Phonetically, to an English speaker at least, Wolof can sound like a rude dismissal, or worse. Get lost! Wolof! In fact, Wolof is the principal language of Senegal and is spoken in other West African countries like The Gambia and Mauritania.
When Molly Melching first arrived in Senegal from the University of Illinois in 1974 she had to learn Na Nga Def, the words in Wolof for Hello, How Are You. And then her response for whatever was said to her, Mahn deggumah Wolof: ‘I don’t speak Wolof’.
In spite of the linguistic challenge Molly, a six-month exchange student focusing on literacy, fell so completely in love with the Senegalese people and their language that she never went back home to Danville, Illinois. Somehow, living with the Senegalese she found a true baaneex dëkka, a contentment, a joie de vivre. She couldn’t describe the feeling in English, French or Wolof. Nor could Molly understand why the villages – where more than 60 per cent of the population lived in her adopted country – didn’t receive basic information about dehydration, hygiene, and especially women’s health. Why was no-one saying or doing anything either about domestic violence against women or the common practice of female genital mutilation (FGM)?
In 1974, Senegal was still in an early phase of finding its feet as a nation, having been independent from France for only 14 years. What Molly had taken for granted and understood as normal in the United States – educational opportunities for women, open debates about gender equality and individual choice, dialogue about changing social and cultural traditions – barely existed there.
Molly realised what fundamental step she had to take. There was one way, not only to find an answer to her questions about the abuses girls and women endured and the multiple health issues they faced, but also to do something about them. It was the way not to judge the Senegalese, not to judge what passed between women and men, what layers of history, culture and tradition seemed to make them do. That step was to learn Wolof. For the world and values and culture of the Senegalese to open up for Molly, she had to go far beyond a basic vocabulary. She grasped that in every language there is a shared understanding of words, phrases, proverbs, references and stories that bind people together.
As the writer John Le Carré once put it, quoting the ninth century king and emperor, Charlemagne: ‘To have another language is to possess a second soul.’ Le Carré later added that the decision to learn a foreign language is ‘an act of friendship. It is a holding out of the hand. It’s not just a route to negotiation, it’s also how to get to know you better, to draw closer to you and your culture, your social manners and your way of thinking.’
For Molly, immersing herself in Wolof meant taking the time for deep listening and learning. What would become Molly’s enduring philanthropy only became possible by understanding what the girls and boys, the men and women of Senegal were saying to her face. Nothing would be lost in translation, in misinterpretation. From her embrace of people and language flowed a philanthropy across the decades that would empower and educate the Senegalese in their mother tongue.
In 1991 Molly made a breakthrough, quite literally. She formed a Non- Governmental Organisation (NGO) called Tostan which means breakthrough in Wolof. Through Tostan Molly was able to put all of her listening and knowledge of abuses, injustices, problems and realities across communities into practical support in a language that people could understand.
Using the community feedback from her own multiple encounters, and working closely with Senegalese colleagues steeped in the culture of the country, Molly created for Tostan what became known as the Community Empowerment Program, or CEP. In essence, Tostan’s CEP facilitated the ownership of the development process by individual communities through dialogue and materials in their own language. CEP became a mechanism through which issues of health, governance, environment, human rights and the participatory role of women could be addressed.
That’s not to say Molly or Tostan got it all right from the very beginning and that every initiative was a breakthrough success. She readily acknowledges, for example, that it had been a mistake in the years before 2000 to focus exclusively on girls and women, ignoring the concerns, and social pressures on men.
Learning from mistakes and the communities, more than 30 years later Molly’s language-based philanthropy continues to change lives. The non-formal education and participatory native language approach of CEP has endured. In a typical year, CEP is engaging between 20,000 and 25,000 adults and young people, expanding knowledge in human rights, health, literacy and numeracy.
Today Tostan’s reach extends far beyond Senegal’s borders. In 2022 no fewer than 327 villages in Senegal, The Gambia and Mali participated in six public declarations to abandon the practices of FGM and child marriage. The following year, 432 communities in three countries formally adopted human rights principles.
Molly Melching did not learn Wolof to become a philanthropist, but to understand what was going wrong, how she could help to make life better or, in the phrase used by Tostan facilitators, to give whole communities the opportunity to grasp that ‘Everyone is equal in human rights’.
Getting the language right in every sense explains why Molly’s philanthropy lasts and why the Tostan CEP model is now being implemented in 22 languages across eight African countries. That’s the point.