Writers and their language of choice

Let us, for the sake of argument, contrast the values of conducting creative writing in English, on the one hand, and conducting creative writing in our mother tongue, on the other.

Those who favour English will say, and convincingly, that a writer in East Africa is not worth publishing and studying if he or she only writes in his or her mother tongue.

Critics of writing in mother tongue will say such writers have no place in the present-day globalised culture.

They will cite the cases of writers like Asenath Bole Odaga and F. E. Makila, who are languishing in anonymity because they write in their mother tongue and their books are only found in Kisumu and Misikhu, respectively.

They will argue that writers who compose in their mother tongue remain unknown and remind them of cockerels that are never heard beyond the fence.

Aoki Miyamoto deals with it at length in one of his studies. For a language to grow it must accommodate new words. In their book, Kenya’s Constitution: An Instrument for Change, Yash Pal Ghai and Jill Cottrell Ghai imply that the Waswahili want to be compensated for their language — Kiswahili — which is used by Kenya. They forget that a language grows and acquires new lexical items.

It would be a travesty if the English were to go around the world and ask people to pay for the use of English. The Kiswahili that was spoken around the coast had few names for agricultural crops. It made references to coconuts and such fruit trees. But the Kiswahili used by Kithaka wa Mberia, Kimani wa Njogu, Ken Walibora and Richard Makhanu Wafula has new words from the new geographical areas.

COLONIAL LANGUAGES

The Maa language was known for its names of cattle, pasture, and other features from the environment. In the 21st century, the Maa language has grown enough to include new items. If writers were writing in Maa, they would have enriched it to such a level that it would be rich with words for the computer, the Internet, and the formulations of the new scientific age.

Colonial languages like English, French, and Portuguese have evolved with industrialisation and what the Japanese called modernisation during the Meiji period.

Taban lo Liyong argued in the East Africa Journal of January, 1969, that “languages are gradable and nobody should deceive us that any African language — Swahili, Kikuyu, Dholuo — is as literary as English, French, German, or Russian.”

No wonder writers in local languages are not known to the Saturday Nation, which has become the Times Literary Supplement of East Africa.

Julius Sigei, the man who invites us to write for Saturday Nation and sits in his grand and posh office at the Nation Centre in Nairobi, has not made any effort to fuel his car and drive to Kisumu and/or Misikhu to interview Asenath Odaga and F. E. Makila.

Kenya has 47 counties, each with writers writing in the languages of their communities. A case in point is G. Wanjau, who once operated a publishing house and wrote in Gikuyu from Nyeri during the colonial times. The other case is Father Gitonga, a retired Roman Catholic clergyman in Murang’a, who enriched Kenya’s literature through writing in Gikuyu.

Proponents of writing in English will argue that Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s experiment of writing in Gikuyu has failed, and that that is the reason he had to translate his books into English.

We have writers in East Africa who write in English and publish abroad. As a matter of statistics, they are better known as they win literary prizes and make more money than those who write in local languages.

The cases the proponents quote are those of journalists and professional writers who write in English, French and Portuguese.

Professional writers are known beyond the borders of their countries whilst those who write in local languages are a little known.

The dilemma here is that political scientists who comment on their societies and theorise on African political thought do not do so in their mother tongues.

Well-known historians like B.A. Ogot and G. S. Were write on the migrations of their ethnic communities in English, and critics wonder for whom they write these histories.

Why did Ogot write on the Luo in English? Why didn’t Idha Salim and Jan Mohamed write on the Swahili in Kiswahili? Would Philip Ochieng have been famous if he had written his feature articles in Dholuo?

GLOBAL OUTLOOK

Would Augustine Bukenya, the outstanding contributor to Saturday Nation, have made sense to us about his sojourn in Machakos if he had written in Luganda?

There is the case of Nuwa Santongo, the Chekhov of East Africa whose plays and short stories flow with humour, because he wrote in English and not Luganda.

Proponents of the English language would argue in the same way about my good comrade Theo Luzuka, the poet and first class editor and his hip poetry of the 1970s at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and my other favourites in Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi.

On the political plane, Kiswahili has not adequately united East Africans.

At the grassroots level, however, one can travel through East Africa using Kiswahili and feel quite at home speaking it as a lingua franca of the region.

BBC has shown, through its broadcasts in Kiswahili, that Kiswahili is the language of East and central Africa. English is, however, gaining momentum as the language of the political and educated elite in the region.

There are strong cases of original speakers of Kiswahili who prefer using English. Although Ali Mazrui is a Mswahili, he writes his global books and conducts his interviews on TV and radio in English. Today, there is no scholar worth his name who does not know Prof Mazrui.

The Mombasa-born political scientist moved his family library to the US and operates from there.

But is it a tragedy that some East African writers restrict their ideas to their little-known mother tongues?

Will they languish in anonymity with their books unlike writers like Taban lo Liyong, Binyavanga Wainaina, Stanley Gazemba and Moraa Gitaa, who write in English and smile all the way to the bank? Is there a lesson we can learn from Russia, which wrote its literatures in its local language and flooded the world with classics?

LINGUISTIC RIGHTS

The Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development is doing very little to aid vernacular writers. If the KICD promoted writing in indigenous languages and provided a market for books in local languages, publishers worldwide would go for those books assured of their pay cheques.

The Kenya Constitution provides linguistic rights to every Kenyan language. But the practice on the ground shows that there is very little to promote creativity in local languages.

The responses to my write-up here show that language is a very emotive issue and that there are negative attitudes towards local languages.

The El Molo would rather speak Samburu Maa and survive rather than speak El Molo and perish. A Bukusu would rather speak English and Kiswahili and look learned and sophisticated, rather than speaking Lubukusu or Tachoni and look primitive and “local.”

The negative attitudes towards mother tongue give English and Kiswahili a privileged position that local languages do not enjoy. It appears to many that one can only storm the Orange Book if one writes in English, and not in Sheng and mother tongue.