To Learn to Read, Be Dumb —By Prospero O. Anuforo.

            


                                1.

You see, I was so smart as a kid. And this made me learn to read later than I should have. Yes, I had to throw away my smartness and conform to the often illogical axioms of the English language.

I had gone to stay with granny. And a cousin was there, too.  She was attending a good private school where they even thought phonetics.

It was a Saturday, and she was in the hallway, reading aloud. I spelt out every word in my head after her.

Coz: Mister.
Me: M. I. S. T. A.
Coz: John.
Me: J. O. N.
Coz: Said.
Me: S. E. D.
Coz: Our.
Me: A. W. A.

I picked  up the reader later, and tried to  confirm that my spellings were just perfect. Well, slight differences which my smart-ass self thought was just a matter of choice: Mister is almost the same as Mista.
The one I couldn't take was their spelling of awa. I scoured through the reader for the one word I was so sure of. Where is awa?

I found my Cousin playing outside and called her in. It was an urgent matter.

"You said awa when you were reading this book the other time, right? " I probed.
"How?" She asked.
"OK. Show me awa in this book, " I said, extending the book to her.

She took it, squinting at the page and running her forefinger along the prints. I was so sure it wasn't there. I was going to tell her to give up the search when she said: "this is it."

I came closer. And her forefinger was on O. U. R.

How could that be awa? I burst out laughing. I still laugh at myself whenever I look back on those days.


                             2.

But sometimes the results of our dumbness stare back at us. And we respond by adjusting our dumbness levels from the ludicrous to the outright bizarre.

This was years later. I had learnt to read.

I had hurried off to the post office at Ikotun to send a letter. At the counter, I got a stamp and did the other necessaries. Then the guy at the counter said I needed to provide the code for the city I was sending the letter to. He pointed me to a list on the board opposite. The postal codes for all the cities in Nigeria were on it. I walked to it and sought out the O category, because I was sending the letter to a place in Oka, the Capital of Anambra State:

                          Ogun
                           Ondo.
                            Osun.         
                          Owerri.
                           Oyo.

No. Oka wasn't on the list. I went back to the guy at the counter:

"How come Oka is not on your list?"
"How?"
"I can't find Oka there."
He came over: "Is this not it?"

He was pointing at A. W. K. A. How do you keep your tongue, and mind, before Awka comes out sounding like Oka? I thanked him, and blamed it on my poor sight.

Whenever I try to remember the spelling of Awka, I just remember the word Awkward.


                                 3.

My Sister was a lector. Lectors are lay readers in the Catholic Church, who read at Mass. They usually met every Saturday to practice the reading for the Sunday. And also to assign readers for the weekdays.
Sis would come back every Saturday fagged from the long phonetics classes that practice was. But on Sunday, at Mass:

    chaos still came out as cha-ohs;
    vault still came out as volt;
    power  still came out as paawa.

Africans hardly do the silent letters and sophisticated sounds thing, except for Edo people, whom the British taught to put the h's that added little or nothing to the sound  of their names. A friend once reprimanded me for spelling her surname on a casual chat as Aluebo, instead of Aluebho. I found it strange where the h was inserted, even though it pretended to give a deeper sound to it.


                               4.

When I asked a certain linguist why the capital of Imo State is called Owerre, but spelt Owerri, he said it was the British. Their tongue couldn't twist and turn in the way of the Ofensala eaters, so they spelt exactly what they could pronounce: Owerri. It's the same with Anambra. It should be Anambara.




Prospero O. Anuforo is a writer and poet.  He manages contents for Pigin Paarol on Asiri Media as Pipiro.