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Jeyifo: English Is Still A Foreign Language In Nigeria: The Word From Abiola Irele (2)
IN this concluding essay to a two-part series, I wish to start my observations and reflections from what I described last week as Professor Irele's fundamental assumption in asserting that English is still a foreign language in Nigeria. Briefly stated, this assumption holds that the disastrous fall in standards of spoken and written English in the last few decades is possible at all because English is not indigenous to our country and our continent and because it is still foreign to us; when it has become domesticated and indigenized, it will no longer be possible to have the alarming levels of deterioration in the use of English that we see daily in our society.
Since for the vast majority of Nigerians there are economic and social issues of daily existence and ultimate survival that are far more urgent than how well English is spoken or written in our country, this whole debate might seem nothing more than the academic indulgence of a professoriate that, like the proverbial ostrich, has its head buried in the sand. I shall return to this issue at the end of this essay. For now, I wish to address this very topic of the disastrous fall in the use of English in our country. Am I exaggerating? Is it as bad as I am making it out to be? Is there a cause for alarm?
In the series in which I engaged Professor Nnolim, I took pains to emphasize that what is happening to and in English by way of very poor, very defective teaching is also happening to our indigenous languages. To that extent, this is not peculiar to English. What is distinctive in the deterioration in English is that the fall in standards are more dramatic because English is our national lingua franca, the link language between our indigenous languages and, putatively, our passport to a modernity that does not expose us to rapacious forces of foreign economic and cultural domination. In other words, while we should be as concerned, if not even more concerned, that there is a fall in the standards of writing in our indigenous languages as in English, the outcry pertaining to the fall in standards in English is louder because English exercises a very large function in the conduct of relations within our multiethnic and multicultural society and between us and the rest of the world. It is within this context, this framework that I wish to very briefly discuss two instances or examples of the calamitous decline in English in recent times in our country.
First there is the case of a young woman that I shall call Beatrice, a poor neighbor's daughter in Oke-Bola, Ibadan. Let me declare that because this is an actual case concerning a person who is known to my small circle of family and friends, I am using a fictional identity here. But one person in this anecdote whose identity I will not disguise at all is my friend, Professor Femi Osofisan. Thus, when Beatrice approached me in 2009 with a letter of admission from one of our first-generation universities in which there were two incredible grammatical errors, Osofisan asked me to double-check to ensure that the admission letter was not a fake document. I should explain that Beatrice came to me because I had promised that if she passed WASCE and NECO and gained admission to one of our universities I would augment whatever financial support her parents could muster. I should also explain that Beatrice was one of the 1.8% of those who passed in the NECO exams that year while a sold 98.2% failed.
I duly investigated the authenticity of the admission letter and found it to be genuine, with its unbelievable grammatical errors. Following this and as a precondition to how much financial support I would give to the young woman, I asked Beatrice to write a two-page, single-spaced essay on why she wanted to study social science in the university. At the end of two hours when she gave me the result of her efforts, there were on each of the two pages of her essay more than a dozen errors, errors that were so flagrant that they showed that as far as English and the use of that language for reasoning and self-expression were concerned, Beatrice had not progressed beyond the middle levels of primary school. Regardless of this, Beatrice accepted the offer of admission and today is a bona fide student at one of our top public universities. This is a person who was among the 1.8% that passed NECO; if that is the case, what can we expect from the 98.2% that failed the exams? To this day, Osofisan and I have found no answer to this question. What both of us know, as professional educators, is that when you admit someone like Beatrice to a university, then you must have in place the infrastructures for very extensive remedial work, otherwise the initial problems with language and expression will worsen immeasurably. Everyone knows that no significant work of remediation for students with poor or sub-standard pre-matriculation "education" takes place in our universities.
For our second example of what is happening in English in our country, I shall quote from an article written by Niyi Osundare, one of our most influential writers, an article in which the poet and scholar of literature and language laments the quality of literary reviews in our newspapers:
Not infrequently, review columns confront the reader with howlers such as "the second paragraph of the poem"; "this is X's second anthology of short stories" (for anthology read collection). And the work is praised as "simplistic" when what the writer means is "simple". There is a constant mention of works of "renown" authors, and reviews are hardly balanced in their handling of "strength and floors". Too monotonously, our critics "opine that…" Almost invariably, what passes for a review is a bungled content summary without a single word on form and style. Quite often, the reviewer confuses biography with autobiography; "criticism" with "critique"; metaphor with simile; "summarily" with "summary". Achebe sometimes gets credit as the author of The Concubine! And the pages drip with cheap, whorish clichés!
There is no question at all about the accuracy and the perspicacity of the sobering observations in this quote. But then, we have to be careful because, as I remarked in last week's column, there is a complexity to what is happening to and in English and our indigenous languages that we must not lose sight of. Let me mention the most salient of these. First, the general intellectual level of discourse in the English language in our newspapers has improved exponentially in the last three decades. Secondly, quite impeccable standards of English language usage now coexist with the most embarrassing forms of misuse of the language in our print and electronic media as never before in the colonial and postcolonial periods of Nigeria's modern history. Thirdly, side by side with a great deal of poor professionalism and writing of a meretricious quality, there are analysts and columnists working in our media institutions that compare well with the best in their profession in the world. Just to give two examples, Next is superbly edited and I have seldom encountered the sort of "howlers" detailed by Osundare in The News. Fourth and perhaps most important of all, the widespread misuse of language, of English in particular, has for a very long time now been the object of reflexive, critical and ironic meditation among our writers, standup comedians, broadcasters, singers and critics. This is such a prevalent aspect of creative and 'cultural' of English-language use in Nigeria that it ought to feature prominently in these debates about what is happening to and in language in our country. As a matter of fact, this is an aspect that fascinates me personally almost endlessly, so much so that beyond the confines of this column, I shall probably write a book, a monograph on the subject.
Of course, Professor Irele is right: we should not be over-hasty in declaring that English is no longer foreign to us. And there is much to ponder in his implicit assumption that the precipitous decline in written and spoken English is possible at all because English is not autochthonous to these shores and has probably not been sufficiently indigenized. But I urge that we be a little more circumspect about these issues. I certainly have relented somewhat from my earlier position, as expressed in the series in response to Nnolim, that we have crossed the line between "foreign" and "indigenous" in the vocation of English in our country and our continent. On this note, I come to the end of this two-part series by returning to the point I raised earlier in this essay on why this topic of the past and future of English should matter to all of us, including the man and the woman in the street who face daily challenges of economic survival in a relentlessly harsh social and human environment. This leads me back to a brief resumption of my essential ideas and positions in the series on Nnolim.
Last week when I wrote and sent in the first of this two-part series, I had not known that Nnolim had written a rejoinder to the original series. Normally, it is the duty of the editorial staff to draw a columnist's attention to a rejoinder. In this case, that did not happen and it was thanks to a friend to whom Professor Nnolim had graciously given copies of both my pieces and his rejoinder that I got to know that in the "Sunday Magazine" section of the October 24 Sunday Guardian Nnolim had published his rejoinder to my series. This information got to me after I had sent in last week's column, months after Nnolim's rejoinder was published. For these reasons, I will be extremely brief and very much to the essential points here.
I will not respond in kind to the personal abuse and vituperation of Professor Nnolim. My series in response to him had faulted him very sharply on logical and factual grounds, but I never once descended to verbal insult in my series. I will keep to that here. The main point of Nnolim's rejoinder was that I refused to offer any blueprint, any concrete suggestions after my four-part series. He is right of course and I myself had stated quite explicitly that my series were not about offering any "solutions"; they were about raising issues for fruitful debate. And although Nnolim even quoted me on this deliberate decision not offer any nostrums, any so-called "solutions", Nnolim in his rejoinder declared that this was the act of a man devoid of ideas. On this note, Nnolim then devoted the greater part of his rejoinder to concrete suggestions on what is to be done, proposing these suggestions as a means of furthering debate on these issues and as a basis of state and governmental action and policies. On this point, I offer three very brief comments.
First, none, absolutely none of the suggestions offered by Nnolim in his rejoinder is new; they have all been offered innumerable times by many of our leading socio-linguists, singly and in their professional associations. Indeed, I found it very embarrassing that Nnolim was completely unaware of this fact. Secondly, Nnolim entirely misses the point in my original series that the most important, the most salient issues in this debate go well beyond the sort of things to which you look for the quick fix of state intervention, even if the state in question is a democratic, egalitarian one, which ours is not. One of my essential points was that as writers, scholars and critics, we still have a lot of self-clarification to achieve if we are to productively engage our language problems as they relate to the language-writing- literature nexus. If we, the "professionals" still have much to learn and unlearn, what can we say of politicians and administrators?
Thirdly and finally, Nnolim, did not touch – and could not begin to touch within the extreme intellectual narrowness of his purview – one of the great challenges I raised in my series, this being that fact that relatively speaking, writing is still both historically new in our country and our continent and has about it a great structural inequality between English and our indigenous languages and between our hundreds of autochthonous mother tongues themselves. Professor Nnolim, we came on these inequalities and they will still be here long after we are gone. What we can do, while we are here, is to beat back the scope of their impact on the great economic and social injustices of our day. For this, I am far more accustomed to raising critical issues than sending memos to the government, especially when a countless number of such memos have already been sent, again and again.
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
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