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

Photo Illustration by Michael Emono / THE REPUBLIC.

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.