Between Fake Accents and Bleaching Cream - A Nigerian Girl's More Obvious Debacle

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I am mostly irritated by things that are not authentic. Things like a Nigerian girl who drops her friend off at the airport and returns home with a British accent. That is annoying, blaad, innit?

I guess I should sneak this in now:

WARNING! THIS is a venting post. If you aren't cool with people's bold opinions, DON'T read. In that case, I'll suggest you just skip to the bottom and resteem for your followers who love the good stuff. 😉 Shall we?

The Brits are amazing folks. The subways, football, the world wars, colonization to mention but a few. These guys possess the midas touch on most anything. So I totally get when every kid in the class decide to roll their socks to the ankle because that is what this kid does, who has hair on the back of his neck, backflips, and will beat up anyone. I totally get. Especially if you are the fat tub with K-leg and smelly breath, who cannot manage five hours electricity in your metropolis, and your education system is a bull’s shit. If you are Nigeria. You will do anything to escape from yourself, irrespective of the trade off.

Let me tell you a little story so you can empathize with my angst. Timaro is my friend. To me she is just what most girls are: cute, beautiful. But the rest of the world, including herself, think she is adoringly beautiful you will want to eat her. I must clarify that I'm not the kind to reduce a beautiful phrase like “eat her” to some human orgy. I just mean everyone thinks she is velvet beautiful you will want to chew on her skin.

Timaro turns heads of both genders. Much of this because she is a “yellow sisi.” She is Caucasian-fair. (My tribute to proper English). When ritualists chase hunchbacks, men chase Timaro because of her fair skin.

So one day Timaro and I were in the same venue just a few tables apart. On my table I overheard two strangers gossip about her. One asked the other if she thought Timaro was Nigerian.

“She is so beautiful. I wish she had a good accent,” one of the girls farted.

All the while I was holding my own, but not anymore.

“You guys mean to say that I don't have a ‘good accent?’ Who even defines that?”

I told them how disappointed I was at such logic, considering that they were Nigerians, although they spoke like natives of nowhere.

Since this accent argument is usually a familiar terrain, I was armed with my homework. My friend once moved to Scotland for just a year and started speaking like he didn't spend a single week of his 23 years in Nigeria, when in truth he only just left Nigeria for the first time. So I brought out my points again.

I asked the girls if they knew that the discipline of Sociolinguistics even accommodates variances in accents. They didn't.

I challenged their faulty concept of an “English” or “American” accent, and rather looked at practical cases of regional accents in the Americas and everywhere else, like say Welsh English versus Yorkshire accents, or Floridian and Pacific Westerner accents. Did they know there were hundreds of such regional accents? They didn't.

I enjoyed to ace this argument. They tried to shoot back but they kept making a case for proper pronunciation. Did they know that was another subject entirely? They didn't.

“What if you guys are told that the Queen's English accent has changed a great deal over 30 years, according to an acoustic analysis?” There was this wow gasp.

I asked the girls what particular accent they were speaking with: which one they would approve for a village boy like me who craved to be posh. They were irritated at my sarcasm.

Then I dropped my “finish him” punch. I told these girls that it was my opinion that adopting some foreign accent was a display of inferiority complex. Cultural complex. Comparable to using bleaching cream to look like my yellow sisi Timaro so you'll be considered beautiful.

“Ever wondered why this is very prevalent of Africans? I've met lots of Germans, Frenchmen, Dutch who all didn't seem to be hasty about tagging their accents “bad” and adopting some hybridized stuff from wherever in the name of a foreign accent. But the Nigerians? It's a passport to social elitism. I hate the radio stations and TV show hosts for this. It turns me off and I tune off.”

I wanted to drop the mic at that point.

So, my friends here (especially from the Nigerian community) let us talk about this accent issue. Do you fault my argument? Posit a better one, I want to learn too. Have an interesting accent story?, let's hear it.

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Further the discuss by dropping your COMMENTS. UPVOTE to feed a minnow. I've not had power for five straight days and I exhausted my budget on running off grid electricity. That hurts my Steemit presence 😟. I hope to steem myself a solar power box in the very near future. RESTEEM and FOLLOW if you think I earned it.

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