Reason Am! is also in talks with another notable NGO in Nigeria called Spaces For Change towards a rolling partnership. Within a few days after I opened the website, Human Development Initiatives, an NGO from Lagos contacted us to transcribe their newsletter from English to Pidgin English and also voice sections of it into podcasts. I was still trying to upload the audio file to Dropbox so I would just share it willy-nilly online when my husband asked me: “why stop at Shell vs Bodo? There are other things that need explaining in Pidgin, right?” I was so disturbed I decided to summarize the technical points of the case in easy-to-understand Pidgin English. Added to this was the fact that Mr Taiwo Obe, my mentor and a strong advocate for Pidgin English, asked me openly on LinkedIn if I would be reporting this case in Pidgin. I wrote the story in English, but it never for one moment escaped me that the fisher folk were not only unable to make it to court, but they would be unable to understand all the grammar and nice prose I had written. Even though I reported previously from court on the Okah and Ibori trials, this case was quite tough to grasp, as the legal arguments went really fast.
I was reporting on a very important court case in May 2014 oil multinational Shell was in a UK court for the first time, dragged there by over 1,000 residents from a fishing community in Nigeria’s Rivers State over two oil spills. What inspired the project and how has the response being so far?
Where did pidgin english originated from free#
So we make these podcasts and they are free under creative commons license, meaning they can be used for whatever purpose so long as appropriate attributions are made. We use podcasts to break down topical policies, issues and news that would ordinarily float above the heads of people who have only Pidgin English as a first language and/or cannot read. So Reason Am! is an audio service which explains complex news and current affairs in Pidgin English for the benefit of African audiences. In Pidgin English, when you say “reason am,” you are trying to argue a point, and so you ask others to reason with you, along the same lines. The whole shebang is on You recently launched a new project called Reason Am! What exactly is Reason Am! Currently I mainly ghost-write for corporate clients, blog on the side for SabiNews and run Reason Am!, which is fast turning out to be a full-time gig. I left South Africa to settle in London in 2011 and have since had a brief stint with the Financial Times, notably on its BeyondBrics desk. My work there brought the 2010 Niall Fitzgerald Prize, which meant Reuters sponsored me for a postgrad degree and an internship in South Africa. I grew up in Lagos and started out writing columns for Thisday newspapers, moved to GTBank working in Corporate Communications and then ended up at NEXT newspapers, all in Nigeria. But a longer version is that I am a Nigerian journalist, writer and producer based in London. In one sentence? I am a journalist whose father was a journalist and killed for being a journalist. So it pleases me to no end to share this amazing but underrated African language with you. It is my first language! I didn’t begin speaking standard Nigerian English until I was about seven.
Pidgin English is dear to my heart for personal reasons. She also dishes out on Reason Am!, a brand new project taking the production and consumption of pidgin english media to new heights. Nigerian journalist, Ruona Agbroko-Meyer, schools us on this versatile and beautiful urban language. Today, the language has evolved into a complex linguistic phenomenon and is widely spoken in the major English-speaking West African cities. It came into being on the coast of Guinea in the 17th century when British merchants succeeded the Dutch as the prominent seafaring group stationed on the West African Coast. In official linguistic circles, the language is called West African Pidgin English.
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