Nigerian English Writing and Translation: The Fate of the Vernacular Literature and Culture
Abstract
This article examines a central paradox in postcolonial Nigerian literary and linguistic history, with a specific focus on Igbo. It argues that while early Christian missionaries used translation into vernacular languages as a tool for evangelism—thereby actively developing the language’s lexical and conceptual capacity—the subsequent project of anti-colonial cultural assertion by Western-educated African writers and intellectuals has been conducted predominantly in English. This literary strategy, though successful in challenging imperial myths of cultural inferiority, has had the unintended consequence of further institutionalizing English as Nigeria’s “power language.” Meanwhile, vernaculars like Igbo have been relegated to a protected but stunted domain of “in-group” communication, denied the “rough and tumble of acculturation and translation” necessary for full modern development. Through analysis of language policy, translation history, and literary texts (by Achebe, Tutuola, Adichie, Soyinka, and others), the article demonstrates how the predominance of English in Nigerian writing has created a state of dependency for African languages, leaving them vulnerable to attrition and hybrid encroachment (e.g., “Engli-Igbo”), while secular translation work that could fuel their growth remains neglected.
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Introduction
Cultural and language studies in Nigeria do not appear to accord great importance to translation of documents available in foreign languages. Sometimes scholars rail against the dominance of English in national public discourse. But it is normal to do this in English because of the assumed institutionality of English in national public discourse as the official language of Nigeria. Thus in terms of the needs to translate, English is not considered by the local intellectual community to be a foreign language.
For many decades following independence, however, there was open resentment of the notion of English as the official language of Nigeria, but that is not to say that there was a clear sense of what else may be called official, if not English. Although the citizens recognize themselves as belonging to one ethnic group or another, which was bound together by one local vernacular that could have served as the source of ‘beliefs, attitudes, and values, [that would then be] part of their cultural software’ (Balkin 43), the bonds to the vernacular may in reality be weakening. A main reason for this is the existence of English as the official language of Nigeria. As a result, the creative role that cultural leaders normally play unwittingly and their contributions to language development in the field of discourse are little felt, or registered. Cultural leaders in many African communities, and this is true also of Igbo in Nigeria, which is my main focus in this paper, often use language purely for communication, without leaving an impact on the language itself, whether the official one or their native ethnic vernacular: they make no impact on the received foreign one, because they have not gained trust among a worldwide language community whose culture centres are physically and attitudinally far off as authentic phrase makers and reliable language innovators; the local language, because there is no level at which attention is paid to the vernacular language itself so as to notice innovations that may be learned, cited, and used again – for according to functionalism, ‘language is shaped by the language community in the context of use’ (Semantics and Discourse 82).
Intended or not, the national language policy of the Nigerian state is one of the ways in which the legacy of colonization is systematically reinforced and rendered permanent. The local book industry suffers from this policy, because the good quality books are ready-made abroad and consumed locally, and there is little incentive to invest in local publishing. This is compounded by the internet which is dominantly in English. But it is dismaying that documents that are available in English are taken to be sufficiently domiciled in the local space not to call for any effort of translation.
However, if these texts have originated in other languages than English, in their translation, the English language exercises itself, grows, and strengthens and extends its capabilities. But the local languages in Nigeria rarely have the chance to exercise themselves in this manner. The exercise is of course enabled by the translator; therefore, a very important language worker. He or she does not just ‘operate[] in a mediatory middle-ground’ (Douglas Robinson 62), as a ‘faithful servant of the source text’ (Bassnet and Trivedi 5), or merely a negotiator of the movement of information from one language to another; in the case of ethnic vernaculars with their typically limited vocabularies and concept-base, much creativity and innovativeness is needed. The low linguistic impact of the scholars of this community is one thing, and the absence of the impulse to translate and give an important foreign language text a place in the holdings of the vernacular culture another. But this is only a secondary cause of retardation for the local language, a primary one being the local use of English for all official purposes, and its encroachment and increasing spread into in-group activities within the given ethnic group.
Conclusion
Obiajunwa Wali’s conception of African literature is tied to ‘ideas of cultural authenticity’ (Newell 8). For him this literature is inauthentic unless it simultaneously inscribes its cultural software in its surface as well as in its depth. An African cultural content in a non-African language is repugnant to him; and that is the anomaly that has provoked his paper. The scenario he envisages for African literature would have inevitably benefited the African languages in the same way as European languages, for instance, rose to higher levels of development in line with the evolving of the literary history. This is by reason of the constitutive role of language in the being of literature, according to Aristotle, the medium that enables the emergence of the poem itself (Poetics, chapter 1), that is, the only way in which this singular poem may ‘accomplish existence’ (Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought 135).
Another mechanism to assist the development of African languages is translation. Its power is seen in Christian religious activity in Africa. Besides religion, and outside the Swahili areas of Eastern Africa, the servicing of all the major out-group functions of the ethnic communities in contemporary Africa is by the official language; and this covers everything from education from senior primary onwards to commerce and exchange, from participation in socio-political discourse to the print media and information networks in a modern plural society, and as we have seen increasingly literature as well. The network powered by the official language has become so encompassing by the early twenty-first century that the preoccupations of the language scholars have all but shifted away from the debate why use the language of the colonists as the official language of an independent African nation. And concern for the subjugated African languages is a distant and dying memory. Instead language research in Nigeria is nowadays heavily focused on the question of the existence and features of Nigerian English. But as the study of native African languages is still provided for at all the educational levels, translation has a big role to play in opening of access to the world’s literary archive in the vernacular languages. There is probably need also for government intervention to advance the study of the native languages with the help of well-funded translation studies to have a role in teaching things like science and technology.
The tragic irony this analysis exposes is that the fight for cultural self-representation, waged brilliantly through the colonizer’s language, may have come at the cost of long-term linguistic sovereignty. The vernaculars survive, but in a state of dependency, their potential for autonomous growth curtailed not by explicit policy but by the very success of their literary defenders. The path not taken—the path of sustained, secular translation into the vernacular, modelled by the missionaries for a different purpose—remains the clearest, if daunting, route to redeeming that sovereignty and ensuring African languages are not merely preserved as cultural artifacts, but developed as living tools for confronting a modern, globalized world.
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