If you speak Twi, don’t mix-mix English with it!

When Professor Kofi Asare Opoku appeared on the Fapempong TV programme, OBRABO

(Available on YouTube, I believe) recently, he unintentionally reawakened the old controversy of which version of Twi we should use.

Some people believe that Twi (Asante) and Twi (Akuapem) should be unified so that together, the two dialects can combine with Fante, to give us a Ghanaian language that willing people would be able to learn, and automatically make themselves easily understood in almost the entire country of Ghana.

You see Prof. Asare Opoku had an Asante mother and an Akuapem father, and however hard he tries, occasionally one version of Twi appears in his speech that is slightly different from the other! Delightful coincidence, don’t you think, to be claimed by both the largest blocks of Twi speakers?

I am an Akyem dialect speaker myself, and thus, I’m often mistaken for an Asante, as the two dialects are almost indistinguishable, one from the other. But when I went to school, the Presbyterian Church authorities (who controlled education in most of the Akan areas) imposed on us – through the Twi textbooks that were used to give us our first lessons in reading – the Akuapem (or Akwapim!) versions of Twi.

Thus, at home, we said baako (one). But in school, the Kan Me Hwe series of textbooks made us say biako! Mmienu (two) became abien! More complex words than numerals, of course, confused us greatly.

The worst of those came from the Twi Bible (from which “recitations” were given to us to chew by heart) as well as the Twi Hymn Book and the Twi Catechism, confused us greatly. Some of the words we chewed by heart, were words we would never use at home. But there they were, to be mastered and produced on demand! Or two or more lashes of the teacher’s raffia cane.

If we native speakers of Twi had difficulty in mastering the Akuapem standard dialect, just imagine how difficult it was for non-native Twi speakers who first had to learn the Akyem dialect that surrounded them in our towns and villages, and then had to morph it into the Akwapem version, when they came to school.

A classic, incomparable verse from the Presbyterian Hymn Book that I remember to this day, was produced by my friend, a guy called GaSimon, when we were in Class One:

‘Manyan yi meto dompe

Ama Nyame magye nkwan”…. [having woken up, I shall buy some bone and go to God to ask for some soup!)

Well, I ask you: how could a non-native speaker of Twi have been able to reproduce a difficult passage like: “Manyan yi meto dwom pa,

Ama Nyame Magyenkwa”?

Of course, the native Twi speakers had a field day laughing at my poor friend. Imagine buying a bone to take it to God to apply for some soup to go with it. But who could blame him? He wanted to make sense of what he had been asked to memorise. And his version made sense to him, whereas the original Hymnary version was complete tosh, as far as he was concerned.

The dichotomous relationship between the everyday Twi we spoke at home and the “sanctified” language we spoke in school, is probably to blame for the fact that many of us regard religion as a Sunday affair that has nothing — or very little — to do with reality. We went to church on Sunday, heard a lot of exhortations in a language we barely understood, and then came back home to carry on the life we had known since childhood. Did that duality also make great hypocrites of us? DISCUSS!

I believe that we have lost a lot of important expressions as a result of having been forced by schooling to jettison much of the vocabulary that we absorbed naturally from our surroundings. For instance, I cannot now remember the word we had for that beautiful game for girls which I now know only as ampe. We didn’t call it ampe in Akyem Abuakwa: I should know, because it was when the girls were playing that game that, at the age of about 6, I learnt how lovely a girl’s body could be.

From the bare ankles to the highly estimated calves, past the waist (with beads round it!) to the torso (with a cloth neatly tied up there to hide the lemon-shaped lumps of flesh that were struggling to become recognised as breasts!) I watched and watched but little thought what trouble the sight could give me in future! For oft, when a maid I pass, I cannot help but wonder what her lemons look like beneath that fashionable blouse-front! And then, my heart with pleasure fills, and lead me to climb amorous hills!

Ha! How can I ever forget the reproach I received when at the age of 6, one young lady so captivated me that I convinced myself that if I did not touch her arm I would die immediately? So I devised a ruse to get my desire fulfilled.

As she waited for her turn to go and resume her ampe game, I slided up to her and said, slyly: “I have been told that if you eat lot of pawpaws, your arms become very supple!”

“Pawpaw? Who told you that?”

She’d taken the bait. I said: It’s true! I’ve been eating a lot of pawpaw lately myself. To test the advice.”

“Ok, let me see your arm!” she said.

I offered my arm to her, and she ran her fingers along the length of it. Her touch was like all the toffees and corned beefs and honeyed mangoes in the world put together – in terms of sweetness.

She said, “It feels ordinary to me?”

I retorted “You didn’t feel it properly. You should have done it like this…: (She brought her arm out and thrust it in front of me.)

I caressed her out-thrust arm as lovingly as I would have treated a one-million carat diamond – if I’d known what that was!

That was my undoing. For as I caressed her arm, my puny member, which had hitherto been hidden by my pieto

(drawers) poked its head, erect, through one of the pieto’s legs.

She saw it. And I knew she had seen it.

I was mortified.

She said, “Bad boy!”

I ran away from the playground. From then on, when I saw her anywhere, I ran a mile!