"We have eyes, but we don't see. We have ears, but we don't hear.
We can read, but we don't understand what we read."

 

I know all about low self esteem and I know all about hating your kind. Those who have never been rejected or made to feel inadequate cannot really understand the feeling. Being the son of two illiterate parents was not a piece of cake in a colonial mentality ridden Nigeria, where your importance is determined by your mastery of the queen’s language and neither is being an African in America, where your importance is determined by the color of your skin. These situations will teach you all you need to know about low self esteem.

 

When you call a language the queen’s language, who would not want to master it especially since yours is inferior and thus termed vernacular. You can get little or nothing done if you’re not, at least, a passable speaker as well as writer of the English language whether in or outside your country, if you’re an African country that has adopted English as its language.

 

Why would anyone who can only speak vernacular not feel inferior to the high and mighty who have so mastered the queen’s language to the extent that their fluency in that language overshadows the merit of their arguments, if any? Logic is not important it is enough that they speak the queen’s language so well. I remember my mom used to say someone’s English was so good, although she was in no position to determine how well spoken the speaker was, that you feel like licking the speaker’s lips. The ability to speak the language was very impressionable to her.

 

By the way, let’s look at the definitions of vernacular from two sources.

 

According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online Vernacular means:

 

1. Using a language or dialect native to a region or country rather than a literary, cultured, or foreign language

 

2. of, relating to, or being a nonstandard language or dialect of a place, region, or country

 

Dictionary.com defines it as:

 

1. (Of language) native or indigenous (opposed to literary or learned).
2. Using plain, everyday, ordinary language.

 

Perhaps the definitions are harmless but if your language is just ordinary as opposed to learned or cultured then of course how would you view it? How would you feel if you speak a language that is nonstandard?

 

From the language, to our skin color to our lips and nose, to our culture, to our continent to our very existence Africans, or if you will Black people

, are termed “inferior”, a race without history. If events are not documented is that tantamount to absence of history?

 

 Apparently, as an “inferior race” we are incapable of any sort of intelligence in the judgment of the “masters”, after all we are black, whether African or African descendants of whatever nationality.

 

It was not just a shameful thing to speak vernacular in Nigerian schools it was a “flogable” offense. Imagine a 7 years old boy discussing last night’s football match with his school mate in their language, which is the only language they know because their parents are not “educated” and therefore couldn’t have taught them English even if they wanted to, imagine the horror on their faces when one of the teachers, his face contorted with anger, bellowed rhetorically “are you boys not aware that vernacular is not allowed on the school ground?. Come here, I will teach you how not to break the school’s rules.”

 

The teacher referred to above is neither white nor English, no, as a matter of fact he could be “blacker” than you’ll ever get to be if you burnt in hell fire for a million years and to make matters worse the man’s cheeks are labeled with the tell tale tribal marks that we don’t get to see any longer, thanks to “civilization”. What makes it worse is not the fact that he had tribal marks it is the fact that like you he’s black, he speaks that language and he joined with others to label it vernacular. I wonder if the English man would adopt another language and term his own vernacular.

 

Your self esteem had no choice but to be low since it just got a very hard knock from the all knowing, Mr. English speaking teacher. You did not only have a low esteem of yourself, you now see your “uneducated” folks as stupid and irredeemable failures, you wished they had gotten some sort of “education”, since they did not you didn’t want to be associated with them because they were “uncultured” and will waste no time in denying them more vehemently than Peter denied Jesus on his was to be crucified. How many of you, with “illiterate” folks can swear that at one time or the other you did not deny your folks because they were “illiterates”.

 

Being “educated” means being superior to those who are not and an educated man should not be seen fellowshipping with uncultured people. You thumbed your noses to your culture, your language and you ridiculed your people in your self righteousness. Being educated is subjective, you might be educated in the western ways but how educated are you in the indigenous African ways, how much do you know about you?

 

How could the black race advance or claim any sort of authenticity when it’s losing its language, culture, religion, history or education. Whatever education we credit ourselves with did not stem from the black race since it doesn’t really teach our culture, religion or history and where it does it is hardly from our perspective. Our worldview is determined for us and we see ourselves from the eyes of others.

 

How many times have we felt so important because we can quote Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, St. Anthony, St. Augustine, Paul, Peter, Sigmund Freud, Mohammed and Jesus Christ? None of them black. And even when we quote blacks we quote them quoting some other people or quoting from someone else’s religion as in “I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!” This, of course, was taken from the bible, which is a Jewish religious book to some extent. The bible as we know it today was compiled and authenticated under the authority of the Romans. This is not taking anything from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. he was a great man; no doubt, as he spent his short life fighting for equal rights and justice, he probably did not get any original black education and thus could not have quoted his progenitors in Africa.