Re: (accented or inarticulate?) Accent War in ‘Jand’
joan.O'sa Oviawe
Where do you differentiate between being accented and being a poor speaker? Some folk are just simply hard to follow when they speak. Is it the so-called strong accent or they need to work on intonation and voice? It's easy for some to hide behind "accent" when they are poor public speakers. For example, I tend to have difficulty understanding UMYA - naija's President (when he speaks). Na im accent or e just need to speak better?
joan
"lady" joan.O'sa
-------------------------
"every problem has an expiration date"
"There's only one thing money won't buy, and that is poverty."
("`-''-/").___..--''"`-._
`o_ o ) `-. ( ).`-.__.`)
(_Y_.)' ._ ) `._ `. ``-..-'
_..`--'_..-_/ /--'_.' .'
((!.-.-'' ((!.-' ((!.-'
P Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.
Ed Taylor, "Mesa, Arizona: Car Dealership Sued for denying Nigerian Employee Promotion because of His Accent," May 31, 2005; available at http://naijanet.com/news/source/2005/may/31/1002.html.
From: Poet <lean...@gmail.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Accent War in 'Jand'
To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
Date: Friday, February 20, 2009, 9:20 AM
Hello Amatoritsero and Pius,Isn't this OUR story, most of us though? I remember that some years back a Nigerian-American of Yoruba extraction was suing his car sales company somewhere in Arizona (if I remember correctly) for promoting a White American subordinate over him when a role he ought to have moved into became vacant, and all on account of his having "an accent". This terrible social malaise is so endemic it became a major area of sociolinguistic scholarship in the US and beyond called 'linguistic profiling' - an allusion to racial profiling - Professor John Baugh formerly of Stanford University worked on this in relation to Housing negotiations over the phone in the US. His study established that certain accents/dialects of English were relatively less likely to make successful housing applications in some parts of the USA. He went on to serve as a consultant to government and agencies on the matter for a while. AND of course, Soyinka's 'Telephone Conversation'!But the diaspora experience apart, one recalls that linguistic profiling has also served inglorious ends in Nigeria's History. Without unearthing too many painful memories, once upon a dark moment one's claim to life hung on whether they said TORO or TOLO on interrogation, the old thro' pence of the 60s.Like any other kind of profiling, it is simply evil. Diversity must rule!Tope OmoniyiOn Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 12:45 AM, Amatoritsero Ede <esul...@gmail.com> wrote:
Pius,This is the linguistic equivalent of intolerance towards 'Other' sexualities or thier denial and repression. let someone try to make you disappear your or my ngbati accent and we will see how successful they are. Is it not the same arrogance we see in the accent police that can be out in the sexuality police?
By Pius Adesanmi
Two years ago a white female student was raped on the campus of the Canadian University that pays my salary. Ottawa Police posted a security alert everywhere on campus. University Communications also sent out the police alert as a campus-wide email communiqué. I read it, empathized with the victim, and wondered how that could have happened in our otherwise serene and beautiful campus. The authors of the communiqué almost ruined things when I got to that part of the notice where they solicit the help of the University community for information concerning the suspect. Hear them:
Description of Suspect:
White male
height between 5'8" and 5'10" with broad shoulders and a chubby build in his mid-twenties
bald head wearing a blue sweatshirt
carrying a white Macy's bag
spoke English with no accent (my emphasis)
Spoke English with no accent? That sentence, of course, means that the culprit has a Canadian accent. I've always been amused by the cultural arrogance which makes Canadians - and their American brothers - assume that there is anyone in this wide planet of ours who speaks English without an accent! In the US, I've encountered Americans speaking in the most incomprehensible southern drawl and who make statements quite unselfconsciously about your accent: "oh, I just love your African accent. It's awesome". Naturally, they are assuming they have no accent. It's worse whenever I'm in London – having the English comment about my Nigerian accent in that funny accent of theirs and assuming, of course, that they have no accent. I've often had to tell my western interlocutors that one Canadian, American, or Briton among 140 million Nigerians is a funny man speaking funny English in a funny accent!
Wole Soyinka gave a talk here at Carleton University in November 2006. During the question and answer session, one Canadian student asked a question that she had to repeat several times because the poor Nobel Laureate could not understand her – hers was the thickest Canadian accent I've encountered in all my years in this country. An exasperated Soyinka asked me to interpret – I was moderator – her question and apologized to her for his inability to comprehend her accent. "Oh my God, I have an accent?" she muttered incredulously into the live microphone in her hand. It simply had never occurred to the poor lady - and nobody had ever told her – that she had an accent. Accents are for Africans, Indians, and other coloured dregs of the British Empire! I told Soyinka later that he was lucky we weren't in litigation-crazy America. In America, the outraged lady would certainly have sued him for pain and suffering!
The war of accents is a tough one for a culturally-sensitive Diasporic Nigerian like me. I have spent the better part of the last ten years struggling to retain my Nigerian accent – I want my interlocutors here in North America to catch a whiff egusi and orisirisi in my sentences; to sniff the flavor of paraga and burukutu in my speech; to imbibe the aroma of garri and kulikuli in my utterances. So, I warn my Western undergraduate and graduate students to clean their ears with cotton bud before coming to my class. Nigerian English being internationally intelligible, my responsibility to them is clear, audible English delivered in impeccable grammar. Nobody should expect me to say warrer (water), meerring (meeting), Orrawa (Ottawa), and Trrono (Toronto).
Incidentally, the pressure to "civilize" my accent comes mostly from Nigeria. Often, Nigerian interlocutors on the phone express surprise that I am still talking like them "after all these years". Folks who have never left Lagos have better "jand accent" (American or British) than me! Their affectations of foreign accents can be infuriating if they are of the Victoria Island-Ikoyi-Lekki-Victoria Garden City axis. My undergraduate nieces have given up on me. Whenever I'm home and they want to show off "their Uncle in jand" to their campus friends, they always have to beg me desperately: "ah, please Uncle, don't disgrace us at that party O. Don't go there and use that your Yoruba English accent O. We told our friends you're a Professor based in jand." Obviously, whether I indulge them by switching to my impeccable American accent – I've had to groom one over the years for emergency use whenever a North American interlocutor absolutely refuses to understand my ngbati accent and communication breaks down totally! - depends on how beautiful their friends are!
Pius Adesanmi, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Director, Project on New African Literatures (PONAL)
Department of English
Carleton University
Ottawa, Canada
K1S 5B6
Tel: +1 613 520 2600 ext. 1175
www.projectponal.com
--
____________________________
SSHRC Fellow &
Doctoral Candidate
Carleton University
Ottawa, Canada
Editor & Managing Editor: Gboungboun Magazine and PONAL Quarterly Forum:Project on New African Literatures
www.projectponal.com
Publisher & Managin Editor: Maple Tree Literary Supplement
www.mtls.ca
Ibukunolu Alao Babajide
My mother trained in England between 1955 and 1960 as a teacher. She always beat all her Oyinbo mates in grammar but she had to work on her accent. Accent is your natural speech track usually picked from your mother tongue or the first tonal encounter you meet as a child.
UMYA and Murtala Mohammed as native hausa speakers will speak English with a Hausa accent. I suspect the sound "v" is absent in Hausa. So when they pronounce government you will hear "Gaument".
My beautiful and brilliant Indian Chemistry teacher in secondary school Mrs. Abrahams did not have the sound "v" in her native tongue so when she taught us Molar Volume we heard Molar Wolume. A classmate cherisrtend her Molar Warrior.
You can be a good public speaker and still have a problem with pronunciation.
IBK
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone provided by Celtel Tanzania
From: "joan.O'sa Oviawe"
Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2009 03:58:33 -0800
To: <USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: (accented or inarti culate?) Accent War in ‘Jand’
Poet
Pius Adesanmi
Hey, Joan, Tope, and IBK,
When I mentioned my kulikuli accent, no be the Adelabu/Jegede Sokoya variety O. Una wan spoil my market value? Joan, I was coming in from the ideological perspective. This assumption that there is some accentless English resident in Britain, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand while the rest of us are ruining civilized ears with our Englishes. There is a game I play tirelessly here in Canada and in the US: be the first to comment nicely about your Canadian or American interlocutor's accent. Make sure you're flashing your best smile as you pay the compliment. Almost always, your interlocutor has never ever been told and has never ever imagined that s/he has an accent. I draw tremendous satisfaction from the facial expressions I get! Try it today in Seattle my friend Joan.
Pius |
Pius Adesanmi, Ph.D. Associate Professor Director, Project on New African Literatures (PONAL) Department of English Carleton University Ottawa, Canada K1S 5B6 Tel: +1 613 520 2600 ext. 1175 www.projectponal.com |
Pius Adesanmi
Taking 2011 Seriously By Pius Adesanmi Only the ruling PDP have shown that they understand what is at stake in the presidential elections of 2011 and have, consequently, begun serious preparations. Professor Maurice Iwu is already looking forward to a second opportunity to organize elections that would be the envy of the United States and Ghana, two countries, he assures us, have lessons to learn from Nigeria in matters of electoral conduct and organization. The usual suspects in the maintenance of the status quo are also fully mobilized. Strange bedfellows are closing ranks to consolidate class interests and perpetuate the slavery of the Nigerian people. Atiku Abubakar has visited Jesus and Mohammed and was instructed to reconcile with Olusegun Obasanjo for the sake of Nigeria; James Ibori has visited Pastor Enoch Adeboye who has become a rock of ages cleft for PDP looters; President Yar’Adua’s daughters are getting married strategically; Tony Anenih, has been quietly yanked from oblivion and placed at that copious source of electoral slush funds called the Nigerian Ports Authority. Does anyone remember Olabode George and his role in the last round of Federal elections? Ibrahim Babangida is making some waves. Strange things are happening. The fate of the Nigerian people is being sealed as I write. If the looters record another victory over democracy in 2011, they would have earned their “victory”. They are the only ones who are taking 2011 seriously. The Nigerian people aren’t. I haven’t seen anything that is even remotely close to the scale of preparations being made by the enemy. Vincent Ogbulafor was not joking when he promised us sixty more years of PDP-supervised bondage. His party controls most of the state owned mass media, all the instruments of state-sanctioned violence, and all three tiers of government. They can afford to stroll leisurely towards a Maurice Iwu-assured victory in 2011. Yet, they have commenced purposeful and visionary planning for the next do-or-die rigging festival. For people so incompetent in the art of running a modern state, you’ve got to admire their sophistication, vision, and industry in the planning and organization of electoral fraud. Their meticulous preparations should awaken the Nigerian masses. By now, we should be witnessing the sort of massive mobilization spearheaded by pro-democracy movements, civil society groups, and human rights organizations during the June 12 and the anti-Abacha phases of our people’s struggle. Socially conscious organizations should begin to organize their signed-up members into conscience squads in Nigeria. I am thinking of the thousands of Obama house parties that were held (hosted by volunteers who understood the stakes) across the US by youths who subsequently fanned out as foot soldiers. Nigerian youths are part of the internet age. Among them, we now have more netizens than citizens. Internet-savvy organizations could begin to get them to sign up for house parties across the country. Those of us in the Diaspora should put our money where our mouths are. I recently joined forces with three other diasporic Nigerians from my home town to start a small listserv into which we are recruiting young netizens from our village. Currently we have forty of them across Nigeria. They are foot soldiers in a project we have baptized Operation Crazy Bald Heads. The idea is for them to host house parties from March 2009 in our village. The three of us who are coordinating and funding things from our bases abroad will phone in. We’ll discuss civics and map strategies to prevent the PDP from stealing our votes in 2011. This summer and the next, I’ll be home with those youths, visiting churches, mosques, beer parlours, markets, and other public places in the village for sensitization campaigns.
Other planned activities cannot be divulged here.The determination of our members to prevent the PDP from stealing votes, rigging, stuffing ballot boxes and terrorizing lawful voters in the village is encouraging. We are determined to secure that village for democracy in 2011. Admittedly, our efforts are just a drop in the ocean and entirely local but if one million Nigerians in the Diaspora undertake similar initiatives in their villages and towns, we just might get somewhere. The current political class has turned itself into a deadly enemy of the people and we are not naive. We are mindful of the fact that the ruling party is a vicious nest of killers as Wole Soyinka so aptly described it. It may yet succeed in raping us,
given its resources and modus operandi. The difference this time is that we will have the satisfaction of having done everything we could to take our village back from the oppressors. This is the little we |
joan.O'sa Oviawe
IBK, UMYA is a poor public speaker like many other Nigerian politicians. I once listened to him talk/read his speech and for forty minutes, all I heard was "Nigeria" and "seven-point agenda." This has nothing to do with his Hausa accent. In fact, the Hausa intonation can be very pleasant to the ears when some people speak.
Tope, thanks for providing the link to Mutabaruka, he is fascinating.
Best,
joan
"lady" joan.O'sa
-------------------------
"every problem has an expiration date"
"There's only one thing money won't buy, and that is poverty."
("`-''-/").___..--''"`-._
`o_ o ) `-. ( ).`-.__.`)
(_Y_.)' ._ ) `._ `. ``-..-'
_..`--'_..-_/ /--'_.' .'
((!.-.-'' ((!.-' ((!.-'
P Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.
Olabode Ibironke
Language is destiny! Isn’t this Bill Cosby’s argument? This is the angle I find most complicated and intriguing as I reflect on Obama’s success. Not being as bold and courageous as Pius, I find myself unconsciously retreat from people who find it difficult to understand my English as they themselves retreat from me. This is not simply an Anglo-America vs. others affair. My conversations with my Chinese friends are usually interrupted at the moment we become mutually unintelligible. And I see their so-call herd mentality as a direct result of the difficulty and pain of communicating in English. This is a real issue here: language as the greatest force for unification and segregation.
ch...@nwokolo.com
www.african-writing.com
AW is a quality, literary paper committed to the literature of continental and diasporic Africa.
-----Original Message-----
From: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com [mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com]On Behalf Of Pius Adesanmi
Sent: 21 February 2009 17:04
To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: (accented or inarticulate?) Accent War in ‘Jand’
Shola Adenekan
I want to thank the contributors on this forum. I'm very, very impressed! I'm a PhD candidate in African literature at the University of Birmingham, England, and I'm looking at emerging African voices online, with Kenya and Nigeria as case studies. I've got many materials but I still need more. Are there any websites, blogs and online magazines I should be looking at. I'm already in tune with the likes of Kachifo, Africa-writing.com and Kwani.org.
I'll greatly appreciate your help. By the way, I also edit The New Black Magazine - http://www.thenewblackmagazine.com
Thanks again!
Regards,
Shola
Tony Agbali
I agree. The governator of now troubled California has an accent too. But he made it in America as a film star and now as governor. Accent as Pius has already noted can be defined by the subtle and conscious way of having power over; of elevating oneself and decimation the other. It is in this that together with language as script and spoken; the issue of accent emerges. Accent is simply a matter of cultural convenience that is mapped by spatiality and regulated by point and level of entry into specific spaces and linguistic niches, that is at times vehemently structured by the norms of "age" and "identity politics." Thus, it is easy for young children brought from say Nigeria to easily imbibe the American accent, whereas for folks like the rest of us already lingua-formed in "outer- alter spaces" and forged through years
of Naija turanci, only God can save us.
Talking about accent, the other day a fellow country person just shoot out and I thought that North Korea was sending its arrowheaded missiles right into my ears. Some accents can be troubling. As much as accents are markers of identity, true communication must ensure efforts to make onself as intelligible to the majority within a communicative environment, hence it has the ability to delimit one's social and economic progress. True, we may have accents, and at times some actually express they love the way some of us talk in these accents, but when it is an absolute problem of embedded and embodied unintelligibility it becomes a problematic burden.
Actually, those with linguistic hears are most probably aware that even "Americans" do have their own regional accents, including some dialects so to say. The drawls and the brogues are also markers of specific speech communities, including indexical markers of origins, even within the U.S. It doesn't take a sociolinguistic or a linguistic or social geography to note these speech variations. Accents exist everywhere, it only surfaces depending on how deep you look for it.
One final observation, is that the few times I have had to do drive-through fast-food, especially when traveling, most of those who would likely perfectly understand my "accentic" ordering would be "whites," whereas African-Americans would often tend to say "what did you say?" Therefore, within the same US, is the accent thing also ethnically/racially determined? Of course, I note this knowing that exceptions do exist, but this is a general observation over time. --- On Sat, 2/21/09, ch...@nwokolo.com <ch...@nwokolo.com> wrote: |
Ibukunolu Alao Babajide
My next door office mate is from Karnaktaka state in India. A very bright man who in his set belong to within 5% of the most brilliant in India. From the general category (i.e no affirmative action or quota) he got selected into the all India civil service and further into the ultra competitive Indian police service.
He studied electrical engineering before joining the police. He is fast on the take and can easily grasp legal principles and concepts.
He speaks English with his Indian accent. Initially communication between us was tough but as we got closer I understood him better and I am sure he too got the hang of my Lagos English (accent).
When he slows down it is easier for us both but when he fires English at the same speed he shoots his own native language I am always lost. Also he must add "not so?" or "isn't it" at the end of every sentence. Initially I felt obliged to answer "yes" which became a chore. However it was him speaking English through the coloration of his mother tongue. All he required was a nod, an approving gesture or a smile to convince him I understood him so far and simply to demur in any way with a frown or with a "No" for him to repeat or recast his message.
Over time we now communicate better and our friendship has grown. He is a remarkable person with his remarkable accent. I also hope he feels the same way about me and my accent.
There is a Yoruba adage "Ohun ti eku nje lo fi nlo omo egbe e" meaning it is what the rat eats that it offers its visitors. In short as humans we are wired to think others are like us and we expect them to behave, talk, and generate ideas or understand them the way we do. If they don't then they have an accent.
Now as my own rule of thumb in 90% of these reactions it is harmless. In 5% we also over react because we are too sensitive but in 5% it is pure unadulterated racist condescension and it is in this situation that the racist hiding behind accent should be exposed and confronted with his racism.
The difficulty but a profound challenge of intellect and judgement is acquiring the ability and wisdom to discern when the "accent" thing is an innocent you are different from me, or a racist you are inferior and beneath me. No matter how smart you may think you are, I will remind you that I am superior and you are inferior to me.
Cheers.
IBK
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone provided by Celtel Tanzania
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: (accented or inarticulat e?) Accent War in ‘Jand’
Ibukunolu Alao Babajide
Like every small scale miner will tell you when you hit a fortune making seam of ore you are never sure how deep or long it is. Is it inches or miles? You may know in a day or years later after your discovery have made a fortune for some, caused genocide and concentration camps for others or even loss of land and culture. I digress too far!
Yes your ideological imperative in crafting your lovely and insight laden piece is all too clear and palpable. What you have unwittingly done is rub the lamp three times and unleashed the genie of perspectives.
The cultural, sociological, political, economical, historical, psychological, colo-mentality, mental, technological (make I stop?) perspectives are embedded in your piece.
That explains the popularity and acclaim that attends it in some of the forums I sent it to. A good friend, Adey with a "y" from originally from Ijebu Igbo now heavily "accented" in the US of A even called me an Iroko and Baba kekere simply for sharing. I just wonder what he will call you whose cerebral effort produced the piece.
Atomic Bomb of Kwara (a boxer beat you to that) was it Dele Jonathan or Hogan Jimoh. My memory and staying too long in exile fail me. I recommend "Awe and Shock". Whatever you get must be better than Iroko whose majesty and kingship of trees lead it to the razor sharp serrated fangs of saws and chains in the bush and sawmills. Its dismembered parts adorn lonely railway tracks from London to Edinburgh perfectly spaced such that they cannot hear each other's sighs of pain and home sickness.
My brother more grease to your elbow.
IBK
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone provided by Celtel Tanzania
From: Pius Adesanmi
Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2009 09:03:54 -0800 (PST)
To: <USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
Ibukunolu Alao Babajide
Thank you. This is illuminating. I just watched Zebrudaya alias 4.30 on YouTube this morning. He made mince meat of Queen's English but transmitted and communicated humour far beyond that language was designed to do.
You also remind me of my daughter born and bred in London. She had an accent for her Londoner school friends and another for her mother and I and her Nigerian cousins and family. It is uncanny how she seamlessly flows in and of one to the other.
Yes indeed there are many sides to this and you have clarified some. When I emigrated in 1987 to London, I was an old dog too old to learn new accent tricks.
Now I know why.
Thanks
IBK
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone provided by Celtel Tanzania
From: Poet
Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2009 15:12:14 +0000
To: <USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: (accented or inarti culate?) Accent War in ‘Jand’
ch...@nwokolo.com
www.african-writing.com
AW is a quality, literary paper committed to the literature of continental and diasporic Africa.
-----Original Message-----
From: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com [mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com]On Behalf Of Ibukunolu Alao Babajide
Sent: 22 February 2009 15:44
To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: (accented or inarticulate?) Accent War in ‘Jand’
kenneth harrow
- hi all
to give a slightly different take on accents. when i was young (18), i spent part of a summer in pau, france, studying french. the class was for foreigners, so we all came from everywhere other than france. i had grown up around new york, and took a new york accent, especially the famous brooklyn accent, as a sign of crassness, if not relative ignorance. i wasn't taught to speak with any particular accent, and didn't know i had an accent until i saw others respond to my speech, but the brooklyn accent was very different from my own (i grew up in mount vernon, which borders on the bronx where most of my father's family lived).
well, there was a dutch girl who went out with some guy from new york, and in chatting at the dejeuner table, she opined that the new york, especially the strong brooklyn variety of accent was really attractive. i was slightly amazed at the idea--that such an ugly accent could be thought attractive struck me as ludicrous. of course, for us (people where i grew up) a french accent was suave and definitely the most attractive. others that were more declasse would be italian accents, since we grew up with many italian kids who were relatively poor.
i never really thought about how much class values drove all this: the lower classes--italians, poor jews, irish--were associated with vulgarity, noise, lack of sophistication. french was closer to upper class speech, though not like oxford accents or the like which bespoke snobbism.
now i view with nostalgia those times when regional accents--southern accents, massachusetts accents, western accents, brooklyn accents--are disappearing. all americans are converging on some kind of tv accent; kids grow up, leave their home regions, and regional accents are flattening out, disappearing. in ny one doesn't hear any more those strong accents--they are gone like my ancestors, les morts qui ne sont pas morts, who spoke with a real accent, a really different accent, which was gone by the time my parents had come on to the assimilated scene and no longer even understood their parents' original languages.
ken
Kenneth W. Harrow
Professor of English
Michigan State University
har...@msu.edu
517 353-7243
fax 353 3755
Olumide Olaniyan
From: Ibukunolu Alao Babajide <ibk...@gmail.com>
To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sunday, 22 February, 2009 15:51:26
Thomas Reardon
Dear All,
I think accent (relative to some "norm" in a place) is valued at the power/richness of the place the accent reflects. The accent has no meaning in itself. When I was a boy in the late 1950s (in US), a heavily accented German scientist was the usual image of a "genius" (to be feared but heeded); it was the image of Einstein, speaking in a heavy accent, and that accent said "I am genius." The strong accent of Maurice Chevalier in French, speaking in English, said "I am from the land of romance, an older and greater civilization." The heavy accent of a British aristocrat speaking in America at that time said "In your subconscious, I represent “deep power.” I am Irish American, and grew up hearing my father tell me that when he was young an Irish accent was considered a joke, the sound of a worker, a dog; comedians imitated them to indicate a stupid laughable low class person; by the 1960s, however, and we had moved from the Irish ghettos and poorhouses into middle class however, and after the amazing shock of producing a president from our ranks (I remember my family crying, they thought it was impossible to rise from lowest to President), no Irish jokes were heard and the accent was thought just charming only. (Imagine the change and rise that represents: recall that in the 1860s in England there was a debate, after the famine killed a million in a tiny island, whether Irish were actually humans and thus the deaths were a true problem). When I was a child, the accent of a Chinese man (still considered second class citizen, a little yellow bucktoothed man) was just considered a joke, "no tickee, no washee." Now tech ads show a Chinese young man, savvy and urbane, and films show Chinese nerds doing amazing calculations and speaking with light Chinese accents. It is becoming the accent of power; of course in a few decades it will be the accent of the largest economy on earth and that accent will indicate to the listener “I am powerful, rich, and lead the world’s economy and am also from a 5000 year old civilization.” A long way from “no tickee no washee”, no? Yet the same accent.
The accent, just like facial features, take on the aura of power of the group that has them. the accent does not confer power, it signals from what power (or powerlessness) base the person comes. In that sense, the forum participants might d decompose reaction to accent into a chain rule: (1) the mapping of power/lessness to the accent, and (2)the mapping of the attitude to power/lessness to the fact of power/lessness.
If a student in my class speaks with the accent of the Detroit ghetto, I know immediately that that indicates he has, as my working hypothesis, a background of poverty. The probability of that is high. My seeing that link is merely statistical, logical. My hypothesis of deprivation being revealed by the accent is testable (based on his background); I can also discern whether there is accent plus grammatical errors (would show deprivation) or accent with no grammatical errors (shows origin but either he was in richer family but same neighborhood, or he is a personal outlier). The next issue is what is my attitude about being with a person with a high probability of being from a deprived background. I think that latter is where the "issues" come in. Do I "hold it against him" in the sense that I impute to all he does that deprivation and so tax his current efforts? I think that latter is the essence of racism. The equation of the accent and the probability of deprivation seems to me to have nothing to do with racism, it is a statistical distribution hypothesis. Tom Reardon
Ibukunolu Alao Babajide
Thank you for sharing this perspective. It is a near perfect acrobatic triple back flip.
The reaction to your assumption of power or lack thereof is a function of your own deep conscious or unconscious racism.
I may have the accent from Central African Republic or DRC both accents of war and poverty in your over-generalized accent induced stereotype profiles but be the sole heir to Bokassa or Mobutu's billions.
As I sit quietly in your class sporting the accent you associate with poverty watching so many adverts asking you to donate to save my ilk, and snugly fitting your accent induced stereotype of who I am, I have enough wealth to drown you standing.
Stereotyping, profiling, and over generalized assumptions are dangerous.
Cheers
IBK
PS: the converse is also true despite the accent of Irish power and Chinese brilliance there too many poor Irish and dull Chinese.
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone provided by Celtel Tanzania
From: "Thomas Reardon"
Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:28:57 -0800
To: <USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: (accented or inarticulat e?) Accent War in ‘Jand’
Pius Adesanmi
"My hypothesis of deprivation being revealed by the accent is testable (based on his background); I can also discern whether there is accent plus grammatical errors (would show deprivation"
|
Monsieur Tom,
Exactly! Former President George W Bush's accent and his horrible grammar, syntax, and malapropisms have always made me suspect that he comes from a background of poverty and deprivation contrary to claims that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
Pius |
ibir...@msu.edu
Bode
Pius Adesanmi
http://www.234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Opinion/Blogs/5299443-146/ “Ibo Made” By Pius Adesanmi Growing up in the 70s or 80s in a little Yagba town in the old Kwara state, your first real contact with the “outside world” – besides European and Canadian catholic priests and social studies in primary school – came in the form of settlerist migrancy. There was the sabo area of town, ceded by Kabiyesi to Hausa/Fulani settlers. That was where you bought suya and fura da nono on your way to and from school. There was Kwaku or Mensah, the ambulant Ghanaian shoemaker (sobata) who roamed the village with his wooden box containing assorted tools of his trade held around his waist by a rope slung across his shoulders. Akosua, his wife, sold rice and beans during break at school. Then there was Okoro from Igboland. He’d been part of the village for as long as everyone remembered. He spoke the local Yagba dialect and its parent Yoruba: he was a quintessence of national integration other Nigerians hardly ever achieve. Most importantly, Okoro owned the only trading store in town. No matter what his real name was, he was always Okoro to the village people. He got that name partly because of his cantankerous Igbo namesake in The Village Headmaster, arguably Nigeria’s most famous TV drama of all times, and partly because of Nigeria’s internal dynamic of racism and othering: each of the three major ethnic groups, forced into a threesome by the British, has unprintable names and degrading stereotypes for the other two. Okoro was the villagers’ sole access to manufactured goods: clothes, maths set, exercise books, whot cards, Ludo boards, kerosene stoves, sardines, geisha, glucose, Wembley 4 soccer balls, skull slip-on shoes for women, candles, key soap, asepso, tetramosol, nku cream, elephant blue detergent, tomapep, shelltox, knitting needles, name it! Okoro’s store was the world: miniature globalization in that little corner of Africa before academia hijacked that word noisily! Okoro’s customers always expected him to have two versions of every item he sold: the original and the fake. Folks believed that the original came from Europe and America. The fake, according to local lore, was manufactured in Igboland by ingenuous folks capable of reproducing any industrial good with the speed of lightening. Welcome to the legend of “Ibo made” in Nigeria’s national imaginary. “Ibo made” came to represent what you bought grudgingly because you couldn’t afford the real deal. It gathered other registers of inferiority along the way, signaling everything that is wrong with the way Nigerians think. “Ibo made” is the most explicit metaphor for the Nigerian tragedy. It explains why we abandoned mal-development and underdevelopment for zero development. It is an unserious country that expects development by disparaging and killing the industry, inventiveness, and technological savvy of an entire segment of its population, socializing generation after generation of her people into a mental universe where every candle or pencil made in Aba is deemed inferior because it is “Ibo made”. Neither the obtuse rulers at the centre nor the Governors of the respective “Ibo made” states were ever imaginative enough to develop “Ibo made” into a full scale national asset. Nigeria is truly a funny country. Her ports are permanently congested because she imports everything from wooden tooth picks to wooden rulers. If air could be imported, Nigeria would import it. Yet, half the things clogging her ports used to be made in Aba and other places in the east. Nigeria killed rather than develop those manufacturing potentials. What Nigeria rejected as “Ibo made”, our friends in China took to unimaginable levels. Now, foolish and ostentatious Nigerians who consider buying “Ibo made” an insult buy stuff that are even inferior to “Ibo made” from China! The Chinese, not being as foolish as we are, flood Nigeria with every imaginable fake and pirated product under the sun. Nigerians buy everything from fake Louis Vuitton products to fake tooth picks from China. A good friend of mine, Mazi Ebere, predicts that unless we change course, Nigeria will soon import elubo, efo riro, and pure water from China. Other Nigerians have received help from the Igbo in terms of the sustenance of condescending attitudes to “Ibo made”. An Igbo friend of mine based in France inspired this piece. He phoned me from Paris the other day fuming. He is building a house in Nigeria and has just discovered that his contractor was billing him for “original material” while using “Ibo made”! When I drew his attention to the irony of an Igbo man fuming over “Ibo made”, he dismissed me impatiently: “Pius abeg leave matter jare. When you are ready to build your own house, hire the same contractor and let him use Ibo made material for you!” I changed the topic. Enter any Igbo shop in Lagos, Ibadan, or Kaduna. If you are a regular customer, the Igbo trader is sure to tell you: “oga, those ones outside na Ibo
made o. Original dey inside. You know now.” We sure do have a long way to go as a country. |
King Ade
|
Professor Adesanmi,
Thank you for this excellent piece of work. We all need to re-evaluate ourselves and what is great about Nigeria.
There is always an opportunity in the middle of every difficulty. I choose to believe that change will come to Nigeria.
Check out this youtube video for some encouragement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBAFmMFKOj4
-------Original Message------- |
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Professor Adesanmi,
Thank you for this excellent piece of work. We all need to re-evaluate ourselves and what is great about Nigeria.
There is always an opportunity in the middle of every difficulty. I choose to believe that change will come to Nigeria.
Check out this youtube video for some encouragement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBAFmMFKOj4
-------Original Message------- |
__._,_.___
Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required) Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch format to Traditional Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe . __,_._,___
| ||
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|
kenneth w harrow
and they are often viewed as part of our "enlightened" foreign
policy. those grants are named after a senator from arkansas who was
highly regarded as a good progressive senator. he was an educated
man, who spoke as such. yet when he campaigned, all of a sudden that
educated accent disappeared, and in good ole arkansas he became a
good ole boy.... and kept getting reelected. na so dis life be
ken
Dept of English
Morrill Hall
Michigan State University
E. Lansing, MI 48824-1036
ph 517 353-7243
fax 517 353-3755
e-mail har...@msu.edu
afrs...@aol.com
Farooq A. Kperogi
| This is exactly what Pierre Bordieu called a "strategy of condescension"-- the symbolic subversion of the hierarchies of linguistic competence performed by people at the higher end of the social scale for the purposes of gaining "cultural goodwill" from the lower classes. Bush used this strategy so masterfully that a lot of people ( including me, frankly) actually didn't suspect that the Texas cowboy accent of this privileged scion of a prosperous and deeply politically entrenched New England family is all theater, political theater. He profited immensely from the inequality that he onstensibly negates by public speech patterns. The point to note, though, is that these categories have a severely limited utility in the African linguistic market. Accent--whether in English or in our native languages--is not a marker of social status; it is more a marker of geo-cultural identity. That's why President Yar'adua, though the son of a wealthy aristocrat who attended "elite" schools--speaks with an almost incomprehensible English accent. Even his spoken Hausa betrays his Katsina origins. And this is not the consequence of a conscious negation of speech hierarchies to assert a commonality with ordinary folks. Farooq One Park Place South Suite 817C Office Tel: (+1) 404-413-5638 Home Tel: (+1) 404-501-0638 Office Fax:(+1) 404-413-5634 --- On Mon, 2/23/09, kenneth w harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote: |
Nkolika Ebele
Dear Prof Pius,
Thanks for this piece but I don't think your friend who is aware that the so called Ibo made is in high demand now and even more expensive than the imported items. Nigerians are already aware of the havoc caused by the inferior products from China. For instance the locally made cables are far more expensive than the ones made in china. Using China cable means that your house can be on fire anytime.Similarly Nigerian made drugs are now in higher demand than China and Indian made drugs. I priced toilet seats recently, while the Twfford brand from China was selling at N4,800 the Nigerian made Royal brand was N6000. And in Nigeria price sometimes tells you the superior brand. The same applies to plastic tiles. The problem is that they are more expensive and many people are are battling with poverty. What is actually killing the Ibo made products today is not the attitude of our people but the absence of electricity in Nigeria. It is
difficult to run any industry using generator and still balance your sheets at the end of the day. So many young Ibo entrepreneurs were forced by this problem to close down their factories and join the China trade.For instance some of the factories producing Nigerian wax or what in Nigeria we call 'abada ' have closed down because of running cost. You may be surprised to find out that imitations of their products are also carried out in China. I think the major problem today is the energy crisis in Nigeria which has impacted negatively on every trade and profession in Nigeria.
Nkolika Obianyo
Unizik Awka
Nigeria.
|
Pius Adesanmi
Farooq my in-law,
For this excellent analysis, I've drastically reduced the yams you owe me from your last fine by one. So, bring 49 insead of fifty. Bode, the point I tried to make is: those who got their beering right with George Bush did not automatically divine a habitus (apologies to Farooq and Bourdieu) of deprivation and poverty on account of his accent, grammar, and malapropisms.
Pius Pius Adesanmi, Ph.D. |
Associate Professor Director, Project on New African Literatures (PONAL) Department of English Carleton University Ottawa, Canada K1S 5B6 Tel: +1 613 520 2600 ext. 1175 www.projectponal.com |
--- On Tue, 24/2/09, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooq...@yahoo.com> wrote: |
Thomas Reardon
My comments yesterday had nothing to do with my own feelings. I wrote of the general perception process. Here is a more abstract restatement to make my point more adequately. There is in each interaction of a listener with the accent of a speaker a two-step process.
(1) The first step is that the listener forms an idea of “who” is speaking by hearing the accent (mixed with visual signs) of the speaker. The listener then “maps” that accent in a mental map he/she with which the listener already comes to the conversation. I named several that typify “maps” in minds of many Americans in my youth versus now, as I understood what people were thinking via what they said about it. Several of you have mentioned other maps you perceive in others’ minds. All this is grist to my point. I was not opining on the correctness or value of the maps, so it is not possible from my comments to guess my stances on anything at all. Now, the “maps” in the mind of the listener contain whatever variables signal, for that person, some valuation or warning process. For example, Bush knew that in the mind of his working class voter listener is a map that connects always correct grammar, big words, and coastal (richer) accent with “elite, exploiter, pushing me around” in the mind of that voter. He thus (I am fairly sure Bush makes no grammatical errors in his regular, off-camera speech) introduced a language style (replete with accent, grammar errors, and so on) so that he would map right into the “sounds like one of us” boxes on the map in the mind of that voter. I believe it was pure manipulation, and had nothing to do with how Bush speaks in private. For the average American, there is a map in his/her mind which connects, vaguely, accent in English to an American speaker’s region and class. Some listeners are more aware than others of the imprecision, and stochastic nature, of that mapping. For example, even though my family is all working class, I was not for a second “taken in” by Bush’s (ecosystem-like) mimicry to the working class, as we had additional information on his socioeconomic background, and I could compare that information to the seeming “signaling” he was trying to do with his (false, I think) accent and word usage. If, however, I had no information (beyond visuals of dress and so on) about a speaker, I would rely (and I believe others would too) to a large extent on my best attempt to “map” the accent to class/region. Depending on how sure I felt about my knowledge of that mapping per se, I could feel that I had identified well or poorly the origin of the person. Depending on whether I needed or wanted to, I would then work to add information to test my hypothesis, and the latter can be confirmed or denied, as several writers noted yesterday. That is all grist for my point.
(2) The outcome of the first step is a mapping, conditioned by other information, in the mind of the listener, from accent to class/region (and any other classifications of interest to the listener). The gist of what other commenters have said about this process (beside informing us that every human on the planet does it in some way), is that it is to be wished (for the social good) that all listeners use as much information as possible to produce the best mapping they can from accent to their classifiers, and not leave off usable information in that mapping. That is all grist for my point.
(3) The second step is the process, in the mind of the listener, from the above mapping (their decision, based on their perceptions from accent, visuals, and other) which is the listener’s guess about “who” the speaker is (class, region, etc.), is the listener’s evaluation of the “who.” My only point in that respect is that every human on the planet has some opinion formed on the general (not individual) set of characteristics of a given “who”. The listener uses a wide variety of inputs to form an opinion of the characteristics (let’s say wealth, to keep this focused) of the “who.” Ignoring visuals (like clothing, which influence the listener in assigning an individual to a point on a statistical distribution), the listener associates (his/her perception of) the class/region of the person with some statistical distribution of wealth. For example, if there were no additional information such as clothing or outside information from others, and I met a person whose accent pointed my mind to their being from elite Nantucket, I would make the (probability based) assumption that they are rich. I am sure, shorn of outside inspection of the keen minds of this forum, and aware of geographical distribution of wealth, and with a knack for hearing and judging correctly the link between accent and place in the US, every participant in this forum would make the same guess about the wealth of the interlocutor. The same would go for Bihar in India: if I met a Bihari, and had no external information from their dress or CV that they are particularly privileged, but merely appeared to be an average representative of Bihar, and knowing Bihar is the poorest state, I would make the hypothesis (ready, dear reader, to test against any new facts presented) that that Bihari is perhaps poorer than a Gujarati I might hear. But I, like my dear readers, form opinions of a speaker’s class and region from more than just the place, if we have additional information. If we learned of any signs of wealth of that individual, we would assign that person a place on higher point in wealth distribution (in our mind) of the Biharis.
(4) The upshot of the mere logic I used in step 2 (logic from which one could not extract an opinion on anything), it is clear that a listener has a kind of “probability distribution” linking say “wealth” (as one evaluative criterion many people use) with class or region. Now, my point in the first email to the forum, was that there are processes whereby the listener shifts his perception of that probability distribution. The most poignant example for my own particular ethnie is that most non-Irish-background Americans thought of being from Irish-American place or Ireland as simply equated with being dirt-poor and uneducated. That PERCEPTION changed in the mind of the average American over a century, to the point where an average American polled in early 1960s would have thought Irish now meant broadly middle class and educated. I did not evaluate the correctness of that shift in perception, or opine on it. I merely did one thing: I noted that there was then a disappearance of joking (scorn, condescension) about that accent in the broad American media. That meant to me that the accent of Ireland went from signaling powerlessness to signaling strength for the majority of persons listening. No one can dispute that point. I am not saying that there were no powerful among Irish before, nor no powerless now, but simply stating my rock-solid point that there was a shift in perception, and thus the evaluation of a person’s wealth from his accent (in this example, Irish). The various examples offered by the forum commenters of where the perception was incorrect, or the mapping different in one country than another, were all welcome grist to my point.
I beg your pardon for my lengthy intervention. Regards, Tom
Cornelius Hamelberg
Well, that's a not so amusing variant when it comes to social stigmas/
discrimination that attach to varieties of Swedish RP "
Rikssvenska" ( standard Swedish - including pronunciation) which
according to my most wonderful, non-discriminating, blue-blooded, blue
eyed and blonde Swedish better half who has a Stockholm accent,"
doesn't exist". ( and neither does the “Golden Mountain” for that
matter or the cockney accent that I worked so hard to neutralise and
I thought that it was good riddance
What do you think that many of us who weren’t born and bred here sound
like? King Sunny Ade? ( Synchro feelings)
There are varieties of American-Swedish accents ( not necessarily
from Minnesota , but even from there they fly over to here to examine
church registers and trace their roots before the great Swedish
emigration, 1840 onwards, of about a million of the Swedish people
to the USA. Before the great emigration from Africa ( smile)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_emigration_to_the_United_States
It’s Good News from over here and you may listen to Swedish Radio and
decide for yourself whether they sound Canadian or American or Merry
England…..
http://www.sr.se/rs/english/
On Feb 24, 2:32 am, "Farooq A. Kperogi" <farooqkper...@yahoo.com>
wrote:
>
> Bush used this strategy so masterfully that a lot of people ( including me, frankly) actually didn't suspect that the Texas cowboy accent of this privileged scion of a prosperous and deeply politically entrenched New England family is all theater, political theater. He profited immensely from the inequality that he onstensibly negates by public speech patterns.
>
> The point to note, though, is that these categories have a severely limited utility in the African linguistic market. Accent--whether in English or in our native languages--is not a marker of social status; it is more a marker of geo-cultural identity. That's why President Yar'adua, though the son of a wealthy aristocrat who attended "elite" schools--speaks with an almost incomprehensible English accent. Even his spoken Hausa betrays his Katsina origins. And this is not the consequence of a conscious negation of speech hierarchies to assert a commonality with ordinary folks.
>
> Farooq
>
> One Park Place South Suite 817C
> Atlanta, Georgia USA 30303
> Cell Phone:(+1)404-573-9697
> Office Tel: (+1) 404-413-5638 Home Tel: (+1) 404-501-0638 Office Fax:(+1) 404-413-5634 Blog:www.farooqkperogi.blogspot.com
>
> --- On Mon, 2/23/09, kenneth w harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:
>
> From: kenneth w harrow <har...@msu.edu>
> Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: (accented or inarticulate?) Accent War in ‘Jand’
> To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com, USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
> Date: Monday, February 23, 2009, 4:50 PM
>
> some of us have benefited from a "fulbright" grant over the years,
> and they are often viewed as part of our "enlightened" foreign
> policy. those grants are named after a senator from arkansas who was
> highly regarded as a good progressive senator. he was an educated
> man, who spoke as such. yet when he campaigned, all of a sudden that
> educated accent disappeared, and in good ole arkansas he became a
> good ole boy.... and kept getting reelected. na so dis life be
> ken
>
>
>
>
>
>
> >But wasn't Bush's accent and horrible grammar part of his appeal to
> >a section of the population and why he won over Gore and Kerry? He
> >was effectively seen as one of "us" because he speaks like one of
> >"us." Wasn't that the game Palin tried to play? Be not decieved. A
> >class analysis of speech patterns is a legitimate analysis, which
> >should not automatically provoke charges of racism but like all
> >forms of analysis, it is fraught with its own limitations.
>
> >Bode
>
>
> - Show quoted text -
Obododimma Oha
Obododimma Oha
Senior Lecturer in Stylistics & Semiotics
Dept. of English
University of Ibadan
Nigeria
&
Fellow, Centre for Peace & Conflict Studies
University of Ibadan
Phone: +234 803 333 1330;
+234 805 350 6604.
Obododimma Oha
Moses Ebe Ochonu
--
There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.
---Mohandas Ghandi
Poet
Anunoby, Ogugua
Price may or may not correlate with quality because perception of quality may help to determine choice. What is often times the case is that ultimately, consumers buy for value even when their definitions of value may differ. “Ibo made’ as an appellation for locally (made in Nigeria) products is not new. It was for many years a pejorative description of products of inferior value. It was believed at that time that foreign (especially British made) products were always better quality. The same attitude was held about Japanese products and even U.S. university degrees for many years. British colonization of Nigeria was so “successful” that anything British was considered superior(better quality)to equivalents that were not . There was indeed a time in Nigeria when the term “overseas” meant Britain. Some people understood/meant London, England.
Economic history is clear about the course of manufacturing success. Emerging countries usually start by being low quality, lower end, low price manufacturers because they are usually low technology, low skill, low or no reputation, high labor, and capital short countries..If however there an abundance of entrepreneurship that id constructively supported and midwifed, commercial success follows and overtime reduces or obliterates the countries competitive disadvantage. As the countries become more competitive they grow to transit to the manufacturers of high end products and become positioned to serve high end markets.
A necessary ingredient for the success described above is government policy. If like in Nigeria, the government has no clear development and trade policies, pays lip service to and evidently demonstrates a high preference for imported and foreign products, treat corruption as a higher goal, and subordinate to self reliance to it, local manufacturers are less likely to make the progress and transitions that they are potentially capable of. Japan, Sweden, Finland, Taiwan, India and indeed China were not always competitive manufacturing and export oriented countries. They are today. The countries roundly evidence the difference that a purpose-driven, articulate, clear, and focused development and economic policy makes. “Ibo made” products are slowly becoming competitive in Nigeria. The country is well advised to take every advantage of the opportunity.
oa
Anunoby, Ogugua
Price may or may not correlate with quality because perception of quality may help to determine choice. What is generally the case is that ultimately consumers buy for value even when their definitions of value differ. “Ibo made’ as an appellation for locally (made in Nigeria) products is not new. It was for many years a pejorative description of products of inferior value when it was believed that foreign (especially British made) products were always better quality. The same attitude was held about Japanese products for many years, and also U.S university degrees among others. British colonization of Nigeria was so “successful” that anything British was considered superior(better quality)to equivalents that were not . There was indeed a time in Nigeria when the term “overseas” meant Britain. Many understood/meant London, England.
Economic history is clear about the course of manufacturing success. Emerging countries usually start by being low quality, lower end, low price manufacturers because they are usually low technology, low or no reputation, high labor, and capital short countries..The spirit of entrepreneurial spirit is blazing however and commercial success overtime reduces or obliterates their competitive disadvantage. As the countries become more competitive they grow to transit to the manufacturing of high end products and are now positioned to serve high end markets.
A necessary ingredient for the success described above is government policy. If like in Nigeria the government has no clear development and trade objectives and policies, pays lip service to local manufacturing, and evidently demonstrates a high preference for imported and foreign products, local manufacturers may in fact never make the progress and transitions that they are potentially capable of.
oa
Farooq A. Kperogi
Tope,
Thanks for your illuminating and insightful intervention. I am in agreement
with almost everything you wrote.
However, I never implied that African languages "are not subject to the
whims of linguistic market operations." That would be an outrageously
unsociological, even pedestrian, claim to make. What I said was that African
languages--at least the ones that I’m familiar with-- are not easily susceptible to the kind of class-based boundaries often erected in the social cartography of
accents in European languages, which often consists in a bifurcation of accents
into the “lowbrow” speech patterns of the "vulgar herd," and the “high-end” phonologic singularities of "upwardly mobile" social classes.
By that I mean that,
unlike in "first-speaker" English linguistic environments, you cannot infer the
socio-economic background of speakers of African languages merely from their
accents. Now, that’s not the same thing as denying that different African
languages, dialects, and accents occupy different hierarchies of social prestige.
And you eloquently made my point when you wrote:
"In 1993 the late Chief MKO Abiola in a radio interview in the
United Kingdom with his undoubtedly Yoruba-accented English also
flavoured his response with a Yoruba saying in English in throwing down the
gauntlet and taking on Babangida and the other brigands of that moment - '
a leopard can dance around a well a hundred times but it dares not jump
in'. I doubt that he lost his international credibility or social status (he
was a highly successful and respected business magnate and titled chief!) as a
result of that performance of the 'local'. "
The late MKO Abiola spoke the English language with a very pronounced,
sometimes inaccessible, Yoruba accent. It is entirely imaginable that he also
spoke Yoruba with an Egba accent. But this fact didn't, by any stretch of the
imagination, diminish his economic, social, cultural and symbolic capital or, as you put it, his
"international or social status." That's precisely my point.
In the United States or Britain, a conventional, stereotypical (but theoretically and empirically impoverished) "mapping"
of that accent would associate it with a “linguistic deficit,” which would be attributed to low social status, inferior education, etc. In fact, most of Abiola’s children who
grew up in the lap of luxury and attended privileged schools and to whom he was supposed to have transmitted cultural capital, according to Bourdieu), still speak the
English language with what one might broadly call a Yoruba accent. (I've had occasion to
interview Kola Abiola when I worked as a journalist in Nigeria.) Of course, there are exceptions like Hafsat Abiola who speaks the English language with an
American accent precisely because she went to school in the United States. But
that is beside the point.
The point is
that, in Africa, accents are not necessarily measures of the socio-economic status of
speakers of a language. An Ibolo person from the royal family speaks with the same accent as an
Ibolo "commoner." Similarly, we cannot isolate a working-class Ibolo accent from a middle-class or an upper-middle-class
Ibolo accent. Nor can we, for that matter, isolate and stratify
accents in Yoruba, in general, on the basis of the socio-economic hierarchies of the individivual speakers. A person who speaks with the socially prestigious Lagos
accent of the Yoruba language may be substantially materially less well-off than
an Ibolo or Yagba person who speaks a less socially prestigious accent of Yoruba. So social exclusivity of accents is not an important feature of African
languages.
In sum, I am saying that you cannot guess the social status of the speaker
of an African language--or even of an African speaker of the English
language--from the accent of the speaker. Of course, this changes when the
contrast of contexts is between different language groups, etc. The Ibolo
dialect/accent of the Yoruba language may be low in the Yoruba linguistic totem
pole, but that says nothing about the socio-economic status of the individual
speakers of the dialect/accent. As I said before, a very well-educated, privileged, and materially prosperous
Ibolo person may, for all kinds of reasons, retain his
dialect/accent in his demotic communicative interactions without inviting us to suspect that he is anything other than just an (insular) Ibolo person.
Now, contrast this to the American and British linguistic markets where,
traditionally at least, people's accents give away their social status, where
accents nurture and pander to the prevalent social hierarchy and intellectual/social
snobbery of the society.
That's my whole point.
Farooq
1 Park Place
Suite 817C
Atlanta, GA, USA.
30303
Cell: 404-573-9697
Home: 404-501-0638
Office: 404-413-5638
Blog: www.farooqkperogi.blogspot.com
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
Dear Farooq,I respectfully disagree with your suggestion that African languages are not subject to the whims of linguistic market operations. That's my understanding of your claim that accents are about identity, not social status. The mere fact that we have and display attitudes towards languages, accents and dialects is proof that there is a value system in place and at work. I'll give just one concrete instantiation of how this works within a given linguistic ecology - I am an Ibolo dialect speaker - Northern Yoruba in Oyun LGA, Kwara State. There is a general trend of convergence towards the higher-rated and supposedly higher status Lagos dialect first by people who move to Lagos from this community and many other Yoruba communities. Now, accent or dialect adoption is beginning to happen even among young persons in these semi-rural areas who have not moved but may be anticipatig doing so in the future, what traditional sociology called 'anticipatory socialisation' and some contemporary sociolinguists would identify as a cause of dialect-levelling. By the way, the negative stereotype of speaking with a 'northern Yoruba' dialect in Lagos is evident in the label 'Ara-oke' (Up Country) with connotations of rural, premodern, slow, unfashionable and so on'. My memory fails me now in not recalling the artiste of that song from the oil boom era in which the Up Country (Ibadfan) pronunciation of [ch- chicken] was humorously ridiculed - 'Eran ki lo je lana, eran sikin ni', and [sh] show and sure rendered as [s] Up Country: 'Omo Ibadan, kini show re? 'So suo ni' .Politically, the dominant status of Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba and the relative minority status of languages like Abua, Nnam, Sha and many others listed by Ethnologue definitely speak to linguistic market operations - this is closely linked to population numbers of the ethnic groups. I hurry to say that a large population does not always translate into [plus power] as we know from South Africa in the Apartheid era. Even seemingly innocent comments like, "Language X is difficult to learn" are loaded with attitudes either towards the language in question or towards the group it identifies. So, to your point about the indentification function of accents, yes, but the scholarship on anti and post-essentialism, performativity and the constructedness of identities on a moment to moment basis warns us to be careful in conceptualising identity in fixed absolute terms. Many diaspora intellectuals in some disciplines more than in others, have felt a compulsion to shed (diverge from) the accents that allows one to locate them geographically and acquire (converge towards) plus-capital accents, the accents of mobility.How this politics relates to English in Nigeria is in the manner in which we consistently rate English over and above indigenous languages in all kinds of policy documents and practices. To speak English with a discernible ethnic or regional accent is to be assigned a social value/status lower than one with an acquired or affected 'British' or American accent. In very extensive studies by reputable Nigerian scholars - so rated by their international peers - this matter has been at the core of ideological debates and remains there.
But it's not all black and white. In 1993 the late Chief MKO Abiola in a radio interview in the United Kingdom with his undoubtedly Yoruba-accented English also flavoured his response with a Yoruba saying in English in throwing down the gauntlet and taking on Babangida and the other brigands of that moment - ' a leopard can dance around a well a hundred times but it dares not jump in'. I doubt that he lost his international credibility or social status (he was a highly successful and respected business magnate and titled chief!) as a result of that performance of the 'local'.
I want to close with some food for thought, one that I continue to grapple with myself. I note how easily we have both invoked Pierre Bourdieu supposedly to theoretically anchor our points of view. But there is/are (an) African epistemolog(y)(ies) within the framework of which these same views could be presented, probably even more profoundly. So I ask what are the language/dialect/accent characterisations of 'Eni a biire' - (one of noble birth)? For that is through and through language and social status.Tope Omoniyi
On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 1:32 AM, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooq...@yahoo.com> wrote:
This is exactly what Pierre Bourdieu called a "strategy of condescension"-- the symbolic subversion of the hierarchies of linguistic competence performed by people at the higher end of the social scale for the purposes of gaining "cultural goodwill" from the lower classes.
Bush used this strategy so masterfully that a lot of people ( including me, frankly) actually didn't suspect that the Texas cowboy accent of this privileged scion of a prosperous and deeply politically entrenched New England family is all theater, political theater. He profited immensely from the inequality that he ostensibly negates by public his speech patterns.
The point to note, though, is that these categories have a severely limited utility in the African linguistic market. Accent--whether in English or in our native languages--is not necessarily a marker of social status; it is more a marker of geo-cultural identity. That's why President Yar'adua, though the son of a wealthy aristocrat who attended "elite" schools--speaks with an almost incomprehensible English accent. Even his spoken Hausa betrays his Katsina origins. And this is not the consequence of a conscious negation of speech hierarchies to assert a commonality with ordinary folks.
Thomas Reardon
I am constrained by lack of knowledge of African languages and being exposed only to the Indo-European, Malayan, and Chinese languages, but have several thoughts which might be applicable. On reading your interesting exchange (Tope-Farooq) I asked several Hindi-speakers and a Tamil speaker (latter is non-Indo-european language family) whether they could, here in Delhi, distinguish a person’s “class” by accent. Here are the following interesting points they made:
1) They can tell from what ethnie/region (non-Hindi speaking and Hindi speaking) a person comes from accent in Hindi; there is a vague mapping (at least in polar cases) of region and socioeconomic status (for example, persons from Bihar more likely to be workers and those from Gujarat better off traders).
2) Controlling for a family being non-migrant and in Delhi for some time, they can still tell origin because of the higher incidence of words “inherited” from other origins (so there might be Persian terms laced in the language of one family, and Tibetan terms in another, but both be long-term Delhi residents).
3) There will be more English terms laced in the Hindi of richer, more educated persons.
4) There will be different word use in Hindi among the educated and thus the richer – not only the use of more technical terms, but also more use of ancient or special cultural/philosophical terms among the educated that the poor would not tend to know.
5) There would be, controlling for class, more slang in the speech of the young, and controlling for age, more slang used among the working class.
6) Finally, they thought (but it was not clear…) that there would NOT be strong difference in actual accent (I leave this point to the last to show that way before they came to accent they named many other language elements that they used to easily distinguish), IF the person is saying the same word in Hindi.
My point is then that focusing on “accent” is only perhaps 20% of the language-based signals that a listener uses to discern a person’s class and or origin. If accents don’t differ over class or other grouping in a given region in African country, would any of other 5 five “signals” apply? My hypothesis is that commonly, across the earth, in each region, there is at least ONE of the above six variables that allows a listener, without seeing the speaker, to guess class/origin from speech alone. That of course is just a testable hypothesis, and is usual, not my opinion. Tom
From:
USAAfric...@googlegroups.com [mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com] On
Behalf Of Farooq A. Kperogi
Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2009 5:53 PM
To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: (accented or inarticulate?)
Accent War in ‘Jand’
Tope,
Thanks for your illuminating and insightful intervention. I am in agreement with
almost everything you wrote.
However, I never implied that African languages "are not subject to the whims of linguistic market operations." That would be an outrageously unsociological, even pedestrian, claim to make. What I said was that African languages--at least the ones that Im familiar with-- are not easily susceptible to the kind of class-based boundaries often erected in the social cartography of accents in European languages, which often consists in a bifurcation of accents into the lowbrow speech patterns of the "vulgar herd," and the high-end phonologic singularities of "upwardly mobile" social classes.
By that I mean that, unlike in "first-speaker"
English linguistic environments, you cannot infer the socio-economic background
of speakers of African languages merely from their accents. Now, thats not the
same thing as denying that different African languages, dialects, and accents
occupy different hierarchies of social prestige. And you eloquently made my
point when you wrote:
"In 1993 the late Chief MKO Abiola in a radio interview in the United
Kingdom with his undoubtedly Yoruba-accented English also flavoured his
response with a Yoruba saying in English in throwing down the gauntlet and
taking onBabangida and the other brigands of that moment - ' a leopard can
dance around a wella hundred times but it dares not jump in'. I doubt that
he lost his international credibility or social status (he was a highly
successful and respected business magnate and titled chief!) as a result of
that performance of the 'local'. "
The late MKO Abiola spoke the English language with a very pronounced,
sometimes inaccessible, Yoruba accent. It is entirely imaginable that he also
spoke Yoruba with an Egba accent. But this fact didn't, by any stretch of the
imagination, diminish his economic, social, cultural and symbolic capital or,
as you put it, his "international or social status." That's precisely
my point.
In the United States or Britain, a conventional, stereotypical (but theoretically and empirically impoverished) "mapping" of that accent would associate it with a linguistic deficit, which would be attributed to low social status, inferior education, etc. In fact, most of Abiolas children who grew up in the lap of luxury and attended privileged schools and to whom he was supposed to have transmitted cultural capital, according to Bourdieu), still speak the English language with what one might broadly call a Yoruba accent. (I've had occasion to interview Kola Abiola when I worked as a journalist in Nigeria.) Of course, there are exceptions like Hafsat Abiola who speaks the English language with an American accent precisely because she went to school in the United States. But that is beside the point.
The point is that, in Africa, accents are not necessarily
measures of the socio-economic status of speakers of a language. An Ibolo
person from the royal family speaks with the same accent as an Ibolo
"commoner." Similarly, we cannot isolate a working-class Ibolo accent
from a middle-class or an upper-middle-class Ibolo accent. Nor can we, for that
matter, isolate and stratify accents in Yoruba, in general, on the basis of the
socio-economic hierarchies of the individivual speakers. A person who speaks
with the socially prestigious Lagos accent of the Yoruba language may be
substantially materially less well-off than an Ibolo or Yagba person who speaks
a less socially prestigious accent of Yoruba. So social exclusivity of accents
is not an important feature of African languages.
In sum, I am saying that you cannot guess the social status of the speaker of
an African language--or even of an African speaker of the English
language--from the accent of the speaker. Of course, this changes when the
contrast of contexts is between different language groups, etc. The Ibolo
dialect/accent of the Yoruba language may be low in the Yoruba linguistic totem
pole, but that says nothing about the socio-economic status of the individual
speakers of the dialect/accent. As I said before, a very well-educated,
privileged, and materially prosperous Ibolo person may, for all kinds of
reasons, retain his dialect/accent in his demotic communicative interactions
without inviting us to suspect that he is anything other than just an (insular)
Ibolo person.
Now, contrast this to the American and British linguistic markets where,
traditionally at least, people's accents give away their social status, where
accents nurture and pander to the prevalent social hierarchy and
intellectual/social snobbery of the society.
That's my whole point.
Farooq
1 Park Place
Suite 817C
Atlanta, GA, USA.
30303
Cell: 404-573-9697
Home: 404-501-0638
Office: 404-413-5638
Blog: www.farooqkperogi.blogspot.com
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either
proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 1:15 PM, Poet <lean...@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Farooq,
I respectfullydisagree with yoursuggestion that African languages are not subject to the whims of linguistic market operations. That's my understanding of your claim that accents are about identity, not social status. The mere fact that we have and display attitudes towardslanguages, accents and dialects is proof that there is a value system in place and at work. I'll give just one concrete instantiation of how this works within a given linguistic ecology - I am an Ibolo dialect speaker - Northern Yoruba in Oyun LGA, Kwara State. There is a general trend of convergence towardsthe higher-rated and supposedly higher status Lagos dialect firstby people who move to Lagosfrom thiscommunity and many other Yoruba communities. Now, accent or dialect adoption is beginning to happen even among young persons in these semi-rural areas who have not moved but may be anticipatig doing so in the future, what traditional sociologycalled 'anticipatory socialisation' and some contemporary sociolinguists would identify as a cause of dialect-levelling. By the way, the negative stereotype of speaking witha 'northern Yoruba' dialect in Lagos is evident inthe label 'Ara-oke' (Up Country) with connotations of rural, premodern, slow, unfashionable and so on'. My memory fails me now in not recalling the artiste of that song from the oil boom era in which the Up Country (Ibadfan) pronunciation of [ch- chicken]was humorously ridiculed - 'Eran ki lo je lana, eran sikin ni', and[sh] show and sure rendered as [s] Up Country: 'Omo Ibadan, kini show re? 'So suo ni'.
Politically, the dominant status of Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba and the relative minority status of languages like Abua, Nnam, Sha and many others listedby Ethnologue definitely speak to linguistic market operations - this is closely linked to population numbers of the ethnic groups. I hurry to say that a large populationdoes not always translate into [plus power] as we know from South Africa in the Apartheid era. Even seemingly innocent comments like, "Language X is difficult to learn" are loaded with attitudes either towards the language in question or towards thegroup it identifies. So, to your point about the indentification function of accents, yes, but thescholarship on antiand post-essentialism, performativity and theconstructedness of identitieson a moment to moment basis warns us to be careful in conceptualisingidentity in fixed absolute terms.Manydiaspora intellectuals in some disciplines more than in others,have felt a compulsion to shed (diverge from) the accents that allows one to locate them geographically and acquire (converge towards)plus-capital accents, the accents of mobility.
How this politics relates to English in Nigeria is in the manner in which we consistently rate English over and aboveindigenous languages in all kinds of policy documents and practices.To speakEnglish with a discernible ethnic or regional accent is to be assigned a social value/status lower than one with an acquired or affected 'British' or American accent. In very extensive studies by reputable Nigerian scholars - so ratedby their international peers -this matter has beenat the core of ideologicaldebates and remains there.
But it's not all black and white. In 1993 the late Chief MKO Abiola in a radio interview in the United Kingdom with his undoubtedly Yoruba-accented English also flavoured his response with a Yoruba saying in English in throwing down the gauntlet and taking onBabangida and the other brigands of that moment - ' a leopard can dance around a wella hundred times but it dares not jump in'. I doubt that he lost his international credibility or social status (he was a highly successful and respected business magnate and titled chief!) as a result of that performance of the 'local'.
Iwant toclosewith some food for thought, one that I continue to grapple with myself. I note how easily we have both invoked Pierre Bourdieusupposedly to theoretically anchor our points of view. But there is/are (an) African epistemolog(y)(ies)within the framework of which these same views could be presented, probably even more profoundly. So I ask what are the language/dialect/accent characterisations of 'Eni a biire' - (one of noble birth)?For that is through and through language and social status.
atanda gbadamosi
Kperogi Mi mi Pin and all that
Linguists and those who map accents are experts on issues in question. Three lines of Kperogi’s reply caught my attention:
“A person who speaks with the socially prestigious Lagos accent of the Yoruba language may be substantially materially less well-off than an Ibolo or Yagba person who speaks a less socially prestigious accent of Yoruba. So social exclusivity of accents is not an important feature of African languages.”
Your allusion to the socially prestigious Lagos accent of the Yoruba and the Ibolo or Yagba person who speaks a less socially prestigious accent of Yoruba tore off an element of the language question amongst the Yorubas of Nigeria.
I just want to clarify that the socially prestigious Lagos accent of the Yoruba is prestigious only among Lagosians. To hinterlanders of Oyo, Ekiti, Osun, a substantial part of Ogun and Ondo state, Lagos Yoruba of mimipin ( I've swallowed pin) midee and other such corruption of the Yoruba language makes the typical Lagosian a laughing stock in the hinterland.
In Lagos, Lagosians—even those with the traditional Oyo marks-like one Alhaji Azeez of the Proof-reading Section – of the National Concord of old, laugh at us when I say I want to eat Okaa—the Yoruba name for what is known in Lagos as amala or I say I want obeeyo, a delicacy of a soup called ewedu in Yoruba.
Note that the likes of Bola Ige, will never campaign in Lagos variant of modeee, mimipin, while he was alive. And Ige was referred as one of the few elites who spoke impeccable Yoruba.
The Lagos mummy mimi pin (Mummy I swallow pin), is not a new war though. It’s a war that is older than a century.
When Professor Toyin Falola taught us History 301, at Ife in 1987--before he abandoned some of his students who admired him, for a fulfilling intellectual life the US-- he made an interesting allusion one late afternoon, to this creeping linguistic duel.
Having banged out his thoughts, with a finger on his old typewriter, Toyin Falola would come to unwind as he delivers his lectures. His allusions- always funny, but loaded with the essence of the question in focus- compel students to listen with rapt attention. He was a teacher’s teacher.
One afternoon, Toyin Falola captured the Lagosians-Hinterlanders linguistic conflict like thus: When the sons of former and freed slaves returned to Nigeria from Sierra Leone and Liberia, they had lost touch with the traditional Yoruba language and their version of it had become interspersed—at times corrupted—with broken and corrupted variants of English words. For example, a Lagosian would say mi ni fun e (I won’t give you), an Oyo man would say Emi ko ni fun o.
With their exposure to Western education and values, the returnees felt superior and triumphant.
But the locals of Ibadan and the Yoruba hinterland—what Lagosians call Ara Oke,--people of uphill country, laughed Lagosians to scorn. The hinterlanders hunch was this: how can the sons and descendants of slaves – as the returnees of Lagos were perceived-- show a candle to the sons and daughters of freeborns—the hinterlanders, who never tasted the humiliation of Western slavery and colonialism?
I guess there is a whole book on it this conflict. Professor Falola could help with the particulars of the book on this cultural conflict.
But that creeping linguistic conflict between Lagos Yoruba and the purists from the hinterland is alive.
We the hinterlanders just laugh them to scorn, even in Lagos, as they correct us when we insist at Mama put joints that we should be served okaa, our own okaa, and not amala.
Wahab Gbadamosi FIRS, Abuja There can be no happiness if there is dissonance in what we believe and what we do. --- On Tue, 2/24/09, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooq...@gmail.com> wrote: |
Okwy Okeke
Pius A maxim of America free enterprise driven economy is that government has no business in business. So laying charge against some state governors and even president smacks of the same fall back we are yet to wean ourselves from; loving the cake of the devil but preferring the company of angels.
Free-enterprise is yet to be trumped by any other system in effective allocation of resources and value.
To simply equate preference for the pricier product to colonial–mentality does not tell the whole story, people are not stupid, correlation does not always imply causal relationship.
Nigerian rice used to be a no-no back in the day because of the poor job of de-stoning, a fast track to the surgeon’s slab for appendicectomy, however, once that gap was bridged by more investments in that sector, the nutritional value of the less processed local rice nudged many to it.
Sustainable economies are not built on sloganeering and nationalism, else Biafra may have succeeded, in the words of Adam Smith, productive is not built on benevolence, and I dare add patronage to that.
But the foregoing tells only half of the story. Made in Nigeria was effectively killed by the Buhari coup, period!!
If my memory serves me right here, I believe Obi Nwakanma has even written that much in his weekly column.
The December 1983 coup was by and large a blow to wrest the country from those that lost the war on one hand, and those that really believed in ‘Adisco 87’ on the other. For researchers, look through the strategic appointments by the Buhari and later Babangida governments.
There were massive steps taken by many states that were enjoying real autonomy for the first time, and sadly, last time in Nigeria, the rest is history, right?
The “final solution” to the problem of “Ibo made” was as former governor Kure of Niger state threatened at the height of the Sharia debate, achieved with the flicking of just a switch, that of power supply to that part of the country. Unfortunately, criminality a most Frankenstein creature did not recognize boundaries, so it walked on all three legs across the length and breadth of Nigeria.
It is inviting to see the problem of Nigeria as that of her citizens not believing in her, but like Achebe wrote, it is squarely that of leadership, I wonder if any people have been burdened with more a myopic variant.
Nigeria’s industrial capacity or the lack of it is the child of Nigeria’s parochial government, just like the case is today with the fraud of gas importation, narrow selfish interest trumping national interest, leave the poor consumer out of the equation.
Same is the case with N/American auto makers, no level of sloganeering, or congress fiat will make some people buy a Ford (found on the road dead) besides quality and they are presently at it turning out sleeker models, and no amount of ethnic hatred stops people from buying a good product (Nigerians may not be the darling of many African countries, but Nigerian movies are selling more than foreign brands in the continent).
Take away the meddling federal government, aka revert to true federalism and the people’s productive energy will be released, but we have lived most of our lives on government life-support, we are collectively scared to try otherwise.
Personal experiences taught me that not only do Nigerian consumers zig-zag between foreign and local products, this depend on the item in question, but between fairly used that was of good quality vs. brand new that is of low quality.
People are not stupid! Cheers,
|
From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com> |
Tony Agbali
To add to wit, there is even what when I was growing up the notion of "Ijebu" that allies with the notion of "Igbo made" or "Aba na nya" among my Igala people. In every spaces of Nigeria there are specific termimologies that index the notion of "fakeness." However, what is interesting about Pius' depicture is the portrait of the enterprising Igbo person in the hinterland of God knows where, ripping under hard circumstances as an indigenous enterpreneur, creative but dexterious. Okoro maps that instance, and I have seen many Okoros all over Nigeria, Africa, Europe, and America using their industriousness to excel or become the visibly sign of African enterpreneurship in spaces and contexts that would be arid without their vision. Not only are they Okoros, but the Adeyemis, the Ovies, are also emerging like Pius' Okoro with African shops in
different global metropoles across the universe- bringing you not only "Olubo" and "Okporoko" but "tuwo shinkafa" and "moss," "Bukurutu in diverse forms and packages, if only you imagine the new forays into novel spaces of migrant entrances are not so much different from Okoro in Yagbaland.
It is the picture of the imagination that Okoro may live under low profile conditions but in years have built a mansion in his native Igbo country, and sooner than later take a title; where many cows would be slaughtered to witness to the reality of the events. Yet, the Okoros may be very instrumental in helping to elevate the conditions of the spaces they inhabit and the people they encountered from certain stonege scenarios.
The immigrant/migrant magic wand has an alluring glare!
--- On Tue, 2/24/09, Obododimma Oha <obod...@gmail.com> wrote: |
From: Obododimma Oha <obod...@gmail.com> |
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Ikhide
"A maxim of America free enterprise driven economy is that government has no business in business. So laying charge against some state governors and even president smacks of the same fall back we are yet to wean ourselves from; loving the cake of the devil but preferring the company of angels. "
"Free-enterprise is yet to be trumped by any other system in effective allocation of resources and value."
- Okwy Okeke
Lord Okwy,
You are kidding me! Thou killedeth me with laff ;-))))) I just read your missive after laughing through Governor Bobby jerky Jindal's response to President Obama's speech to Congress. How can you make the statements above at a time like this? Have you not heard, there is a revolution, the masses are looking for the dead bodies of those who gave us capitalism, free enterprise, blah, blah, blah! I don't know what they are going to do to the dead but I am not looking O!
The government has no business in business - they should only give out contracts and fight wars. See where it got us. We are broke! "Free-enterprise is yet to be trumped by any other system in effective allocation of resources and value." Tell that to the dead, man ;-)
American free enterprise is propped up by a pyramid scheme of mind-boggling subsidies by the government. The real terror is when all the other economies in our part of the world wake up one morning to find that, well, they actually believed that there is such an animal called free enterprise. We are going to be victims of our gullibility, mark my words.
BTW, this is not a commentary on Lord Adesanmi's piece, Ibo Made. When I was in Nigeria, my parents never bought anything that was in Nigeria, not to talk of Ibo Made. Everything was flown into our 500 acre estate every day - even our bath water and the breakfast orange juice was freshly squeezed by a fresh British maiden every morning. So all the unnecessary suffering that Professor Adesanmi has been enumerating in his daily postings are new to me. I never knew that people were capable of that much suffering Anyway, I responded simply because I am in the mood for teasing my good friend Okwy ;-)))))))
- Ikhide
Okwy Okeke
Oga Ikhide,
I hail thee this morning, this is a clear cut case of misplaced aggression: the chicken should confront the killer not the knife. It is not me that said telephone is not for every Nigerian, take your case to the proper quarters;-)))))).
Back to the shrew called capitalism you just sent me to catch, I hope you have water for me to wash my hand after this not so dignifying task.
That the U.S. is presently the high priest of free market capitalism does not make her the author and finisher of that faith. Capitalism has been around in the world since my people domesticated yam, and perfected the act of sacrifices to God without blood, a signifier of their non-aggression pact with both the living and the dead, not to digress, capitalism, I repeat, remains the best economic system the world ever knew. That does not make it perfect, neither does it suggest that the corrupt, gangster cronyism practiced is the west and taken to new heights by the last government is capitalism. You actually come late to this game of poking around the altar of capitalism in search of dead bodies, the mass-servant aka The Economist tried so in the heady days of last quarter, luckily, they have found their way back to the temple, good for them, and good for the world.
Finally, I pass on Governor Bobby Jindal's speech, it was meant for the entertainment of middle-class cable-t.v. watchers, I am yet to be admitted to that group, do you have any idea when I get done with my shift? Please leave the governor of the state with the lowest credit-worthiness rating out of matters finance, it was your neighbor, Michael Steele's coming out party joke to the people, and was it not you that taught me not to aggrandize morning dew with rain collecting pans and pots?
I hail thee, the apprentice is not greater than his master
Cheers,
|
From: Ikhide <xok...@yahoo.com> |
Anunoby, Ogugua
OO
"A maxim of America free enterprise driven economy is that government has no business in business...”
Okwy Okeke
The is one of the most misleading claims made for free enterprise. I am tempted to say that it is actually be a bold faced lie. Free enterprise is neither no regulation nor self regulated enterprise. Any one paying attention knows that its is erroneous conceptions and assumptions about free enterprise such as the above that helped to get the global economy where it is today. The sad news is that free enterprisers were warned that that their chosen path was the wrong one. Not every one is surprised therefore that unfettered capitalism is facing avoidable challenges at this time. It is apparent that capitalism is in fact undergoing a reformation right now.
There is always a role for government in governance of the state including matters of business and enterprise. The challenge of government is ensuring the right balance of policies and laws that inform action and inaction. A true believer in free enterprise in my opinion would argue that government should enable and not hinder free enterprise. They would not argue that government has no business in business.
oa
From:
USAAfric...@googlegroups.com [mailto:USAAfric...@googlegroups.com] On
Behalf Of Ikhide
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 8:30 PM
To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: "Ibo Made"
"A maxim of America free enterprise driven economy is that government has no business in business. So laying charge against some state governors and even president smacks of the same fall back we are yet to wean ourselves from; loving the cake of the devil but preferring the company of angels. "