S(h)ibboleth: Many a slip twixt opponent and enemy

In a campaign speech featured on the national network station of the Nigerian Television Authority on Monday February 1, 2010, Prof. Charles Soludo, Peoples Democratic Party candidate in the Anambra State governorship elections, told his audience that even his “enemies” in the polls they conducted on the election had put him ahead of the other candidates. Coming at a moment that S (h) ibboleth was desperately looking for subject matter for another Tuesday engagement, Soludo’s reference to his political opponents as “our enemies” was most helpful! One should be grateful to the professor for making this week’s s (h) ibbolething possible. I have learnt from the PDP flag-bearer that his (political) opponents are indeed his enemies.

Or, perhaps that was Mistake Number Two, the first being Soludo’s subscription to the traditional PDP approach to nominations. If all mistakes are connected, as I think they could be in politics, then calling one’s political opponents enemies was a way of speaking from the abundance of the heart. Sigmund Freud might not have been wrong in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: Forgetting, Slips of the Tongue, Bungled Actions, Superstitions and Errors (1901) when he wrote that a slip is linked to :”a disturbing influence ... which comes from something outside the intended utterance, and the disturbing element is either a single thought that has remained unconscious, which manifests itself in the slip of the tongue and which can often be brought to consciousness only by means of searching analysis, or it is a more general psychical motive force which is directed against the entire utterance.”

In other words, there is more to Soludo’s mistake in word choice than mere lexical error that could occur in the speech of one for whom English is a second language. Soludo’s expressed error, which in the context of his unconscious is not an error but a self-confession of belief and feelings, is possibly linked to the discourse and ideology of his party, particularly in a context where the Anambra governorship race is conceived as warfare. In war, those who stand against our pursuits are normally perceived as our “enemies”, and the theology of war makes killing them a vicarious assignment.

It is a learning process anyway and I expect that Soludo would rethink his paradigms somewhere along the line. Indeed, he seems to have already started learning to do so, for in the same campaign speech referred to above, he later referred to his political opponents as “our opponents” and no longer as “our enemies.”

Psycholinguistics calls it “self-repair,” a term that I like much, for it includes not just the repair of a damaged expression, but indeed the repair of damaged impression of self. In referring to his political opponents as “enemies” Soludo endangers himself ethically, presenting himself as one who cannot tolerate objections to his own pursuits.

Let us hope that his political handlers are also involved in this self-repair, as I suspect they were doing through the pieces of paper they passed on to him as he spoke and then repaired himself. Let us also hope that Soludo’s opponents have ceased to be his “enemies” after the self-repair carried out by him subsequently.

Perhaps if I were a Soludo apologist, I would have invoked the phenomenon of First-Language Interference in an attempt to help in repairing the damage to the ethos of the speaker. I would have perhaps argued that Soludo, as someone with Igbo as his First Language, experienced a kind of “vocabulary emergency,” with a convergence between “enemy” and “opponent” in Igbo language as simply “onye iro” or “onye ilo.” In other words, Soludo, as a Second-Language speaker of English, was struggling to reconcile the lexical options in Igbo and English, finally ending up with uttering a kind of “Igbo-in-English,” resulting in an “Engligbo” that takes both “enemy” and “opponent” as synonyms..” A wonderful face-saving analysis, isn’t it? Well, that’s what intellectual excuses do in times of emergency!

Soludo must count himself lucky that he was addressing an audience that perhaps did not care much about the rationality of what he was saying. Only few elements like me, who would probably be classified among Soludo’s “enemies” (at least based on the fact that I had in “The Soludo Solution” and “Counting Our Soludos before They Are Hatched” done some s (h) ibbolething against his selection as governorship candidate) would care for what he said and what he did not say or how he said what.

If in spite of all the self-repair and reactions like mine Soludo’s opponents still remain his “enemies,” we should not expect much tolerance from the person in whose imagination this enmity is staged.