If you grew up in a Nigerian setting, you would relate to my experience, and if not, you would be surprised at how funny growing up in Nigeria could be. I won’t mind you sharing a slice of your experience as a kid in the comment section.
As a young boy during my early years in secondary school, I was exposed to several action movies like Blade, Rambo, and the like. As kids, we all like to assume several characters. “I’ll be the actor while you’ll be the boss”, that’s me assigning roles to the cast, my colleagues at school. Saheed, one of my good friends, would always want to act as the villain. “I’ll be the last boss, and it’ll take like 5 minutes before you can kill me”, Saheed said. In real life, Saheed, the shortest among us, is a tough nut to crack. He randomly finds trouble, and he doesn’t respect even our seniors. If not for the special flogging session that was conducted for him, he would have been a menace to the teachers! After the assignment of roles, everyone takes a position, and we fling into action. Sometimes we coordinate these “movies” within an uncompleted building in our school, and other times we postpone Part 2 of our acting until we get home.
“Puf puf, I got you!”, I have a way of mimicking gun shots that is different from that of my co-actors. “Keu Keu, Dayo, I got you!"—that's Saheed shooting at Dayo with a stick. “No, you didn’t get me joor; I hid by the fence”, Dayo replied, trying to stay in the game. We have all agreed that once one gets 'shot', the person will be out of the game! As kids, we were always looking forward to the next time we would meet to play, and we always found different scenes to act out. Although we couldn’t totally speak like they do in the movies, we managed to at least mimic the shooting sounds.
I was more curious about the words spoken in movies, and gradually, I started paying attention to what the actors said, how they said it, how they dressed, and so on. In no time, I started demanding corporate clothes and shoes as my Christmas and birthday gifts, and funny enough, my parents got me some suits then. After wearing my suit and shoes, I sometimes feel like I am one of the actors in the movie, walking with swag like they do, bouncing, and catching all the fun. My world of make-believe was that of an actor with swag and a top-notch American accent that could blow the world away. In our acting sessions, my friends noticed the difference. “Guy, shoot if you want to shoot, which one is ‘I’m gonna kill you men’, stop that thing”, Dayo, Saheed, and other friends of mine got irritated by my new ‘acting skills’ because it seemed as if I was out shinning them. But I wasn’t going to stop. “That’s how we do it, men”, was my response to Dayo’s irritation. Soon, my clique got infected and started using the accent. Although it was all a childish play, we all still felt like foreign actors every time we played our roles.
Growing up, it became a part of me to always want to speak good English, and not just good English but the use of a foreign accent, inclusive. I got scolded by some elderly Nigerian folks, and others encouraged me. I was very good at debates and other speech-related contests. What no one knew was that I never planned to be that way; it just stuck! I am, however, grateful that this playful thing, which started with acting as a kid, has in one way or another led to my emergence as a voiceover artist! Maybe I don’t speak like I did then, but I know the origin of my current vocation can be traced to what was once a childish play.
