English became more than a language: it was the language, and all others had to bow before it in deference.
—Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind

Nairobi—As reminders of British colonialism go, my new apartment is hard to beat. Norfolk Towers: stiff, upright furniture, heavy green-and-gold curtains, lacquered coffee tables, manicured gardens, and a sparkling outdoor pool, protected from Nairobi by a high wall and a dozen armed guards. You would never suspect what a terrible crime occurred here just three years ago.

Twice a week, my Swahili tutor, Sam, swings by for an hour of mumbo jumbo. Those were in fact two of the first words he taught me; in the original language and spelling, mambo means “how are things,” and jambo is “what’s up.” Not quite the stuff of poetry, but a little more expressive than English speakers make them out to be.

Despite us, Swahili is now the most widespread tongue south of the Sahara, a living language if there ever was one. Born on the east African coast to Bantu parents, it grew Arabic appendages with the onset of a Middle Eastern presence, including a slave trade, a thousand years ago, spreading and evolving as colonization progressed. In the course of suffusing the continent, it absorbed countless African dialects, some Portuguese, a little German, and, most recently, a few wisps of English. As many as a hundred million people speak it today.

Chances are poor that I’ll ever be one of them. Fortunately (or not), most people in Nairobi speak English at least as well as Swahili. All the more impressive considering few people speak either natively — around here, the first words anyone utters are in any one of dozens of indigenous tongues that have been here for centuries. Each of these is as distinct from the other as, say, Cree and Coast Salish, only far more vibrant.

That African dialects should continue to thrive while so many of their North American counterparts are in the final stages of extinction is probably the one positive legacy of Kenya’s historical poverty: few families could afford an education. School, after all, was where children learned to hate their mother tongue.

The tendency of colonial powers everywhere to stamp out local dialects says a lot about the power of language. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, arguably Kenya’s most ardent opponent of this process, has written about going through it himself. The similarity of his account to those of native Americans is striking:

One of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking Kikuyu in the vicinity of the school. The culprit was given corporal punishment – three to five strokes of the cane on bare buttocks — or was made to carry a metal plate around the neck with inscriptions such as I AM STUPID or I AM A DONKEY.

The passage is taken from Decolonising the Mind, a good read for anyone interested in the interplay of language and power. Ngugi’s description of organizing the community play that got him arrested in 1977 is fascinating; so is his account of the Kikuyu novel he subsequently wrote – on toilet paper – in cell 16 of Kamiti Maximum Security Prison.

Of course, repressive governments have been provoking great literature for centuries. The usual pattern is for the benefits to skip the author and accrue to the reader, and Thiong’o’s life stuck to the script. His passionate defence of African languages, together with a vehement critique of the role of English in politics and literature alike, earned him the undying wrath of Daniel arap Moi’s regime. In 1982 he left the country, and although he continued to write prolifically – and always in Kikuyu – he wouldn’t see Kenya again for twenty-two years.

When he finally returned in 2004, he wasn’t empty handed. Wizard of the Crow, his just-completed novel, was arguably his grandest effort yet, a vintage Ngugi blend of satire and magical realism. Moi had finally stepped down, and it seemed safe to promote, on home turf, a book featuring presidents who grew too big to fit inside their palaces, shape-shifting advisers, and publicly funded skyscrapers designed to put politicians in direct communication with the gods.

But the coast was not as clear as Ngugi thought. Which brings us back to Norfolk Towers – my current address, and for two weeks in 2004, Ngugi’s home as well.

The short version is this: He moved in; less than two weeks into his visit, four thugs stormed into his apartment; they tortured him and raped his wife. Three of them were caught almost immediately, as they were employed as guards at Norfolk — on duty that very night — and those three are now in jail. Deepening the mystery, Ngugi’s nephew, who was visiting him when the attack occurred, may have been an accomplice. Ngugi and his wife survived, and returned to America soon after.

But this was no random crime, and here the story degenerates into the frustrating realm of unsolved mystery. An account by Ngugi’s son, published in the Kenyan literary journal Kwani? (which means “so what?”), explained how the culprits “had chosen not to wear gloves or masks, making them easily identifiable by their fingerprint or in an identification parade. How had they planned to get away with it? They had not been hurried as one would expect in a quick robbery — they had been calm, eerily deliberate and methodical while attacking a couple whose return was being covered by national and international media. This confidence struck me as one that had money and power behind it.”

The good news is that the languages of Kenya, like Ngugi, are alive and well despite the battering they’ve received. You won’t see them in the business pages or anywhere near parliament, but they’re out there, telling jokes at the bar, rapping in the alleyways, copulating in the fields and forests; in fact, not long ago they gave birth to a bastard named Sheng. Like most teenagers, this child of (S)wa(H)ili and (ENG)lish isn’t yet terribly articulate, but she’s clever and mischievous and might, when you’re not looking, tell a story just for the hell of it.

Tags: international, kenya

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Posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 9:19 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.