(Yes, I said it.)
Let’s stop pretending this is not a thing.
In South Africa, the moment you open your mouth and speak English, you’ve already been placed in a box. Not gently. Aggressively. With labels.
Your accent can tell people:
• which province you’re from
• which school you went to
• which university you attend (or attended)
• your race
• your class
• sometimes even the suburb you live in
And let’s not lie — a lot of the time, those assumptions are accurate. And that’s social reality.
But here’s where the madness begins.
English became a weapon, not a language 🔪
Somehow, English — a language not indigenous to Africa — has turned into a measuring stick Africans use to judge each other.
Bad accent? Mocked.
Different pronunciation? Laughed at.
Foreign rhythm? Twitter entertainment.
And the wildest part?
Most of the people doing the mocking do not have English as their mother tongue either.
Read that again. Slowly.
Acting like English is your ancestral inheritance 😭
You’d swear English was passed down through African bloodlines the way surnames are.
As if:
• English did not arrive here through colonialism
• English was not taught in classrooms, not kitchens
• English was not learned, adapted, survived
Yet some of us defend our version of English like we were born in Buckingham Palace.
Suddenly, everyone’s a pronunciation police officer 🚨
Suddenly, everyone’s an Oxford graduate.
Please.🙄
Meanwhile… in actual English-speaking countries 🌍
Let’s be very honest.
White English speakers do not all sound the same. They do not understand each other easily. They struggle too.
• Americans struggle with Scottish English
• Brits struggle with Irish English
• Australians confuse Americans
• Jamaicans confuse almost everybody (with love 😭)
Accents clash. Misunderstandings happen. People ask, “Sorry, can you repeat that?”
What usually doesn’t happen? 👉 Public humiliation. 👉 Intelligence-shaming. 👉 Turning accent into character assassination.
But somehow, in Africa, we do it with confidence.
Yes, some accents are hard to understand. So what?
Let’s not lie for the sake of being politically correct.
Some accents are difficult. Some pronunciations are confusing. Some English will make you pause and ask yourself if your ears are okay.
That is normal.
That does not mean:
• the speaker is stupid ❌
• the speaker is uneducated ❌
• the speaker’s English is “wrong” ❌
It means your ear is not trained to that rhythm yet. FULL STOP!
The part we don’t like to admit 🪞
When Africans mock other Africans’ English, it’s rarely about clarity.
It’s about:
• insecurity
• internalised hierarchy
• proximity to whiteness
• sounding “better” than the next person
English becomes a badge. An accent becomes currency. And cruelty becomes entertainment.
That’s not confidence. That’s fear dressed up as superiority.
Let’s say this plainly
“Accent is not a measure of intelligence. It is a record of history.”
And this one needs to be framed:
Pretending one African accent is ‘correct’ while others are laughable is dishonest and harmful.
Because English was never meant to sound the same everywhere. If it did, it wouldn’t be a global language.
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