Africans and Accents

Many Africans who speak English have different kinds of accents influenced by where they grew up and the other languages they speak. An accent is described as a mode of utterance peculiar to an individual, locality or nation. This dictionary definition makes it sound like your accent is a part of your identity and is something you should be proud of but I have met many Africans who are not proud of their accents.

In Botswana the closer your accent is to that of native English speakers like the British or the Americans the more people envy you. If you have what I call a “raw Botswana accent” people tend to look down upon you. This is partly due to that most of the people with the raw Botswana accent come from public schools while those with the near perfect English or American accents come from rich private schools where some of their teachers are English or American. Thus in most cases your accent gives away your social status. Many people try so hard to perfect their accents in order to give the illusion that they went to rich schools or good public schools in the city. Most radio stations in Botswana nowadays seem to be hiring people who have accents that come close to those of native English speakers. The question this raises is does having a near perfect accent mean you have mastered the language better than someone who speaks it with their natural accent? I have met a few Caucasian people who spoke my language with my accent and I was impressed so I wondered if this meant that I had to master the American accent in order to impress the Americans with my English.

The accent issue gets complicated when an African moves to a place with native English speakers like America. The first thing a person in America notes when they talk to you is your accent. Many of them politely say they love your accent leaving you to wonder if they really meant it or it is their way of telling you that you are odd. You pray so hard that during your stay in America you will absorb some of the American accent if you are ashamed of your own and you celebrate when someone notices an ‘improvement’ in your accent. If you do master the accent you feel a sense of acceptance by the Americans because we all want to feel accepted but guess what? Many of your friends back home in Africa are waiting to hear your accent as soon as you get back and if it is too perfect they will accuse you of being less of an African even though they too would like to have an accent like yours. Talk about complicated!

A possible solution is for us to realize that there are many English accents and there is no one right English accent so we should take pride in our accents.

Iyo Ndzimu wangu! (Oh, my God!)

I am leaving for South Africa tomorrow to do Theater in Jo'burg and Cape Town. I'll be there for a month and I am the only non-American in the group. The questions I am getting are ridiculous!! Wish me luck.

"Oh, Donald, like since you're half South-African and you've been there before, like, should I take my digital camera with me 'cause I might get robbed, you know, like the black people might still be angry about apartheid and all..."

"Like, do they see a lot of Americans down there? 'Cause I mean if they do, they've probably heard we're coming and they're expecting gifts. Like, we can't give them much, we're college students...I mean, charity is what the US is known for..."

Iyo Ndzimu wangu!!

Yeah sure, my pet elephant has already run up to the top of Kilimanjaro to send smoke signals to the entire continent to say you saviors are coming.

Pride nurtured by Elitism?

Tumelano's comment on "Is African Renaissance of the Mind" made me think of something. I wonder whether it matters what kind of social class an African associates with in US once in the US for them to be proud of being African. I mean, if you come here and go to the most expensive boarding schools, elite colleges, you're in an environment that is likely to release your appreciation of Africa (big place, I know) by just giving you the chance to be proud. Would you think the same way if you had come here and begged on the street and ended up in the projects? I think probably not...especially if you came from the bottom of the barrel in Africa to begin with.. I could be wrong, though.

ma soeur

speak to her in yoruba, twi, swahili, sesarwa or shona.

she may not comprehend some,

but in all she will delight in a rhythm natural to her ear,

a movement instinctive to her tongue

and hopefully a reassurance that she has a home on the other side of the sea:

my sister is the soul in Africa’s golden daughters.

she has glistening brown eyes

like one who stared at the earth for too long,

her nose is fantastically flat,

her lips are fabulously full

and every hair strand in her dreadlocks is twisted and locked just the way it ought,

her smile flashes bright and wide because home lives in her.

sister’s skin shines dark black,

her hands heal everything they touch

and her song echoes a revolution in the valley of my soul.

today, I won’t let her cast her head down just because of skin.

Heaven fell in love with her dark black before she knew dark black.

brown skin or dark skin, it is of God not shame.

in time, these foreign soils she trots will speak her name.

and today, sister’s going to shine that black and lift her chin.

Donald Leungo Molosi. 2007

no, really, what's up? kanti senzeni?

I found it both somewhat futile and thought-provoking when yesterday Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo gave a speech in New York City addressing representatives of the African Diaspora and warned the Diaspora about another “Scramble for Africa”. Obasanjo was basically saying that unlike the scramble we already know of (colonies and slaves), this time the world’s great powers will come after Africa’s energy resources especially those found in the Gulf of Guinea. He said that the scramble is “being led by China from the East and the US from the West”. Three things intrigued me about this:

1. How much can Africa really protect herself from the scramble? Do we have the capacity, considering that a lot of our self-protective capacities are in the West’s hands? We are not in a position to put the West, or even the East in sanctions because their trade feeds us, among many other reasons.

2. Obasanjo asked the African Diaspora to join Africa in its efforts to protect its resources. This is where my cynicism about Pan-Africanism shows up. Really, African-Americans see themselves as first American and secondly of the African Diaspora, if at all they acknowledge the latter. So, you can figure whose interests they will have at heart. Use the same reasoning for other groups in the African Diaspora and you’ll see this might not have been as grand a move towards progress as Obasanjo may believe.

3. I ask myself if the scramble ever stopped after the slavery and colonization. And if Obasanjo is right that something really huge and explicitly nasty is coming, whose help do we seek?

COMFORTABLE IN YOUR VERY OWN SKIN

Djimon Hounsou from Sierra Leone

Alek Wek from Sudan

they are too dark for whom?

It is hard to define the standard of beauty or decent looks for a continent of people as vastly diverse as far as looks go as Africans. People throughout the continent come in all shapes, sizes and colors, and even more interestingly, the standard of who looks good might have this same complexity within one African country. I can think of how difficult a task that would be even in my home country of Botswana, a country of less than two million people.

But one thing seems to be common throughout the continent’s psyche though – the belief that the lighter your skin, the better you look. Most of the publicized stories about this are about West Africa but I believe this mentality to be all over, like a huge cancer imperceptibly eating away Africa’s integrity.

Colonization may have played a part, yes, and passed the baton to 21^st century international media. But those influences are from without Africa. What about the negative messages we send from within the African continent to other Africans on the continent that darker skin is uglier? In my opinion, we as Africans facilitate the duping of our very selves, yes, certainly as an effect of what we have been taught and believed for too long, but is it not about time we put integrity back into having African features? Can we ever separate our views what we've been indoctrinated with? I don’t know how we can put gorgeous back into dark skin in our minds, but time is running out for you, Africa. Too many of your daughters die physically and in the soul using toxic creams to make themselves look lighter. And too many are paying the price in other ways such as at the link below:

http://www.mmegi.bw/2006/October/Tuesday3/298357583761.html

MUTED DRUMS!

A friend of mine, Annie recently shared with me an Afro-politically-conscious song I found extremely inspirational. It inspired me to scribble a poem as I listened to it and I wrote the poem below. I think it reads better in its original two-column fomat and I did not go back to edit it because it has an honesty about it I did not want to tamper with yet. What do you get from it?

***

WHAT IS MY REVOLUTION?

We were taught, sometimes in a very
positive way, to despise ourselves and
our ways of life. We were made to
believe that we had no past to speak of,
no history to boast of.

Khama. Mandela.
I speak your names for your spirit
marches inside me.
Ke leungo la tiro ya diatla tsa lona:
I am the fruit of your revolution

It should now be our intention to try to
retrieve what we can of our past. We
should write our own history books to
prove that we did have a past…a nation
without a past is a lost nation, and a
people without a past is a people
without a soul.

Khama, I saw a drum today.
I literally saw a djembe head that had
been slashed with something sharp,
What use is it now?

And what use are my words if
my poem, devoid of craft, fails to
convey the tragedy of a mute drum?

What use am I, impounded in
these foreign mountains to beg and sigh?

We have known ironies, insults, blows
that we endured morning, noon, and
evening…

Who will forget that to a black one said
“tu”, certainly not as to a friend, but
because the more honorable “vous” was
reserved for whites alone?

Who will forget that to a black one [says]
“tu”, certainly not as to a friend, but
because the more honorable “vous” [is]
reserved for whites alone?

Lumumba. Nkrumah.
In the sound of your names I hear drums
that would not be muted by blood and
fire. Though your drums played loudly,
You fathers did not warn me.

…equal opportunities. It is an ideal
which I hope to live for and to achieve.
But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I
am prepared to die.

Mandela, remind me.
Something, bite me; ruffle me.
Something! Shake off this
cancer consuming my capacities

Sound of drums, wake me up to a
revolution.

The emergence of such a mighty
stabilizing force in this strife-worn
world..[it] should be regarded not as the
shadowy dream of a visionary, but as
practical proposition, which the peoples
of Africa can, and should, translate into reality.
Tomorrow may be too late and the
opportunity will have passed, and with it
the hope of free Africa’s survival.


Nkrumah, I saw a mute drum today.