Imagine the Tower of Babel that Nigeria is-more than 500 ethnic groups, all speaking different tongues. Now imagine a single language across Nigeria.
Of course, every ethnic group speaks retains its own language, but still communicates with others-and not in colonial language of English.
This is the position that Guosa aspires to fill.
“It is the only language that can bring us together,” says Alex Igbineweka, who developed Guosa and has been single-handedly pushing its spread.
“When Guosa is in place, you don’t necessarily think of where the president comes from, whether Hausa or Igbo, because we all speak one common language that revolves around every other ethnic group It eradicates tribalism and a whole bunch of stuff that goes with language that are negative.”
As British rule ended, Nigeria was in search of a common language. English filled the gap, but the country adopted Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, and approved public communication in 13 other languages.
Guosa started life shortly after the end of colonisation-in the head of a 13-year-old Igbineweka. By 1962, he lived with his uncle, the Oba of Benin, a top civil servant in Enugu then. His mother tongue was Edo, but he couldn’t speak it without interjecting Igbo words. It would have been natural to interject English words into Edo.
“It was intriguing, and people made jest of me,” Igbineweka remembers. “But I was building words.”
The family moved to Lagos as the Civil War came, and Igbineweka added Yoruba. It moved to Kaduna and he added Hausa.
In one incident in a Lagos market, he told traders blocking his way, “Kuro na uzo kam ko’ oja”-a mix of Igbo and Yoruba that means “Leave the way, let me pass”.
The women sassed him right back in a mix of Igbo and Yoruba. Igbo speakers who heard him presumed him to be Yoruba, and the Yoruba speakers presumed him to be Igbo.
Thinking in more than one language wasn’t always easy. The young man could never know in what language he would speak.
“My brain was always fighting,” he says. “One part says think before you speak, the other says don’t speak that language. I couldn’t help it. I spoke it to my family and everywhere.”
Igbineweka named Guosa after his middle name “Ekhaguosa”-Bini for “vengeance is mine, says the Lord”. (Think self-named inventors Newton, Paschal, Einstein).
Igbineweka started actively developing Guosa into a full-fledged language. The rule was simple. Concrete nouns came from Hausa or any other language in the north. Non concrete nouns came from Igbo, Yoruba or any other Nigerian language but the word had to come from the top of the alphabet list.
“Please, give me water” became “Biko funmi ni ruwa”-biko from Igbo because it came before Yoruba’s “ejoo”, funmi ni from Yoruba, and ruwa from Hausa.
Up to 120 other languages have followed that rule to merge into Guosa, alongside syntax, concord and grammar. A 1982 Daily Times article praised the possibility of “unity through national language.”
“It promotes unity, identity, commerce, industrial revolution,” says Igbineweka. “Language is one instrument of unity. It is a vehicle of communication, culture. It is a whole world.”
The first volume of Guosa dictionary had more than 30,000 headwords. The education ministry pointed the Guosa language project toward universities’ departments of linguistics and Nigerian languages. In response, they only sniffed.
“University deans told me to use my brains for other things,” Igbineweka recalls. University of Ibadan raised issues with nouns, syntax, adverbs, he adds. “Some even said I had mental issues. I knew I wasn’t mental. It is just my own way of expressing myself, using what we have to get what we want.”
Education and culture authorities held no hope. In a letter from 1989, the federal department of culture (as it was then called) conveyed “financial constraints which have painfully made it difficult” for it to help with printing the 30,000-headword dictionary of Guosa.
But Guosa got welcome outside Nigeria. The US-based West County Weekly published a glowing article it titled, “Man uses words to help unify a nation”. Since then Guosa has been creeping into US school curriculum.
The West Contra Costa adult education programme called Guosa West Africa’s answer to East Africa’s trade language of Swahili. It also charges $20 for a one-hour-a-week course of Guosa for parents and children.
The third international conference on Guosa language (yes, there’s one) holds this year and will convene educators, linguists and enthusiasts for teaching and learning Guosa.
Kate Edozieh has begun learning Guosa and has taken on the task to promote it. Her vocabulary is still rusty, but she likens it to the success of the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS.
“The subject of economy is very crucial to any nation. I am promoting Guosa as a tool for economic development in West Africa,” she says.
The potential for Guosa as a lingua franca for West Africa spells as much business as the ECOWAS bloc-teaching, publishing and the world of culture that English occupies in the region and Swahili commands in East Africa.
“It is a language for the people of Nigeria and ECOWAS, from ECOWAS and by the people of ECOWAS,” says Igbineweka. “In other words, linguistic democracy.”
The exhibition ended on Friday.
