Decolonizing Western Phonics

Children’s Humour and Uncle Wowo's Pedagogical Performance

Abstract

Studies have focused on written children’s literature, and only recently, those on performances for children have concentrated on social effects. However, a novel strand of children's performance, Uncle Wowo (a Facebook/YouTube performance page) whose anchor, Uncle Wowo, resorts to a performative mode that draws on the Idoma (an indigenous Nigerian language) alphabet to spell-read English words. First, he spells each alphabet. This study draws on Idoma spelling and articulatory system, English pronouncing conventions and sundry concepts of decolonization to unveil how Uncle Wowo guides his humorous purposes to online child auditors by focusing on the most defining skits containing words capturing the fragmentation of the autochthonous African worldview. These words which range from the names of countries, places of worship, acts/items of worship embodying foreign thoughts and ethics to those serving as impediments to the indigenous group’s complete humanization, especially because they were the heritage of colonialism alien to the indigenous users. This essay argues that Uncle Wowo’s performance was a decolonising performative act that retrieves the African language from the sphere where it symbolises the language of the oppressed to that which it figures actual liberty, even if, linguistically. Paulo Freire’s theory of critical pedagogy assists in this symbolic retrieval, revival and liberation of the oppressed through the restoration of the thought-language of the dehumanised and colonised. The essay concludes that as insignificant as children's humorous performance, Uncle Wowo dares to upstage Western pronouncing patterns in obviously negligible ways but significantly decolonising of Western linguistic pedagogies.