By Musaddam Idriss Musa

In Nigeria, any local literature could expect to become a derision to the supercilious English grandiloquence which pretends to be more cerebral than others. This folk of people with a frivolous attitude towards their lingos are incontrovertibly having their brains inverted brimming with superficiality of the whites. This might sound grievous I know but I just can’t hesitate to be in the shibboleth of denying to call a spade a spade to repudiate the irrational outlook by our neighbours (English writers) who are intoxicated with the admiration of what they are unconnected with thinking they’re wiser and most regarded individuals.


It’s awful that those obtuse sophisticated wordy-wise blasé reckon that only dunderheaded, birdbrained and English slow-witted individuals opt for writing in their lingoes especially the northern Hausa writers. This view that holds and of course blindfolds them leads to their desertification from making a justifiable panorama to people like me who are in the first place non-Hausa speakers as well as multilingual men of letters.


It’s unfortunate that this prideful snobs or rather airheaded sages fail to understand that ability to write in English doesn’t measure the level of one’s intellect. They should also consider that it’s not for all northern communities that English serves as a second language because millions of Nigerians from the north (myself not in exception) learn to read and write Hausa alongside the English in school. We look at both languages as extraneous and consider them ‘official’ since we learned them in school. Our common affiliation with Hausa sometimes seems to make us envisage English as “alien”, and this same feeling also exists with certain people when talking of Hausa language. So the point here is to help clear the incomprehension of the people that are writing Hausa as being inept of writing in English.


There is no doubt that certain Hausa writers could write in English far better than those deriding our brains, it’s just that writing in English cost nothing to us (although there are people like me who are not even bilingual but multilingual writers). We believe that a Hausa writer is coequal to English writer; none of them is superior to the other. Especially, we the non-Hausa speakers, we consider both as lingua fraca and that which we learned from school as well as for the fact that both are not our lingos.


So disrespecting a Hausa writer is one and the same to showing your shortage of exposure and interface with the outside world.