Made in Nigeria

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WIRED IN
CONDUIT FOR CULTURE
Technology is a blank canvas and we can use it to reflect our
culture in diverse ways
Kola Tubosun
When the Nigerian English
Google Voice was
launched a few months
ago, the responses were
mixed. It was expected.
On one hand, there were people who
were very happy that technology is beginning
to reflect us little by little, sound
like us, and adapt to our peculiar outlook
on society. On the other hand, there were
those to whom the idea of a computer
voice that sounds like a Nigerian was
abominable. “Why?” Some asked, “does
Google want to create a ‘local’ voice when
we can continue to use the ‘international’
one with its British or American accents
(with its imperfections, wrong pronunciation
of Nigerian names, and often
inscrutable accent)?”
Passions rose on either side of the debate.
From afar, it was fascinating to observe,
the argument between presenting our
own selves to us through technology
and aspiring to what is said to be “global”
arose. Those who are familiar with my
work know where I stand on this matter.
There is a strong need for technology to
reflect the cultures under which it is used
and deployed. But I have often wondered
what the root causes of the resistance
to change of this nature are, beyond the
usual assumption that its perpetrators are
just ashamed to look at themselves in the
mirror.
Computer technology, to much of the
continent, is a relatively new phenomenon.
I remember the first computer I
ever touched, around 1994, to have been
the only one in Àkóbọ̀, where I lived in
Ìbàdàn. I would not see or touch another
one until about three years later. They
were mostly used for games: Chess or
Prince of Persia. Their word processing capabilities
were quite rudimentary. The first
personal computer I ever had — I bought
second-hand — was in the early 2000s, by
which time Windows had improved a bit
more, and Microsoft Word (and its other
Office tools) had added a lot of advanced
features. But they only worked in English.
Maybe there were a few other European
language capabilities on the device, but
mostly it was a device set up in the image
of its American inventors.
Technology has always been that way.
When I was growing up, much of the electronic
devices I saw had “Made in China”
written on them. It conditioned the mind
of the child that electronic items were
always Chinese, naturally. If not Chinese,
they were Korean or Japanese. From cars
to televisions to stereo sets. Many times,
the manuals one had to read to understand
how to operate these devices were
written in those languages. So, from the
receiving end in our Nigerian homes,
we naturally associated them with Asian
cultures.
When computers came, it was the same. It
was a Western idea and so everything in it
had to be Western too. Whenever Microsoft
Word underlined our names with the
red wriggly line showing that it thought
of it as a typo, we just grinned and bore
it without complaint. It didn’t seem like
a dealbreaker in a device that did a lot
more things for us, like let us connect with
people from all over the world at the click
of a button. And so the conditioning took
place, little by little, over that time. We
developed a tolerance for exclusion. After
all, everywhere else we looked, we were
surrounded by English. Our educational
syllabus was based on the British English
one. Our official language was English, as
is the language of the courts, and governance.
What was a little inconvenience
with computer technology that we could
not bear?
But what that did was cement an already
precarious legacy of conditioning. Yorùbá,
which had to be written with diacritics
to be able to make sense, started losing
even more grounds to the Latin script
that allowed no such adornment. I’d be
interested in looking at theses written
between 1995 and 2005 in the African
languages departments in our universities
to see how faithful its writers were to
the conventions of the languages in the
absence of word processing applications
to properly print them.
We are in 2019 now, and things have
changed. Well, I should say that things are
changing. African language technology
is now a field of interest to many of us interested
in creating opportunities for our
languages to thrive in the technological
age. Believing that not being able to use
them online and in our computers and in
our mobile phones is as much an obstacle
to language growth as not speaking them
to our children. There is a long road ahead,
of course, but the journey has begun. The
creation of the Nigerian English Google
voice is one step in that direction, and
many would surely follow.
Maybe a little child in a corner of the
country will begin to get used to the idea
that technology itself is just a blank canvas,
not peculiar to any culture. It is what
we put on it, and in it, that determines the
possibilities to which it can be used. And
maybe one day, non-English-speaking
Nigerian citizens can use their mobile
phones in a Nigerian language. Then we
would have begun a journey into real
self-actualisation.
African language technology is now a field of interest to many of us
interested in creating opportunities for the languages to thrive in
the technological age.
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