Nigeria: "Have You Write Your Name?" or the Death of English in Nigeria

12 November 2014
opinion

I exaggerate, of course. All the languages of the world will have died before English dies in Nigeria. And of all the languages threatened by extinction, English is hardly one, many thanks to the extraordinary success of England in colonising nearly two-thirds of the world before the sun did finally set on the great British Empire on which the sun was never to set. Still, the sun of its language, enriched and revitalised by the diverse cultures of the world it dominated had burned its alphabet and grammar on the tongue of the world. The rest was left to the hegemonic power of cultural imperialism, as chiefly propagated by the United States of America, heir to Great Britain.

In short, English is here to stay in Nigeria, for good or for ill -- mostly for good, if you ask me. The place of the languages of imperialist conquest in "independent" former colonies has been debated to death. From Obi Wali's 1963 essay "The dead-end of African literature" to Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, there is hardly any issue worth litigating anew on the subject. The rude fact of history which, "despite its wrenching pain," as Maya Angelou aptly pointed out, "cannot be unlived but if faced with courage need not be lived again," makes it clear that Nigeria will remain in essence a linguistically-imagined country, bound to the linguistic medium of Lord Lugard's imperialist contraption: English.

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