Niaje to Niwuodhes: Inside the lexicographic prison of Sheng

He is garbed in a yellow suit today, a black folder in hand. His grey hair is neat and shaven, completing the picture of a senior man who clearly cares about how he looks.

Some people call him “Chairman”, but many others know him as Joe Aketch, a former mayor of Nairobi.

Aketch was born in 1947 in Nairobi during the colonial period, when racial discrimination was the order of the day.

The white folk lived in the more affluent areas west of Nairobi, Indian immigrants at the centre of the capital, while Africans, many of whom had migrated from rural areas in search of employment, settled in the eastern side of the city now commonly referred to as Eastlands.

LIMITED GRASP

Aketch was born in Ziwani, a residential estate about two kilometres from the city centre. There, he mingled with peers from different ethnic communities and, even though few know it, it was from this convergence of ethnicities that Nairobi’s most controversial language was born.

The children brought up under the circumstances, like Aketch, ended up with a limited grasp of their mother tongue and were, therefore, more comfortable communicating in English or Kiswahili.

“Like most people living in the city, I would communicate with my parents in such broken Dholuo that they would tell me: ‘You might as well speak Kiswahili’,” Aketch recalls with a chuckle.

This limitation, widespread among young people, gave birth to a bastard language called Sheng, a fusion of ethnic tongues, English, and Kiswahili that young people soon developed into a coded language that they would use to keep their old folks in the dark.

CHILD OF THE RAILWAY LINE

“If my brother wanted to tell me that I had a message from a girl,” remembers Aketch, “he would say, ‘Dame wako amekupigia binja.’” This directly translates to “your girlfriend has whistled at you”.

With that, Sheng emerged as a dynamic language with an ever-changing and developing vocabulary. And, after all these years, the young are still inventing new words and expressions, borrowing, as they always have, from the beauty of Kiswahili, the dynamism of English, and the resilience of indigenous tongues.

Fredrick Iraki, an associate professor of French and a linguist at the United States International University (USIU) in Nairobi, dates Sheng’s first use to the pre-independence Kenya of the mid-1940s, while Kelvin Okoth, the executive officer at Go Sheng — an organisation that curates Sheng online at www.sheng.co.ke — calls it “a child of the railway line”, spoken mainly by “those who grew up in the late ’40s and early ’50s and lived in the residential areas of Ziwani, Kaloleni, Makongeni, and Shauri Moyo”.

UNIFICATION TOOL

The language, however, is no longer confined to the dustier side of Nairobi and is now used by numerous Kenyan companies to advertise their products. Prof Iraki says this is a sign that the controversial language is finding a place in the national dialogue.

Some people, however, think Sheng can do more than appear on billboards and radio spots. Robert Ochola, better known as Robo, is one such person.

The former news reporter at Kenya’s first mainstream Sheng radio station, Ghetto Radio, believes that if it was not for Sheng, he would have been killed while reporting the 2008 post-election violence and thus looks at it not just as a language, but also a unification tool.

Robo had just interviewed a woman at the height of the violence in 2008 when a gang confronted him, seeking to know his name. They suspected that he belonged to a “wrong ethnic group” and so they demanded to know where he came from.

PUT ON A PEDESTAL

He was internally debating whether to lie to them or run when the woman came to his rescue. “Don’t you know Robo from Ghetto Radio?” the woman asked the machete-wielding men. They said they did, and started engaging Robo in idle banter.

As they left, Robo called out to them: “Tuko pamoja. Tunaongea lugha moja (We are one. We speak one language).” In the middle of the conversation, Robo had managed to calm the gang members by telling them that, even though his ethnic name was Ochola, he could barely speak his mother tongue.

Sheng was their common identity, the one thing, beyond a shared national heritage at the time fractured by bad politics, that made them brothers and sisters.

If Ghetto Radio put Sheng on the airwaves, a genre of Kenyan urban music referred to as Genge put it on a pedestal. And the capital of Genge in the country is Calif Records, a small recording label that has given the region such big names as the King of Genge himself, Jua Cali.

APPEAL TO THE YOUTH

“Genge is Kiswahili for ‘a mob of people’,” Jua Cali explains, adding that much of his musical inspiration comes from conversations with his friends. His 2012 hit song, Kuna Sheng, lists the different areas across the country where the language is spoken and sums it all up by saying: “Sisi sote tunaelewana (We all understand one another).”

But, beyond the universal appeal among Kenya’s youth, or what Jua Cali calls “understanding”, does Sheng have a future in the modern world?

Prof Kiprop Lagat, an anthropologist and the deputy director of the Nairobi National Museums of Kenya, does not think so. “It does not have its own lexicon,” Prof Lagat states. “For example, can you teach chemistry in it? There are not that many words you can use in it.”

Prof Iraki, on the other hand, believes the challenge with most linguists is that they do not understand linguistic history. “French and English started off as Shengs, as colloquial languages,” he points out. “You were called ‘trash’ or seen as barbaric in Europe if you couldn’t speak Latin.”

SHENG DYNAMISM

Prof Lagat, while agreeing that languages tend to have a not-so-rosy history, says that the huge dynamism of Sheng causes a challenge to the language as a tool for communication.

In a 2010 research paper, for instance, he gives the example of the word “Niaje” (How are you?) whose use evolved to “Aje jo” then “Niwuodhes” in a span of six weeks.

Prof Iraki sees this dynamism as a normal trait of language, but agrees that change that is too rapid can be limiting.

That drawback is what puts Kiswahili, Kenya’s second national language after English, at an advantage against Sheng, says Munira Mohammed, the liaison officer at the Research Institute of Swahili Studies, Eastern Africa (Rissea) which seeks to research on, and promote, Kiswahili.

As a result, Mohammed says, Kiswahili will outlive Sheng to play an integral role in bringing Kenyans together while creating a unique culture based on the language.

Her views are supported by Prof Iraki, who says that Kiswahili will remain predominant because Sheng heavily relies on the language for its structure.

ONE CITY AT A TIME

But he still holds that Sheng constitutes Kenya’s cosmopolitan identity, and that the unity of the country will be evident through rapid urbanisation.

“There will be more intermarriage,” he states. “Parents will speak to their children in either English or Sheng.”

According to the UN Habitat 2010-2011 State of the Urban Youth report, Nairobi’s population stands at an estimated four million people.

With Kenya’s youth population — those aged between 10 and 24 — standing at 35 per cent of the population, could Sheng be the key to unifying this nation, one city at a time?

Dr Tom Onditi, the associate dean at USIU’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and also a linguist, sees language as a tool of inclusion, but warns that inclusion should not be at the expense of other languages as one language as a “hegemony” of others only propagates exclusion and division.

PUSHING TO EXTINCTION

In a research paper titled Safeguarding Multilingualism and Diversity in Kenya, Dr Onditi states that vast numbers of Kenyans have been excluded from “decision-making and [community] participation” in various areas of society, ranging from political, health, and other socioeconomic issues, “because the languages they understand are not the ones used in the affairs of their counties”.

This exclusion results in economic stratification that breeds conflict, he argues.

Language carries the identities of the speech communities and, by compelling the use of only one dominant and “token” language — English or Kiswahili — Kenya is pushing ethnic languages to extinction as people are drawn to speak the perceived language of influence and affluence.

Dr Onditi believes that wherever one intends to work in the country, one should learn the local language for better understanding and facilitation. The people will also be more inclusive and receptive.

“There is a theory in linguistics that polyglots — people who speak many languages — end up being intelligent because a language represents a system of thought,” Dr Onditi concludes.

Maybe Sheng could be part of this linguistic revolution. Maybe not.