Sandra Sanneh

Senior Lector II, African Languages 

Sandra Sanneh, B.A. University of the Witwatersrand, M.A. Yale University, faculty member at Yale since 1989: You are the Queen of African Languages at Yale. There is no doubt that without your commitment, devotion, hard labor, and creativity over many years, the study of African Languages at Yale would not exist in the way it now does. 

You yourself have taught Zulu—beginning, intermediate, and advanced—to Yale graduates presently all over the world. Besides your dedicated classroom work, you have developed digital teaching materials, created language programs for healthcare professionals, enhanced resource materials, and taken part in countless conferences—all in support of a language with 12 million native South African speakers. 

But there is so much more. For while your own teaching has been in Zulu, you have been a central support for the teaching of all African languages over many years. As director of the Yale African Language Initiative for six years, and an inveterate member of the Council on African Studies, you have fostered all language learning and study of Africa. Since its early days, you were involved in the inter-institutional Summer Cooperative African Language program, which hired instructors to teach eleven courses in eight African languages. When that dissolved in 2011, your development of a module-based program of online distance learning courses in African languages responded to the need for new and adaptive ways of teaching and learning language. In 2012, you were among the first instructors to join the Shared Course Initiative, sharing your Zulu courses via videoconferencing with students at Columbia and Cornell. And you were active on the national level, coordinating a working group for Southern African languages that meets each spring, and co-organizing the consortium which brings together African language program directors, coordinators, and instructors from universities throughout the Northeastern U.S. for two meetings each year. 

And then there is your role as a devoted campus citizen. As an experienced, thoughtful, and highly respected adviser, counselor, and wise elder in Yale’s language community, you have been invaluable over the years in multiple administrative roles: You helped select applications from students who wished to undertake directed independent study of languages not currently offered as courses. You were the executive secretary to the Faculty Advisory Committee on Foreign Languages and served on the Language Study Committee for many years. And you were always willing to do even more, taking the helm as acting master of Silliman College for a year in the nineties when the college was in need of interim leadership. 

You have just returned from Ghana, where an institute was dedicated in the name of your late husband, Lamin Sanneh, scholar of Islam and Christianity and D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity at the Yale Divinity School. You and Lamin, each with your own special gifts, enhanced the climate of learning around Africa at Yale for three decades. As you retire to spend more time with your accomplished children and your grandchildren, the Yale community asks: how will we do without you?