Apostle Paul in 1Corinthians 14v10-11 spoke with clear candour on the time-honoured importance of language, meaning and understanding. Hear his illumined thought: “There are, it may be, so many kinds of languages in the world, and none of them is without significance. Therefore, if I do not know the meaning of the language, I shall be a foreigner to him who speaks and he who speaks will be a foreigner to me.” Yomi Akinbami is a friend. He is a likeable, hardworking and God fearing soul who loves discipline and family cohesion. He is conservative, real, but sadly, a hardened Anglophile. The last attribute unnerves me. On my last social visit to Yomi, I unearthed a cultural disaster right under his cohesive roof. Jide, his second son, had invaded my universe the very second I sat on the soft settee. Could it be the ‘perf’ I had on?
Jide’s attitude towards me brought back memories of my childhood and the excitement I exuded at the sight of my father’s friends. But there is one important difference—my dad was never an Anglophile. Speaking Yoruba ‘ponbele’ made my dad looked as cool as geranium. He was a tribal tiger, or a culture preserver, with astonishing, not to say, passionate rebellion against the deployment of English language among his Yoruba peers. Nucturnally, he read his newspapers—Daily and Sunday Times—with such rigid avidity, which, to be fair, formed my formative addiction to English language and love of journalism. Publicly, he regarded English Language as a shatteringly inferior language to his Ibadan dialect. He never hid his direct antithesis to any sign of public Anglophonic air. He burnt the Englishman’s language with cultural relish.
Thirty minutes into my social visit to Yomi, Pauline language conundrum found sudden fulfillment. I called Jide and cooed some words in Yoruba ‘ponbele’ into his soft, young ears. I detected an innocent guilty look in his penetrating eyes. For a few thrilling, anticlimactic minutes, Jide stood motionless. Again, Pauline prognosis became real. That reality would later ignited bitter scholastic quarrel with Jide’s parents. Jide, a son of proud Yoruba ‘ponbele’ parentage neither could speak nor understand the seemingly baloney of a language I poured into his eardrum. To Jide, I am a foreigner- a foreigner to a boy born, bred and socialized in Ibadan. This horrible ambiguity portends a clear, step backward, culturally, which, in turn, represents the triumph of colonial darkness too thick to be dispersed by one great stroke of light or enlightenment. Jide had been held down helplessly in a hopeless bog of cultural confusion.
How could a boy of Yoruba parentage born in Ibadan be cruelly denied his own self-identity by a pair of self-conscious Anglophonic parents with untreated inferiority complex toward the English language? Recently, I listened to a radio programme in Ibadan that expressed social concern for the disappearance of Yoruba ‘ponbele’ among the speakers of the language. The station had a spinster who is looking for a Mr Right. To win her heart, phone-in listeners are encouraged to speak to her, in the uttermost, raw Yoruba ‘ponbele’ without any smallest word in English language. Mere saying ok disqualifies the suitor. For example, a word like television, in its inelastic, vintage ‘ponbele’ is ‘amohun maworan’.
I counted ten speakers but only one scaled the ‘foreign language trap’ hurdle and sailed away, I guess, to a fictive desert island with his fictive studio spinster. The prevailing clichés of the moment especially among some barely educated Yoruba people is the often futile notion and, of course, prideful insolence, of equating fluency in spoken English with academic brilliance, intelligence and being civilized. This fabulous sweeping stupidity has, in turn, sealed the fate of our children especially those with a domestic background where no language is allowed but English language as in the case of Jide. That aside, this revolting and nauseating cultural somersault could also be seen in social discussion. What on earth could encourage two Yoruba speaking friends, colleagues, associates and classmates converse in English language in social interaction? This cultural contradiction debilitates me. It exceeds the limit of contemptuous shame. It is a sad, pompous affair that merely puffs up the ego of the speakers but more damagingly destroyed our Yoruba heritage. Why are all cultural rebels forever proud and gobsmacked by a captive language like English language with all its savagery on our traditional, cultural, cosmic and social life?
Abroad, this appalling state of affair is quite common in the Diaspora where we breed devastatingly illiterate children who could not speak their parents’ language. We exhibit all the ugly traits of cultural vampires who want to know the ‘shires’ more than the owners of the ‘ shires’. Majority of Yoruba people in the Diaspora hardly speak ‘ponbele’ to their wards but rather submit to the colonial mentality of breeding Queens English’ speaking children, which, in turn, elevates as homage to white man’s cultural superiority. The white man, with imperial air, albeit justified, mocks us as people whose brains are emptier than a camel’s bladder in a world where cultural identity is being violently recaptured from its colonially driven forced exile.
Asian, Hispanics, Welsh and Irish are valiant guardians of their traditional languages with no wannabe illusion of wanting to be Shakespearean more than the real William Shakespeare. It is time to retrace our steps backward and relight the doused fire of our noble grail-Yoruba ‘ponbele’- through cultural nationalism against the cultural pollution of English language as our preferred lingua franca. That is saving the future of Jide and our tribal languages from cultural slavery and extinction.
