Miscellaneous
Cornelius Hamelberg
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
Dr. Oohay
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Cornelius Hamelberg
In this AI age of cyber technology
Long live the oral tradition !
Long live the manuscripts fromTimbuktu !
Long live the Universe-ity of Sankore !
Dr Oohay, it was ages ago that the dinosaur known as Deep Blue wiped out biocomputer Garry Kasparov. Nowadays none of the human grandmasters and world champions should have a chance against the future man-made super-intelligent AI technologies capable of analysing and processing all the complex S.H.I.T. and making accurate decisions in circa one billionth of a second.
Scary:: Yoshua Bengio : AI Fears
Whilst the late Wa Thiong’o believed that (for so many reasons such as identity, human rights, ethnic chauvinism, self-preservation, heritage etc ) we should preserve and develop our indigenous languages and literature, science and philosophy - although from the point of view of where he is right now, perhaps he doesn't mind that much if we don’t write or pray in Gikuyu or Hebrew etc , since he may have come to the conclusion that there are more important life matters in this world, than preserving all the world's languages that are said to have been originally spawned through the Tower of Babel ( I almost wrote “ babble”) and, by the way , too late, Krim, an indigenous Sierra Leone language is now officially dead, since it takes a speech community of at least 400 people to maintain a language ( keep it alive)
In the meantime, I’d just like to note that in this world of diversity and enrichment of our common humanity, nobody is being prevented from praying to God ( Who it is said understands all languages) or writing a couple of love poems and songs to God, and /or his and her beloved, either speaking in tongues or in his and her own God-given mother tongue or in the language that can best communicate his thoughts and emotions to whatever specific audience.
How many poems can the eloquent CAO boast that he has written in his mother tongue?
(Psychologists advise parents -especially Diaspora parents to speak their “ emotional language" - their mother tongue to their babies and very young children)
It’s said that Jesus spoke his mother tongue.
Hopefully, the ideas contained in the library known as “The Bible” , and the Quran, the Hindu Scriptures, the Buddhist texts - Dhammapada etc, can be made accessible in other languages.
Let's thank the Almighty !
I also thank God for Talmud, Kebra Nagast, D. O. Fagunwa, Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey, King Sunny Ade, Mr Macaroni…
In about 100 years from now ( if they haven’t blown up the planet by then) Nigerians will be praising Burna Boy for carrying forward their heritage into the "modern “ age through song and dance music…
Dr. Oohay
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Dr Oohay,
Many thanks for highlighting Okot P'Bitek’s Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol -literary critiques - lamentations - of a sociological nature ( of the then modern Africa in his neck of the woods) which preceded Wa Thiongo’s later peregrinations about decolonising literature, by more than a decade. Yes Sir, Naija pidgin ,other pidgins too and the literary servings of Amos Tutuola and the likes of Sam Selvon without any grammatical or “ literary” inhibitions caused by inferiority complex and colonial mental-ity
With regard to the dearly departed, there’s always the risk of committing the occasional biographical heresy, but, incidentally, I just checked Biko’s Facebook where he enlightens his fans about the meaning of the name “Ngugi” - directly from the horse’s mouth, albeit not posthumously :
Onwubiko Agozino
“I once asked a Kenyan intellectual who is fluent in Kikuyu what is the meaning of the name, Ngugi? She scratched her head and told me that it has no meaning. I could not believe that there is such a thing as a meaningless African name. Then, while attending the 7th Pan African Congress in Kampala in 1994, I was pleasantly surprised to see the Wizard of the Crow himself sitting beside me. I asked him whether it is true that his name has no meaning? He smiled and told me that the name means Labor. I thanked him for his labor of love for African literature and for the decolonization of the world. Nice name!”
About what you (Dr.Oohay) deem impracticalities - “tends to make such ventures hardly workable” etc, who knows - at a more advanced technological age when a more hybrid humanoid AI could have developed both intuition , self-awareness, individuated ethnic identity and feeling - passion - not only of a cerebral nature, to the extent that it is aware that it / he /or she is writing brilliant poetry - AI could be excelling at composing - not only Arias - in Yoruba ( like Hubert Ogunde) but in Hausa too.
And how would you like that ?
Like the last sentence in Animal Farm:
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which”
Nor can we underestimate the pervasive influence of Bard Wole Soyinka on some of the aspiring Nigerian men ( and women) of letters… as I have noticed. I have failed to notice any such influence on Ojogbon the dignified and humble, for example, or the spontaneous and self-composed Teju Cole - or the late great Pius Adesanmi of Blessed memory, but that much is clear in e.g. the journalese of some wannabe pompous entities ( pretentious monkeys) - pompous - without Soyinka’s background, exposure and the understandings and frames of reference in which he is so grounded, marinated. The mimic men ( some of them ) can all go to hell ( literally) As the evil spirit replied in Acts 19, ”Jesus I know, and I’ve heard about Paul, but who are you?”
All said and done, although we have all learned to speak , and even to play through imitation, there’s nothing like the original, the real thing whether it's in Jamaican Broken, Baba Kadiri’s Rikssvenska or the King’s English. (As a Wolof dude from Senegal once told me about “Jollof rice” - after I told him that Sierra Leone is the champion when it comes to Jollof rice - “There’s nothing like the real thing”, he chirped, “The Original - that’s why it’s called Wolof Rice” - although a rose by any other name would smell as sweet…