On Wednesday, June 4, 2025, 1:01 PM, Cornelius Hamelberg <corneliushamelberg@gmail.com> wrote:
Stockholm
Sweden
People's Planet
4th June, 2025.
This language problem that Wa Thiong'o has been talking about is ostensibly an African problem. Not an African American problem. Purely an African problem.
Most of the Swedish writers worth their salt have used their mother tongue, of course, with full effect. Ditto, the French inevitably much prefer to do everything in French. If you have to abuse a French-man / French-woman you'll have to do it in French, otherwise it will have no effect. Doing it in just any barbaric language will have no effect. Will not have the desired effect. As Lakunle the village school teacher says in Soyinka's play " I rise above taunts and remain unruffled." That's the Frenchman for you; call him an imbecile and he remains unruffled, but say it French (imbécile or crétin or espèce d'idiot) with the correct pronunciation and you find yourself in plenty of trouble.
The French couldn't possibly contemplate adopting German as their official language even if they were colonised or occupied by the Nazis for a thousand years.
Another case in point :
Over here in dear Sweden, the crime rate has soared with the new spate of gangster criminality, to the extent that the prisons are nearly full as a result of which Sweden has bought six hundred ( 600) prison places in Estonia ( subject to ratification by a two-thirds majority in the riksdag (parliament). If he (Strömmer / the Swedish Government) had bought those prison places in Nigeria, then, fear of doing time in current Nigerian prison conditions such as what obtains at Kirikiri prison would have had a marvellous deterrent effect on would-be criminals in Moder Svea, since by comparison, Swedish prisons are said to be like luxury hotels,
Not that Kirikiri prison has had a deterrent effect on the grand larcenies being committed by the lootocracy..
I hear that Mr Gunnar Strömmer our Minister of Justice was answering questions about this cost-effective move of hiring prison places in Estonia
I'm told that question one was someone crying "but those poor prisoners that are going to be locked up in faraway Estonia won't get visits that they are entitled to - their human rights (their girlfriends etc won't be able to visit them on weekends etc)" - and in answer to that Strömmer reminded the questioner that the distance between Stockholm and some towns in the North of Sweden is greater than the distance between Tallinn and Stockholm .
The second matter of great concern was that the prison guards in Estonia don't speak Swedish. Strömmer replied "Most of the prisoners don't speak Swedish either" - thereby implying that most of the criminals doing time in Swedish prison are foreigners.
Some of those prisoners are soon going to be accusing Strömmer of" racism" , another crime.
Patiently waiting to hear Trump declare that speaking Chinese or any other foreign language is henceforth forbidden in the United States, and any violations of that executive order will face the full wrath of the law.
Some people's favourite colonial language
without which they believe they are incapable
of thinking, let alone writing poetry :
Generally, in need of having their minds de-colonised,
because of "colonial mentality"
and a deep-seated inferiority complex
"in a civilised place like this" they feel
less civilised composing e.g in their own
mother tongue and (shame on you)
feel more civilised in attempting
to impress themselves and others not in French but
in low grade Buckingham Palace English (of the kind that King Charles
and Algernon Charles Swinburne , and Nobel Laureate
Bertrand Russell and Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess
and John Cleese and Stephen Fry and the late great
Margaret Thatcher and Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa
have never spoken !
O me miserum !
The difference a missing letter can make
necessitating correction from the upper chamber of the
correctional facility which mind you is not really a penitentiary:
I or the auto-correction mistakenly wrote " unkept"
(like an unkept woman) when this is what I intended to say
in this sentence about James Ngugi, back in the day :
"...during which time he wore short trousers, let his hair grow wild (about his hair - a later Adichie preoccupation in Americanah, an English-speaking Nigerian or Oyibo would have used the word " unkempt")...etc etc
How would such a miscreant describe Wole Soyinka's hoary hairs,
now in full bloom this winter?
Or Cornel West's ?
Going further back in time,
Unkempt ?
It's a word I last heard - not in my auditory imagination but for real from the lips of some officious, senior education official outside our dear Secretary's office in Port Harcourt, an official that was as officious as Polonius, ; this was around the time that Pope John-Paul was visiting Nigeria and we had been locally instructed to wear our best "traditional" attire" -prior to which there had been some mumbling and grumbling about my buba and Sokoto, but now that His Holiness was paying a courtesy call they thought that we should show him some genuine homemade Nigerian culture by donning our Agbada and the traditional Ijaw and Ikwerre paraphernalia.
The official had the impertinence to tell me, "Sir, your hair is unkempt!"
I asked him," Where did you learn such a word?"
Funny, the kinds of tricks memory can play on you:
This morning , don't know where the thoughts came from
whether they came from outer space or from the
interior castle of my skin or of my "mind", not GAZA
but early 1970s Accra at night, driving around either
with Jeff Holden in his old beat up Deux Chevaux or
with Joe Seward (the husband of Adrienne Seward) Joe,
slightly tipsy, the car swaying from the left to the right
side of the road, him reminiscing as usual, but you can't
say exactly homesick, humming along with Billie Holiday
who he always called" Lady Day " humming " He's Funny that way"
just as I woke up this morning, humming,
not " Lay Lady Lay "
but Billie Holiday
singing
What a little moonlight can do
That was just a snippet of Ghana, January, 1970
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