I was at a wedding in Boston, Massachusetts, many years ago; a Yoruba wedding full of pomp and circumstance. If there is one thing Nigerians in Diaspora have done well, it is the tenacious retention of their party culture; the food, the clothes, the party favours, the music, and even the spraying. I understand it got so bad at a time in New York the FBI, that’s the Secret Service, took an interest. Who sprays hundreds or thousands of dollars in America when the minimum wage is $7.25? We even do “take-away”, the greedy hoarding of choice meats, moinmoin, jollof rice, pounded yam, asaro, to take home, even though we can all afford these in our homes. They are quite affordable at our African grocery stores with the dollar power. One thing we have not done very well is the retention and transfer of our Mother Tongue to our children. Mine is Yoruba. Mother Tongue is the primary vehicle of culture, which conveys the thought, traditions, knowledge, history and heritage of a people. It is the bedrock of identity.
Diaspora parents being first generation immigrants do not seem to be aware of the great loss their children suffer by this great cultural deficit. Some of us defer to the idea that children should integrate and be American as quickly as possible, and they think the best way to do this is to annihilate home language and make English dominant. It is an ignorant perspective because research in the United States shows that immigrant children who retain their home language perform better than their peers academically and have higher self-esteem than those eager to Americanise by speaking English only. Most of us parents take the lazy route, the path of least resistance. I belong to this later group. I succumbed to the language environment and use English mostly with our children after some time. It was my husband, an African-American anthropologist of Yoruba traditional religion, who systematically taught them Yoruba, speaking it to them and encouraging literacy in it by asking them to write essays in Yoruba, and rewarding them generously when they do. As for me, they heard Yoruba mostly as a language of threat, often to correct their behaviour in the public when I wanted to hide my intentions to punish them from bystanders. Till this day, they remember “Eleda a daa ju e lo.” To my shame, I also told Ijapa stories to the children, in English.
The wedding in Boston included an Elewi who gave the most beautiful rendition, including the oriki of the couple. We had all swayed to the music of Ebenezer Obey’s “Eto Igbeyawo laye” and then it was the turn of the chairman to do his part. He took the microphone and started with prayers for the couple. He then waxed poetic about how they should conduct their marital life, with proverbs, jokes, and anecdotes, all in Yoruba. He had gone on for about ten minutes when someone quietly walked up to him and informed him the couple do not speak Yoruba. Two young Yoruba-American professionals, raised by Yoruba parents, have in a generation, lost their ancestral language. We all lost something that day. It is a huge loss with deep implications for identity, growth, rootedness, and psychic well-being in a world where black people have been constructed by other people as non-human for hundreds of years. Our language and culture are our refuge. Globalisation is another word for Western colonisation. We are at a point in history where we are able to choose how we engage foreign influences. No longer under colonisation, we have all the tools and the resources in this century to retain, transform and renew vital aspects of our culture, while we add the advantages gained from Western education and technology.
This brings me to the desperate and misguided attitude of parents living in Nigeria who raise their children to speak English only. It is a bizarre turn of events. Our dear friend, an award-winning Lagos filmmaker said this is because parents want their children to speak Mama Charlie’s language. Mama Charlie? I inquired. He calmly told me she is otherwise known as Queen Elizabeth. According to him, affluent parents pay a lot of tuition to schools that put the children under air-conditioners and set them in front of CNN so that they can acquire English. Mama Charlie is 91 years old. When she joins her ancestors, she would have done her job, transferring her culture, traditions, and language intact to her descendants. To the parents who deprive their children of their Mother Tongue because they think speaking English would advance them better in life, the questions to ask are: Is Mama Charlie more important than your mother or grandmother? Why would you not be a responsible custodian and transfer the mother tongue to your own children when you yourself were raised with it? Why would you give the children a short shift? Why do you consider your own life ways, traditions, beliefs, and values inferior enough to abandon them for one that you would never understand or master? The best writers we produced in Nigeria wrote in excellent English. Their mastery of English happened precisely because they had a deep understanding of their primary languages. Pick up any Achebe or Soyinka, and you know these are people who are rooted in the richness and beauty of Igbo and Yoruba languages.
No tree is healthy with weak or damaged roots. The children we are raising now become the adults of tomorrow. Depriving them of their language heritage, right on their own land, is an abomination. In Cambridge, where we lived when our children were young, I encountered Yoruba in the most unexpected way one evening. Our children’s elementary school had an event to which parents were invited. At the beginning of the event came a song which we were all asked to stand up and sing. It goes, “Afanga, Alafia, Ase, Ase,” repeated several times. We were told it was an African song. My husband and I looked at each other and smiled. We recognised it. The original song was “Awa nfe Alafia, Ase, Ase.” Cambridge school children learnt this song through a Cuban woman, a drummer, an Olorisa, who was hired to enrich the children culturally in their after-school programmes. It is therefore alarming to see little Tayo or Bidemi in Ibadan or Lagos greeting adults in English, totally deprived of the depth, nuances, and beauty of Yoruba language. It is an ominous sign of wholesale destruction of culture, and the children will bear the greatest costs. Parents must be faithful custodians of our languages for the regeneration and health of those coming after us.
Bunmi Fatoye-Matory, Ekiti girl, attended Universities of Ife and Ibadan, and Harvard University.
Credit: Bunmi Fatoye-Matory, Premium Times. Photo: Google Plus