112 Deaf Epistemologies, Identity, and Learning
in the early years of the school, which differed from the gestures used in the home
and village environment. (Gestural communication is widely used in Sub-Saharan
Africa; see, e.g., Dalle-Nazébi, 2009, and Sorin-Barreteau, 1996.)
In 1979, American mission ary Andrew Foster established the second deaf school in
Kumba in the anglophone area of Cameroon. Foster was the first African American
to obtain a bache lor’s degree from Gallaudet University. Noticing that formal deaf
education was almost nonexistent in Africa, he had started his work by founding
a deaf school in Ghana in 1956. Altogether, he would establish 31 deaf schools in
western and central Africa, which is why he is called “the father of deaf education in
Africa” (Kamei, 2006). He is well remembered and highly respected by the Camer-
oonian deaf community. Foster also founded the Christian Mission of the Deaf and
deaf gospel churches in those re gions before he died in 1987.
ASL was the language of communication and instruction in these schools and
churches, which ensured a strong ASL influence on deaf communications in western
and central African countries. At a teacher training center for deaf Africans in Ibadan,
Nigeria, established by Foster, 161 deaf adults from 19 African countries received train-
ing. Kamei (2006) writes that in this training institute, ASL was “changed” to teach
French and fit in the francophone African context; a dictionary was published on
this Langage des Signes du Sourds Africain Francophone (Sign Language of Deaf Franco phone
Africans; Tamomo, cited in Kamei, 2006). A francophone deaf trainee from Cameroon,
who graduated from the training in Nigeria in 1986, confirmed that he was trained in
French. However, he brought a different English dictionary from the training to Cam-
eroon, prob ably because he was prepared to work in the anglophone Ephata Institute
for the Deaf in Kumba. The book, which is titled Sign Language Lessons for the Deaf:
Handbook for Teachers of the Deaf (Silas, n. d.), contains a collection of signs that reveal
a form of an English signed system rather than ASL. This use of this communication
system was in alignment with Total Communication philosophies that were popular at
that time in the United States and in Europe. The use of a sign system as a language of
instruction was also confirmed by interviews with deaf adults who worked in the school
during Foster’s time, most of whom were trained in Nigeria and became deaf at a later
age. Influence of sign systems (in forms of CSL influenced by ASL and Langue des
Signes Francophone [LSF]) can also be seen in the use of CSL today.
The establishment of the Kumba School for the Deaf not only introduced ASL,
but also contributed to the dissemination of ASL throughout Cameroon by means
of deaf school students and graduates who socialized with deaf adults in other
places, such as Yaoundé. Another source of ASL influence in Yaoundé was a deaf
church where a missionary who had been trained by Foster in Nigeria used ASL
as the lan guage for the church services. In the 1990s, LSF was introduced in deaf
schools in some places where French was the primary language (such as Yaoundé
and Bafoussam, a city in the interior). The (ideological) motivation was that French
could only be taught through LSF and not through the ASL-based sign language
that was being used in the adult deaf community. However, the use of LSF and
ASL does not simply mirror the spoken-language French-English bilingualism of
Cameroon. Most Cameroonian deaf adults who participated in my research use an
ASL-influenced variant of CSL. The introduction of LSF has resulted in the first