By Simeon Mpamugoh
Professor Alex Igbineweka is an inspired linguistic scholar and creator of Guosa language, a Nigerian-Economic of West African States (ECOWAS) lingua franca for the promotion of peace, unity, identity, political stability, arts, culture and science. The US based scholar and member of World Language Creation Society (LCS) says that he has written more than eight books on Guosa language, in addition to endless Wikipedias written by Europeans and Americans linguists. In this e-conversation with him, he speaks on his efforts to get the language, which has been accredited in America and approved by the Federal Government of Nigeria, but to no avail.
Kindly tell us about your scholarly experiences?
I was also employed by the Nigerian Television Authority in the mid-1980s as a confidential secretary, and rose to the position of a principal secretary until I retired and left Nigeria to the United States of America on the invitation of Boston University, Massachusetts, to lecture the international communities about the Guosa language creation, because the Nigerian government and her language experts won’t listen to me or give me the opportunity to grow on my linguistic ingenuity. Thanks to America, the land of endless opportunities, for providing the opportunity.
Till date, the Linguistics Association of Nigeria is not serious about looking inwards by using what we have to achieve what we need in the Nigerian lingua franca programmes and policies. Instead, they are bent on signing up Chinese and foreign languages into the school curriculum at the expense of our indigenous languages, yet we want Nigeria to unite? What a shame of hoping against hopes!
Meanwhile my first invitation to the United States was in 1988. It was followed nine years later in 1966 by the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University, both in California. That was how I became a Californian and a US permanent resident to date. In the US, I obtained a bachelor’s degree, MBA and a PhD in business administration. I am also a current PhD student at the Gambit School of Business in London.
On the whole, language evolution and creation is my talent, my inspiration and my stock in trade. This is my natural inheritance from my grandfather, late Pa Okpevbo N’Erua, who was one of the Oba of Benin’s chief medicine man. He was the spiritual language communicator and interpreter between the living and the dead at Erua community, Uhunmwode Local Government Area, in his days. I think one does not have to be a PhD holder to be a scientific language creator. It is an inspiration or natural gift from those who sit above us and inherent in my ancestral roots. I appeal to Nigeria to come unto me, and I will teach her the linguistic unity and the thrills in Guosa language, if only she will humble herself, put down egos or the English language grammatical camouflaging theories to learn. Jesus Christ said, “I will make you a fisher of men….if you follow me.” I am also telling Nigeria and her ECOWAS member nations, as well as the rest of the world, that I will break the linguistic barriers, make Nigerian citizens bachelors, masters, PhD or an “Otohen” certificate and degree holders in Guosa language studies if only they pay attention to me. “Come learn of me, and I will make you teachers of Guosa language, if you follow me,” is a paraphrased word of God.
How did you come about the collaboration with the University of Abuja celebration of Guosa language Conference Day?
A few years ago, the University of Abuja, Nigeria’s center of unity took the lead by offering Guosa language certificates upon successful completion of its Guosa language vocational studies. For me, one does not need an English or Chinese certification to qualify as a Guosa linguist; it is from the ECOWAS, for the ECOWAS and by the ECOWAS. One can have a PhD in Chinese language, Italian language, Interslavic language, and a PhD “Otohen” in the Guosa language is not a bad idea. The Nigerian University Commission can approve the award of Guosa language degrees and titles to whosoever qualified and passed the board’s examination including the white, tourists, visitors, etc. Bob Marley said: “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery”. It is too bad, we always want foreigners to give us our human rights while we sit around condemning our own ingenuity, talents and creativity.
The simple wisdom is that both the theoretical, the natural and the unnatural language experts need to work together to make Nigeria great. But, unfortunately, the Nigerian government and her linguistic employees have limited their knowledge to the English grammatical classrooms theories. What a big loss to the nation at large! Sometimes we need to step out of history to make history by taking the road less travelled. We can’t be doing the same thing repeatedly and expect miracles to happen. The western world is always inventing and advancing 24/7. So, the “collaboration” with the University of Abuja is the action of working with a group of people and organizations to produce or create something formidable. I needed the collaboration of the Linguistics Association of Nigeria and most of the Nigerian universities’ dons, but they turned their backs at me.
Thank God, lots of the international linguistic academic communities came to my rescue; hence, the Guosa language continued to wax stronger to date as you can read all over the “intanayo” (Internet) in Guosa language. Also, there are so many universities and academic institutions in Nigeria, who adopted the I-don’t-care attitude, because they saw it from a nothing-in-it-for-me perspective. But thank God, the University of Abuja has been working with us gradually right from 2016 when Prof. Michael Adikwu, the former Vice-Chancellor, oversaw the affairs of the institution, and now Prof. Aisha Sani Maikudi, the new dynamic acting Vice-Chancellor, is in charge. The collaboration has been notched up to other institutions, like the West Contra Costa Unified School District, Richmond, California, and the East Bay University, Hayward. So we are now working to run the Guosa Language Vocational Courses at the University of Abuja, Nigeria.
Guosa language is a combination of some Nigeria’s languages cobbled together to form it. Can you tell us about the creative work?
Guosa is an evolved or created indigenous zonal lingua franca, also known as auxiliary language, born in the poly lingual milieu of Nigeria and the surrounding regions of West Africa in the mid-19th century. West Africa is home to three language families, the Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan, which represents over 500 recognised languages — not including commonly spoken colonial languages like English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Some decades ago, 1975 fifteen nations in West Africa – Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, the Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Senegal, and Togo signed a treaty, thus creating the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which is the area that the Guosa language aims to serve.
Within those regions, some of the major native languages are Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo, Ga,Twi, Wolof, Bassa and about 490 other indigenous languages and dialects, according to the world ethno-linguistics research. So, growing up in Nigeria in the 1950s and 60s, I was repeatedly exposed to not only colonial English, the Nigerian Pidgin English and my mother tongue, Edo, but also Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, Efik, Urhobo, Izon, Kalabari, and Fulfulde; again, thanks to the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) scheme, whose aim was to educate and sustain Nigerian Indigenous languages beginning from 1958. The scheme saw the Rediffusion radio channel sequentially broadcast their programmes in the nine Nigerian local languages, which I enthusiastically consumed.
The 1958-1960 nine-language broadcast scheme was really a relief to me. However, I remembered painfully how my father was forced to pay a penny fine to St. Stephen’s Primary School management on 1st East Circular Road, Benin City, for speaking Edo language, my mother tongue, to a classmate at school during the British colonial law that forbade local Indigenous languages or dialects from being spoken in academic environments. The question is: has there been any meaningful change in our government linguistic structures between the 1958 era of British rule to date and now that we are independent nations? Yet we introduced foreign languages into our academic syllabuses in preference to our mother tongues and the unified Guosa language. Why do we hate our nation’s dialects and cultures so badly? Who did this to us?
Listening to the nine Nigerian language broadcasts on a daily basis enabled me to learn and write additional local languages —or at least corresponding lexical items if not diverse grammatical features like morphology, syntax —and using these cognates in everyday speech when I was alone. In our daily speech in Nigeria, it is common to code-switch between the English language with interlaced words from our various mother tongues. For me, it was not just code switching between English and my mother’s native Edo language but also all the nine language broadcasts from NBC.
I synced volumes of different Nigerian Indigenous words and meanings in my brain as a young boy, and I was able to pronounce and recite those words with ease. Having acquired lots of different Nigerian traditional language words, I found myself interlacing Edo language words with Igbo words, some other Nigerian languages and dialectal words. For example, “biko, fun mi ruwa” meaning “please, give me water” became a common phrase on my lips, and that is a blended linguistic element from Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Itsekiri, etc. Thus, at age 13, living in my family home at 19, Abakaliki Road, Enugu Nigeria, the Guosa language was born.
How do you think this indigenous zonal lingua franca can serve as the panacea for the promotion of authentic democracy, peace, unity, identity, political stability, tourism, arts, culture and science within the region?
For me, Guosa represents a natural lifetime of work. From my early youth, when I created the language from my dreams, a divine message like the Ignota created by Hildegard von Bingen in the 12th century, and the Interslavic language of the European Slavic nations created by two brothers, St. Cyril and St. Methodius, in the 11th century, popped up. Others are the combinative teams of Presidents Julius Nyerere of Tanzania 1962–1985 and President Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya 1964–1978, who promoted Swahili language as integral to the East African region’s political and economic interests, security and liberation.
As an inspired code-switching teenager growing up in a multicultural and multilingual Nigeria, it was a call of nature to create an indigenous national language for my motherland Nigeria and then expand it to the neighbouring ECOWAS region of West Africa. I am happy to share this inborn linguistic knowledge and experience, and allow linguistic interpretation, research, documentation and spread of the Guosa language for the unity of humanity at home and abroad. However, I cannot do it alone because, all over the world, a tree has never made any forest.
On the linguistic Structure of Guosa; although it has largely been created as a posteriori based on Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, and some other Nigerians nay ECOWAS languages and dialects. It has also been influenced by over 200 West African languages, stemming from the Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, and Nilo-Saharan language families. Yet, the diverse group of languages that have influenced Guosa are like the Leonardo Painting, or the Benin bronze to pull together into one cohesive scientific alternative language solution. A true linguistic study of African languages showed that there are many shared linguistic features common to many languages of the continent, most likely due to language contact and cultures between languages and language families.
An overview of some of the Guosa language developing linguistic grammars, courtesy of Guosa Linguifex indicate that there are adequate developing rules for the scientific inclusion of endless traditional words and linguistic metamorphoses into the Guosa language but they are simple experiments. Additionally, Guosa language contains some phonological variations to assist learners of the language in being understood. This phonological feature would undoubtedly assist speakers who struggled to produce an alveolar trill, a feature found in Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba and some indigenous West African languages which are the primary parent languages of Guosa.
In the 1990s, you made several efforts to get Nigeria’s government to accept the language as our lingua franca. Why did you abandon the project in Nigeria for America?
I wrote to the late ex-president Shehu Shagari and Dr. Chuba Okadigbo, who was the former political adviser to the President. They were very pleased about the Guosa language evolution and sent my request to the Ministry of Education to work with me, and develop the language. The ministry of Education directed me to contact the Nigerian universities to help me out. The Linguistic Association of Nigeria tossed me around and declined to be of help, claiming that they did not see any success in the Guosa language because Esperanto, to them, was a failure.
I went to the University of Ibadan so many times. All my invitations and discussions ended up fruitlessly negative and in frustration. The dons told me that Guosa language is good, but that it lacked grammatical parts of speech and rules. What an ignorant attack! So, after about 15 years of struggles with the Nigerian universities’ employees without any form of help in sight, I had no choice but to accept the invitations from the international language professionals for help. If one was in my shoes I am sure the person won’t decline such golden opportunities. I am happy and thankful to God that I chose the right decision.
Otherwise, the Guosa language could have been forgotten long before now. Worst still is the fact that in 1993, the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council, Jibowu, Yaba Lagos, offered to assist me to print the first Guosa language dictionary. They required me to pay some portion of the dictionary funding as part of my commitment to the project. I paid the required amount and guess what, from 1993 to date the Guosa dictionary was not published, and my money wasn’t refunded either. That is a report for another day.
What are some of the books or compendium published to immortalize the language in Nigeria and across the world?
I have published lots of books on Guosa language and some foreign language experts have done so as well, including Joseph Windsor, Founder, Language Creation Society, Dr. Wilson Jenson, Peter F. Gopsill, Chair, British Interlingua Society, etc. Some of my books are: Teach Yourself Guosa Language Book I: Express Publication, 1981,Teach Yourself Guosa Language Book II: Guosa Educational, Scientific & Cultural Inst., Inc., 2000, The Complete Dictionary of Guosa Language: Guosa Educational, Scientific & Cultural Inst., Inc., 2007, The Complete Dictionary of Guosa Language, 1st Revised Edition: Guosa Educational, Scientific and Cultural Inst., Inc., 2009, The Complete Dictionary of Guosa Language, 2nd Revised Edition: Universe World Publishers, USA 2019, The Complete Dictionary of Guosa Language, 3rd Revised Edition, Great Writers Media, USA 2023,The Handbook of Guosa Language Book I, 2018, The Handbook of Guosa Language, Book II, 2020 e t c.
There are equally endless Wikipedias written by European and American linguists, including Caro De Sadega – Guosa Wikifandon, Guosa Wikitongues, Guosa – Simple English Wikipedia, the free Guosa encyclopedia, Guosa Wikidata, Guosa Wikipedia in several West African languages, Guosa – Wiktionary; the accreditation list is endless. The Nigerian and West African linguists are way behind in the Guosa language research, development and documentation. Instead, they held on to the “dead on arrival” defunct Michael West English Dictionary rather than teaming up with us to move the nations forward.
How would you rate the interest of the people to embrace another new Language as a means of communication?
The interest of the teaming population who wished Nigeria’s love and unity in diversity are extremely high but for the majority of the government linguistic employees. The life we are living today is not so much about the old and unproductive ways of doing things but the latest artistic, scientific and technological breakthroughs and that is what Guosa language evolution is about among other benefits
Literary critics are of the view that the language lacks guiding principles in its design, arbitrarily selecting words from a few Nigerian languages rather than proportionally and methodologically selecting its vocabulary from a larger variety of Nigeria’s languages. What is your reaction to the critique?
Those kinds of literary critics are serious in not being serious and they do not have any clue or whatsoever they are criticizing natively other than showcasing their English language PhDs on the pages of the internet. They are completely naïve and ignorant. There are destructive criticisms and constructive criticisms. The wisdom of the wise is based on constructive criticism and that is what exalts a nation, not the other way round. Let’s assume that the Guosa language was how they saw it, what have they done to help correct the lapses for good? If the language was perfect and lacked nothing, I would not have asked for their linguistic input in the first place. Because I recognized my inability to explain all the Guosa terminologies at the very onset. They quickly took advantage of the negative conclusions that Guosa lacked the English language terminological definitions rather than working with us.. Why use the anglophone language to standardize African ingenuity? Why not the other way round? Is there any crime in that? The English language of the 15th century isn’t the same English language of today, it has undergone endless academic research and development. Similarly, the Guosa language of 1965 isn’t the same pattern and structures as the Guosa language of today. It is constantly going through reviews, research and development. Lots of grammatical rules have been updated. For example, there was no word like “email” in the English dictionaries until recently. Similarly, we now have “imel” for email in the Guosa language, “teliwaya” for telephone e.t.c.
The University of Lagos noted that Guosa language is good but an uphill task learning it and they backed out. The University of Ibadan equally wrote to me saying that Guosa language is good but lacked adjectives, syntax, morphology, nouns, etc and they equally back out. All I needed was for them to assist me with their various linguistic technical research and development, but they saw me off the conference rooms, claiming that I may have some mental challenges embarking on this kind of linguistic odyssey; and that If I was a classroom linguist I won’t venture into the Guosa language mission. Looking at some of the Guosa language examples, one will notice that Guosa language lacked no any parts of speech. Any language that is capable of clear and understanding communication does not lack the linguistic parts of speech. If we are smart enough to understand the language of the birds and other animals, we should also be able to analyze or define their various linguistic parts of speech.
What contributions do you think adopting the language in Nigeria’s education curriculum will have to the peace, justice and development of the country?
Adopting the Guosa language in Nigeria nay Economic Community of West African States educational curricula will usher in the missing link to our global socioeconomic; political and industrial revolutions. Right now, the hub or the center of Nigeria and the ECOWAS can’t hold itself together, every language and ethnic groups are after itself, no national identity or selflessness at heart in the true sense of nationalism and patriotism, and every language groups is fighting to identify or plant their individual rubber stamps into the national body politics. No nation can ever see the light of the day in so doing. When we embrace the Guosa language and speak it as a nation, we will achieve unity in diversity, no matter whatever nation of ECOWAS we come from. The Swahili language for East Africa, or the Interslavic language for the Slavic nations of central Europe is the gap Guosa language for Nigeria and the ECOWAS will bridge.
You did marvelously well trying to promote the language in Nigeria in the early 90s before moving to the United States, what steps are you taking to relaunch it into the consciousness of the Nigerian people and government?
He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day. I had to fight or fly to regain my fighting energy in my bid to unify Nigeria through my inborn linguistic science. I am right now like the biblical John the Baptist crying in the wilderness. Yes, I left Nigeria for the United States but my soul and my spirit never left at any point in time, otherwise I would never think of coming back to propagating the language of Guosa in the country of my birth. Guosa is gaining momentum more than ever, with the gradual help of the University of Abuja and I wished the National University Commission (NUC) and other universities in Nigeria would come onboard. I appeal to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and others to come to my aid. I can’t do it all by myself, a tree can’t make a forest.
Nigeria is more divided today than it was when you began to advocate for a new lingua franca for the country’s unity. Would you say that Guosa is the language to deal with the conflicts, marginalization and agitations by some ethnic groups of the country?
Yes! Nigeria is more divided today than it was when I began to advocate for a new lingua franca for the country’s unity because the leaders won’t listen to me, probably because I am not a millionaire. It’s like you do not have any intelligence, if you are not rich. Guosa language is the final panacea and the centerpiece of Nigerians and the ECOWAS unity.
How many years did it take you to compile the complete dictionary of Guosa language? And where are the places the publication can be found?
I started dreaming of the Guosa language about the age of six years old. 1956 to be sure. Thereafter, I started collating the different Nigerian languages and dialectal words as the building blocks of the language from 1958 to early 1960s. The first book of Guosa language was published in 1981 and the latest Guosa language dictionary was published in 2023 and available on Amazon.com, Barnse & Nobles, eBay.com and other international bookshops including the Library of Congress, The White House Washington DC. In all it took me more than 60 years to compile the publication.
On a lighter note, could you advise Nigeria’s leadership in Guosa language and translation?
Jama’a, asusu Guosa wu asusu ikpodo fun kasa Nigeria nasi ECOWAS. Biko ron mi hannu n’irushe asusu Guosa mani kpke, itache kono ko kanbo wu idaji. In English language translation it means: My people, Guosa language is the language of unity for Nigeria and the ECOWAS. Please, help me with the Guosa language works and programmes, because a tree cannot make a forest.