Legon Journal of the Humanitie 2.Cdr

Miethaner, Ulrich. 2005. I can look through muddy water: PIDGIN, ‘BROKEN’ ENGLISH AND OTHERING IN Analysing Earlier African American English in Blues GHANAIAN LITERATURE Lyrics (BLUR). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Kari Dako and Helen Yitah1 Ofulue, I. Christine. Nigerian Pidgin and West African Pidgins: Abstract A sociolinguistic perspective. Paper presented at the This paper looks at the manner in which speakers of pidgin and ‘broken’ English are ‘Othered’ in four Ghanaian literary SPCL Conference, University of Ghana, 2-6 August, texts: Kobina Sekyi’s The Blinkards (1918), R.E. Obeng’s 2011. Eighteenpence (1942), Cameron Duodu’s The Gab Boys (1968) a n d K o f i A n y i d o h o ’s E a r t h c h i l d : w i t h B r a i n Surgery (1985). In these works, ethnicity, education and class Skinner, P. Elliot. 1963. ‘’Strangers in West African Societies’’. status are tied to language, so that the (usually male) speaker of Journal of the International African Institute. 33 (4): pidgin and ‘broken’ Ghanaian English (GhaE) is cast as the 307-320. ‘Other’ whose use of non-standard English prevents him from entering the mainstream of Ghanaian society. The non-standard English speaker typically comes from a background Trudgill, Peter. 1983. ‘’Acts of conflicting identity: that is geographically and culturally removed from southern The sociolinguistics of British pop-song pronunciation’’. Ghana (for example, he may be a foreigner or of northern In Trudgill, Peter (ed.). On dialect: Social and Ghanaian extraction), and is often a semi-literate or illiterate servant attempting to communicate with his ‘master’. He is Geographical Perspectives, 141-160. Oxford: Blackwell. childlike, inarticulate, lacks intelligence and/or refinement, and is generally an object of ridicule. Thus a social boundary is created based on these linguistic representations of belonging and exclusion, many of which border on cultural essentialism. Introduction This paper focuses on the negative ‘Othering’ of speakers of pidgin and ‘broken’ English in the Ghanaian imaginary. In the four texts that we examine— Kobina Sekyi’s The Blinkards 1Kari Dako and Helen Yitah are both Associate Professors in the Department of English, University of Ghana. Legon Journal of the HUMANITIES Special Edition , 2012 | 201 202| Legon Journal of the HUMANITIES Special Edition , 2012 (1918), R.E. Obeng’s Eighteenpence (1942), Cameron Duodu’s language, but he also speaks Twi. Kobina Sekyi was a lawyer in The Gab Boys (1968) and Kofi Anyidoho’s Earthchild: with Brain Cape Coast, a coastal Fanti-speaking town. He had been called to Surgery (1985)— Standard English is the preferred variety and is the bar in Britain. In Cape Coast he would have heard pidgin spoken by those with Western education, while pidgin and spoken by Liberian and Sierra Leonean workers who thronged the ‘broken’ English are undesirable forms associated with the harbour as deckhands and were also employed as domestic illiterate, who are also of the low class. The speaker of Standard servants. English is credited with linguistic and cultural competence as well R.E. Obeng, the author of Eighteenpence was a school as refined manners. By contrast, the (usually male) speaker of master from Kwahu in the Eastern Region who first taught in non-standard English lacks intelligence, competence or Basel Mission schools in the Eastern Region and later joined the refinement. He is inarticulate, a source of humour and an object of Government Teaching Service. He retired as headmaster of Juaso ridicule—he is the Other. He is alienated or excluded from Boys’ School, Asante-Akim, which he had started. Living in an “mainstream” society because he is “defective” in his use of inland Twi-speaking area, he would not have been exposed to English and is thus a threat to the “desirable” way of speaking the much pidgin, but he was many times called in as translator in the language. Although linguistic alienation of the non-Standard colonial magistrate courts and would therefore have been familiar English speaker is the most obvious level of “Othering” in these with the way the police spoke English when giving evidence. He literary texts, it seems to be inherently linked to a deeper level of would have heard escort policemen speak pidgin or ‘broken’ exclusion which is based on class and ethnicity. Thus, in all English. Obeng became a pensioner in the 1930s and that is when instances the illiterate or semi-literate pidgin speaker is either of he started to write. He has written and published in both Twi and in northern Ghanaian extraction or a foreigner; he is typically a low English. class worker or a servant whose “master” is a European or a Cameron Duodu is a journalist from Akim in the Eastern southern Ghanaian who speaks Standard English. In the world of Region, but a couple of generations younger than R.E. Obeng. these texts, ethnicity, education and class status are tied to He worked as a journalist in the magazine, New Nation and language. later with Drum. He left Ghana when he was editor of The Daily It is therefore worth noting that all the four authors whose Graphic, Ghana’s biggest selling newspaper. Duodu would have works are dealt with in this paper are Western educated men from heard pidgin spoken by escort policemen, and also by labourers in southern Ghana. Their background varies, as do the texts they Accra, where he worked early in his career. The Gab Boys is his have created, but the authors have some aspects in common. They only novel. Duodu has worked as a freelance journalist from all write in English. Three of them have an Akan dialect as first London since he was compelled by political reasons to leave language: Sekyi has Fanti as first language, Obeng and Duodu have Twi as first language and Anyidoho has Ewe as first Ghana in the early 1970s. Legon Journal of the HUMANITIES Special Edition , 2012 | 203 Dako and Yitah | 204 Kofi Anyidoho is Professor of English at the University of Pidgin has always been regarded as substandard and a distorted Ghana. He is a well-known poet and has published many approximation to astandard, and anything short of Standard collections of his poems. Anyidoho hails from Whetta in the English [SE] is not considered worthy of the printed page in southern part of the Volta Region. Whereas his earlier works have Ghana. Boadi (1971:52) is thus right when he observes that distinct socio-political themes, his recent collections have been “Pidgin very seldom occurs in written form in Ghana.” more sociocultural in praise of his heritage and tradition. Yet, as can be seen from the literary texts examined here, pidgin As standard English speaking men who also wrote in and broken Ghanaian English have appeared in Ghanaian English, the four authors possess the power of representation in literature since before Independence in 1957. Ghanaian fiction fiction. As Rabinow (1986: 234-61) observes, “Representations has, however, not raised the status of pidgin; instead, it has are social facts”; they do not simply “reflect” existing realities but reinforced negative attitudes towards pidgin and its speakers. The general Ghanaian attitude to speakers of pidgin is also captured in actively participate in the construction and understanding of such Ama Ata Aidoo’s short story, “In the Cutting of a Drink”, where realities and the category of “reality” itself. What the individual the illiterate male narrator refers to pidgin as “that kind of white can know is shaped by representation which provides positions man’s language which everyone, even those who have not gone to and invites, “interpellates” the individual to locate himself/herself school, speak in the city” (Aidoo, No Sweetness Here, 1970:.35). in them as a subject capable of cognition and consciousness of This type of linguistic “Othering” in itself is not a new distinctions between the “self” and the “non-self”, the “same” and phenomenon in literature. For example, white American writers the “different”. To be in control of representation is therefore to be like Mark Twain, Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page in a position of power; that is, to be in control of the production, deployed “Negro dialect” as a sign of stereotyping. However, such promotion and circulation of subjectivities. In the southern Othering does not typically occur with regard to pidgin and Ghanaian contexts represented in the literary texts under study, ‘broken’ English in the literatures of Africa and the Diaspora. English is the means for the manipulation of power and relative Indeed, in fictional works across the Black Atlantic, and also in social status. In these texts the “self” and the “non-self” are politics and the media, pidgin and ‘broken’ English tend to be mapped onto the positions of the privileged and the marginalised, valorised. Nigerian pidgin literature and the Jamaican dub poets the master and the servant. are cases in point (see also Ezenwa-Ohaeto, 1994; Joseph In short, unlike the standard, to which everyone should McLaren, 2009). As Ezenwa-Ohaeto (1994: 48) has noted in a aspire, pidgin is spoken by marginalised groups. Pidgin used to be discussion on Nigerian fiction, pidgin is not only used to create called Kru Brëfo in Ghana, that is, the English of the Kru people humour and demonstrate wit, but also, and more importantly, to who were itinerant labourers from Liberia, and who did menial “enhance the creative focus of the work”. Similarly, in a paper jobs in the urban centres and also worked on the cocoa farms. titled “African Diaspora Vernacular Traditions and the Dilemma Legon Journal of the HUMANITIES Special Edition , 2012 | 205 Dako and Yitah | 206 of Identity”, McLaren (2009: 104) observes that for the Jamaican conceptualization, pidgin and non-standard English represent the dub poets “Africanized” English is a libratory voice for the ‘deviant’, the ‘unacceptable’, what does not belong, the ‘Other’.

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