Niemen says it all in Strange is This World
Oh, strange is this world
Well, still it seems
There's so far so much evil
And strange it is that since long ago
Man despises man.
Oh, strange this world
Of human affairs
Sometimes I'm ashamed to be in it
Oh, so often a man can kill
With a bad word or still a knife.
But most people are of good will
I - thanks to them - believe
That this world should never, never die
And now, the time has come
The final time for hatred, for hatred
To destroy itself.
Verily, this is what colonialism has done to some of us. Sixty years after Nigerians achieved Independence from the linguistic dictatorship of Westminster the "My accent is more British than yours" syndrome persists as a post-colonial phenomenon; some would say a post-colonial hangover which should be funny if it wasn't so silly (comic) and so tragic. It's akin to something like this.
To rephrase the question in that most famous dramatic poem, " Telephone Conversation", the caller, obviously speaking RP, gets past the landlady's "not sounding British" language suspicion litmus test, failing which, in addition to enquiries about the hue, shade, colour, shape and maybe the weight of the caller's bottom or booty, the landlady would have remarked either " Your accent sounds very dark" ( West African Sepia) or maybe "somewhat lighter" ( Derek Walcott, Trinidad and St Lucia)
In which case an adequate response to all the questions could have been the Parthian shot, a typically vulgar Americanism, "M-f, you can kiss my entire black ass" (if you please
Back in Sierra Leone, as my two secondary school classmates from Nigeria ( Omodele Wariboko and Michael Bassey) can also testify, we had a Nigerian geography teacher Mr. Inyang who we used to mock/ make fun of ( his nickname was " Heng-'am dae" – because just like Michael Jackson, his trousers were usually suspended about six inches above his shoes) but we mostly made fun of him because of his weird pronunciation of the most common English words, and in defence of his peculiar pronunciations he would offer this concise explanation: " Pronunciations va-ary".
We were very conscious of the approved Buckingham Palace pronunciation in our School which after all was opened by His Royal Highness, the then Prince of Wales, on April 6, 1925. Unfortunately, some of the products from that school became real neo-colonial snobs, you know…
Sure enough there are varieties of English and varieties of accents within the British Isles, not to mention other diversities in both vocabulary, pronunciation and standard orthography when you extend the family language empire and common wealth to include V.S. Naipaul & Salman Rushdie's India, Tariq Ali's Pakistan, T.S. Eliot, Gore Vidal and Amiri Baraka's North America, Patrick White's Australia ( he had a good ear for colloquial speech and their approximate transcriptions to the written page) and Elsie Locke's New Zealand. I mention Elsie Locke, because my wife translated her (into her mother-tongue which is Swedish.
I mention other English worlds to consciously remind those who may need reminding that the language world also has its "infinite variety" , and that it is only ignorant, small-minded parochiality that breeds the intolerance that is typical of what Baba Kadiri would like to attribute as evidence of all manner of psychological disorders some kind of post-colonial stress of the kind that the Chinese do not suffer and that's why it could not occur to Sheikh Umar to start ridiculing their President for not speaking goody English…
And how I hate the condescending English pre-and post-colonial attitude of " You speak good English" and some of the other confusions, straightened out in these charts on " What the Englishman says and what he means"
In utter ignorance, about any precise number I asked Alagba Google, How many British accents are there? Some of us would be surprised to know that we don't fit into any of those 37 varieties.
I know, because when I was about nine years of age and attending school in Fulham I had a perfect "London accent "and my aunty Nelly ( Dutch) uncle John Jeffrey-Coker's wife) has to rub some of it off me, because I said " pint box" instead of paint box, and of course Charlotte and I could not say "lie" – the polite word for children like us, was "fib"
We've got to liberate ourselves from "mental slavery". What I liked about pre-Satanic Verses Rushdie was that in his own creative mode, he did not seem to have any respect for Her Majesty's English, that he showed a sufficiently self-certain mastery of the lingo, that he was obviously doing precisely whatever the hell he liked with it , instead of being attached to the straight and narrow of it, as if still shackled in in post-colonial slavery to it – like some guys still writing poetry etc. as if Shakespeare had never existed.
As for me, have no fear. Baba Kadiri has thoroughly indoctrinated me all about Pa Michael Imoudu
Those of you living in English-speaking countries such as the United States, have no idea what it's like for people like us. This afternoon I called Kehinde Ogunrinola in Canada, talked to him for approximately twenty minutes, mostly reminiscing about when he lived in Stockholm and in comparing the two places, one of the main differences is that in Sweden, the Oyibo's last line of attack or defence when he doesn't want to give you the job, is that you speak Swedish with a "foreign" accent. Anyway, towards the end of our conversation Kehinde started speaking Swedish to me, and to my great surprise I noticed that he is now speaking Swedish with what sounded to my ears, something like an American accent. "No", he corrected me, "Canadian". A Swedish -Canadian accent. Not the same as a Southern Swedish or a Stockholm accent. Amin.
--The overwhelming majority of Nigerians speak with accents.
President Buhari committed no crime because the Constitution ( until amended) does not prohibit accents.
In native English speaking countries leaders stumble on words and are mocked and this never led to national crises. President George W. Bush never once pronounced "nuclear" correctly during the Iraq war. He always pronounced 'nukila' We all laughed and mocked him (including non native speakers.) Nothing came of it.
Some northerners are being over sensitive to criticisms. No one is perfect. We all can learn to better our best.
OAA
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------From: Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu>Date: 25/03/2020 10:52 (GMT+00:00)To: dialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Haba!
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--Many private messages have been sent that Southerners are mocking Northerners over language and accents. And some have been posted with one going viral.
Haba! When Kperogi was talking about verbs and nouns, you all forget that he is not an Igbo man. I don't know that verbs and nouns now have colors.
Haba! When someone says a letter emanating from a state house, a paid media communicator with a degree, is badly written, what as being Kanuri or Hausa go to do with this?
Haba! Have you not heard Gowon speak? Or he speaks well because he is not a Hausaman? Do you not know of a man called "the golden voice of Africa?" Tafawa Balewa, Nigeria's first prime minister!
Haba! Let me show you the recorded Keynote Address by Malami Buba, my Fulani friend; or the writings of Aisha Bawa, my Fulani friend; or of Bunza, my Fulani friend; or Ashafa, my Kaduna friend; or Bishop Kukah, the Zangon-Kataf man. Are they not better than many of the so-called southerners?
Haba! Everything is not about resource control or federal character.
Haba! This nonsense must stop today.
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