Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún is a Nigerian linguist, writer, and cultural activist, who advocates for integrating African languages into global technology – notably by introducing Nigerian English into Google’s voice recognition systems. Túbọ̀sún is also the publisher of OlongoAfrica, a platform dedicated to African literature. In an interview with Bethlehem Attfield, published in the Asymptote Journal, he discussed the importance of local languages, and the need for mutuality in translation. Below is the interview;
Bethlehem Attfield (BA): What first inspired your passion for languages and writing?
Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún (KT): Growing up in Ibadan, Nigeria, my father worked in cultural production—particularly in Yorùbá. He was a poet and collaborated with Yorùbá artists and musicians. I believe this laid some of the foundation, though I had no idea at the time.
Our parents spoke to us in Yorùbá, but we attended a private primary school where English was the language of instruction, and we were punished if we spoke in Yorùbá or any Nigerian language, which was called ‘vernacular’. This created a dichotomy: at school, we spoke English and couldn’t speak anything else, but at home, we spoke only Yorùbá, even though my parents could speak English. This made me aware that something was happening.
There is one incident I remember very clearly, when my father came to school and dropped by my class. I was around seven or eight. My classmates got up to greet him as they usually addressed all adult visitors: ‘Good morning, sir!’ To this, he looked at them strangely and said, ‘ah, èmi ò gbọ́ èèbó o!’—which means, ‘I don’t speak English’. The children laughed, then greeted him in Yorùbá. I remember being so embarrassed throughout that week, for what I thought was a personal affront to my identity. Now all my classmates knew that my father was a ‘vernacular speaker’!
Now, mind you, I never had a problem with the language we used at home. I never found my parents embarrassing. But having my two language universes clash like that unexpectedly and publicly was traumatic in a way I couldn’t understand until much later. So when people ask how I got into language, it’s easy to look back and point to that event as one of the catalysts for my awareness of a certain struggle between different language universes.
It was after completing high school that I found out many of my friends and colleagues—who grew up around the same time as I did—had a very limited vocabulary in Yorùbá and had been shaped by that English-medium policy and didn’t have the home advantage I did. It was only then that I realised I had a privileged upbringing. So I started paying more attention.
I found myself in linguistics almost by chance. Like most people, I initially believed it would only help me learn more languages. However, a few years of the course fostered a deeper appreciation of multilingualism and of my existing competence in Yorùbá. Two years after completing my undergraduate degree, I was chosen to teach Yorùbá in the US through a Fulbright programme. Once that was over, I realised that this is the path I want to pursue.
My undergraduate project at university was a ‘Multimedia Dictionary of Yorùbá Names’, which comprised a CD featuring around a thousand names with their pronunciations and meanings. I had begun exploring the idea of blending language and digital technology, which was recently made widespread and accessible. Ten years later, I decided to develop the project further into Yorubaname.com, now a public resource.
So language has always found its way to me in different forms. One day, I realised that there were not enough translations of literary works into Yorùbá, and I wanted to address this. Most popular translations tend to be from Nigerian languages into English, rather than the other way around. Therefore, the more I pursue this, the more I find fulfilment in work that combines my roles as a linguist, a Yorùbá speaker, a translator, and a creative writer.
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BA: I’m glad you mentioned the story about the language policy during your student days. Recently, the Nigerian Minister of Education reversed a policy that mandated the use of local languages in the early years of primary school; now, all Nigerian schools must teach in English. What are your thoughts on this? You said private schools taught only in English, but what was the actual policy at the time?
KT: Even when I was growing up, as you mentioned, the policy was that in public schools, the first three years of education had to be in a local language. One of my sisters attended a public school at the time, and they were teaching them in Yorùbá. However, private schools were somehow exempt from this rule, and as a result, the policy didn’t work. In the eighties, because public education was poorly funded, most parents simply sent their children to private schools to get a better education, and because the policy on the mother tongue medium of instruction wasn’t uniformly applied across all the school systems, it eventually created the impression that English-medium schools, which produced better students, were better because of their language of instruction rather better funding.
When the rules aren’t applied uniformly, what is the point of having an education policy? I believe that this recent reversal just cements what had already been broken for a long time. Still, the previous policy was a good idea, if it had been better implemented. In the sixties and seventies, there was a pilot project called Ifẹ̀ Primary Projects Experiments, in which Professor Fafunwa, then teaching at a University in Ifẹ̀, attempted to use Yorùbá as the medium of instruction for the first six years. All the children who participated in that programme performed much better in the final standardised exams than the many who were taught in English—and this demonstrated that the use of local languages is both possible and admirable. Unfortunately, the project was not replicated on a national scale.
Children learning English in primary schools often come from families like mine, where local languages are spoken at home. When they go to school, there isn’t a smooth transition; they are simply thrown into an education where they must use a new language. As a result, many students still fail their English language exams. Even those who follow a syllabus based on British English must still sit the IELTS when they apply to study abroad, because just speaking and studying in English all their lives is not recognised.
So I think we need policies that support students from families where English isn’t spoken at home, to help them transition properly.
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BA: In addition to writing poetry, you are also involved in literary translation. Could you share how this began and the kinds of books you have written and translated?
KT: My initial attempts involved translating my father’s works from Yorùbá into English, but I never published these translations. Eventually, I began translating longer works that have been published, including writings by Chimamanda Adichie, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Ṣóyínká, Richard Berengarten, Chika Unigwe, James Baldwin, and Haruki Murakami, among others. In 2021, I published my first full-length book translation, a collection of Emily R. Grosholz’s poems. There is another project I hope to complete someday: a collection of translated short stories by African writers into Yorùbá. This is similar to what we do at OlongoAfrica’s Lingua Project, where we publish various short stories translated into different African languages.
I am also the Africa editor for the Best Literary Translations project, which we’ve been publishing since 2024. It was Wendy Call’s idea, and she invited me to join in 2020 or so. My job there is to find works translated from different African languages into English; Noh Anothai’s role is to find those from Asia; and Öykü Tekten’s is to find those from the Middle East and Europe. The aim of this project is to encourage American publishers to pay more attention to literary translations, as US readers typically read only works written by US writers. We hope that, by doing this, we can help bring global works to their attention.
Translated works are submitted by journal editors, meaning that the translation must have been published in a US-affiliated journal. The journal editor then submits it to us, and each year we review hundreds of entries, selecting a number of favourites. These are then sent to a guest editor—whom we invite annually—to select the final roster. The first was edited by Jane Hirshfield in 2024, the second by Christina Rivera Garza, the third volume in 2026 is edited by Arthur Sze, a US Poet Laureate, and the 2027 edition will be edited by Emily Wilson.
I realised that translation is a crucial battleground for language survival, especially given the imbalance between how many African works are translated into English and how many English works are translated into African languages. My work in linguistics, lexicography, and language technology has shown me this. The more corpora available in a language, the more resilient it becomes. English has demonstrated this well.
For example, most technology tools for African languages are ineffective because their developers tend to scour the internet for materials. However, Africans rarely use their languages online due to the dominance of English, and as a result, the low-quality content available online often ends up in tech tools, further threatening language survival. By increasing translations into African languages, we generate more usable corpora. This empowers translators to produce more and broadens the audience for our creative writings.
I remember discovering, while working on Ìgbà Èwe, that the reasons why many of the words from other languages and cultures aren’t easily accessible in our languages is because we haven’t invested a lot in translations into our languages. Having to invent words for ‘snow’ or ‘maple tree’, which are not native to our environment, tells me that there is still a lot we can do to help our languages thrive.
Through the Lingua Project, we collect short stories written by Africans in English, French, or other languages, and collaborate with African translators to translate them into various African languages. These stories are then shared and archived in audio form. My hope is that it becomes a significant corpus of translations that can be shared across generations—not just for those who can’t read in English, but even for those who can’t read at all.
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BA: When I discovered OlongoAfrica, I was particularly intrigued by an article written by Tolu Daniel, which discussed the supposed demise of Nigerian literature. He explains that critics are lamenting the loss of a unified ideological voice and a robust industry, not actual literary decline, stating: ‘What we face is not an ending, but a choice of emphasis. We can continue to chase visibility and mistake its glare for health.’ Do you share this view?
KT: Yes. I have followed many of the conversations preceding that piece, in which people claim African literature is dead. Most say it is because there is no robust debate or discussion around literature, or they claim that all our writers live abroad. Others argue that it is because all the prizes are funded by foreign sources, each of which contains varying levels of truth.
There are various metrics for assessing whether the future of literature is promising or not, and my view is that African literature can be both thriving and faltering, depending on which metrics are used. My interest, however, is in whether the literature being produced is finding its audiences, and this path always leads me back to language.
When I taught English in a high school in Lagos, we had a subject called ‘Literature in English’, which I always found quite problematic because it excluded a wealth of oral literature, art, and creative production in Africa that already surrounded us. Students are learning through a very narrow prism, and even readers are shortchanged. When I say ‘African writer’ to anyone today, the immediate image that comes to their mind is someone who writes in English or French. They’d mention Achebe, Ṣóyínká, Adichie, etc, leaving so many out. So is African literature thriving? It depends on whom you ask, how you define ‘African literature’, and in what language the question is being posed.
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BA: It’s wonderful to see your passion for documenting and digitising African languages and texts! I’d love to hear more about the project ‘Black Orpheus Revisited’.
KT: I believe that Black Orpheus was the first literary journal dedicated to West African literature. It was founded in 1957 in my hometown, Ibadan, by a German expatriate named Ulli Beier. Its initial purpose was to bring existing literature from Francophone West Africa into English through translation. There, many writers—such as Senghor—were producing work, and their pieces were being translated. The journal began with major works by Senghor and Aimé Césaire, and after a few issues, it also began showcasing works by Nigerian and other African writers, eventually becoming the most important comprehensive resource for understanding the literature of West African writers.
In the twenty-two issues Beier edited between 1957 and 1967, he managed to codify much of the early days of African literature in English. There are several poems published there that you can’t find anywhere else. There are also some early drafts of Achebe’s works, first chapters of works by Ama Ata Aidoo, reviews by Paul Theroux, and more. Over time, however, the journals became scarce; you could find them in foreign libraries, British libraries, and university collections—but not in Nigeria, where they were originally published. This led to my realisation that archival institutions have not done enough to preserve many of the important cultural productions of that era.
I travelled across Nigeria trying to locate the magazines, finding a few in private libraries and some on Amazon for fifteen hundred dollars a copy. It was disheartening, so I began seeking an opportunity to buy all the existing copies to preserve them. Thankfully, we secured grants from the Open Society Foundation to make the entire collection digitally accessible, and since then, it has become a valuable resource for many people, scholars, and researchers interested in African literature and writing. We hope to continue this effort—not just for the work found in Black Orpheus, but for all Nigerian literature, anything we can find, including rare materials that are now decaying in various places. Our goal is to locate them, scan and digitise as many as possible, and simply make them available for research purposes. The point is that producing literature is valuable, but if nobody can access what you publish, it defeats the purpose.
That’s all for today. See you in the next edition of author interviews.
