Douglas Murray made a complaint about ‘Mohamed’ being the most common name in the UK. His problem, being about the assimilation of Eastern cultures in the UK. In Nigeria meanwhile, only recently were indigenous names allowed to be used as baptismal and confirmation names (Rituals in the Catholic Church). So most people bear an English name by default and that is considered normal.
When my father’s mother took him to the church for the first time, she didn’t do so because she was suddenly saved by a saviour she had never actually listened to (Hell she didn’t get baptized until a few years before her death well into her nineties), she did so because she was trying to get a better life for her child. She realized that the people who went to this so-called church were usually the ones who would eventually get better off. For this reason, she sent her child to the church. The church which I would say ran the society alongside the British government, created a system whereby to be anything in the society, to be economically viable at the time, had to come through the church and so my father and his siblings had to take on English names.
Economics is the real top gun because, because people wanted to get a better life, an amount of self-loathing began taking place in our society. Before I knew the neutral meaning of the word ‘local’ as a child, I had always just known a negative denotative that implied inferior. So people tried to be more English and this was most likely because of the food (economics).
I grew up in Oyigbo, Rivers state and even though I have always understood Igbo, I never learned to speak. In my immediate environment, we mostly communicated in English, from church to school to house. When I schooled in Enugu, a predominately Igbo-speaking state, I was more focused on surviving school than learning the language. Never once was I teased about not knowing the language. My not knowing the language was usually passed with a sort of nonchalance, “He can’t speak Igbo,” without any sentiments and even there were sentiments, it was the usual anger of, “He’s just forming.” Which I couldn’t be offended by because it came with a place that afforded me superiority.
Let’s imagine a similar story to mine but from a slightly different angle. There were those who could speak Igbo fluently but weren’t so great in English. They were teased aggressively and their accent was mocked. I remember a particular joke made about a boy which went like this, When talking to a girl (Opposite sex issues where people put forth their best behaviours and accent and invariable meant he had to speak English), it was said that his speaking English to her was in the same comparisons as solving physics in his head. Why does English have to be the love language? Apparently, the best accent to have is a bland one that does not give away any tribal affiliations and so because there is superiority in accents, there is ultimately a superiority in language.
I remember a scene on Twitter where an Igbo man who wanted his children to be global citizens, had them learn some European languages. Then, they were to have Mandarin tutors. Now the outburst came from the fact that he didn’t see the importance of his children knowing Igbo. He used vague excuses of his mistreatment by Igbo brothers as to why he does not have any connection with the language. Do I even need not debunk his argument by asking if he is unaware of racism in European and Chinese society? I know that he is aware. My children (If I do have any) must know how to speak Igbo even if I don’t. But a question has bugged me. If I was given the option of my children solely speaking just one language between Igbo and English, which would I pick? There was a reason why the man in question wasn’t teaching his children a Togolese language. He and I were somewhat the same. We were under the brunt of Economics because even though the Igbo population in Nigeria is more than that of Swedish in Sweden, our language has less significant influence because of the economy of our country.
The issue of language and economics is bigger for me as a writer. Now say an American writes a book. He doesn’t have to explain their indigenous terms like, ‘Bucks’ or ‘Dude’ and the likes, I’m expected to know what these mean when I read their works and even if I didn’t know what these terms meant, they don’t need me as a buyer because they already had an established book market. The same conditions might not be extended to me. Nigeria doesn’t have a thriving book market and so our successful authors, our recognized authors are the ones who have gotten some level of Western recognition. The critic Ikhide believes that there is no African literature because our gatekeepers are western. Now, I don’t necessarily agree with him on this because I believe this statement limits literature to his prejudicial biases on what literature is or should be and there are a lot of indigenous books financed by the local market which does not necessarily follow the laid down rules of what African literature should be. These books are the Onitsha market books of our time. But Ikhide does have a point and this is what I would like to talk about. Since westerners are the payers of the piper, we tune our works to please western audiences and so we forgive the ignorance of our language and common words like ‘Oga’ and ‘Wetin’ is put in italics and food is sometimes bastardized with English names as though an apology for having any other names. I remember in my primary 3, I was taught that the English name for akara was bean cake and some novels have egusi in italics.
The effects of languages don’t just cut across the book world, it also cuts across the film world and so certain words are subtitled in English. Even beyond languages, Nollywood goes through so many other forms of americanization. I mean we could even begin with the name for the industry wish just switches the ‘H’ of Hollywood with an ’N’. ( A side note, I watched a Nigerian movie recently that talked about government spies, Lmaoo.)
Do I have a clear cut solution for all these? Maybe not so much but there is one contributing factor here, government. Government is that reference point that no matter where you ran, it is always up influencing every decision you make. It’s a different case when it was the time of my parents, the British were either actively colonizing us or just leaving. Now that power rests on us (on the government at least). What economic policies are they making to have us independent? To be rest assured in ourselves? To not have to keep pandering to certain audiences? I mean to get recognition outside of your home is nice but having to depend mostly only on that audience outside of the home doesn’t seem fair. So when would government stop ‘bullshiting’ and make us stand on our own and have our own money? Because in the long run it almost always boils down to the money.
