Unsurprisingly, the typical Nigerian believes Nigerians are amongst the most intelligent people in the world. The reasons for this belief are varied, none of them empirical. Some attribute this widely held belief amongst Nigerians to the number of high profile Nigerians that have attended top universities in the world. It is not hard to find out that if the proportions of alumni from Oxbridge and Ivy League universities are aggregated by nationality, Nigeria will not be in the top 20. Some attribute it to sharp practice as exemplified in the advance fee fraud, affectionately known as “419”.
I was utterly disgusted when a Nigerian born professor at a British university declared in a restaurant (i.e. in public) that Nigerians are “the most intelligent people in the world” because of their skilfulness at 419. I remain disgusted. Some attribute the belief to “sense” which can be best defined as the “art of taking advantage of those who trust you the most.” Sense has not brought Nigeria great wealth, cutting-edge innovation or security in society amongst other things. At best sense almost always brings its practitioner short-term narrow gains and long term broad losses. Societies that function well coordinated with interactions and relationships of trust, reciprocity and loyalty, sense annihilates those virtues decisively.
I am therefore one of those who do not think Nigerians are the most intelligent in the world. I have some reasons for this. Firstly, is the simplest of things: colours. In most Nigerian languages there are only three colours (and using Urhobo as an indicator) they are red / yellow “owvawvare”, black “obiebi” and white “ofuafo”; in Yoruba it is “pupa”, “dudu” and “fufu”, respectively. Someone like Muhammad Ali (boxing and civil right icon) has been described as ovwara, obie and ofua by Urhobo people meaning yellow, black and white often by the same person describing him within twenty words of each other.
So, may I ask what colour Muhammad Ali is in the context of Nigeria languages? Southern Nigerian before the mass deforestation and up this day is surrounded by abundant amounts of bush. Equatorial forest bush is green. Yet, there is no colour for green in Southern Nigerian languages. Northern Nigeria has a generous helping of various shades of brown in its environment but no Northern language has a word for the colour brown. The blue sky has always been there for Nigerians to see for thousands or millions of years, depending on whether you are a creationist or evolutionist, but there is no word in Nigerian languages for blue. I remember as a child when my late mother used to import wrappers from Europe to sell in Nigeria and how words failed fashionable women if they had to describe their preferred colours in Urhobo.
In fact, a common practice was for these women to look in the living room for a book, magazine, calendar, almanac, etc. for a colour patch to describe a colour. My mother solved the problem by getting hold of a graduated colour catalogue because words such as lilac, turquoise, mauve, ecru, maroon and electric blue were seen by her mostly educated customers as “grammar” or “showing off”. I often wonder if failing to identify and classify omnipresent colour in one’s environment is a sign of intelligence. Maybe we can blame it on colonisation.
Secondly, taking the issue of language further, we come to technology. “Okor” in Urhobo means boat. The aeroplane is known as “okor enu” meaning “boat in the sky,” but does not account for space rocket, ballistic missile, hot air balloon and helicopter. “Okor otor” is “boat of the ground,” which refers to road vehicle especially the motor car, but does not account for train, tank, crane or digger. It also does not account for jeep, 4-wheel drive, salon, sedan, limousine, hatch back, station wagon or convertible. Things Nigerians just love to have such as mobile phone, DVD players, Compact Disc, internet access, satellite television, membership of social media is pushing the expectations of Nigerian languages to vaporisation point if you use them as a reference point.
I honestly wonder if Nigerian languages themselves are rendered intelligent, evolving or living by their speakers. If all reality is derived solely from language as many philosophical schools demonstrate, how can Nigerians do well in the global market with the limited languages we have?
Nigeria’s so-called most intelligent men and women are those who think almost exclusively in English, but they tend to struggle gravely with the idiomatic aspects of the language. Once one starts to think in terms of Nigerian language, problems of clarity start to appear amongst the intelligentsia. With all your learning in English you have to come on down to “Nigerian earth.”
Many people in Nigeria, particularly Westerners, are fond of saying “if you understood Yoruba you would have found what I said funny” because saying it in English robs it of its humour. That is true but only with regards to English, the humour is retained when translated directly into Urhobo and other Bantu or Edoic languages. A strong language is fully translatable in the context of another strong language.
Nigerian languages are not strong and very incomplete in comparison. That is not to say they are not interesting, useful or enjoyable. Translate “sio no” to English and you get “remove it” which means nothing to an English speaking adult, however, it means a lot to adult Urhobo speakers because it is the most identifiable phrase in one of the most famous yarns on sexual activity in Urhobo language. I think with the right tone “gbe kuro” has the same meaning in Yoruba without loss of….
Thirdly, for those Nigerians who are illiterate or have low literacy skills, the story can get very unpleasant. Nigeria has one of the largest populations of illiterate people in the world, according to UNESCO reports; it is a catchment of people Nigerians love to forget just as they do the people resident in the Makoko slums. No Nigerian language has words for virus or bacteria. Millions of Nigerians still believe AIDS, tuberculosis and other serious infections can be acquired through witchcraft, are preventable with “melcine” and are curable by spiritual means simply because they have no concept of microbial transmission of disease in their reality and their language.
A non-industrial non-technological language is also a great harbour for superstition. When Patti Boulaye stated this fact on Nigerian television in 2003, many self-appointed intellectuals dismissed her argument. All Boulaye wanted (though not clearly stated) was the inclusion of bacteria and virus in the local languages of Nigerians so that ordinary rural and urban folk could “understand” and “save” themselves from the scourges of sexually transmitted diseases.
If Nigerians have not gotten languages that can adequately capture the realities of the demands, necessities, technologies and problems of the 21st Century, are they an intelligent people or can their languages serve their intelligence adequately? This question can be taken as poignant if the Nigerian elite, be it in business, government, politics, science and technology, art and culture, all do a lot of thinking in Nigerian languages against a background of stronger international languages. Soon Nigerians will be thinking in Mandarin.
Language has power but not yet for Nigerians especially in global sense.
Dr. Nane is an errant scholar and economist, who lectures at London South Bank University.
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