Language, Culture & Politics in Kenya

There is a story in my village of a girl who went to England for a two-year training as a nurse. When she returned to the village, she spoke to the community through an interpreter. A two year stay in England had wiped off her twenty years’ knowledge of her African tongue. Is it a true story? It does not really matter. It embodies a truth of the cultural life of the educated in Kenya today. A few years back I went to visit a family in Nakuru: mother, father and a seven year-old daughter. The parents and I had been active in anti-colonial politics as students at Makerere University College way back in the early sixties. We sat on the veranda. Mother goaded her daughter into speaking. In English, of course. A book too, I think, Winnie the Pooh. Daughter, obviously a precocious child, obliged with a perfect English accent. I congratulated her in Kikuyu language. She replied to me in a stream of incomprehensible words. Father and mother laughed hilariously. They were very proud of her performance; on top of her obvious intelligence and abilities, she had also displayed two very important qualities as manifestations of that intelligence; she could read and speak English very well; but more important she could hardly utter two comprehensible words in Gĩkũyũ. Thus ignorance of an African language, instead of it being a matter of shame and personal discomfort, was now a thing for pride and public display.

The position of the African writer who has chosen literary enslavement to European languages and who at the same time is committed to speaking to a national audience, can be compared to that of the main characters in the stories above: faced with the accusations that they have abandoned their mother tongue, African writers have oscillated between the positions of the girl nurse in Limuru and that of father and mother in Nakuru: they demand interpreters or display pride in their ignorance of African languages.