A lilting poem and melody full of Kenyan-Scottish symbolism

When Mstaafu (Rtd) President Uhuru Kenyatta stepped out to inspect his last Guard of Honour, before handing over to our new President, the military band struck up into Auld Lang Syne.

This is the song many of us sing on the dot of midnight on New Year’s Day. “Should auld acquaintance be forgot,” we croon, “and never brought to mind?”

The song is by 18th-century literary great, Robert Burns, generally regarded as Scotland’s National Poet.

Auld Lang Syne suggests a reunion of two friends who had gone their different ways after an idyllic childhood spent together.

The speaker in the poem, one of the friends, suggests that the two should revive their relationship, have a drink and shake hands over it, for good old times’ sake (“for auld lang syne”).

My first reaction to hearing the tune at the inauguration ceremony was “how apt!”

The words pose a rhetorical question of whether we should forget old (auld) friends and never think of them. The answer is, obviously “No, we shouldn’t.”

The relevance of this to a man walking into retirement, after steering his country for the better part of a decade, was unmistakable.

These are the fascinating ways in which language and, indeed, all communication works. In semiotics, the science of how we make sense or significance of utterances, events or situations, we say that interpretation is a process of plausibly decoding the components of the utterance or event.

The speaker or communicator codes the message and the hearer or interpreter decodes it.

Interpretation

Indeed, semioticians regard every experience as a “text” from which a competent interpreter will elicit meaning.

The validity of the interpretation will depend on both the interpreter’s training and life experience. This is why we say that interpretations (or what we see in a text) are open-ended, if not infinite. 

Let us, however, get down to my response to the Kasarani Auld Lang Syne last week.

I have already hinted to you that I was responding to the tune that the band played. I started my response by relating the tune to the words that go with it since I know them.

To one unfamiliar with the lyrics, the piece was just a sequence of sweet martial music.

My second step of interpretation was relating the lyrics I had recalled to the situation of the momentous retirement of one President and handing over to another.

That is where we got to the rhetorical question. The situation was even more poignant because the incoming President and the outgoing one had led the country together, with the one deputising for the other, over the ending decade.

That makes the well-known refrain of the lyrics, “for auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne” (for old times’ sake, in our English) especially relevant to the situation.

I believe that what most of us wanted to see between our two leaders as they exchanged power is what the speaker in our poem offers. “And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere (friend), and gie’s (give us) a hand o’ thine”. I need not elaborate on the significance of handshakes.

I have no idea how the music for such occasions is selected, and I certainly did not know what to expect, musically, at the inauguration. I presume that, like other military affairs, the performances at such occasions are steeped in tradition. So, what I am sharing with you here is my personal response to what I observed at the ceremony.

Indeed, this makes the central point about the process of making sense or meaning out of “texts”.

The utterance or event is only one part of what it “means”. What the receiver or witness of that event makes of it is just as important as, if not more important than, the utterance itself or even the intentions of the person who originated it.

To return to “Auld Lang Syne”, hearing it played at Kasarani aroused in me memories of not only the long line of my Scottish teachers, colleagues and friends, both in East Africa and in Britain but also the adventures of my residence in Scotland in the early 1970s.

Did I tell you I had my wedding in the cathedral city of Dunblane in Perthshire, and my honeymoon in Edinburgh?

But long before that, I had learnt to play Auld Lang Syne and Scotland the Brave on the fife, from my first Scottish teacher in junior high school, Fr James Barry?

The recent red-hot focus on Scotland, for understandable reasons, was more than just place names to me. Incidentally, the late Queen Elizabeth’s mother was a Scottish noblewoman.

King Charles III went to a Scottish public school and his heir presumptive, Prince William of Wales, attended St Andrew’s University in Scotland.

Scottish link

More relevantly, however, the sound of a Scottish tune at a key Kenyan function reminded me of the intriguing link between Kenya and Scotland.

I had heard comparisons of the Kenyan Highlands with the Scottish Highlands, and the logic dawned on me when I went roaming, with friends, over the latter, especially in the summer.

Little wonder, then, that many Scots found Kenya a comfortable place to live and settle, many of them to the present day.

Historians will tell you that several Scotsmen and people of Scottish descent played prominent roles in Kenya’s colonial and early independence affairs.

From random memory, such names as Bruce Mackenzie, independent Kenya’s first Agriculture Minister, and Malcolm Macdonald, the last Governor and only Governor General, who handed over to Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, come to mind.

But plausibly the strongest link between Kenya and Scotland is the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA), founded by an organisation patently named the Scottish Mission.

I will not arrogate to myself the telling of this inspiring and well-known story. But for most of us, it is concretised in the famous “Thogoto” (a Gikuyunisation, I understand, of “Scottish”) base, in the Kikuyu area, where it all began.

Should auld acquaintance be forgotten?

Prof Bukenya is a leading East African scholar of English and [email protected]