# What do the languages of the invisible ties binding the 'other side' to Africa actually say?  
The history of languages, their proximity, contact and rapport, should never be disassociated from that of their speakers. Africa definitely does not feature in the masters' posters, which do not mention its languages (Figure 2) and disassociate it from marronage. It is, however, found in the vocabulary used in slave ship survivors' places of worship.  
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[^0]:    3 Source: Le Glaunec, J.-P. and Robichaud, L. (dir.). Le marronnage dans le monde atlantique : sources et trajectoires de vie. http://www.marronnage.info.  
![img-27.jpeg](img_ref_28)
figure 2. Announcements from Santo Domingo, 1789, with mention of languages ignored (French) or spoken (French, Creole, English, Spanish, Gascon) by the Maroons'  
Creoles have too often been described as simplified languages, yet they are as complex as their history and the underlying paths of the African languages that inhabit them. They are clothed in new vocabularies, recut phonetically in some places and rebuilt semantically in others. For a long time, the negation of African forms in creoles limited the appreciation of their role in the codeswitching underpinning the formation of the language (more so than their extent, which, returning to the occasion, was sometimes exaggerated). This is true of both creoles with an English, French or Spanish lexical base and those with an African lexical base.  
We too easily forget that Africa is home to three dozen creoles, the lexical bases of which can most frequently be traced back to Niger-Congo languages: 'The Gulf of Guinea creoles are considered prototypical, and they are among the oldest creoles on earth' (Klein, 2006). Sango and, most recently, Kituba, are often given as examples, whereas Tadaksahak raises questions in terms of codemixing Songhay and Berber languages (Christiansen and Christiansen, 2002).