Chuks adibeli @StrengthChuks - Twitter Profile

1 day ago

I want to be fair to @PeterPsquare . He is not wrong that French opens doors Igbo does not. He is not wrong that parents get to decide how they raise their own children. But I guess he underestimates the fact that he is not just any parent. P-Square is a name millions of Igbo people grew up admiring, their success made them proud to be who they are. People all over the world sang their songs using Igbo words. So when a voice like that says Igbo is not worth passing on, it does not land like one man’s private choice. It gives permission for a belief a lot of people were already quietly carrying, that English and French, in short anything foreign, sits above Igbo, that their native language is something to graduate out of rather than something to hold onto. I am not Igbo. I am Swiss. But my husband made it clear from the beginning that our children would speak Igbo, and I have never once seen that as a burden or a complication. Our children speak Swiss German, English, and Igbo at home, German at school, and now French as well, since that is part of their school curriculum too. Five languages, and none of them fighting each other for space. That is the part people forget when they frame this as a choice. Children do not need to pick one language to be strong in. They can navigate several at once, easily. It is adults who turn language into a competition. Children just absorb what is spoken to them and grow fluent in all of it. A language is not only a tool for getting ahead. It is also a rooting tool, the place where love, memory, and belonging live. It is the specific way a grandmother scolds you and forgives you in the same breath. It is a joke that only works in the original. Lose the language, and you do not just lose a skill. You lose a room in your own house, one you can still visit as a guest but never quite live in again. That is what worries me most in this conversation. A child who cannot speak their father’s or mother’s language will, at some point, stand in that homeland and feel like a stranger. Not unwelcome, not unloved, just outside something that was supposed to be theirs by birth. One day, my sons will be handed a kola nut, and in that moment, no one should have to do it for them. They should know how to receive it, how to speak over it, how to break it themselves, not pass it along to someone else because they never learned the words or the meaning behind them. That is such a small moment, and yet it says everything. It is the difference between being someone’s guest and being someone’s own. So when I hear “Igbo is useless,” what I actually hear is a wound that has not healed. From the outside, I have watched how often English or French get treated as the languages worth keeping, while Igbo gets treated as the one you can afford to let go of. That preference did not come from nowhere. It is a colonial hierarchy that convinced generations of people that closeness to their own culture was a limitation rather than a foundation. I don’t say this to shame anyone, least of all a man raising his own family the best way he knows how. I say it because the people who shape how we see ourselves carry a weight beyond their own households, whether they asked for it or not. My hope is simple. That we stop treating our children’s languages as a competition with only one winner. That we let them have both the world and their roots, and trust that they are capable of holding both without ever having to choose.

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Chuks adibeli

@StrengthChuks

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