Reflections on sunday: Paying for paradoxes of the English language!

That however has been my lot for as long as I can remember, but it’s not all. I also remember the early 1960s in the sprawling refugee camp of Nshungerezi, in Uganda, when we were in Kyandera Primary ‘School’; for several times I’ve written about this ‘school’ where we had no class rooms. ‘Classes’ were formed wherever there was a tree that could provide a shade …This time I want to talk about school teachers, not classrooms. We fled Rwanda together with the young men and women who taught us; they were very strong in Mathematics. Anyone who studied in Rwanda then, will tell you that Mathematics was emphasized to the point of being adored.When it came to languages, these teachers had never come in contact with English as a foreign language! That was the source of my misery! Since the teachers were learning the language on job, sometimes you could leave them by a few ‘vocabularies’ or you could grasp the phonetics of the English language faster. Usually, problems arose because the teachers learnt English using the French-English dictionary, by just checking for the translations and their phonetic pronunciations. For instance, a teacher would check the French word ‘hière’ to learn its translation, which was given in English as ‘yesterday’ [jest?dei]. Unfortunately, the teacher would read it in its phonetic form as ‘jestoday’! A number of us could not resist the temptation, and we usually pointed out: “Sir, it is pronounced as ‘yestahdeyi’. Evidently, we were hardly any better at pronunciation, or anything else, but it didn’t stop the teachers from giving us a thorough thrashing. The mother of all whippings came to pass when our teacher noticed my declining class performance and asked me: “Ingina, term one, one; term two, two; why term three, four?” I was rather perplexed and unable to comprehend. Then a flood of revelation occurred to me, and I blurted out: “Sir, I get what you mean. You are supposed to say: ‘Your position was first in the first term; second in the second term; why is it fourth in the third term?’ The teacher worked on my bottom until I passed out! I managed to limp home that evening, alright, but it cost my parents a month and all types of herbs in the region to restore my bottom. I joined secondary school as a sound-bottomed pupil. However, this was not because of the scarcity of ‘English-language-induced miseries!’ Rather, it was because caning as a form of punishment was outlawed in secondary schools and many other forms of punishments existed; I did a number of them. A typical example was my first day at school, when I said: “Sir, I’ve been to all the ‘hice’, but I can’t find my name on the lists!” The teacher in charge of allocating dormitories looked at me in bewilderment for a minute, then his clouded face cleared and he swore under his breath: “You, illiterate fresher!” He later asked a second year prefect to take me to the library. I was given two thick novels to read and only go out of the library when I could speak decent English! It was not until almost a year, that I learnt words like ‘mouse’, changed into ‘mice’ in plural form. Others like ‘house’ only acquired an‘s’ to form their plural, and never changed to ‘hice’! Before that year ended, I had received the most severe punishment, to go home for a whole term, for being an incorrigibly difficult student. This time, of all lessons, my sin was committed in Biology practical! When our Biology teacher explained that the small animal spread out and pinned on the table, which he had just finished dissecting, was called a ‘guinea pig’, I could not comprehend it. I raised my hand, and when he nodded in my favour, I said: “But, sir, how can a Ugandan rat be called a ‘guinea pig’? Even if it came from Guinea, surely it still remains a rat!” The teacher looked straight into my eyes, went to the Headmaster’s office and came back with a letter suspending me for a term. Since then, I learnt to interpret English language paradoxes quietly, and to avoid asking nosy questions! Contact: ingina2@yahoo.co.uk