The recent lecture delivered by Dr Konotey Ahulu at the Westbourne Caribbean centre and hosted by la association was challenging to say the least. The topic of his lecture was: THE Phenomenon of Mid-Pitch Arrest in African Tonal Languages. And his question was-Is the Genius of African American Musician Rooted in the wonder of African tonal language?

He began his speech by asking what these great musicians in the Diaspora have in common. Ray Charles, Steve Wonder, James Brown, Louis Armstrong , Count Basie , George Benson , Brook Benton , Church Berry , Fats Domino, Billy Eckstine, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Roberta Flack, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Al Green to mention a few and all the great American musicians.

His answer is that they all have at least 3 things in common beginning with the letters A, G, and M which he interprets as ‘AFRICA’, ‘GENIUS’, and ‘MUSIC’

The African Diaspora has been defined as the forced and brutal dislocation of millions of Africans into foreign lands during the African Slave Trade; it is the global community of Africans and their descendants living outside the African continent that make up what is known today as the African Diaspora.

It has been well documented that over the years, and regardless of more than enough evidence to the contrary, Eurocentric historians like Arnold Toynbee and Hugh Trevor-Roper , and racist anthropologists, sociologists and classicists from Tillinghast to Mary Lefkowitz , maintain that Africa has no history worth talking about until the arrival of Europeans, and that neither did her peoples make any significant contributions towards the sum total of human civilization, ancient or modern.

It is primarily as a result of this rather bizarre and inhuman interpretation of what constitutes culture and what constitutes history, that the African-American, because of his African ancestry, has been considered to be "culturally and historically bankrupt.

Of course, Europe needed to perpetrate the lie that Africa had no history or culture in order to pave the way to the culture of slavery, colonialism, and racism which she later established at the expense of people of African descent.

For many social scientists and historians, the connection between Africa and the American children of the Diaspora is tenuous at best. Other than owing their physical traits to native Africans, Americans of African descent are not thought to have much in common with Africans Then the assertion goes to be made that, at best, all that African-Americans possess of culture is 'slave culture,' which some would concede, may have had its nascent beginnings during the enforced migration.

Dr Konotey Ahulu disagrees with these assertions. According to him, when through Enforced Migration, Slave Traders shipped Africans across the Atlantic they thought they were transporting just African brawn (muscle power) to work on the plantations. Little did the traders in human merchandise realize that they were also transporting African Brain. These highly talented African Americans (and there are many more not listed) are not only the tip of a huge brainberg but also the evidence (if evidence was required) that present day Africans have hidden treasures of brain-power that need to be brought out and placarded. It is therefore his intention to make a modest contribution, by presenting here examples of Africanisms-examples of African cultural influences-that have left their indelible imprint on the Diaspora and therefore on world civilisation.

One such hidden treasure Dr Ahulu said is our Tonal Language in Mother Tongue. Many of these languages – Akan, Ga-Damgme, Ibo, Yoruba, Ewe, etc. - are tonal or tonemic, i.e. the use of variation in pitch to differentiate meaning of otherwise identical word-forms and to perform syntactic functions is systemic in these languages. Such a system does not operate in any European languages, but it is operative in the Caribbean creoles. Other features of these new languages which abound in West African languages, and which play little or no roles in the structures of European languages include: the frequency of ideophones ('sound-concept' words); the prototypical open syllabic structure of West African Languages, where even borrowed words with consonant clusters have to be 'opened' up.

Using his Mother tongue (Krobo/Dangme-Gã) as an example, he defines a tonal language as one whose vowel can impart up to six different meanings to the same consonant. What is written ta in my mother tongue he said has (without prolonging the vowel) 6 different meanings derived from 3 pitch positions of the vowel (high mid low) with each pitch possessing two possible quality modes, nasal and non-nasal. Himself an accomplished pianist, he interrupts his speech to demonstrate the tonal pitch on the piano to illustrate his point

As has already been mentioned there are three pitches (high, low, and middle) and the meaning of a word is determined by the pitch on the vowels. These are expressive which lie at the heart of the African-American musical experience. The cultural history of African-Americans is reflected in oral and written musical traditions. Social, religious, and other aspects of the culture are readily recognized in expressive devices unique to African-American music. Dr Felix I D Konotey-Ahulu the Kwegyir Aggrey Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana and the Harley Street Consultant Physician in London said.

As the saying goes a language dies with its culture. By all means let us learn English, French, Portuguese and other foreign languages but, I repeat, to stop teaching our Mother Tongue in Primary School to him, is a tragedy.

He ended by exhorting every Ghanaian to learn to speak at least one other Ghanaian language fluently. Let us preserve the pitch and quality of our spoken languages he said and teach them to our brothers and sisters in the Diaspora. In fact to get the message properly we would need an encore sooner than later to grasp the depth of this message.