A Yoruba Woman’s Notes on Language as a Barrier, Bridge and Bedrock

‘But how disturbing it is that my own language, one filled with so much beauty and melody, would be considered foreign to me. Why did I not think in my language? Why would my default language be one that was imposed by brutal colonialists on my ancestors’ lips?’

It was a Friday morning, on the short but hilly walk back from a class to my dorm room, when I opened WhatsApp and made a devastating confession to my mother: I had become more fluent in French, a second colonizer’s language, than I was in my own mother tongue, Yoruba. At the time, I had spent nearly two months in Belgium’s Francophone Wallonia region, and before then, I had spent five months in Bordeaux, France. In the space of those seven months, a rapid metamorphosis had taken place. My once hesitant French had become a fluid stream, weaving together fairly complex sentences that went beyond simply asking for directions or guidance to truly getting to know people and letting people get to know me. They would often be left wide-eyed at the Nigerian woman who somehow found herself in a small university town in Francophone Belgium and actually spoke the language. I was an outlier, especially to the Francophone Africans, and even though I was a bit weary of the tired expression of amazement, I also lowkey revelled in it. I basked in my quick mastery, in my fluency and polished pronunciations—at least where they didn’t stumble.

But on that Friday morning, someone had asked me for the translation of a word—which eludes my memory now—in my indigenous language, and my mind had stalled. It had fumbled, reaching first for the French equivalent, as if my own language were the foreign one. My brain had started doing that disturbing dance often: it would process that I was trying to speak a non-English tongue, and it would pick French over Yoruba. But how disturbing it is that my own language, one filled with so much beauty and melody, would be considered foreign to me. Why did I not think in my language? Why did I not dream in its colourful tones? Why would my default language be one that was imposed by brutal colonialists on my ancestors’ lips?