What oracy, referenda and dumbness have in common

Olympic Primary School pupils recite a poem. Oral components are integral parts of most language and communication courses in schools and colleges in Kenya. PHOTO | FILE

What you need to know:

  • In Uganda, people seem to be doing you a great favour if they condescend to return your greetings, even if you want to buy something from them.
  • In all the East African countries —Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda — where I have spent some time, it’s in Tanzania that I can most easily expect to pick up a chat with anyone.
  • Oral communication is the most familiar and the most affordable means of conveying and sharing information in our society.

Love and respect for the spoken word: that’s one of the best things my Tanzanian education taught me. Tanzanians love conversation, the live and lively exchange of feelings and ideas.

In all the East African countries —Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda — where I have spent some time, it’s in Tanzania that I can most easily expect to pick up a chat with anyone.

In Dar es Salaam, even the good old gumzo, the pure open banter, seems to be still acceptable.

In Kenya, we don’t talk to strangers, even if they are our new neighbours, so they remain strangers.

In Uganda, people seem to be doing you a great favour if they condescend to return your greetings, even if you want to buy something from them.

BASIC LITERACY

The dumb generation —that hardly ever says hello, how are you, thanks, welcome, please, sorry or excuse me — seems to be alive and well north and west of the Victoria. It’s bad to be illiterate, but it’s a lot worse to be inorate. Just as illiterates cannot handle written communication, inorates cannot handle oral communication.

Pio Zirimu, my departed teacher, and I may not have been the first to say it. But we are on record as insisting, way back in the 1970s, that literacy alone cannot and will not make us “educated”.

Apart from numeracy, we also need oracy, competence in the spoken word, in order to claim an elementary education. Instead of the “3Rs”, we should think “ONL” (oracy, numeracy, literacy).

In Africa particularly, our development efforts will remain stunted or even frustrated unless we pay due attention to oracy.

This is because African society, at least at this point in history, is primarily oral and orate. Oral communication is the most familiar and the most affordable means of conveying and sharing information in our society.

As things are today, all efforts are concentrated on literacy, and oracy is largely left to fend for itself. If oracy is going to play significant roles in national development, its practitioners, especially in its secondary and tertiary forms, such as radio, television and other audiovisual media, must display particular creativity and competence.

Most of what I am saying is quite familiar in academic circles, and oral components are integral parts of most language and communication courses in schools and colleges in Kenya. Indeed, I recently teamed up with my friends, novelist Pasomi Mucha and Prof Martin Njoroge, to publish a full-fledged text on oral skills.

There is still, however, a wide gap between our awareness of oracy and our conviction about its applicability in public affairs. In other words, our leaders and policy makers are either unaware of the richness of oracy as a communication resource or unwilling to deploy it in our day-to-day operations.

This struck me particularly in connection with the imminent referendum on the Tanzanian draft constitution. Wananchi there are due to vote on the draft some time next month. But a great deal of controversy surrounds the exercise.

TEXT DISTRIBUTION

The citizens’ main complaint, expressed in various media, is that they are not sufficiently conversant with what is in the draft constitution.

What the Tanzanians are demanding, in their meticulously precise terminology, is “uelewa” (a sure grasp) of the proposed supreme law.

The root cause of the problem is that the text of the constitution is not easily accessible to the prospective voters.

The problem is, apparently, so acute that some very powerful faith-based organisations are threatening to advise their followers to boycott the referendum, unless it is rectified immediately.

Yet the government has not been remiss or negligent. It has printed and distributed some two million copies of the draft constitution, according to the Constitutional Affairs Minister, Ms Asha-Rose Migiro.

With nearly 24 million people expected to vote all across the United Republic, you get an average of about a copy to every 12 people.

Why then are the voters complaining?

The snags seem to arise from a number of factors which go beyond the text distribution.

The relevant questions are, first, how many of those voters are literate? Secondly, even if we assume accuracy of the national 70 per cent literacy rate claimed in official documents, how many of those literate citizens really have the ability to plod through a 100-plus page long text and internalise it?

Thirdly, even if we generously assumed a 100 per cent literacy competence, how long would it take to complete this reading exercise, with every 12 people sharing one copy of the draft?

My abysmally poor mathematics tells me that if we allowed each voter 48 hours to go through the text, it would take each distributed copy of the draft constitution some 576 hours to go round its allocated group.

ADVANTAGE OF TECHNOLOGY

That is quite a few human hours! But there is a possible short-cut around this problem. How about getting these groups meeting and reading the document aloud to one another, maybe in turns, and then discussing it?

That would be one way of “oralising” the printed text: a creative meeting point between literacy and oracy.

But even that is only one of many other ways in which oracy can come to the rescue.

With all the advantages of modern technology, public readings of the text cannot be the only option for everyone.

I do not know if there is a complete audio version of the draft constitution in Tanzania, as there should be of every significant national document.

If such a recording was produced, it should be widely distributed, over the TV and FM radio stations, on CDs, cassette tapes and online.

Indeed, the Muungano Government could have used some of the resources it spent on producing the millions of printed copies — many of which will never be read — to produce and disseminate these oral-aural documents.

Imagine the kind of purposeful gumzo that a public playing of the “rasimu ya katiba” would generate on the floors of Kariokoo Market in downtown Dar es Salaam!

Maybe I should also consider posting audio (“oralised”) versions of my column.