1 A LINGUIST'S FIELD NOTES INTRODUCTION ... - Llacan - CNRS

office constituted a forward observation post for South Africa before a research centre
was officially sited there. In 1990, CREDU’s Director, who knew Nigeria very well,
succeeded in persuading the Ministry and the Embassy in Lagos to open another branch
office in Nigeria to integrate West Africa into a network that was beginning to form. Of
course, the funding fell short of these ambitious plans, and they ended up with a slender
budget and an elaborate administrative set-up. Fortunately, the support of the Cultural
Counsellor, in the form of post-doctoral scholarships and budgetary extensions, made it
possible to organize a colloquium, a collection of works and a newsletter, and to bring
some Nigerian researchers into CREDU’s activities.
Many reasons combined to favour the choice of Ibadan as its foundation site. In
Nairobi, CREDU is sited in a building directly opposite the Embassy of France. The
embassies had still not packed out of the former Nigerian capital, Lagos, a swarming,
disorganized, stinking and dangerous city, full of traffic jams. Moreover, the sheer cost
of a building in the embassy reservation area of Lagos made it impossible to site
CREDU in the same environment as in Nairobi.
Aside from these physical considerations, there were also diplomatic reasons: the
conditions in favour of the siting of CREDU in Nairobi made CREDU look like an
extension of the services of the Embassy, its scientific objectives not always being
clearly distinguished from the needs of the Embassy for information, especially in the
mind of the Ambassador himself, who sometimes tried to make CREDU undertake
research work needed to write his telegrams to Quai d’Orsay 9 . Paradoxically, therefore,
geographical proximity was the cause of tensions between CREDU and the Embassy.
In Nigeria, the federal structure of the state, the decentralization of cultural life, and
the relative independence of research and universities with regard to central power,
made it possible to avoid the problems and ambiguities of Nairobi by distancing
CREDU from the capital. At the same time, the non-existence of modern means of
communication were (telephones and fax machines perpetually out of order) required
that the centre be not sited too far away, so that administrative problems could be
resolved quickly. Letters could be picked up at least once a week, from the Embassy :
9 Quay d’Orsay is the address in Paris of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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