ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Observations category.

Re: Spotting Nigerians

I got this mail from Nick about another personal peculiarity in English pronunciation in response to my recent post. Enjoy.

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I enjoyed your post about spotting Nigerian accents by the pronunciation of “man/men”

(https://www.ktravula.com/2011/08/spotting-nigerians/).

This doesn’t have anything to do with Nigerian English, but I know you like American English accents, so I thought I’d write. I ran into something similar to the “man/men” issue when I moved from my home town of Portland, Oregon to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (you should visit both cities if you get a chance). Having lived in Pittsburgh for ten
years I still find myself having to consciously use more of a “aa” sound, particularly with the word “bag”, which my wife tells me I pronounce too much like “beg”. I do it pretty automatically now, but I actually find myself exaggerating it to prevent comments. I think I sound like a sheep, going “baaaaaa-g”. The vowel sounds more open and I hold my tongue farther back in my throat than I would naturally.

This might not be exactly the same as the “men/man” thing, but it seems similar.

This is just my experience and not evidence of a regional accent issue, but at least one of my friends reported something similar after moving from Portland to the east coast. Other significant factors are that I may have picked up a bit of my mom’s New England accent, and also that Pittsburgh is home to a slight local accent and some cool local vocabulary like “yinz” instead of “y’all”.

Thanks for your always-interesting blog,

Sincerely,

Nick.

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Notes

This mail reminds me of one other distinct pronunciation difference in Nigerian and Ghanaian English. Growing up in the early to late eighties, I remember a common assumption that Ghanaian English sounded closer to the British standard than Nigerian English, and Nigerian parents paid more to send their children to private schools that had Ghanaian teachers rather than ones that didn’t. And though they paid so much for the “privilege” for us, we never understood much of the obsession beyond the fact that our teachers insisted on pronouncing “Church” as “cherch” (as it rhymes with “perch”), the as “the” (as rhyming with the “e” in “wet”, hamburger as “hamberger”, luck as “lack”, and but as “bat” rather than the Nigerian “bot” among very many others that I can list if I get the time. We students also didn’t gain much from the hubris that the teacher brought with them either. It however provided plenty moments of comic relief in classroom sessions when it didn’t come along with punishments for deviation. We had some good laughs as I am sure did Ghanaians who had listen to us speak English as well. I have been to East African and I think that the English there – along with its own amusing peculiarities that knocked Nigerian and Ghanaian versions to a corner – comes the closest to British English pronunciation standard in all of the Englishes I’ve heard on the continent. But then, I’ve never been everywhere.

Thank you Nick.

Sincerely,

Spotting Nigerians

Watching a cover of Rihanna’s “Man Down” yesterday, I noticed something curious: one of the girls in the video pronounced the word “man” with a familiar consistency. I became intrigued and went to see other videos by the young ladies. Eventually I found one in which they answered questions from their fans, and I got what I was looking for. They were born to Nigerian parents, raised partly in Nigeria and in the United States. It’s unmistakable. That pronunciation of “man” in the video is of someone who has lived in Nigeria at one point or the other in their life. Watch the song cover here.

The last time something like this happened to me was four weeks ago on the streets of Chicago. “Are you from Nigeria?” I asked the taxi driver who had spoken just a few words to me through the window as I complained that his fares were too exorbitant. “Yes, in fact,” he responded, to the astonishment of my company. “There was something in his pronunciation,” I told her later. It turned out that the man had grown up in Nigeria but had lived in Chicago since 1979. Like her, he was also astonished to hear that I had guessed his nationality from just a few words in a big city.

There are some very distinct peculiarities in Nigerian English pronunciations observable usually only to compatriots, residents or regular visitors. This must be why all comedic imitations of African speech by American actors seem to be funnier (or sillier, depending on how you look at it) for being too inaccurately generic. (Chris Tucker does another one of those impressions at the end of this video, and Steve Havey in this one.)

PS: Here is a related video in which we played around with the perceptible difference in “man” on a Nigerian or an American tongue.

In Redneck Country*

The invitation from my friend for me to come along to Highlands – a town about twenty-five minutes away from Edwardsville – included a caveat that I would be entering a “redneck” zone. I immediately conjured up images of a rural and underdeveloped small town with no non-white person in sight, and everyone driving trucks with “NObama 2012” bumper stickers. The immediate second thought of course was that it was going to be a fun experience witnessing a county fair or a demolition derby for the very first time. I absolutely have to go see this, I said, and started looking for my camouflage fisherman hat.

I have now returned, and I am alive which must mean something (especially to those whose imagination of a “redneck” town includes a horde of black-hating, gun totting, motorbike riding people with tatoos all over their bodies who eat hamburgers, listen to Rush Limbaugh and watch Fox News). In actual fact, what constitute a small town is not really its ethnic homogeneity (even though that is certainly noticeable). What makes a small town a small town is the ordinariness of the way they look at the world, their down-to-earth-ness (as literally as you can interpret that), and the otherwise silly, playful ways in which they spend their leisure (and the seriousness with which they take it).

The county fair is an annual event, I’m told, and it includes a public auction of farm animals. The ceremony is graced by the distinguished presence of the year’s beauty queen of the town who stands gracefully with a tiara on her head beside the stall of the waiting animals. There are also live barns in the fair where if one chooses one could purchase of any of the animals. The cattle are extremely huge and in pretty colours. I saw a sheep wearing a military camouflage jacket. We also saw a hall full of rabbits all for sale for about $2 each. “Do you eat rabbits?” I asked Karla who immediately began to giggle. “No, I don’t.” She said “They’re pets. They’re cute.” Yea right! A few seconds later, the barn owner who had overheard us had a few more words to add. “Of course we eat rabbits. And more, we use parts of them for very many other things too. You know those pee sticks you use for pregnancy tests at home? They’re made from rabbit brains! Their eyes are used for glaucoma testing and the animals are also used to test beauty products before they are released to the market… Of course we eat them. We have about 1,200 of them in our farm at home.” Well, there you go.

There were roosters of various colours and kinds which reminded me of Chicken George in Alex Haley’s Roots. I have never seen so many different kinds of cocks in one place. (I have a different post coming up on this come later. There was something distinctly familiar about the smell of so many free-range roosters put together in one place, cackles, colours, and all. It comes from distant memories of my own childhood).

The demolition derby itself – the fair’s biggest attraction – took place in the arena surrounded by an anticipating crowd. Imagine the arena in Rome with gladiators in the ring. The gladiators in this case are trucks constructed specially for the occasion. The aim is to ram them into other competitors’ trucks as much as possible until there is only one functioning truck left in the arena. Think again of the WWF’s Royal Rumble of those days. By the time we arrived, one truck was already out of commission. The remaining five slugged it out in the mud for a while, and by the time we left, there were three of them left chasing each other around the muddy stage. I’m told that the grand event will take place today with even smaller vehicles still driven by real people, playing the same game. I guess the idea of building something that will eventually be crashed for the purpose of entertainment makes a whole lot of sense. From sitting in the stand and watching along with the intense excitement of fellow spectators, I can at least say that it has its thrilling moments.

All that remained was walking around the fair grounds, observing small town park entertainment, having a first taste of some new snacks (a corndog is a hotdog covered in corn bread and fried. A funnel cake is not a cake. It’s a fried sweet dough covered in icing sugar). In the end, I also discovered that I was not the only black person in a fair of many thousands of people. There was this other guy I saw at the auction close to the horse, but he was probably American.

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* I use the term advisedly. Wikipedia tells me that unless you are one yourself, it’s not a word you should use to refer to someone else.

Burning Up!

These two statements are very true: America is a very hot place. America is a very cold place. There is one reason however why one of the statements will raise an eyebrow anywhere else across the Atlantic. The most enduring image of this country is that of white flurry snow falling down on lighted trees at Christmas. Somehow, for some strange reason, none of the images of sweating pedestrians, smelly cowboys and dusty roads of Nevada and California survived childhood memories and a transatlantic flight.

The temperature in Edwardsville yesterday was over 100 degrees F (about 37 degrees C). In Minnesota just two days ago, the recorded temperature was 115 degrees F. (That is 46 degrees C for heaven’s sake!!!) Thirteen people have already died from heatwaves. It is very telling that this happened in Minnesota, a usually cold place that still had snow until April when everyone else had already started having sunlight. If there was ever need for anyone to see that climate change is a harrowing reality, this is it. The question is, how do/would people survive the summer here, especially people already used to cold weather for half the year?

This statement is also very true: although coming from sub-saharan Africa, I’ve never been in a hotter or colder weather anywhere else.

Secondary School Days

It was always cold and dry in November towards the end of the school year, and the season always came with a certain bubbling feeling and restless feet. School was at Agodi, a stone throw from the governor’s office, and the state prisons. It was bordered by a military housing project/barrack which had some of the best eating shacks we had ever encountered. It was also the only place where we could go have burukutu in the after hours with the little money we could save. Fufu at Barracks was the best, for some reason. It was rock solid, and filling. It was just as well since the majority of the customers of the eating joints were military people expected to be tough, filled, and healthy.

The broadcasting corporation was about two miles away. It had a very large fenced compound where at this time of the year an exhibition was held. It was called an exhibition because it was conceived as a carnival for the Christmas season. In time, it became a spot for gaming, alcohol and peppersoup and not much else. It was the ultimate taboo spot of escape from school, and we took the liberties many times daring the always looming risk of being apprehended by state law enforcements sent out to find school children loitering the streets during school hours. The best way to get to the broadcasting corporation from the school without getting caught was to walk through a winding short-cut road that went through the Officer’s Mess of the Second Mechanized Division located just across the road. I see it now, a quiet living estate with fancy houses and barking dogs. Three, and sometimes four, young school boys in blue checkered shirts trekking across the land under a sometimes scorching sun. In their pockets are a few coins each, and some roasted groundnuts tied in transparent nylons.

The excitement at the exhibition grounds never always justified its anticipation, but it almost always compensated for gloom of confinement that the walls of our school represented. Dry harmattan Novembers on the streets of Bashorun as pesky loose cannon truants from a faraway place looking for a lost piece of their precocious childhoods… were good times. They also featured really dusty feet in rubber sandals.

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