A Journey Into Speech

(This version originally published in Palapala Magazine)

 Joyce Ashuntantang, Ph.D.

I grew up speaking English. In fact, I was born into English and never considered it a foreign language. I was also born into Kenyang, the language of the Bayangis, and Pidgin English. I learnt all three languages at the same time and in the same house.  Actually, my love for literature in English is rooted in both African and British literature including Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, Jane Eyre, Eze goes to School, The Drummer boy and Things Fall Apart.  Also, my parents studied in England in the nineteen sixties and as I grew up, I visited England through their stories, pictures, music, my mother’s kitchen utensils and my father’s bookshelf.

Indeed my childhood was immersed in English.
Buea, where I grew up, is situated at the foot of Mount Cameroon. It is a town built by Germans in the 19th century. What is remarkable about Buea is the cool weather, the German architectural relics and the English Language, a British legacy. Inhabitants of Buea are known in Cameroon as “I was” because they prefer speaking English amongst themselves instead of Pidgin English.

 Joyce Ashuntantang, Ph.D.

I grew up speaking English. In fact, I was born into English and never considered it a foreign language. I was also born into Kenyang, the language of the Bayangis, and Pidgin English. I learnt all three languages at the same time and in the same house.  Actually, my love for literature in English is rooted in both African and British literature including Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, Jane Eyre, Eze goes to School, The Drummer boy and Things Fall Apart.  Also, my parents studied in England in the nineteen sixties and as I grew up, I visited England through their stories, pictures, music, my mother’s kitchen utensils and my father’s bookshelf.

Indeed my childhood was immersed in English.
Buea, where I grew up, is situated at the foot of Mount Cameroon. It is a town built by Germans in the 19th century. What is remarkable about Buea is the cool weather, the German architectural relics and the English Language, a British legacy. Inhabitants of Buea are known in Cameroon as “I was” because they prefer speaking English amongst themselves instead of Pidgin English.

First, a Proud Cameroonian…
In my history books I learnt that the Portuguese discovered Cameroon and named it after a river, “Rios dos Cameroes” meaning “river of prawns”. My history books also taught me about the Berlin Conference, German occupation, and the British/French rule in Cameroon. I learnt all these facts absentmindedly and regurgitated them perfectly during exams. However, I was a child born at the height of African nationalistic fervor and so my primary school history lessons included local history. This local history captivated me. I didn’t know why at the time, but it just seemed easier to understand.

I was a talkative, vibrant and energetic girl and in primary and secondary school.  I participated fully in the cultural festivities marking our two national holidays, 11th February and 20th May.  On these national holidays we had a marching parade.  I participated fully in these parades and in my senior years in primary school, I held the Cameroon flag or school signboard and marched ahead of the entire school. I usually felt a great sense of pride as we marched and sometimes sang to “Cameroon, My native land”. During the eve of the national day celebrations, we usually had a choral competition. I was our choir “conductor” in primary school and I still remember one of my competition songs vividly:

Our countrymen and women listen to these words
Listen now, Oh listen now.
We sing to him our comrade praising but his name,
We do this with joyful hearts.
Ahidjo our comrade has worked for us,
We must follow and serve our nation.

I bathed in this kind of national rhetoric daily. I believed in Cameroon and in my president. I had to work for my Nation. I felt safe belonging to Cameroon.

An Invisible Anglophone Cameroonian…
Then, I passed my “A” Levels and went to Yaoundé to attend [then] the only University in the Country. Once I got to Yaoundé, my voice was under attack and my sense of Cameroon too. All around me French prevailed. I understood French relatively well but I could not speak it fluently. With a less than perfect knowledge of French came a less than perfect sense of self. My confidence began to suffer. I will enter a taxi and barely say my destination. I could not talk aloud for fear of ridicule that easily came from Francophones who regarded Anglophones as foreigners. Sometimes I will sit in a taxi with other people and there will be an interesting conversation going on in French and I will remain quiet. This talkative me will be quiet! In the market the same thing happened. Like in other African countries, the market in Cameroon is a place to buy and unwind. It is basically ‘woman’ territory but in Yaoundé it was a linguistic duel. I would go to the market, barely point to what I want, ask “Combien?” (How much?) Pay and take off. I could not indulge in the market-spin-off- tales that characterized shopping in the market. I had lost my speech in Yaoundé.

On the university campus, we could not speak English freely. Each time the francophone students heard us talking in English, they would poke fun at us and call us “Biafrans” from Nigeria, a reference to the fact that the English-speaking Cameroon was part of Nigeria. In the university, Anglophone girls were more under attack than the boys since they could  not physically fight back. When the francophone boys saw an Anglophone girl and recognized her as such, they will scream “Anglo tu m’aime? Oui je m’aime.” (Anglophone, do you love me? Yes, I love me.) This was to poke fun at our inability to communicate in French.

Around the city of Yaoundé, all signs were in French and when they did have English translations, the English version would be in tiny letters under the bold French version. The subtle message was that English was the lesser language, and English Cameroonians were second-class citizens.  I began to feel like I had no country. My sense of nation began to suffer.  The Cameroon I had built in my mind started crumbling. Then, I read Anderson’s assertion about the nation being “an imaginary construct,” and it made perfect sense. Nevertheless, in Yaoundé, I kept my vibrant voice within my English speaking community and still tried to identify with my country Cameroon. Nationalism, once it takes its roots, is hard to shake off.

After graduation, I won a Postgraduate government scholarship to study Library Science at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. As a government sponsored student, I was a Cameroonian abroad. Yet, amongst my friends I had a hard time convincing them that Cameroon was a bilingual Country, with English and French as the official languages. The few who knew Cameroon believed it was a French country, period. In those days I would go to the library and pick up books, bibliographies, magazines, anything on Africa to see how Cameroon was presented, but, to my dismay it was always presented as part of French Africa. English Africa was Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Malawi, and Zambia etc. English Cameroon was lost. That is still the case to this day.

Part of America’s Black Minority…
I arrived in the United States in the mid nineties. In this vast New York, I was lost again but I discovered I belonged to another minority group that included Hispanics, folks from the Caribbean, African Americans, and Asians etc. I had a new name. I was a person of color and my sub-category was “black”.  Each time I looked for employment, I had to identify myself on a piece of paper “meant for statistics only”. The paper never gave me a chance to say I was Cameroonian or African. The statistics compilers only needed to know whether I was Black, Caucasian, Hispanic, not white, Pacific Islander etc. Of course I was black. Yet being black wasn’t easy either.  At school, I spoke very rarely. I had to watch my speech to make sure that both my ideas and accent conformed to some sort of universal (white) standard before I spoke. I didn’t want to sound black, African, or Cameroonian. It felt awkward. Yet the white students spoke in class and sounded white. Sounding white was OK. It was universal.

Then I re-read Ngugi’s Decolonising the Mind and several other essays on the linguistic impact of colonization. I felt ashamed about our struggle in Cameroon was based on two languages forced upon us by colonization. I decided to be Cameroonian with no official language or better still, just plain, African. English and French were part of my heritage and I was going to use them wherever it was necessary but they would not define my identity. After all, no one cared! This was America and details of identity did not matter. All that most people cared about was my skin color and if they needed any further detail “African” was sufficient since every one treats Africa out here like one country not a 54-country continent. So I settled into being black and African. I traded my small minority identity (Anglophone Cameroonian) for a bigger minority one (Black and African). Each time I went to Cameroon, I tried to explain to my family and friends that Francophones and Anglophones all belonged to this large black family which exists all over the world and there was no use trying to fight each other. Each time I returned to the United States I noticed that our large black family had different members and each with its own identity. I ignored this. I wanted my “big” minority identity. It was safer for me.

I Discover Myself
Then, I read Meena Alexander’s The Shock of Arrival, Michelle Cliff’s The Land of Look behind, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Still Small Place, Molara Ogundipe’s Recreating Ourselves and Mari Matsuda’s Where’s your Body?  Immediately, something started stirring inside me. Matsuda talking about the need to recognize and own our identity argues:

Our culture, our identity is not entirely of our making. We participate in and act upon what we are handed by history.

I just couldn’t act African. Africa is a continent. I had to be something before being African. At the start of her career Matsuda was advised to be a Law professor not a Japanese-American Law Professor but she could not follow the advice. As she points out “I can take the cloak of the detached universal, but it is an uncomfortable garment.”  I agree with Matsuda.  I have tried being the detached Black and African Woman, but like Matsuda, I will say it does not fit. It is like wearing a garment called “limbo”. One must be rooted somewhere before becoming, colored, black, African or Cameroonian.

So what am I? I am a Bayangi woman from English-Speaking Cameroon, which is presently part of Cameroon. Cameroon is in Africa. Africans are part of the black race, which is part of the human race. This is my identity. It is unfortunate that a European language has to define part of my identity but that is a fact of my heritage. If I deny it, then I deny myself. As I think over my outlined identity, questions bubble inside me. I know they will one day explode in answers still rooted in contradictions and more questions. At least, I would have gained my voice, and as Chinua Achebe puts it, I must have identified “where the rain began to beat.”

I have gone full circle and come back home. Home with my parents and my three principal languages: Kenyang, English and Pidgin English. Sometimes, I add French into the mix. I can now begin my journey into speech…

This is an excerpt of a paper originally presented at the Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York (CUNY), USA in 2000.

Picture: Masquerade by Abidemi Olowinara.

Our countrymen and women listen to these words
Listen now, Oh listen now.
We sing to him our comrade praising but his name,
We do this with joyful hearts.
Ahidjo our comrade has worked for us,
We must follow and serve our nation.

I bathed in this kind of national rhetoric daily. I believed in Cameroon and in my president. I had to work for my Nation. I felt safe belonging to Cameroon.

Comments

[George Esunge Fominyen]

Dr J,

It's a pleasure reading your work.

The complexity of who or what we are always fascinates me.

It pleases me to see that anglophone nationalism or not; "camerooness" or not;afro-centricism or not; there are more and more persons ready to make us realise that we don't have a single identity.

Once you are born from the union of a man's sperm and a woman's ovule - it is two distinct creatures and identities that you are going to carry throughout existence. Add the cultural baggage that comes with this and pepper it with political considerations - you quickly construe that we are not always exclusively who or what we think we are!

When I go "full circle and come back home," - there is Pidgin English, French, English, Bakweri, Metta, now Wolof...I ended somewhere in-between...

Peace Sister and May the Journey continue to be successful!