Why teaching using vernacular, as Ngugi wa Thiong'o suggests, is a long shot here

What you need to know:

  • If we adopted such a system, Kiluhya would be the only such language for Western Province, Dholuo, Nyanza; Kikuyu Central, perhaps Kitaitta for the Indian Ocean coast, and so on.

  • Yet, that would affect me considerably negatively as a lover of language because, like almost all other Kenyans, I have neglected the scientific study of Kiswahili ever since I finished high school in the mid-1950s.

Though no longer called James, my high school classmate remains a powerful voice for our country’s mental development. Indeed, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s voice now resonates throughout humanity’s world. For he writes not only for Kenyans but for humanity as a whole. Yet that statement contains at least one problem.

Our other classmates may no longer recognise Ngugi by name because he has long doffed the Euro-Christian first name James by which we knew him as our classmate at Kenya’s Alliance High in the mid-1950s. A few days ago, the great story teller recommended, as one Nairobi newspaper put it, that the so-called “vernacular” languages be the tuition media in Kenya’s schools.

MAJORITY

One of its meanings would be that every ethnic area would be teaching in a different language. But because I purported to know Ngugi’s mind, I thought I readily caught the real drift of it. It seemed to raise one extraordinarily significant question: What on earth are “vernaculars”? For, indeed, as far as the dailies reported him, the great story teller had not at all been specific.

Yet, by “vernaculars”, Ngugi would have meant the ethnic languages which abound in the entire human world. The great novelist’s thought seemed to be that most schools in, for instance, Kenya’s Nyanza Province should teach only in Dholuo, the language spoken by the ethnic majority of that area.

Here I use the superlative adjective “most” for the self-evident reason that Dholuo, my Nilotic mother “mouth”, is not the only ethnic speech in East Africa’s inter-lacustrine area. On Kenya’s side alone, are other highly important culturo-linguistic systems abound, including Kalenjin and Maasai (Nilotic) and Gusii and Luhya (Bantu).

However, if you launch yourself from the fundamental premise that every language is vital to its speakers and, therefore, has the right to exist, you must logically and powerfully arrive at one other conclusion. It is that, as far as it concerns, for instance, the people of Eastern Province, Kikamba should be Kenya’s unchallenged language not only of national mental tuition, but also even of the nation's commercial, industrial and political dialogue and management.

SCIENTIFIC

If we adopted such a system, Kiluhya would be the only such language for Western Province, Dholuo, Nyanza; Kikuyu Central, perhaps Kitaitta for the Indian Ocean coast, and so on. Yet, that would affect me considerably negatively as a lover of language because, like almost all other Kenyans, I have neglected the scientific study of Kiswahili ever since I finished high school in the mid-1950s.

In this, I probably exemplify all other so-called “educated” East Africans, including even those whose mother tongue Kiswahili is. For, scientifically speaking, to grow up in and through a language is not necessarily to know that language scientifically. In my experience, most people whose mother tongue Kiswahili is do not know that language at all from the scientific point of view.

That statement is true of all other culturo-linguistic situations because, both in its biological origin and in its social purpose, humanity has only one language.

The writer is a veteran journalist.