Our enslavement by alien lingo Sheng is the biggest problem, not vernacular
What you need to know:
- Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Raila say MCAs should debate in mother tongues, argue allure for English is a colonial frame of mind.
My first, and so far, only personal acquaintance with Prof Ngugi wa Thiong’o was back in the 1970s when he gave our Literature class a lecture at the University of Nairobi, and managed to do two things at once: Describe my colleagues and I as “reactionaries”, and wean me away from Marxist interpretations of the subject I loved most.
He left me confused, and it was only later that I understood why, in his eyes, a group of us who had been transplanted from Makerere University that year could not fit into his way of looking at the world and had to be shocked into understanding that everything in life was a variation of the class struggle.
In retrospect, I should have listened more carefully to what I was being taught, for then I would have learnt that there is no right or wrong way to interpret fiction and poetry, and that I had for too long been indoctrinated into believing that Literature was all about plots, characterisation, genres, voice, diction, and so on. It was only later that I realised what I had been taught right from high school was a form of disembodied and disengaged interpretation of reality.
Now the good professor has me confused again if, as was reported in a certain newspaper early this week, he wants our MCAs to be conducting the affairs of their counties in mother tongue. According to the report, Prof Ngugi and former Prime Minister Raila Odinga cannot see anything wrong with county assemblies using vernacular in their proceedings.
Now, I must confess that my attempts to find out whether Prof Ngugi actually uttered those sentiments were not successful. However, judging from his professed partiality for vernacular in place of the languages of the former and present-day oppressors, I am inclined to believe he probably had such a notion at the back of his mind. Whether Mr Odinga went along with one of the most ridiculous notions I have heard in a long time just to be a good host, we shall probably never know.
Maybe these two doyens of literature and politics were just being charitable to our poor MCAs, most of whom cannot fluently express themselves in English or Kiswahili. As Prof Ngugi reportedly said, “If we are to take devolution seriously, we must connect with the people through language”.
Yes, but which language? To start with, do the people and their rulers actually speak the same language? Isn’t there a contradiction between the noble objective of forging a nation out of 42 ethnic communities and allowing each county to use the language spoken by its majority? The idea of turning a legislative assembly into a chief’s baraza does seem a little far-fetched. If a leader cannot communicate in any but their mother tongue, then something is seriously wrong.
But before we dismiss this issue too lightly, maybe it would be prudent to dissect why we are having this conversation in the first place. It is fact, as Prof Ngugi says, that many people are completely deficient in the linguistic skills they should have picked from their mothers. They are growing up, going to school and obtaining degrees, but they cannot hold an intelligent conversation with their grandmothers, because along the way, they lost their own languages. This is not natural.
In the past, a child would learn his or her mother tongue first, and then progress to the languages of instruction, Kiswahili and English. By the time they got to university, they would be multilingual. Not any more. To the mortification of many parents, children, especially those born in cities, are by-passing their mother tongues and latching on to the mongrel sheng, which captivates them so much they cannot communicate in any other, either orally or in writing.
And this has an effect on parents too. They give up too early and join their children because they realise that is the only way they are going to communicate with their offspring. The idea of a 50-year-old trying to converse in sheng is grotesque, but what to do?
So maybe Prof Ngugi and Mr Odinga could be right; we have been enslaved by foreign languages. However, it is not the languages of former colonisers, but by the alien lingo, sheng. Indeed, they should have insisted that business in county assemblies be conducted in sheng.
