Francis Egbokhare, poet, cultural critic and professor of linguistics at the University of Ibadan, has made tremendous contributions to African linguistics. One of Egbokhare’s signal contributions to his field is the codification of the Emai language, spoken in Edo, Nigeria. Egbokhare’s distinguished academic career spans four decades in which he has served as president of the Nigerian Academy of Letters. In 2020, Egbokhare published Echoes and Chimes, an acclaimed anthology of poems that addresses the deplorable postcolonial condition of his milieu. In this conversation, Egbokhare discusses his ongoing twin project of codifying Nigerian Pidgin and translating classic African and European literary texts into Nigerian Pidgin. He is in the final stages of translating Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. This chat with Tolu Akinwole, which has been edited for clarity, coalesces around Egbokhare’s linguistic and literary projects.
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It is a privilege to be here and to have this conversation with you, Professor Francis Egbokhare. I say that because you were a big part of my own formative years in English studies—you may not know that. You, Professors Ben Elugbe, Segun Awonusi, Abiodun Adetugbo, and many others wrote some of the foundational texts I read in my undergraduate days. So, it is a pleasure, double pleasure, to sit with you and to have this conversation. My questions are along two lines. One will be your journey into literature, and we may pivot in that vein to talk about that false dichotomy between language studies and literary studies in many Nigerian universities. And then a big part of this is just to get to learn about this project of yours. As I understand it, you’re translating Chinua Achebe’s classic, Things Fall Apart, from English to Nigerian Pidgin. I think that’s wonderful work. And I’ve also got a few questions about your motivation for codifying Nigerian Pidgin as you do. But the first thing I think to say would be thank you so much for your work, for your commitment to scholarship in the humanities, and just for your service, for all you do.
Thank you, Tolu, and it’s always a pleasure to meet a student who benefited from the modest work that we have done. Often, you don’t get to have people come back these days to say, “Look, we read your work,” or “You impacted us one way or the other.” It’s refreshing. It is difficult for people to know that this expression of gratitude is the life blood that flows in the veins of a teacher. So, it’s wonderful to be able to have this discussion with you. Thank you very much.
Alright. So, the first question will be at what point in your academic journey did you settle into literature? I know you have an anthology of poems as well, in which you translate John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud” and James Shirley’s “The Glories of Our Blood and State” into Nigerian Pidgin—a lot of people may not know that. At what point did that happen?
If you grew up in the village as I did, you would know that literature is part of the experience of the average African who is inserted in traditions, oral traditions, performances. So, I grew up in a village. Also in those days, in secondary school, you had to read quite a number of poems, novels, and so on: James Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child, for instance, and a lot of poems. I had to memorize 21 poems for my school certificate, and I still remember quite a few of them. In my school certificate, I had an A1 in literature. So, literature, for me, I didn’t see it as a subject to study; I looked at it like a life to live. It took me a while to understand this whole creative enterprise. Everywhere I went to as I was studying, I found literature. For instance, whether we’re talking about history, and if you look at poems, periodized poems, you will find that the poems have historical contexts. If you look at linguistic texts, if you want to do good linguistics, you collect big data and you find that in collecting the big data there’s a lot of anthropological, historical, and literary information in the big data. For 15 years I was doing field work with one of my mentors and we were collecting oral narratives of Emai people, and there was something that always resonated with me when I listened to the music, the narratives, something always moved in me. So, it’s difficult to separate my linguistics from literature. At some point, I started to do poems while I was an undergraduate reading linguistics because I needed some other avenue to express myself. I started writing essays as well. I also enjoy a good joke. I’ve always said that if I were not a teacher I would be a comedian. Jokingly, I call myself MC Prof. So, you can see that there’s a whole web: everything is woven together. Knowledge is fluid, and I think we just break it up in order for us to be to have a convenient way of studying to the detail some aspects of knowledge. I also got involved in social activism as a result of my upbringing as the son of a teacher, the son of a school principal. Getting involved in socio-political issues just came naturally as a student of the boarding school system. In all, literature presented to me an avenue for self-expression. Take the music of Fela for instance, which I believe is one of those motivations for my generation. You can see everything prepared me. But I must tell you that I am a little disappointed that I’ve not done much in literature because I’ve been too busy, hardly having any time to pause to reflect. I just have notes taken here and there. Only once in a while do I have opportunities to do something really good along the lines of literature. So, I hope that that gives you the perspective.
Yes, thank you so much. Following up on that, let me lean in on your work as an academic. What one finds in many departments of English here in Nigeria is a division between literary studies and language studies. I think it’s artificial. The one leans on the other; you can’t have literary studies without the facility for language, and you can’t study language as you should without studying it in practice, in literary activity. So what one or two things would you say about that?
We have so much calcified knowledge to the point of making knowledge ridiculous. I have tried a bit, in my own case, to get students to know that in order to be rounded you can look at this knowledge as a hierarchy. You have to have some basic fundamental understanding of literature even to live as a human being. Talk about figures of speech for instance and look at poetry…. It’s very difficult to do any thorough linguistic study without having literary content, whether you call it oral narratives, or you do data mining, because you you’re not only looking at raw data, computer data, we’re also looking at meanings and we’re also looking at styles—how language is used, genres. In short, you’re looking at variations and varieties in different locales. You know, there are all kinds of sociolinguistic parameters that you have to consider. So, linguistics cannot be stripped of literature. When you do that, the quality of the content diminishes in such a way that it’s almost like taking the dynamism in language out of it and studying a plastic kind of variation of data. That’s why it’s unrealistic to say, for instance, that you are getting a BA in literature and then the language is not your business or vice versa. The language is not divided that way. We have to study the language, and we do so most effectively by paying attention to the literary component of language. It is not as if one can just extract grammar out of the literature or extract literature out of grammar. Both of them have to be in a dialectic relationship. And then the deeper you go into the appreciation of language, the more you want to express it; and the way you express it will be for consumption of owners of the language, it will be in literary form. But if you want to write to academics, you can probably narrow down your writing in such a way that it becomes useless to the owners of the language. But we must try to funnel something back into the society, to those who own the language, otherwise sometimes I find many of us presiding over languages that are dying without really putting anything back to revivify those languages.
If I may pivot now to Things Fall Apart, there is something about the work you now do with it, translating it to Nigerian Pidgin, that’s a combination of your expertise in language studies and your love of the literary arts. So, let’s start with this: what was the motivation for this work?
First of all, Nigerian Pidgin has become important. Also, I was beginning to develop the intuition that we are not really analyzing African languages on their own terms, rather, we are analyzing English. African languages through the medium of English are different from African languages themselves. How to put this really is that the initial grammars written about these languages were not exactly grammars of those languages because the theories that were used to frame them, the categories, the nomenclatures used to analyze these languages were not adapted to the realities of these languages. For instance, English is an agglutinative language unlike many African languages that are fusional. My language, for instance, tends to aggregate a lot of categories, strung together so you can have one expression, so that one word in context means many things. English, on the other hand, will represent a word in a very elaborate morphology and will lexicalize its different meaning categories. So I realized that what we’re doing basically is translating English into these various media; it’s like dressing up English in these various media.
The second issue has to do with the fact that we need to also bring knowledge to people in languages they can understand best, and Nigerian Pidgin has become one of the dominant languages in West Africa, in Nigeria particularly. So, I was thinking about the best ways to transmit knowledge to individuals so as to catalyze transformation in society. The goal should be to get people not only to enjoy their literary resources, but also to be able to get deep knowledge about who they are, to create an awakening for the “ordinary man.” Illiteracy is a problem of the medium, not a problem of access to knowledge. So, can we create multimedia, audiovisual means of transmitting knowledge? In response, I felt I should start translating classics to Nigerian Pidgin, starting with Things Fall Apart, because people can relate with its symbolisms, its metaphors, its expressions. There are similarities in the Igbo language, which Achebe dresses in English, and many other African languages. The distinctions between their underlying structures are minimal. Not only that; there are similarities in the conceptual world that those languages frame. Then, I thought to translate this and then create audio versions and have them played on radio—there are so many community radios now. When people listen to these, they may appreciate anew the richness of their cultural contexts and thereby have we broaden access to knowledge. I wanted to start with Things Fall Apart because anytime I read the novel, I rediscover it. I also want to go on to translate Animal Farm, 1984, and many other African and European classics, so that without preaching to people about the need for change, by bringing them closer to literature through a medium that is convenient for them and through forms they can understand best, such a Nigerian Pidgin, we can catalyze transformation in society without necessarily carrying guns and bombs.
I agree, because literature has often proved a powerful channel for political theory and for theories of social organization. As I say this, I think about Achebe’s own novels, A Man of the People and Anthills of the Savannah. The literary world still marvels at how A Man of the People predicted the first military coup in Nigeria….
You know, what strikes me most about Things Fall Apart is that it is the book that speaks; the narrator does not often speak. As we read on, we find the voice of the narrator. It speaks to the complexity of the work: the narrator yields the narrative to the book, and the book, at some point, cedes the narrative to the narrator.
As you say that, I’m reminded of other works like that, particularly Toni Morrison’s Jazz, where the book speaks, the narrator speaks, even the storytelling is ceded to characters through the device of free indirect discourse. And that is not surprising; Morrison was an excellent storyteller, and she once mentioned Achebe among the greatest influences on her writing.
That’s true.
Now, before we delve deeply into this project, I would like us to talk about a parallel project of yours: the codification of Nigerian Pidgin in a lexicography. Please, tell me a bit about that project.
Actually, the project started almost twenty years ago. Initially, when I wanted funding I was told that there was already a project being done on Nigerian Pidgin at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ife. So, I could not make a headway. Five years later, I got a small grant of one million naira from the Institut Français de Recherche en Afrique (IFRA), and then I started to work. IFRA gave me an advance, but then they canceled the project the following year because they got a new director. So I was in trouble, but I kept on doing the work. Many years later, around 2017, we started collaborative work with some colleagues from France. We wrote a proposal for a Nigerian Pidgin corpus. Two years later, we won the European Union-funded grant. In the course of the work, we saw the opportunity to develop a dictionary of Nigerian Pidgin for use. This is purely a Nigerian Pidgin dictionary written in Nigerian Pidgin. We are dealing with what I call Common Nigerian Pidgin, a version of Nigerian Pidgin that most Nigerians understand, and we have extensive data for it. A lot of the data that will go into this dictionary comes from that corpus. I think it is the largest corpus of any African language today, and it is available online for access. So, this dictionary is largely a way to augment what I started many years ago, and we are now at the final stage of the work. Our ideology for the project is to analyze African languages as African languages, and in keeping with that we have maintained an authentic pidgin translation of lexical items without having English determine the parameters of our translation. But, of course, we cannot run away from the influence of English as well as Yoruba, Hausa, and other Nigerian languages on Nigerian Pidgin. For me, apart from codifying the grammar of my language, I think this will be one of the most satisfying works I have done in my academic career. There are close to 100 million Nigerians who use Nigerian Pidgin to one degree or another, and Nigerian Pidgin is spreading into the West African region and is mutually intelligible with Cameroonian and Ghanaian Pidgin. So, there is a great opportunity for the emergence of a West African speech form. We now have to prepare the grounds for whatever actions to ensure that the structure of Nigerian Pidgin is not dictated by the Western world. We now have BBC version which is now aired on radio. It is good that BBC is using it, but we have to be careful that we are not reframing it in the image of language, which is what a dictionary will help us to avoid. We also recognize the fact that we are not interested in standardizing the language; that is, killing the language by prescribing what it should be. I am totally against using standards as a mode of control. What we are doing is to have a wiki-based version of the dictionary so that it can take a life of its own and there can be crowd participation in the development, expansion, and improvement of the dictionary.
That is admirable. Now, I want us to go on to talk about this literary project. I just wanted us to establish your work with the Nigerian Pidgin from a purely linguistic perspective before we then move on to the literary side of the coin. Two more questions and then you will regale me with a bit of your translation so far. The first is about Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. So, at least two things distinguish Things Fall Apart. Literary critic Biodun Jeyifo has argued somewhere that Achebe’s writing, especially Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, more than the work of any other modern writer, exemplifies the profundity of simplicity, because each time one approaches either work, one discovers new depths of thought, as you mentioned a while ago. On another level, it is how he manages to get English to rise up to the philosophical density of Igbo. Now, as a translator, how were you able to deal with that?
Going into this project, I had learned much from my earlier work codifying my language, Emai, in collaboration with Ron Schaefer. While we worked on the project, we knew we wanted to maintain the integrity of the language in translating the oral narratives we collected. There was the risk of losing the literary beauty of the narratives in translating them to English. On the other hand, we could lose the linguistic essence of the text if we over-emphasize its literary beauty in translation, because then we would be imposing our own style on the material. So, what we did was to have layers of translation. In this case, I chunk the material into information bits, try to understand the linguistic structure of the Benue-Congo language that underlies the language in Things Fall Apart. Really, Achebe was a master of the version of the English language in which he wrote the novel. My aim was to maintain that version in translating it to Nigerian Pidgin. And since Nigerian Pidgin and the version of English in Things Fall Apart basically maintain some Benue-Congo underlying structure, I did not have too much problem with that. So, I translate and then go back to see if the information structure agrees with what is presented in the original. And then it goes through multiple readings to see if there is some loss of meaning. What you will see therefore when I read is an effort at maintaining Achebe’s style. Of course, it is not possible to recover one hundred per cent of Achebe’s style, but if I am adjudged to have retained 50-60 per cent of it and people read it and see some sense of Achebeness in it, I am satisfied with that.
Your final statements in answering that question answers what should be my follow-up question. So, at this point, I would like to invite you to read a bit of your work so far. Afterwards, I will ask one or two more questions and that will be it.
Okay. Thank you very much. Let me start by saying that I have translated the title, Things Fall Apart, as Katakata. And you know that in Nigerian Pidgin, “katakata”means pandemonium, chaos, and so on. So a bit of the opening of Chapter 1:
Who no sabi Okonkwo? For Umuofia reach Mbaino, na everywhere them dey talk about am because of im power. Na small pikin e still be when e fall Amalinze for ground. You no sabi this Amalinze en, na cat e be. Im back no dey touch ground. Na so e dey draw like okra for wrestling. E sabi wrestle well well. For seven years nobody fit fall am reach Mbaino oh, reach Umuofia. Na Okonkwo only fit use im back touch ground. E be only 18 years when e do this thing. Okonkwo make im village people glad well well.
As them talk am, them never see any fight wey tough like this since the time wey the man wey start Umuofia follow spirit fight for seven day and night.
As the people wey dey play band dey play band, na so thet wey dey blow flute dey blow am. Every where just dey shake, everybody just dey look anyanya. Today na today. You sabi this Amalinze en, e get cunny. But Okonwo dey draw like okra. Na cat meet okra for fight n aim be the case of Amalinze and Okonkwo.
Na so the two of them muscle chuk comot for them back and leg as them hold themselves. Small remain make person even fit bein thing say im dey hear their muscle dey stretch like rope wey dry kakaraka! No do no do, Okonkwo lego the cat for ground. E don tay well well wey this thing happen. E reach like say twenty years. Na Okonkwo come dey reign for everywhere. This Okonkwo sef na so e grab. Person no fit look im face two times. Im eyebrow full with hair like say na bush grow for there. Im nose wide like rabbit hole. Na so e dey breath fukufuku like trumpet. Even sef, them talk say im pikin them with im wife dem dey hear am for night for them own house as im breathing strong reach. Okonkwo no dey waka like ordinary man. If e dey waka come for where you dey, e go be like say e wan come catch you make e for beat you. Sometome sha, e dey beat people. The thing be say im leg no dey touch ground. Na im toes e dey use waka, and e go be like say na bounce e dey bounce like ball.
Wow, that is great! I see the closeness to Achebe’s work in the multiple similes, and then there is the local color of the novel that Nigerian Pidgin helps to emphasize. It is beautiful!
Thank you. It is just that it is a little awkward reading Pidgin, for some of us who have become very much accustomed to English. And that’s partly why we should make works like Achebe’s accessible to people in Pidgin. If you have this read on radio by professionals, for instance, you can imagine that it will hold people spellbound. So, that’s the whole idea. Also, I think this is one of the best ways to further immortalize Achebe, because we will be able to reach more people with his work. Knowledge is not just for people who attended formal schools. So, this is a way of reaching out to the “informal” side of knowledge production, so people can enjoy their heritage and participate in the sorts of conversation we are having in scholarly circles. This is the kind of public-facing work I hope to do as I move towards the end of my academic career in another decade.
Yes, and it’s about time. I say that because there’s a whole lot of theories lost to us in academia because we treat this non-academic sphere as if no knowledge or theories emanate from there, as if we have the prerogative of thinking about the world. There are intellectuals out there. Look at Unoka’s artistry. There’s a depth to Unoka that Okonkwo does not have and does not understand. Unoka is a sorely misunderstood person, and so is Okonkwo. There is a lot that Achebe asks us to meditate upon.
I agree. You know what I really find amazing is that the story in Things Fall Apart is so deep that I wonder if Achebe planned it. The profundity in Things Fall Apart is almost unplannable. The themes that emerge from the novel and the depth of the character…. I don’t know—and I speak as a scholar—if one could have planned all that.
Yes. Much of that boils down to what we have been talking about. Achebe welcomed the world that he knew and lived in into his own world of literariness. And that is the depth we see in Things Fall Apart, where Okonkwo is a richly developed character, and we see that depth in Unoka who has but a short appearance in the novel. Speaking of Unoka, I wonder if I could trouble you to read a bit more. There is a part of the novel in which one of his creditors comes to demand his money of him….
Yes, yes….
If you could read a part of it.
Okay, I will do that:
Okoye sabi talk plenty. E talk go up and down so tay Unoka sef no come sabi where e dey go. E sha tell am make e pay back im two hundred cowries wey e borrow for two years ago. E sha tell am make e pay back im two hundred cowries wey e borrow two years ago. Unoka burst laugh so tay im eyes come dey bring water. The thing surprise Okoye. Na so e just open mouth for ground. E dey wonder say wetin come make im friend dey behave like that.
“Shoo, you no see that wall? Look the white chalk wey them draw for the wall for yonder.” Okoye look come see line wey them arrange for wall. Na five group dey. The one wey small pass get ten lines. Unoka sabi overdo something. E no talk. E just take im snuff put for nose. You hear “gbizi, aah! Ehen!”
“You no see en, every line na to show the money wey I dey owe somebody. One line na one hundred cowries. You no sabi the one wey dey for there so, na one thousand cowries na im I owe am. But the man still dey allow me sleep for my house. Never ever come wake me for morning. I go pay you your money but nobi today. Our elder say sun must to beat people wey stand before them wey kneel down. Na the big one I go first pay before the small small one.
Okoye roll im goatskin, get up, comot.
Wow! I cannot thank you enough for this work, for helping to further immortalize Achebe. Rendering it in this popular linguistic form is akin to the efforts that some have taken recently in transposing Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman onto the film mediascape. But, of course, Things Fall Apart had its filmic iteration way earlier than now. And this effort of yours is just fitting. So, this brings me to my final question for you today. What do you envisage as the afterlife of this project?
Well, I’m hoping that after this project, we will build interest around African writers. Globalization is creating a big shift, which I think is destroying our heritage. We seem to be losing the authenticity of the African cosmos; there is a lot out there for our people to learn about themselves. You now have, for instance, Nigerians who do not speak any Nigerian language—what they call “expatriate Nigerians,” which is a euphemistic way of saying they don’t speak any language. They neither have access to their own language, nor do they have access to “complete” English. They are becoming a dominant group, with a few verbs, plenty of nouns, and some mannerisms got from Hollywood. It is difficult to engage and interact with these people without them becoming aggressive, because the world has left them without a means of expression. I’m hoping that with this project, we can re-interest Nigerian youths in what belongs to them, and using Pidgin, which is a popular cultural medium, we can then reintegrate them into their worldview. That’s what I’m hoping; that we create interest in this way, that there will be many more like this, that we will create memes and generate a whole wave of interest around such work as this in Nigeria. What people don’t understand is that before an industrial or technological revolution there has to be a cultural revolution. People must have a sense of self-awareness, a sense of their own identity, and then build the confidence in themselves as a people. Without this positive valuation of our culture, it’s difficult to advance in any meaningful way. Simply put, meaningful scientific advancement without the humanities is but an abstraction, an abstraction that is nonsense.
I agree. And on that note, I am going to thank you very, very much again and say that we are looking forward to the manifestation of this project. We are looking forward to being able to discuss your translation of this work in classrooms. We also eagerly anticipate its impact on popular culture. Thank you very much for advancing the academic world and for advancing literary expression.
Thank you for this opportunity to engage. This sort of inter-generational conversation is crucial. We older scholars tend to be fossilized in our own ways. We basically worship paradigms that are no longer relevant. It is by having this cross-generational interaction that you also bring us alive and that we also share with you what we have. I think this is what I find very fascinating about this. Thank you very much.