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The Cost of Assimilation: Wunmi Mosaku and the Language we Lose in Proximity to Whiteness
There is something particularly painful about Wunmi Mosaku saying that she never really had a conversation with her grandmother.
Not because they did not know or love each other. They did. But because they did not share a language fluently enough to speak to each other without someone else standing between them.
For much of their relationship, Mosaku needed an interpreter.
In a recent interview with Sky News, the British-Nigerian actress spoke about her decision to learn Yoruba as an adult and the much deeper reckoning that brought her there. This wasn't simply about wanting to become bilingual. It was about identity, assimilation, colonialism and the things we unknowingly surrender in our attempts to belong.
Mosaku moved from Nigeria to Britain as a young child and has spoken previously about how English came to dominate her life. She has said that her parents were advised to stop speaking Yoruba at home after difficulties she experienced with reading English at school - difficulties that were later understood in the context of dyslexia. She has described losing her mother tongue as part of the price of assimilation.
But in the Sky interview, she goes somewhere even more uncomfortable: proximity to whiteness.
Mosaku reflects on colonialism and how proximity to whiteness and the coloniser contributed to her not being taught Yoruba. It is a powerful observation because it forces us to consider language not simply as something that families accidentally lose, but as something that has historically been assigned value.
For generations, proximity to whiteness came with its own social currency. How you spoke, how you dressed, where you were educated and how successfully you could navigate white spaces could determine opportunity. Language inevitably became part of that negotiation.
And this is where Mosaku's story becomes much bigger than Mosaku. Because the hierarchy doesn't begin when Africans leave Africa. It exists at home too.
Across parts of the continent, fluency in the language inherited from colonial rule remains closely connected to formal education and social and economic mobility. Children are expected to master English, French or Portuguese because their academic progression may depend upon it.
There are understandable practical reasons for shared official languages in multilingual countries. The problem is not learning English. Or French. Or Portuguese.
The problem is what happens when mastering those languages comes at the expense of our own.
A Nigerian child may be corrected for poor English while nobody is particularly alarmed that they cannot construct a complete sentence in Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Efik or their family's own language. Speaking polished English can become evidence of a good education; speaking your mother tongue is too often treated as optional.
Then take that child out of Africa and raise them in London, Manchester, New York, Toronto or Los Angeles. The odds become even harder.
The dominant language follows them everywhere. It is spoken at school. With friends. On television. In books. Eventually, it becomes the language in which they think.
Their mother tongue, meanwhile, may have to survive almost entirely inside the home.
And even there, survival isn't guaranteed.
That part of Mosaku's story hits particularly close to home for me.I am navigating this very struggle with my own daughter and Igbo. She wants to learn. She has shown so much enthusiasm about learning the language, and perhaps that makes my anxiety about it even greater. I sometimes worry that despite my intentions, I will fail to give her something that is fundamentally hers.
Because intention and reality are two different things.
There is work. There is school. There are activities. There are deadlines, responsibilities and the relentless logistics of everyday life. You tell yourself you will speak more Igbo at home. You plan to make more time for lessons. Then another week disappears.
And we keep trying.
I suspect many African parents raising children away from home will recognise that tension. It isn't necessarily that we don't value our languages. Sometimes we are simply trying to preserve them in environments where almost everything else in our children's lives is reinforcing another language.
That is why I don't hear Mosaku's story as an indictment of African parents. I hear it as a warning about what can disappear despite our best intentions. Because language is not simply vocabulary.
There are jokes that don't survive translation. Inflections that tell you when your grandmother is teasing rather than scolding you. Proverbs whose meaning collapses when converted too literally into English. Family histories, pet names, prayers, gossip, humour and tiny expressions of affection that belong specifically to a language.
And then there are the people themselves.
Mosaku's reflection about her grandmother is devastating precisely because she understood that linguistic distance had also created an emotional distance she couldn't fully appreciate until later. She loved her grandmother, but there were parts of that woman's personality she could only reach through somebody else's interpretation.
Imagine loving someone all your life and later realising there was an entire dimension of them you never got to meet. That is a very particular kind of loss. Perhaps, then, we need to rethink what it means to prepare African children for the world. Of course they need English. Of course they need the languages that allow them to study, work, travel and participate fully wherever they live. But why must progress require subtraction?
Why shouldn't an African child possess both?
There is power in that duality: being able to move confidently through the language of the world you inhabit without becoming linguistically estranged from the people you come from.
And perhaps this is where the conversation about white proximity becomes most important.
Reclaiming our languages does not require rejecting English or rejecting the countries in which we now live. It means questioning why closeness to one language, culture or identity should require distance from another.
Our children should not have to choose between access and ancestry.
I don't know yet how fluent my daughter will eventually become in Igbo. I hope very. But I also know that perfection cannot become another reason to give up. So we speak what we can. We learn. We repeat ourselves. We try again.
Mosaku began learning Yoruba as an adult because she understood what had been lost.
Perhaps our responsibility now is to make sure our children don't have to lose the language first before understanding its value.
Maybe the inheritance begins simply with refusing to stop trying.
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