By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. There are certain words that native English speakers in Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, an...
By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
There are certain words that native English speakers
in Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand liberally use
only for people they perceive to be culturally and racially inferior to them. I
call them vocabularies of racial differentiation and exclusion. In this article
I am concerned only with words whose racial “othering” is so subtle that most
linguistically undiscerning people don’t notice it. I must add that modern
native English speakers who use these words aren’t racist or intentionally offensive;
they are just subconsciously influenced by their socio-linguistic environments.
1.
Chief. Most English dictionaries define this word as the
head of a “tribe” or “clan.” That’s why it’s also rendered as “tribal chief.” Since
Europeans—or at least contemporary Europeans—have no “tribes” (see the entry on
“tribe” below), they have no “chiefs.” Only nonwhite people do. What Europeans
had or have are “kings.” But a little more context is needed to unpack the
ethnocentrism of the term. I recently read an 1821 British Foreign Office
document titled Correspondence with
Foreign Courts Regarding Execution of Treaties Contracted. On page 110 of
the document, the reader finds that the British colonial government actually
went out of its way to purposively discourage people in their African and Asian
colonies from calling their monarchs “kings.” King, the document says, is
reserved only for a British monarch. Monarchs in the colonies should just be
called “chiefs.” If the chiefs enjoy enduring historic prestige among their
people, they might be called “paramount chiefs,” but never kings.
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| An Indian "chief" |
Nigerians have internalized this nomenclatural discrimination
and call their monarchs “chiefs.” This is especially true in northern Nigeria
where non-Muslim—or non-Emirate— traditional rulers are called “chiefs” and
their spheres of traditional influence are called
“chiefdoms.” In southern Nigeria “chief” is chiefly prefixed to the name of a
traditional title holder. (See my June 15, 2014 article titled “A
Pragmatic Analysis of ‘Emir,’ ‘Sarki,’ ‘Oba’ and ‘Chief’ in Nigerian English.”)
Won’t it be nice, in the interest of linguistic
equity, to prefix “Chief” to the names of these European monarchs: the Chief of
England, the Chief of Denmark, the Chief of Norway, the Chief of Spain, the Chief
of Sweden, the Chief of the Netherlands, the Chief of Belgium, etc.?
2.
Genital mutilation. The removal of the clitoris is called
“female genital mutilation” when it’s done by nonwhite people but “clitoridectomy”
when it’s done by white people. I personally oppose female circumcision (a
value-neutral term for what’s now “female genital mutilation”), but I can’t
help but notice the invidious linguistic double standards in calling the act by
a derogatory term when it’s done by nonwhite people and by a scientific name
when it’s done by white people. Gynecologists in nineteenth-century Europe and
America used to remove women’s clitoris in order to “curb female masturbation.”
It was called “clitoridectomy.”
In any case, why isn’t male circumcision also called
“male genital mutilation” since it’s similar in many respects to so-called
female genital mutilation?
3.
Indigene. Native English speakers never use this word for
themselves in their everyday conversations precisely because notions of
citizenship override loyalties to primordial origins in their countries or
because loyalty to primordial origins and citizenship are indistinguishable
since many European nations are mono-ethnic states. That’s why “indigenes” invariably
means nonwhite people whose primordial origins can be traced to the place they
currently live. No native English speaker will ever say he is an “indigene of
London” or an “indigene of Atlanta,” etc. The inflections and figurative
extensions of the word such as “indigenous,”
“indigenize,” “indigenization,” etc. are more commonly used by native
speakers than the root, which is also synonymous with words like “autochthon”
and “aborigine,” which all connote a primitive person.
But Nigerian English has developed a more creative
use for and meaning of “indigene” than conventional dictionaries envisage. In
Nigeria “indigene” is often contrasted with “settler.” Even if your ancestors
have lived in a town for hundreds of years, you’re still a “settler” if those
ancestors don’t share the same linguistic and ethnic identity as the
“indigenes” who founded the town. And you’re considered an “indigene” of a
place even if you or your immediate past ancestors have never lived there for
even a single day so long as you can trace your lineage to that place
patrilineally.
3.
Natives. Western
Europeans—and their descendants elsewhere— are never “natives” even if they are
the original inhabitants of a place. The Celts who have lived in Britain,
Spain, and Gaul since prehistoric times are not “natives.” That word is
reserved for racially and culturally “inferior” peoples in Africa, Asia, Latin
America, etc. But the denotative meaning of the word hardly reveals this
semantic nuance.
Many dictionaries
define a “native” as “an indigenous person who was born in a particular place.”
That sounds pretty innocuous. But the connotative meaning of the word is more
racially discriminatory. It was originally used by white colonialists and later
by Western anthropologists to refer specifically to nonwhite people. The New Oxford American Dictionary (3rd
edition) captures this subtlety well. One of the definitions of “native,” which
the dictionary says is “dated, often offensive,” is “one of the original
inhabitants of a country, especially a nonwhite as regarded by European
colonists or travelers.”
Notice, though, that in American English “native” is
used widely in a non-racially discriminatory way. When people call a city their
hometown they often say they’re natives of the city, as in “I am an Atlanta
native,” “She is a native of New York,” etc. I am not sure how widespread this
usage of “native” is in British English, but it appears 148 times in the British
National Corpus.
The New Oxford
American Dictionary’s usage advice on the word is instructive. It says, “In
contexts such as native of Boston or
New York in the summer was too hot even for the natives, the noun native is
quite acceptable. But when it is used to mean ‘a nonwhite original inhabitant
of a country,’ as in this dance is a favorite with the natives, it is more problematic. This meaning has an old-fashioned feel and,
because of its association with a colonial European outlook, it may cause
offense.”
Most Nigerians don’t realize that one of the reasons
the country’s first national anthem (“Nigeria, we hail thee”) was changed to
“Arise, o compatriots” in 1978 was because of the appearance of the words
“native” and “tribe” (see the entry on “tribe” below) in it. The first anthem
was written by a British expatriate by the name of Lillian Jean Williams and
has the following words:
Nigeria, we hail thee,
Our own dear native land,
Though tribe and tongue may differ,
Interestingly, in Nigerian English, when people say
they have “gone native” they usually mean they have adorned non-Western,
Nigerian clothes. I’ve always had problems with that expression for at least
two reasons.
First, to “go native” is an idiomatic expression in Standard
English that means a person, usually a white person, has left his country to
some “native land” and ends up internalizing and adopting the “primitive” ways
of the “natives.” Second, why are jeans, coat, ties, etc. just “clothes,” but buba, sokoto, babar riga, etc.
are “native clothes”? Why does wearing Nigerian clothes represent “going
native” when the wearers of the clothes are themselves “natives.”? I suspect
that Nigerians unreflexively copied that phrase from British colonialists who
described wearing African dresses as “going native.”
5.
Tribe. I have written several articles on this odious word
(See, for instance, my February 27, 2009 article titled “What’s
my Tribe? None” and my March 27, 2009 article titled “Of
Tribe and Pride: Deconstructing Alibi’s Alibis for Racial Self-Hatred,”
among others). No modern person of European descent belongs to a “tribe.” Only
nonwhite people do. The only occasions when native English speakers use “tribe”
to talk about themselves is when they talk about their dim and distant past, as
in “the Germanic tribes that invaded England in prehistoric times” or the “12
tribes of Israel.” The other occasion is when they use the word figuratively,
as in “tribes of journalists gathered there,” etc.
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| These are "tribal" people |
Shorn of all pretenses, “tribe” basically means
backward, primitive nonwhite people. Let
no one deceive you that the word means anything other than that. Even the Oxford Dictionary of English recognizes
this fact. Its usage note on “tribe” reads:
“In historical contexts the word
tribe is broadly accepted (the area was inhabited by Slavic tribes), but in
contemporary contexts it is problematic when used to refer to a community
living within a traditional society. It is strongly associated with past
attitudes if white colonialists towards so-called primitive or uncivilized
peoples living in remote underdeveloped places. For this reason it is generally
preferable to use alternative terms such as community
or people” (p. 1897).
I personally prefer “ethnic group” as an alternative
to “tribe.”
Other derivatives of “tribes” that are no less
odious are “tribesman,” “tribeswoman,” “tribalism,” “tribespeople,” “tribal
marks.” They basically mean “uncivilized man,” “uncivilized woman,” “primitive
loyalty to a tribe,” “uncivilized people,” and “primitive facial art.” A
value-neutral term for “tribal marks” is “facial marks.” Lastly, “detribalize”
means to civilize, to make less primitive, although Nigerians use it as an
adjective (i.e., “detribalized”) to mean “free from narrow ethnic loyalties.”
These terrible words have been congealed in our
lexical repertory, so it’s pointless fighting against their use, but I can at
least shine a light on the linguistic alienation they represent.
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