Teach culture and local languages to grow our children

Modernisation is good. With it has come a great bundle of presents like white weddings, technology, girls’ education and eradication of FGM. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • By not passing down our languages and cultures, we risk them becoming extinct and allowing other people to define our cultures for us.
  • With manufacturing being part of the Big Four agenda, it is time we considered the Buy Kenyan, Build Kenya strategy.

Recently on Twitter there was a conversation that elicited a lot of reactions and it started with a simple question: “Why do black people have white weddings. It is purely our tradition as white people. Is it because there is no African way of getting married?” (Edited to make grammatical sense).

The person asking the question explained that he could not understand why black people dump their own and adopt something foreign.

One of the pitfalls of modernisation is the loss of culture especially in cities like Nairobi.

While the tweet speaks only of black people, most people in the world are affected and have lost much more than wedding practices.

Whether it is by choice or as a result of being modern, the beautiful, unique and outstanding parts of our cultures are slowly disappearing.

LANGUAGE

Let us put a Kenyan perspective into this. When you go into a supermarket to buy groceries, the labels are in English. What is our national language?

Is it not Kiswahili? If you go to a store in Poland, the labels are in Polish. What is their national language? Is it not Polish?

That means if you don’t speak Polish you will spend more time in the supermarket trying to figure out what is what, even with the help of Google Translate. So, why aren’t our labels in Kiswahili?

Think of how quickly Kiswahili could grow into a world language if we allowed foreigners to interact with it on a daily basis!

Nowadays, it is common for parents - especially in urban areas - to bring up children who speak English and Kiswahili but cannot utter a word in mother tongue.

PRIDE

The main reason for this is to avoid mother tongue interference in the child’s English language.

While that is indeed a genuine concern, is it enough reason to not teach our children their mother tongue? What shame is there in “shrubbing”, especially because English is our language of instruction and not our first language?

The world knows that everyone in Kenya belongs to a particular community and they expect us, in addition to English and Kiswahili, to speak a vernacular language. What pride is there in saying our children cannot speak or understand their mother tongue?

If we don’t teach our children our respective vernacular languages and the cultures that identify us, who will? Are these not the very things that make us Kenyan? There should be pride in that.

By not passing down our languages and cultures, we risk them becoming extinct and allowing other people to define our cultures for us.

But if we share, we will be able to accept one another and truly realise that in our diversity is our unity and this is what makes us Kenyan.

BUSINESS

The irony in all this is that we are paying to study other people’s languages yet we cannot speak our own!

The same phenomenon is also experienced in our consumption patterns. We prefer to buy products from abroad because we believe they are of higher quality.

This causes our own local industries, which can make the same things, to fall. If we bought local products and services more, their demand would cause the government to invest in these industries with a growing zeal and passion to see them succeed.

Sometimes we do this after a terrible experience particularly with ‘fundis’ (tailors), but if you get a good local business person, buy from them and urge others to do the same.

With manufacturing being part of the Big Four agenda, it is time we considered the Buy Kenyan, Build Kenya strategy.

Not only will it enhance competitiveness, it will also boost confidence in consuming locally-manufactured goods and services.

CULTURE

Modernisation is good. With it has come a great bundle of presents like white weddings, technology, girls’ education and eradication of FGM.

Nevertheless, modernisation should not be a reason to throw away the good that our cultural identities have to offer.

It should enhance them for all to see and desire to be part of. A simple way to do this is by being able to speak and understand our mother tongues.

A time will come when you or your children will need to use it and you will be glad that you took the time to learn and to teach them too.

Ms Wanjohi is the founder, Mazingira Safi Initiative. [email protected]