Embrace Kiswahili, it can get us ‘home’ faster than we think

A newspaper edition and a newborn human being have something vital in common.

It is that they both come out of confinements that are potentially deadly.

In other words, both of them always risk being stillborn.

Among other reasons, that, too, is why — just like a newborn human baby — a newspaper edition is called an ISSUE.

Both ISSUE from potentially strangulating confinements.

CHAUVINISM

Concerning newspapers, however, please stick to the noun ISSUE. Do not follow the example of the daily newspaper which, on Friday, made the following allegation in a major headline: “State ISSUANCE of land title deeds favours men”.

No, the statement that the Kenyan state favours men is not anything I would argue with.

Like all other states the world over, the Kenyan is dominated by male as chauvinistic as pigs.

Among these, moreover, are individuals dedicated to murdering language – especially a foreign tongue called English which they themselves adopted at independence as their language of mental upbringing and of national and international exchange.

IGRORANT

Germanic though English is in its foundation and Mediterranean (Greco-Latin) in its mental roofing, our political fathers adopted it because English was the language in which colonised Kenyans had so far been brought up to understand the world intellectually.

English was the language in which, thus far, educated Kenyans could grasp all the issues facing human beings the whole world over.
In short, English was the language that united a newly important and rapidly rising political class of indigenous Kenyans of all ethnic and racial communities.

Kiswahili — the native language of our Indian Ocean littoral — might have done the job equally effectively — even though the Luo, an important Nilo-lacustrine people, were still practically ignorant of that increasingly significant Bantu language with its important Semitic thought content.

GLADDENING

Even now, 50 years since independence, the countryside generation of the Luo remains what the Latins called ALALI (“speechless”) in Kiswahili.

My advice to my ethnic community is for it to take that issue extraordinarily seriously because Kiswahili is the only language which can now unite Kenyans – nay, all East Africans – to enable them to achieve their life-and-death economic and political goals in the shortest possible time.

That is why it is so gladdening whenever I am passing by in town to hear members of the younger generation of my own community, the Luo, arguing not only with one another but also with age-mates of other ethnic communities in a kind of Kiswahili that flows as effortlessly and as poetically as the Athi, the Kuja, the Mara, the Nzoia, the Sare, the Tana and the Yala.

SACRIFICE

For that fact has ineluctable implications.

One is that one day, very, very soon, even our political language will flow with poetic and caressing majesty to better even that of Josiah Mwangi Kariuki and that of Thomas Joseph Mboya, two extraordinarily energetic Kenyans who sacrificed their lives at a very tender age precisely in that great cause.

Philip Ochieng is a retired journalist. [email protected]