‘I Don’t Think in Yoruba’

The Labour Party gubernatorial candidate for the state, Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour (GRV), a 39-year-old, foreign educated Lagosian of both Yoruba and Igbo descent, emerged as a viable opposition for the Gubernatorial elections, and arguably served as the embodiment of these underlying ethnic, class, and generational tensions. Many analyses have paid particular attention to GRV’s mixed heritage and its significance amidst the backdrop of inter-ethnic tensions within Lagos State. For instance, Cable writer Kayode Ogundamisi describes the ‘Chinedu Factor’ referring to how GRV’s opponents ran a dog whistle campaign against GRV using his Igbo middle name as a rallying cry to discredit his Yoruba ancestry. GRV, in turn, has defended his Lagos pedigree, citing his family’s numerous contributions—dating back centuries—to Lagos’ development. While GRV’s dual heritage exposes enduring interethnic suspicions in Lagos, less attention has been paid to how GRV’s emergence as an admittedly non-fluent Yoruba speaker in a Yoruba speaking state, raises important questions for Nigerians concerning intragroup ethnic identity and its connection to language.

Language was one of the many aspects used to justify why GRV did not represent the Yoruba people. GRV addressed his limited Yoruba proficiency during an interview with Channels Television on the 9th of March in which he stated:

It’s not as though I don’t understand Yoruba or I cannot speak it. My intonations are funny, people laugh at me, and I don’t think in Yoruba. I went to school at MIT, I went to school in Nottingham, I went to school in France. So there’s been a lot of movements in my life. But that does not change the fact that everybody at the end of the day wants good governance.

For the Yoruba people that already doubted GRV’s Yoruba heritage due to his Igbo mother and wife, his confirmation that he could not speak Yoruba fluently proved to be the nail in the coffin as to why he could not be trusted as a true ‘son of the soil.’

Nevertheless, as I listened to GRV speak, I could not help but empathize. As a Yoruba woman, who grew up with parents who spoke Yoruba to one another—but primarily English to us—I also cannot speak my mother tongue fluently. This reality is one that I have painfully wrestled with for many years and finally grown to accept.

GRV’s situation resembles my own and has become quite common among countless other people of Yoruba descent, particularly in the urban middle to upper socio-economic classes, who speak English as their first language. Many grow up as receptive bilinguals, or people who possess a native comprehension of the two languages—Yoruba and English—but can only express themselves fluently in one of those languages. In most cases, English. As I heard some of our Yoruba-speaking elders and even my peers use GRV’s limited language proficiency to discredit his claim to Yoruba heritage, I could not help but realize that in the process, I and many others in my generation had also been rendered cultural imposters.

The question of language remains extremely complex in a diverse, formally colonized African country like Nigeria. Language implicates questions of age, class, globalization, colonization, economics, culture, kinship and good old-fashioned linguistics. Despite this complexity, Nigerians too often see speaking one’s language merely as a measure of one’s cultural patriotism and interest remedied by oft-repeated advisories to parents to speak their language at home. Yet even the most Ijinle Yoruba of homes cannot solve the type of widespread, systemic language decline of indigenous languages that colonialism initiated over a century ago.

To say a widely spoken language like Yoruba is in decline can come across as either out of touch or hyperbolic. After all, with an estimated 45 million speakers, Yoruba remains one of the most widely spoken languages on the African continent. Furthermore, it boasts a vibrant Yoruba language film industry, books, radio stations and an ever-growing library of social media content. Yoruba is a language that can be heard both on the streets of Lagos and the streets of London as well as across the Atlantic in countries such as Brazil and Cuba, where it functions as a liturgical language in religious traditions such as Santeria and Candomblé due to the transatlantic slave trade.

Notwithstanding, some Nigerian language scholars have argued that Yoruba runs the risk of endangerment, observing the gradual disappearance of Yoruba words from everyday use in favor of English equivalents. Other scholars have noted a type of ‘mother tongue eclipsing’ in younger generation whereby English is increasingly becoming children’s first language rather than Yoruba. Such language phenomena become most apparent among the educated classes in Nigeria. While scholars often blame the ‘educated elite’s’ rejection of traditional values and preference for Western norms as the culprit, a lot of Nigeria’s current language dynamics can be traced to the colonial era.​​