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That UNESCO gaffe about Igbo language

By CHERECHI UDEMBA

THE report by United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization UNESCO half a decade ago giving the Igbo language 15 years to go extinct has generated lots of controversy in enlightened circles. The report can be firstly viewed and analyzed objectively on its face validity. It is true that enrollment in Igbo language in Secondary School Certificate examinations is falling drastically, it is true that universities and state governments in Igboland have not taken Igbo language so seriously such as developing an advance Igbo science and technology dictionary or researching into Igbo herbal pharmacopeias, it is equally true that Igbo’s in Diaspora have not tried to leverage their language into international limelight such as featuring them in international news languages in such media as BBC and that many urbanized Igbos tend to play down on their language sometimes as a result of their republican, pragmatic, assimilative, broad minded and internationalist worldviews.

These problem, certainly present urgent and concerted challenges to Igbo intellectuals, universities, state governments, religious institutions, cultural unions and individual researchers to develop a functionality driven road map to a twenty first century compliant implementation strategy for a linguistic renaissance.
A few efforts are being made in these regards at mere theoretical levels such as the Ahiajoku annual lectures, the Odenigbo lectures, etc. but they basically lack strategies for proffering recommendations for effective practical implementation and therefore make little or no impact.

These necessitate a more dynamic approach to the problem such as establishment of centres of excellence in Igbo and African Studies, endowment of university chairs in Igbo technology and cosmology, scholarships, international electronic media features, etc.

These needs are urgently imperative alright. One can however, carefully look at the UNESCO report from another perspective. As one of the three major tribes in Nigeria the UNESCO knows quite well as an assumed experienced organization that it should not use virtually derogatory terminologies to described any tribe nor try to place it at comparative sociopolitical disadvantage. But this it did or tried to do. In this regards the report although timely and welcome was operationally a disaster. It is sheer impetuosity for half a century old organization to try to give the boomeranging death wish to a language that is over a dozen millennia old and spoken and used daily by over 30 million people.

It is mainly the language of their liturgy too (mostly Catholics for now) UNESCO should at least have tried to proffer solutions to its report rather than a fatalistic near pre-meditated controversial presentation which for all intents and purposes seems reckless, brash, arrogant, over-generalized, unlearned, and tends to lend some credence to international conspiracy theories against the Igbo race directed at some political and powerful international religious circles. UNESCO has virtually no physical impact in Igbo Land and the average Igbo pupil does not really understand the acronym. What then informs its authoritative declaration about Igbo language?. Its only impact was half a century ago when it strived to help set up an advanced teachers college in Igboland.
In summary the dynamics of the report is still puzzling and only UNESCO can unravel the meaning of that puzzle.
• Udemba wrote from Owerri, Imo State