The Extinction Of The Igbo Language, by Chibuike Obi

This essay is a reworking of my response to a friend who had reposted on Facebook a post by an Igbo person lamenting the status of Igbo as a spoken language within and outside Nigeria and echoing old worries about the possible extinction of the Igbo language.

Many reasons have been advanced for the worrisome decline in the number of native Igbo speakers worldwide, the positive disfavour in which speaking Igbo is held, especially amongst educated middle and upper-class Igbos, and the dismal global status of the Igbo language relative to the other major Nigerian languages of Hausa and Yoruba.

My response to my friend draws largely on the analysis of Igbo colonial and post-colonial society by the historian and essayist Chinweizu.

I read Chinweizu as maintaining that a significant cause of the Igbo peoples’ (an ethnic nation of about 35 million in Nigeria) almost complete alienation from their culture was the nature of the British conquest of the Igbos, in contrast to the conquest of the Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba and other ethnic-nationalities in Nigeria.

Igbo village republicanism and their generally decentralized acephalous political systems compelled the British to engage in systematic, piece-meal destruction and devastation of Igbo communities.

The base and superstructure of Igbo life, to use Marxist terminology, were devastated, making it much easier for the British to impose their customs and language, and the severity of the devastation made the Igbos associate their culture and language with inferiority and weakness.

This was in contrast to the Hausa-Fulani and Yoruba with centralized kingdoms and chiefdoms which the British captured and left largely intact, merely imposing their puppets as Emirs and Obas, and thus perverted their governance institutions for their purposes of exploitation and rule.

After the British pacified the over 250 ethnic groups they forcefully enclosed in a country they called Nigeria, they appointed the Hausa-Fulani and other Northern ethnic groups as their effective successors. This British-selected Northern oligarchy, together with occasional Yoruba collaborators like Obafemi Awolowo, Olusegun Obasanjo, and Bola Tinubu, have been the faithful servitors ever since both of the British and the US-led Western systems of hegemony, exploitation and oppression. Equally willing Igbo collaborators like Azikiwe, Peter Obi, Okorocha, and Orji Uzo Kalu, have been prevented from either heading the neocolonial contraption called Nigeria or acquiring meaningful political power by the Northern Nigerian oligarchy.

( ‘We are grateful to the British officers whom we have known, first as masters, and then as leaders, and finally as partners, but always as friends.” remarked a grateful Tafawa Balewa in one of the more vivid illustrations of the reality of British picking the North as their collaborators in looting Nigeria. The quote by Balewa is from Adewale Maja Peare’s article “Being Lord Lugard” in the London Review Of Books).

The co-optation and adaptation of the largely intact Hausa-Fulani and Yoruba cultural and political institutions by the British accounts for why the Hausa-Fulani and the Yoruba could still identify with their culture to a considerable extent. It is then probably the reason for widespread Hausa and Yoruba language use.

The Yorubas were perhaps the most successful in weathering the storm of British depredations of the native cultures of Nigeria. They syncretized their religion with Christianity and Islam and so their linguistic and religious culture fared relatively better under colonialism.

The Yoruba syncretization of European Christian religion and Arabic Islamic religion from their previous encounter with Islamic invasion and trade contrasts sharply with the Hausa-Fulani who are politically and economically subservient to the Christian and supposedly secular West, but culturally and religiously subservient to the Islamic East; and the Igbos who are almost completely subservient culturally and religiously to the West.

An enduring legacy of British colonialism was the imposition and indoctrination of Anglophilia that exacerbated the cultural schizophrenia of Nigerians caused by colonial conquest and that cultural schizophrenia afflicted markedly the writers and artists. The best-known Nigerian writers, Achebe and Soyinka, widely regarded as pioneers and legends of Nigerian and African literature penned disingenuous defences and tortured rationalizations of the use of English in their writing that merely served to expose their cultural schizophrenia. Defences that are seen as specious and hollow in the face of, in my own opinion, Obi Wali’s irrefutable arguments for the use of African languages for African literature at the 1962 Writers Conference at

Makerere University.

Obi Wali’s argument was so powerful and convincing that it persuaded Ngugi wa’Thiongo to drop his Christian name and write all his subsequent major artistic works in Gikuyu. And that did not detract from the brilliance and universal acceptance of his writing.

So Nigerian artists, especially Igbo artists from Achebe to Adichie, also bear a considerable part of the blame for the peripheralization of the Igbo language given their fallacious claims of their ability to render in English faithfully the subtleties of the Igbo language and experience. Claims that are, as I said before, merely tortured rationalizations of their prioritization of a universal audience over the primary Igbo audience.

The solution, I think, is complete decolonization that will be political, economic, linguistic, social, and cultural and ought to begin by questioning the very existence of Nigeria as a contraption forcibly imprisoning its many constituent ethnic-nationalities which are qualified to be viable nation-states in their own right.

The Igbos should emulate the Welsh and the Scottish, who are not merely content with mainstreaming their languages in their public life but are fighting for independence from the UK because they realize that complete freedom and autonomy will enable them to realize their full potential as a people.

The Igbos and other constituent ethnic nationalities of Nigeria should realize that complete separation from Nigeria is a necessary but certainly not sufficient condition for their progress. Nigeria’s structure and functioning are dependent on the needs of Western capitalism. (Big Oil especially) This is why the Northern Nigeria oligarchy and their Southern Nigeria collaborators, Western capitalism compradors to a person, are implacable in their refusal to countenance discussions of the peaceful dismantling of Nigeria and working with their Western overlords have brainwashed many Nigerians, including supposed intellectuals or in the case of the Igbos “otellectuals”, that the dismantling of Nigeria will inevitably result in balkanized anarchy to borrow a description from a Twitter mutual.

The Igbos should not repeat the blunders Ojukwu made in the fight for Biafra to secede from Nigeria; blunders being repeated today by Nnamdi Kanu. Rather than repeating the disastrous mistakes that the megalomaniac Ojukwu made, Igbos had better learn from past and present successful revolutionary movements. In other words, Igbos need present-day incarnations of principled, committed and intellectually heavy-weight leftist leaders like Amilcar Cabral, Thomas Sankara, Patrice Lumumba and not Anglophiliac, intellectually light-weight, flip-flopping milquetoast liberals like Azikiwe, Ojukwu, Akanu Ibiam and the rest of the Igbo leadership whose leadership of Biafra contributed in no small part to the Biafrans losing the war.

Chibuike Obi, a freelance journalist based in Niger State, can be reached at ojionu@hotmail.com or on Twitter @chibuikeobi19 or Facebook as Chibuike Obi.