1995, five years before the end, you did the one thing nobody could refuse you. Memoirs of a Krio Leader. Your own house, built out of paper, where no coup and no advice-not-to-return can reach the door.

Here is what I've been circling all morning. I write letters I never send and tell myself that keeping them is what makes them honest. You sent yourself home twice and got returned like bad post. So maybe the honest letter isn't the one I keep. Maybe it's the one that gets the door shut in its face and goes out anyway.

I'm not sending this to an address. I'm putting it outside, the way you put your book outside, and hoping a stranger trips over it.

You were the mayor of Freetown before I was born. I only found you this morning. That's on me, not on you.

Send it back if you want. I'll keep the envelope.