By Chidi Odinkalu
In 1989, academics, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, published to great acclaim their study of the evolution of the diverse dialects of English language from different empires. Their title was The Empire Writes Back. The book shows how various outposts of the empire took ownership of the language and adapted its grammar and usage.
Few
outposts from Empire have been as prolific in this enterprise as Nigeria.
Conceived as somewhat of an illegitimate offspring in the ménage à
trois between Sir George Taubman Goldie; his mistress, Flora
Shaw; and his successor in propinquity to her, Frederick Lugard, Nigeria became
a colonial experiment in the Tower of Babel.
A national anthem composed in 1959, one year before independence which occurred in 1960, acknowledged this reality in the third line of its first stanza, reminding the world of the aspiration to create a country even “though tribe and tongue may differ.” The anthem itself invited citizens to “hail” the country in antiquarian, biblical third person, symbolising a relationship with the country that was fractured from origin. Never mind that the hailing was to be done in the borrowed language of a foreign country.
