Arrange words properly for them to have a meaning
What you need to know:
- It is that the police have a right to kill anybody who does not have an identification document.
- The acronym “IPOA” will not have made any kind of sense to the many non-Kenyans who arrived in your inimitable country that morning.
Because words are the atomic ingredients of specifically human communication, they must be arranged in a conventionally recogisable way for them to make the same sense to all members of a language community. Take the headline: “Constable killed two university students despite them have identification, says IPOA”.
I culled that claim from page 6 of The Standard of May 9, 2016. The implication is extremely serious. It is that the police have a right to kill anybody who does not have an identification document.
But let me leave that to our human rights activists. What concerns me is only the language in which the newspaper couched it.
The acronym “IPOA” will not have made any kind of sense to the many non-Kenyans who arrived in your inimitable country that morning.
But that, too, is by the way. The question is: Did those headline words make any sense even to you? In a country where English is the language of all tuition, what can the words “...despite them have identification...” mean?
What made it “news” — apparently — is that the police had killed somebody although the victim had had an identity card and that the police have a right to kill you whenever they find you with no such card — an allegation so grave that it should have obliged the editors to take the story to page one.
But — much more astonishing — were the words “...despite them have identification...” What can that mean? What kind of illiteracy is this from the mouth or pen of a man or woman for whom information is the stock-in-trade? Listen to it again: The police had killed one of them “...despite them have identification...”
HAD NO IDENTITY CARDS
Although these four are English words, the way they have been put together is just not English. Do even the most illiterate human beings really talk like that? Of course, not. Even the most inorate person would say something like “...although they refused to identify themselves” or “although they had no identity cards.”
The adjective inorate was coined decades ago by the “oral literature” departments of Africa’s universities to refer to those who, even if “educated”, could not express any of their needs, thoughts and feelings articulately in a European language. It continued despite the fact that the term “oral literature” is a self-contradiction..
How can anything which is merely oral be called literature, which my dictionary defines as “...written material such as poetry, novels or essays...”? And how can anything which is literary — namely, written — be called oral?
This, of course, does not deny the socio-culturo-intellectual wealth that abounds in the traditions of non-literate societies.
That African universities need to impart that wealth is not deniable. How to impart the oral material under the rubric of “literature” is the only contradiction.
For “literature” as an “oral” activity is a meaningless thought since the noun literature refers to written material, whereas the adjective oral is confined to words straight from the mouth to the ear.
