Does our mother tongue capture our manhood better?
I'm a firm believer that English lacks the vocabulary to fully express what we feel as Africans.
What you need to know:
- More and more young men I know have found themselves in that space where they come to an awakening and feel the need to learn their tribal language.
- The problem is they don't know where to go and how to start.
- Many of them are in their late 20's as they start to chart their path into manhood.
Literary titan Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o put Kenya on the international map yet again. He was awarded the 31st Catalonia International Prize "for his distinguished and courageous literary work and his defense of African languages, based on the notion of language as culture and collective memory". He made history by accepting the award in his mother tongue, Gikuyu. But what should have been a celebration of culture, turned into a fight over what language he should have used.
It took me back to my discussions on language. I'm a city born and bred man with the languages I speak being English, Kiswahili, Sheng (maybe, perhaps, depending on who you ask.) What tongue I spoke didn't matter early on, until I joined university and suddenly I felt, or I was made to feel inadequate because I didn't speak my mother (which is usually in practice, father) tongue.
It was like a new must-have for manhood. The truth is I didn't speak Gikuyu. Where would I have learnt it anyway? I came from a mixed-tribe family. We lived in Nairobi and between my dad's constant travel and my mom's work schedule, I don't think that teaching us our mother tongue came as the most pressing need.
Many young men around Kenya are in that space; urban born and bred from parents in inter-tribal marriages but society miraculously expects them to know their native tongues.
Just after my father died in 2015, I had an identity crisis of sorts and that took me down the path of history and culture. I took an interest in Gikuyu's history and culture and started learning the language. Something I hadn't thought about for most of my life.
More and more young men I know have found themselves in that space where they come to an awakening and feel the need to learn their tribal language. The problem is they don't know where to go and how to start. Many of them are in their late 20's as they start to chart their path into manhood.
This is a great shift from our urban childhoods where children with ethnic accents were mocked by teachers and punished for it. Where fellow students would mimic your heavy accent and label you a mshamba.
There is even a company that prides itself on offering an accent reduction program.
There's also conversely the group of people who don't feel the need to learn it and feel complete without it and I agree with them. People who speak English, a sparse sprinkling of Kiswahili, and a boatload of Sheng, mainly. Sheng is some people's mother tongue even though it's hard for others to grasp, as we were taught to view it as lesser, as ghetto, as uncouth, and as a lower-class language. People who hear sheng and immediately clutch onto their knock off pearls and Louis Vuitton handbags that their mitumba seller swore were originals. If sheng is what you and your parents were brought upon, then it equally qualifies as your mother tongue.
One of the biggest questions people ask revolves around the value of their children learning their mother tongue. More specifically the economic value. This is why people would have their children learn French and German over their mother tongue because they can't figure out how their own languages would help them make money. It's a sad way to look at language as intrinsically useless unless it's through a capitalist lens and not the broader impact of language on identity and culture.
Another big hindrance is the notion that anything centered around ethnicity is inherently divisive and problematic. It's led to such movements like "My Tribe is Kenya" because someone sold the idea that your tribe is the reason that you're divided. Language isn't the reason that post-election violence has happened. Blame politicians on that.
I'm a firm believer that English lacks the vocabulary to fully express what we feel as Africans. It lacks the width, the depth, and the nuance our tongues exude. It lacks the history, the spirit, and the emotions that we truly experience. It brings baggage we never had, excludes people we previously embraced, and in many ways expresses oppression in the voice the masters brought it with. Our local tongues are it for me. Let's reclaim who we were and redefine who we are.
