Posted by TAM FIOFORI on
LISTENING to the BBC programme Assignment in early November, I was astonished by the anger of a Nigerian illegal immigrant named Precious (how ridiculous I thought) being interviewed in a Moroccan desert refugee camp.
LISTENING to the BBC programme Assignment in early November, I was astonished by the anger of a Nigerian illegal immigrant named Precious (how ridiculous I thought) being interviewed in a Moroccan desert refugee camp. First, he told the lady BBC correspondent that he was confident that he already had one foot in Europe and very soon he would be in Europe from where he would be able to send money to his family in Nigeria, because according to him, 'without money life is useless in Nigeria."
Then he complained bitterly about the Moroccans who 'treat blacks as if they have nothing in their head." He concluded by saying that, 'the Moroccans think they are white." I felt rather sorry for this ‘lost' Nigerian youth and my mind went back to my encounter with many of his type in Mali in 2002, desperate to cross the dangerous Sahara Desert en route to Europe. Of course many perished in the desert and became unknown statistics. The BBC correspondent made a pun of his name, saying that many sub-Saharan young men and women would continue to risk their lives to reach the precious land of Europe.
Poor Precious I thought. He may have been precious to his parents who named him so, but even in North Africa he was considered as nothing more than ‘black dirt.' As an aside, his name could well be another of those straight translations from the vernacular with the usual embellishments. So we end up with coy names like Blessing, Innocent, Favour and Gloria, which in most cases do not reflect the character of the bearer. Now what would a President Obasanjo with his rigid fixation of Nigeria being a great country, have to say to a Precious who feels useless in the same Nigeria simply because he has no money?
Grappling with being black in a world controlled by whites and shaped by their values has always been a social and intellectual problem for blacks. For many, this remains the problem of the world that refuses to go away. Seventy-odd years ago, the Great Zik of Africa, put the humiliation he was subjected to as a black student in America in verse he entitled, Despise me not because I am black. Less than fifty years ago, one of the world's greatest-ever leaders, Nelson Mandela was jailed for over twenty-five years because he questioned an impostor ‘white regime' that considered him inferior in his own country simply because he is ‘black.'
Rosie Parks, a seamstress who fifty years ago sparked the race riots in the South that led up to constitutional civil rights for black Americans, died in 2005 aged 92. Yet with high-profile ‘black' Secretary of State Rice now in office, Oprah Winfrey Queen of American TV Talk shows, was recently snubbed when she attempted to enter a highbrow shop in the same United States of America. Rosie Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man in a public bus in Birmingham, Alabama. Oprah Winfrey, reputed to be one of the richest entertainers in the world, was refused her right to spend her money in a white shop. Such is the flavour of being black in the greatest and most powerful nation in the world!
Our own irrepressible Fela had lamented in song on Why Blackman Dey Suffer Today. His relative, Nobel Prize dramatist and poet Wole Soyinka, in his anti-racism poem Telephone Conversation obliquely observed that, 'the soles of my feet are white." So, in politics, protest, poem, person and pain, black people have for generations fought against the stigma imposed on their physical being by all manner of so-called white supremacists. Be they white-robed crazed Ku Klux Klan members who still roam free in the United States of America or the demented Nazi Hitler who refused to shake hands with the great black American athlete Jessie Owens, the world is still greatly influenced by the colour bar. The Dutch Reformed Church that instituted apartheid in South Africa fervently believed that blacks were made inferior to whites. Are they any different from our horde of Pentecostal churches in Nigeria who preach that God is white and the Devil is black?
The bottom line is language and its use. Unfortunately, as we adopt the English language and use it daily in discourse and writing we become like parrots imitating meanings that are damaging to our own psyche. Ignorance really is no excuse!
I do not know the history of the English language enough to ascertain whether there were black people in England when the language was being developed. I however know, from flipping through the pages of any English language dictionary that everything black is bad and negative. From blackmail to blackleg, black is not the colour or mood of good, beauty or happiness. Whether this is deliberate or not, is really not the issue. What has remained true since the English language was invented is that its collective vision of anything black is plain bad.
Now, what to do? Ironically, it might be a bit late in the day to argue that we should abandon the English language. Language we know is dynamic and proof of this with regards the English language is well documented in Nigeria with the presence of Pidgin English and Nigerian-English. We cannot however unilaterally decide to revise and reverse the English language by say substituting whitemail for blackmail.
In the meantime, some sloganeering has helped to shift the permanent damage. We have therefore welcomed expressions like Black is Beautiful and taken pleasure from sayings like The Blacker the Berry the Sweeter the Juice. This has not stopped Nigerian men from their craze for ‘yellow sisis' or the women imposing unnatural Yellow Fever on themselves.
I was very disappointed when in the wake of the double tragedy that befell Nigeria recently, our newspapers and magazines went to town with screaming banner headlines proclaiming a Black Sunday, Black Day for Nigeria. Yes, it was a tragic double-blow for Nigeria, but surely our journalists and editors should have paused a while and thought a little deeper to find more appropriate words than black. For whatever it is worth, I am reliably told that the so-called Black Box of an aircraft is in fact orange in colour.
Fiofori lives in Lagos