How sugar can unite us by its very name

What you need to know:

  • Let me leave the politics of it to other people in our division of labour.
  • Let me confine myself to that commodity’s potential to unite us by its very name.

Controversy over a commodity called sugar is now threatening to bring down Kenya’s entire tea house. Yet both in taste (as a commodity) and in etymology (as a word), sugar is wholly capable of uniting all Kenyans into a great nation.

Where, then, does its present widespread political and language divisiveness come from? Exactly what happened? Why is the commodity’s sweetness failing to organise Kenyans into a single conviviality, a permanent and evermore joyful national tea party?

For the nonce, let me leave the politics of it to other people in our division of labour. Let me confine myself to that commodity’s potential to unite us by its very name. Yet you wouldn’t know it from the fact that our extended time’s Euro-Caucasian elite has long ago claimed sugar as a word of Indo-European invention.

Practically, according to that elite, all intellectual products must be traced only to an Indo-European language. The English word sugar is no exception. My dictionary, Collins, asserts that sugar is to be traced no further in time-place than ancient Sanskrit.

The word sugar, Collins teaches, comes from sarkara. Collins’ attempt would have been a great deal more convincing if he had dwelt a little more on the linguistic route that the word sarkara itself took before it arrived in England as sugar.

The “r” in the first syllable (sar) makes Collins’ but a cock-and-bull story. For neither in speech nor in writing does the consonant (“r”) appear in the first syllable of sugar itself or its cognates in other European languages and such of their East African counterparts as Chagga, Dholuo, Kikuyu, Kiswahili and Luganda.

The contemporary European word closest to sugar is the old French cucre and the modern French sucre. The first “c” in cucre achieved its “s” sound if, in writing, you attached a tail-like structure called cedilla to the bottom of it.

As Collins points out, when the letter c is followed by an “a”, an “o” or a “u”, a cedilla is “a character (,) placed underneath a c ... indicating that it should be pronounced (s), not (k)”, a practice common also in Portuguese orthography.

The word for sugar in every European language that I know, including the French sucre, is related to the Latin-derived chemistry term sucrose. In all those languages, the initial “s” is decidedly “s” in sound, except in English, where, for some reason unknown to me, it takes the “sh” sound to land on your tympanum as “shoo-gaa”.

A commodity so delicious will produce very many sugar-coated idioms. A well known one is sugar daddy, an old man who showers a young woman with gifts in return for her romantic company.

Sugar beet, sugar cane and sugar maple are plants which human beings tend for their sugar contents. To sugar is to sweeten tea, coffee or some other consumer stuff by adding a sugary substance to it. Please note the adjective sugary, which may remind the keen reader of sukari, our Kiswahili word for sugar.