‘Woman Wan Troway Poo-Poo, Come Trap For Window’

If you have no idea what the headline means, please understand that you’re not alone.

It mystified me as well.

Let’s back up.

This exhilarating journey into the nonsense world of BBC Pidgin English began innocently enough with a video X fed me.

“No carry your phone enta toilet! Your mama, wife, or husband don cut you dis warning. Make you no carry your phone enta toilet!...

Toilet na where we dey poopoo and dis our poopoo dey carry bacteria, viruses, and parasites. Your eye no go fit see dem but dem dey dia and fit contaminate your phone.”

VIDEO

WTF is “Pidgin English”?

Having never been to Africa, I hope I may be forgiven for not knowing what it was, or why state-funded BBC might have an entire division dedicated to news in the pseudo-language.

After more investigation, I learned that, for some reason, the British authorities took it upon themselves nearly a decade ago to cook up a standalone news outlet called “BBC Pidgin” to service West Africa — which, by the way, is thousands of kilometers away from the British Isles and serves no real national interest — by offering news in *extremely* bastardized English.

Via Wikipedia (emphasis added):

“BBC News Pidgin is an online news service in West African Pidgin English that was launched by the BBC World Service in 2017. It is based in Lagos, Nigeria.

Pidgin, first used by British and African slavers to facilitate the Atlantic slave trade in the late 17th century, has become one of the most widely spoken languages in West Africa, with up to 75 million speakers in Nigeria alone. However, it does not have a standard written form. In turn, the BBC developed a “standardised” form of Pidgin aiming to serve all West African speakers which has certain traits not found in other forms, such as increased usage of inflections.”

What an amazing world!

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Naturally, some questions remain.

For one, how does mangling the English language to the point of unintelligibility not qualify as “cultural appropriation”?

A rhetorical question:

Could I do the ching-chong eyes, put on a one of those straw rice farmer hats, and talk in Chinese-like gobbledygook, and get the British taxpayers to foot the bill?

Could I even do it in a British jurisdiction with my own bootstrapped finances and not end up in one of Keir Starmer’s gulags for hatespeech?

Upon further examination, I discovered another piece from some state-funded abomination, this one also concerning feces (they all seem to, somehow) about a “woman wey dey learn gymnastics.”

Via BBC Pidgin:

“The woman wey dey learn gymnastics, just start to waka with Bristol student, Liam Smith, for di first time, when she take fear troway di poo-poo comot for window.

Instead make di thing land for garden, di poo-poo come jam between two windows wey no dey open wide.

Di lady decide to carry her thing back; she use head enter the small space wey di poo-poo bin dey, but na so she come trap for there, and trouble start.

Mr Smith say im no get choice but to call fire service make dem help remove di girl, along with her poo-poo.

Now, im don dey try raise money to repair di windows wey break, so e write all di tori for inside one University of Bristol crowd funding page.”

After some translation help from the private-sector, Daily Mail, I came to understand that this was an account of a Tinder date from hell, in which a girl shit in a toilet, it got clogged, she threw the shit out of the window in an attempt to dispose of it, it got stuck on the window, she got herself stuck, and the fire department had to come rescue her.

And BBC, apparently, predicted the West African audience would lap up a poop story from another continent, which strikes me as oddly softly racist in the liberal sort of way.

Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile (now available in paperback), is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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