A story goes that a man with a stutter was lost, so he stopped a passer-by to ask for directions: “Ex-ex-c-c-c-use m-m-m-m-m-me, c-c-can you t-t-t-t-tell me the way to the st-st-st-st-st-stuttering sch-sch-sch-school?” he struggled. The passer-by replied, coldly, “What do you want to go there for, you can already do it!”
In real life, not many people would dare be so overtly rude, but that underlying attitude becomes all too apparent when people with speech impediments try to deal with the rest of society.
Despite anti-discrimination laws, they find it almost impossible to get jobs and socialising is difficult as they are seen as introverts or even snobs, and are disregarded by others who feel embarrassed by them and their struggles to complete even a simple sentence.
As a stammerer myself, I had to work harder to prove that I could outdo everyone else. I remember a maths teacher who took it upon himself to make life difficult for me, every day. Most teachers encouraged me but he thought I was playing pranks in class and threw me out each time I stammered. As a result, there was a whole year in high school when I literally didn’t participate in class at all. My self-esteem took a battering, until I decided there was no point saying anything in class. When our results came out those who did not know me were surprised at my good grades. Â
Fortunately, I had some teachers and mentors who saw my potential and nurtured it, and grew my confidence. Now my job as a journalist requires me to talk to people all day, every day and even though I still stammer when I meet new people or am nervous, it is Âmanageable.
But for the people in this story, talking is still such a trial that we communicated via e-mail.
Saintha Maistry has a BA in psychology and linguistics and is now doing a master’s in psychology. She has applied to more than 100 companies but only been called to four interviews. She says that when a potential employer phones her and realises she has a speech problem, they don’t call her back. Two companies kept her on probation as a trainee research executive for about two months before dismissing her because her “communication skills weren’t up to scratch”.
There is a perception that because people with speech impediments struggle to get the words out, they have nothing of value to say.
“The people at work behaved very awkwardly around me,” she says. Work she should have been doing was always assigned to a colleague, even though she was more highly qualified, and she was relegated to the position of assistant.
At one company, a senior manager said her stuttering would create a negative impression on clients. “Human resources people [always] say that I will not fit into the company and make some excuse. I am frustrated because I worked so hard, overcame so much to study, took countless loans and bursaries and yet I have not gotten anything for all this,” she writes.
Papi Nkoli, a projects officer in the transformation office at Wits University, also stammers, in addition to using a wheelchair, and has felt at first hand the prejudice against differently abled people.
Now a PhD candidate at Wits Business School, he contemplated leaving university while doing his honours course in politics, where he was required to make weekly verbal presentations in seminars. “I started to hate university and almost quit,” he wrote. He is still frustrated that the university does not adapt to the needs of its diverse student body.
John Shaw, CEO of Mabili HR Solutions, says that while people with more visible disabilities are increasingly being integrated into companies, those with speech impediments are still at a disadvantage.
“The case of speech impediments is rather tricky, as communication is such a vital competency within the working environment. Where effective communication is an inherent requirement of the job, then non-selection cannot be considered discrimination,” he argued.
“Where it is not an inherent requirement of the job, one would probably still favour a candidate who can communicate effectively because of the value society places on effective communication. In these cases one could consider non-selection [to be] discriminatory,” he pointed out and added that a position in management is more difficult to secure if you stutter.
At school, my inability to take part in all the talking meant I became an avid reader. I loved a story called The Slow Sound of his Feet by Dambudzo Marechera. It starts thus: “I dreamt last night that the Prussian surgeon Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach had decided that I stuttered because my tongue was too large; and he cut my large organ to size by snipping off chunks from the tip and the sides.”
In a way the story mollified my rage and my hopelessness by pointing out that I was in good company such as Moses, Aristotle, Marechera himself and other great thinkers who had speech impediments, but I would rather have sat at their feet at the stuttering school so that I could speak. Fluently.