Cotonou, Benin · August 12, 2026
Francophone Africa Conference of OBT Consultants

Someone in the room laid out the comparison that everyone had been circling. Hebrew poetry rests on rhythm. French poetry rests on rhyme. Two languages, two entirely different foundations — and every translator present works in French as the language of wider communication, and in Hebrew as the source.

Then the question for those working in African languages: so what does poetry rest on in our own languages?

Nobody in the room could answer it in full. Not because there isn’t an answer — twenty years of workshops across the continent have settled that — but because no one has written it down. There is no description of the poetic structures of most African languages that a translator could open beside a psalm and use.

The stakes are practical. Without that description, the consultants said, the risk is falling into prose: producing something accurate, comprehensible, and flat, where the Hebrew was built to stir emotion. A psalm can survive translation and arrive dead.

One participant offered the beginning of a method. He had taken a traditional song from his own tradition and set it next to a psalm, and found the same devices at work in both. The conclusion he drew was not that African poetry resembles Hebrew poetry, but something more useful: the artistic procedures belonging to African poetry exist, they are specific, and they are worth naming.

Another suggestion followed from it — that local artists, the people who already compose in these forms, could help build the translation tools themselves. The singers are not the recipients of the work. They are the ones who know the grammar of the thing.

The question went unanswered, in the sense that no one left with a structural description of their language’s poetry. It also went answered, in the sense that a room of consultants now agrees it is the first step in the work, not the last.