As we walked into the house, my reflections turned to my mother.
My mother’s eyes always lit up when she talked to us about her years in a European run convent school in Lagos during the colonial era in Nigeria.
She would talk about her favourite teacher, Mrs. Ford, and the hours she spent teaching her class how to pronounce words in certain ways, and to speak with a British accent. My mother often retold the story of how her classmates would make fun and laugh, making jest of their teachers but she said Mrs. Ford would patiently continue her mission to get them to speak with a British accent. My mother would tell the story of how she was expected to enunciate each word, speak the “Queen’s English” and learn the grammatical rules and structures behind each sentence.
With her impeccable memory, she would detail how her teachers would teach them to pronounce words like “good” with a particular intonation that felt very foreign to her tongue. Up to this day, my mother bursts into fits of laughter when she retells the story of her and her classmates laughing after many failed attempts at mimicking their teachers.
From childhood my mother spoke two indigenous Nigerian languages fluently; however, her high school strictly prohibited students from speaking any native language, which had been labelled as “vernacular”. She described how the teachers would admonish students and state, “No vernacular in class!”!
The first language she learned as a child was Nembe. Nembe, the traditional language of the Nembe kingdom, a rich language full of character and rapid intonations. The language, which could go from sounding like the harsh waves of the Atlantic Ocean to the soothing breeze on a humid day was steeped in the deep cultural roots of the Ijaw people.
My mother was most expressive when she spoke Nembe. It was almost like she took on a different personality and I wished I could speak the language and fully understand the richness of the context in which she spoke. As a child I would watch the joyful expressions on her face as she spoke to her mother in Nembe. Their discussions were often punctuated by exclamations of “segboru emi o” when something excited them!
I would listen keenly and mimic some of her words and expressions and ask my mother what some of the words in her language meant, but she was never able to fully capture the depth of the meaning in English – see as children we never learned the richness of my mother’s mother tongue. English was the primary language spoken in our home and my mother, heavily influenced by her high school years in colonial Nigeria, made sure that we her kids spoke and wrote grammatically correct English. She would painstakingly take her time to break down the grammatical rules and logic behind sentences.
My thoughts began to float on to another story that my mother had told me when I suddenly heard someone calling my name, “Ima, Ima, Ima…. “ – with a pronunciation that reflected the fullness and richness of my name in its true intonations, inflections and meaning, I quickly turned around and smiled…
Ima, thank you for sharing your story and your reflections. Looking forward to part VII. – Darlène