USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Atiku and the Meaning of an “Orphan” in English

Kperogi's rather tortuous bending and extending of the universal meaning in order to accommodate, explain, "justify" and excuse his boss Atiku's misuse and mishandling of an otherwise plain and generally accepted meaning of the word "orphan" according to Her Majesty's Mother tongue is nevertheless interesting. In whatever given context, whether he Mallam Abu Bakar Atiku the presidential hopeful was holding forth or presenting his argumentum ad misericordiam ("I am also a poor orphan O , a victim of tragic circumstances, therefore please sympathise with me O and give me your vote" etc.) and by "whatever given context" I mean, whether he was speaking German in Vienna or Berlin or Naijan English in Benin or Hausa in Kaduna or Arabic in Sokoto or Medina, one wonders if he could not have used a more local word ( local to him) to convey his exact meaning and thereby without the necessity of any apologies to Modern English by Kperogi his would-be English Language mentor, speech writer, corrector and editor.

Somebody - a Yoruba man - could be specific and say "abiku" for example, if he means abiku, he could call a spade a spade and without any self-appointed & erudite apologist or good-willed explicator and translator having to take recourse to some extended sociological or social anthropological lecture to try to convince us as to exactly what he means, meant or intended.

In this sphere, V.S. Naipaul's elucidations in his "The Masque of Africa"provide very satisfying reading, as with the denouements of a thriller, except that with Naipaul this constant, ongoing unravelling, un-concealment and revelation by the semi- omniscience of the speculator-author is from time to time quite exciting as you travel together with him (Naipaul ) his stimulating a meta-dialogue with you and whether you like your reacting and from time to time finding yourself disagreeing with him, with his words on the printed page, strongly, sometimes very strongly. It's known as interactive reading and that's good, not boring companionship on any pilgrimage through the pages, the tragedy being that the page, sometimes the dead page / pages do not always grant him the right of reply and now that Naipaul has become one with the infinite eternity, that right of reply is substituted by gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha . Toyin Adepoju, my living crutch over there in darkness by moon at the Lagoon in Lagos, you know what I mean?

But to his credit, Kperogi is no Naipaul – to be sure, the disdain ( and a little tinge of the arrogance too ( the big grammar arrogance, the my brain is bigger than yours, ( my Mercedes too) and MY MIND is also often there with Kperogi, for those who fall short of Her Majesty's Higher language status - as The Last Poets put it,

"Niggers are very untogether people
Niggers talk about the mind
Talk about: My mind is stronger than yours
"I got that bitch's mind uptight!"
Niggers don't know a damn thing about the mind
Or they'd be right
Niggers are scared of revolution "

But putting all or the above aside, dear Farooq Kperogi's latest efforts have had a very positive effect at least on me: he got me scampering after the Holy Quran and checking out some Islamic history for some essential considerations, above all and most importantly the status of orphans in Nigeria !

The Prophet of Islam salallahu alaihi wa salaam , was an orphan from a very early age

The Holy Quran speaks frequently about our duties to orphans and widows

This, very clearly must have contributed to his extraordinary compassion for orphans and widows.

Apart from all the tittle-tattle about the meanings of these words, since it's a more pressing concern, we should like to see this compassionate consideration for orphans and widows reflected in official Nigerian state policies :

It's a n interpretational problem, especially in Muslim counties where as a result of the wanton decimation of whole populations through war and terrorism, especially in countries like Iraq , Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories, the  orpnas and widow casued by Boko haram, and of late through the horrific Saudi bombings in Yemen , the result has been numberless orphans and widows who Islamically speaking at the very least are our responsibility. One could preach  about this extensively but I'm sure that in your hearts, you've got the gist 

Of relevance when it comes to mother tongue eulogies to the departed ; Tribute To Burstic Kingsley Bassey

On Sunday, 25 November 2018 22:20:20 UTC+1, Farooq A. Kperogi wrote:

Sunday, November 25, 2018

Atiku and the Meaning of an "Orphan" in English

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

In his pre-recorded initiatory presidential campaign speech on November 19, 2018, former Vice President and PDP presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar described himself as having grown up an "orphan." "I started out as an orphan selling firewood on the streets of Jada in Adamawa, but God, through the Nigerian state, invested in me and here I am today," he said.

President Buhari's social media aide by the name of Lauretta Onochie led a chorus of Buhari supporters on Twitter to pooh-pooh Atiku's claim to orphanhood. She said Atiku wasn't an orphan because he didn't lose both parents. This ignited a frenzied social media conversation about the meaning of an orphan. Below is Onochie's tweet that set off the debate:

"Atiku cannot be trusted; I started life as an Orphan in Jada"-Abubakar Atiku (BIG FAT LIE)

"ORPHAN-a child whose parents (Father and mother) are dead. In his book, MY LIFE (2013 pg 30) refers [sic]: Atiku said his mother died in 1984. This was when he was 38 years. He was old enough to buy mum a house.

"What's the point of this lie? To deceive Nigerians and get their sympathy? It's disrespectful and insulting to Nigerians for a candidate or anyone to lie to them.

"He is saying we are too gullible to find out the truth. No, we are not. President Buhari nor [sic] Vice President Osinbajo will never lie to Nigerians."

What this semantic contestation captures is a clash of socio-linguistic cultures. As I pointed out in my May 4, 2014 column titled "Q and A on Popular Nigerian English Expressions, Word Usage and Grammar," my first daughter had a similar argument with her teacher nearly seven years ago. I lost my wife to a car crash in June 2010 in Nigeria and brought my then 6-year-old first daughter to live with me here in the United States the same year.

One day in class, she told her teacher that she was an "orphan." Her teacher, who knew me, said my daughter couldn't possibly be an orphan since her father was alive. My daughter, who had become linguistically American but still culturally Nigerian, insisted that the death of her mother was sufficient to qualify her as an orphan. Their argument wasn't resolved, so she came home to ask me if she was wrong to call herself an orphan.

I told her she was right from the perspective of African cultures and UNICEF's classification of orphans, but that her teacher was right from the perspective of conventional English.

Different Cultural Significations of "Orphan"

In many African—and other non-Western cultures— an orphan is understood as a child who has lost one or both parents before the age of maturity. In Islam, an orphan is a child who has lost only a father before the age of maturity. The usual Arabic word for an orphan is "yateem" (or al-yateem), which literally denotes "something that is singular and alone." But the word's canonical and connotative meaning in contemporary Arabic and in Islamic jurisprudence is, "a minor who has lost his or her father."

Nevertheless, other rarely used words exist in Arabic to denote an orphan: al-Lateem is a child who has lost both parents while al-'iji is a child who has lost only a mother. Note, however, that yateem is the word used in the Qur'an to refer to an orphan, which is why people who are socialized in Muslim cultures define and understand an orphan as someone whose father died before the age of puberty. Atiku is a Muslim who grew up in a Muslim cultural environment. There is no reason why he should use Western cultural lenses to describe himself.

 Until I relocated to America, I too had no idea that in conventional English, an orphan is generally understood as a child who lost both parents. Curiously, the meaning of the word changes when it is applied to an animal: An animal is regarded as an orphan only if loses its mother, perhaps because animals have fathers only in a reproductive, but not in a biosocial, sense.

Note, though, that in English, an orphan can also be a child who has been abandoned by its living biological parents. That means almajirai (plural form of almajiri in Hausa) are invariably orphans since they don't get to enjoy the care of both parents who are usually alive.

It's also noteworthy that UNICEF, being an international organization that represents the interests of people from different cultures, recognizes the cultural clashes in the conception of orphanhood and seeks a fair sociolinguistic compromise. That is why it has three different types of orphans. UNICEF has a class of orphans its calls "maternal orphans." This category encapsulates children who lost only their mothers. It also classifies certain orphans as "paternal orphans," which refers to children who lost only their fathers. Then there are "double orphans," which refers to children who lost both parents. I think that's a good cultural compromise. By UNICEF's classification, Atiku was a paternal orphan.

Many contemporary English dictionaries are taking note of and reflecting this shift in the meaning of orphan. For instance, the Merriam Webster Dictionary now defines an orphan as "a child deprived by death of one or usually both parents." The Random House Unabridged Dictionary also defines an orphan as "a child who has lost both parents through death, or, less commonly, one parent." And Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged, a British English dictionary, defines it as, "a child, one or (more commonly) both of whose parents are dead."

 So Atiku's use of "orphan" can be justified in contemporary, evolving English, but even more so in historical English, as I will show below.

Etymology of "Orphan"

Orphan is derived from the Latin orphanus where it meant a "parentless child." But Latin also borrowed it from the Greek orphanos where it means, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, "without parents, fatherless." Orphan, ultimately, is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root orbho, which means, according to etymologists, "bereft of father."

This clearly shows that loss of a father, not both parents, is at the core of the signification of the word from its very beginning. In fact, a survey of the earliest examples of the usage of the word in historical writings in English shows that it was used to mean only a child who lost a father. For instance, in Scian Dubh's 1868 book titled Ridgeway:An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada, we encounter this sentence: "At his birth, he was an orphan, his father having died a few weeks previously." This shows that in the 1800s, a child was regarded as an orphan only if it lost its father.

It must have been changes in social and cultural attitudes in the West that expanded and limited the meaning of "orphan" to a child who lost "both parents."

Motherless Babies' Home or Orphanage?

A place where orphans are housed and cared for is called an orphanage in contemporary Standard English. It used to be called an "orphan house" until 1711. (Orphanage used to mean orphanhood, that is, the condition of being an orphan; the current meaning of the word started from about 1865).

Interestingly, orphanages are called "motherless babies' homes" in Nigerian—and perhaps West African—English. Does this suggest that our conception of orphanhood is changing from deprivation of a father through death to solely deprivation of a mother through death? Why are there not "parentless babies' homes"? Or, for that matter, "fatherless babies' homes"?

Related Articles:

Politics of Grammar Column

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperog

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

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