Mbaq, fo beix sowqng? (My friend, how are you?)

The name Dagaaba, plural of Dagao, designates the nearly 2 million people who speak one of the Gur (recently renamed unofficially Mabia) languages  variously called Dagaare, Dagara, or Dagarte, as the non-natives tend to say, and whose dialects include Waale, Dagara-Lobr, Dagara-Wule, Lo-saale; Birifor, Manlaale, Manyaale, Mantaree, and a few others. Populating the North-Western corner of Ghana, the South-Western corner of Burkina-Faso, and the North-Eastern corner of Cote-d'Ivoire, ... I hope you get the drift!...the Dagaaba are de facto "corner dwellers" of three "countries". Their territory happened to fall under the pen of the Lords of the Berlin Conference of 1884, which put them both literally and figuratively in the corner. Hey, don't get the wrong idea that they are just sitting there feeling victimized and wobbling in self-pity. No, they are not. Well, let us just agree that they were puzzled at first, I mean more than two centuries ago now, over what befell them, but they have since gotten over it ... ! Actually, only those who lived close to the Whiteman's pencil lines (now called borders) woke up one day to be told by their chief that, due to some invisible wall that had just been erected between their house and their farm, or between their house and their neighbor's, they needed to buy a Whiteman's permit in order to be able to go freely to and from their farms or neighbor's house. The Whiteman from whom they were to seek that permission happened to be living some eight hundred miles away, in some village called Elmina, ... in fact, it may have been Goy, but why the heck would they be concerned with telling the difference between a "Father" and a "Whiteman" anyway?! They figured that since they couldn't walk to Dassaa-Dar (read Adisadel) and return before the rainy season was over, they just ignored the chief and continued trespassing. Believe me, no one got arrested for that insolence, but families were split up for eternity. This family breakup happened just the eve of that decisive meeting at which they were going to come together to agree o what name to give to their language!!! Ah well, too bad for the rest of us that the meeting never came on. Now the result is that the language has several names, and no one really knows whether it should be Dagaare or Dagara, but it certainly is both. Dagara family members started adding French words to their Dagara on the Burkina and Cote d'Ivoire sides of the line, while those in Ghana started adding English to their Dagara. How well do we all understand each other now? Sometimes hardly. But we're still the same people anyway, aren't we? Same history, same customs, same physique, same patches of sandy loam to grow peanuts and cowpeas on, same cowries circulating within the economy of the time, ... need I go on? Okay, same smocks, same xylophones, same dancing styles, ...actually, I'll leave you to explore the rest yourself. Enjoy your visit to my cyber home. Ka foh puori yihri (good bye).