How our bad Kenyan English results from our lack of a reading culture

Before my retirement, I used to teach an MA course called Strategies of Effective Writing in Literature.

In order to illustrate the larger structural issues in writing, I liked using Barack Obama’s autobiography Dreams from My Father.

I am talking about manoeuvres such as crafting a striking introduction, one that whets the appetite of the reader; arranging the contents of the work in an ascending order, bearing in mind that we remember best what we hear last; and finally, forging what William Shakespeare would have called a full circle conclusion, one in which you end where you began, and which answers the question: So what? A conclusion that rings in your ears long after you have finished reading the book.

When they are composing their life stories, lazy and unimaginative writers begin by saying: I was born in such and such a year and in such and such a place. Obama doesn’t do that. Instead, he begins his autobiography with a defining moment.

He is twenty-one, and living in New York, when he receives a telephone call from his aunt in Nairobi who drops the bombshell that his father has been killed in a car accident. Barack Obama’s introduction is the textbook definition of an attention grabber.

Obama then ends his story at the point at which he goes to the graves of both his father and grandfather, kneels and sheds tears. Then he says memorably: “I saw that my life in America — the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I had felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago - all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin.”

Reminiscing about this scene many years later, the former American president, during a visit to Kenya, said the experience meant more to him than staying in a five-star hotel. And as we can see, the most famous Kenyan American ends his life story where he began.

Let us bear in mind I would be using Obama’s Dreams from My Father, which has been in our leading books forever and ever, as a model of good writing. I would then routinely ask my students whether they had read the book.

The vast majority, if not all, would say no. And mind you some of them were teachers of English on the school-based programme. Let’s reflect on this: literature graduates had not read a good and famous book that is locally available. So, I ask, what do we educated Kenyans read, if at all we read?

Again, before I retired, I used to teach a first-year undergraduate course called Language Use in Literature. I would begin by asking the students individually when they last read a book from cover to cover. I would insist they don’t tell me about their set books.

And the students in a class of about 100 would simply stare at me: they hadn’t read any book outside the school syllabus. Pay a visit to libraries in our secondary schools and you will find that most of them contain only textbooks. Nothing for general reading: no fiction, no nonfiction.

If you enter the Education Building at the University of Nairobi, you will see many students charging their phones in the foyer and staring at whatever they have downloaded on those gadgets.

Earlier this year, when I was attending a writing workshop at Kenyatta University, I witnessed the same thing: students glued on their smart phones. Not a single one of these otherwise intelligent young people was reading a printed book. Yet, these are the same people we see at graduation ceremonies receiving degrees.

The results of this poor reading culture are catastrophic. Listen to educated Kenyans, some of them professors, and you will hear them say: “I can be able....” even on national TV. And you wonder, why wouldn’t they know that the word “can” means the same thing as “be able to”? Why the redundancy?

Several years ago, I attended an international conference at Serena Hotel here in Nairobi. During the introductions, my compatriots would say: “My names are so and so.” For their part, the foreigners would say: “My name is so and so.” And the Kenyans did not even take note of the linguistic discrepancy. I am not lying when I say I felt like going to hide in the washrooms.

Unfortunately, this sloppiness has crept into Kiswahili. People no longer say: “Jina langu ni....” or “Naitwa....” Instead they say: “Kwa majina, naitwa....” I wouldn’t brag about my knowledge of Kiswahili sanifu, but this usage sounds pretty uneducated. And I should say parenthetically that our Kiswahili lexicographers don’t guide learners on usage: the dictionaries they compile contain only synonyms. You get into big trouble if you can’t figure out the meaning of the synonym.

Let us talk about the word “dowry.” This is the payment that is made to the family of the groom by the family of the bride during marriage negotiations. This kind of transaction takes place in India, and perhaps in the Indian communities in Kenya. Among us Africans the payment is from the groom’s family to that of the bride, and it is called bride price. But we seem to have forgotten this, so much so that even in our print media black African men talk of paying “dowry” for their wives.

Consider the following other mistakes. Our police officers stop us for a crime they call “overspeeding,” yet the shorter word “speeding” on its own means driving faster than you are legally allowed to. The word “disinterested” does not mean “uninterested”: it means unbiased, impartial and public-spirited.

“Severally” does not mean several times: it is a legal term that means separately. For instance, we can say: members of the criminal gang were charged jointly and severally. That building from which we buy meat is called a butcher’s shop; it is decidedly not a “butchery.” The word “butchery” can rightly be used to describe Putin’s killing of Ukrainians.

After the violence of 2007/8, some public intellectuals popularised the phrase “negative ethnicity.” No, my dear Kenyans: ethnicity is neither positive nor negative. The word these well-meaning compatriots should have used is “ethnocentrism.” This is when we put our own ethnic community at the centre of the universe, thereby seeing those who don’t belong as unworthy and contemptible.

At this juncture, I would like to say something about a disease called pomposity, the pretentious use of big words. I have complained about this problem elsewhere: that our English teachers in secondary schools typically mislead our children and grandchildren into thinking that good writing must have a generous sprinkling of big words. And these students who rely solely on what they are told by their teachers come to our universities having internalised this habit. (The same thing happens in Kiswahili, but I won’t go there because that is not my territory.)

Picture this: I am attending a meeting at the Ministry of Education. At some point, I go to the washrooms. Then this gentleman in an expensive suit walks in, greets me, and starts fiddling with the taps, and says: “These taps are not operational.” Of course he is telling me what I have already seen.

But I start asking myself: Who talks like that? Why can’t this official of the Ministry simply say: the taps are dry, or there is no water? And I am also thinking: the poor fellow is trying to impress me, but the effort has achieved the opposite.

Much later, I’m reading this interview in one of our dailies in which this governor is answering questions about his administration and his personal life. The governor has impressive academic credentials. But when he talks about his family life, he refers to his wife as “my spouse.” The word “spouse” is a legal term which refers to either gender.

We come across it when we are filling out forms from the KRA which are addressed to both husbands and wives. So, I am wondering as I read this interview: Why wouldn’t a male governor not know the gender of his wife? Why is he calling her “my spouse” instead of “my wife”? Why would any man refer to his wife as “my spouse”?

As I write this essay, I can hear descriptivists screaming at me. Who gives you the right to judge how Kenyans use the English language? So what if we speak and write badly? Why should you care? Why should anyone care?

My answer is simple. When our ancestors invented language they also drew up the rules governing the use of the language. This is what we call grammar. They said a sentence was a group of words that makes sense. This group of words had to have a subject, a verb, and an object.

Linguists talk of the SVO structure which applies to English and Kiswahili and other Bantu languages. When I tried to learn some Japanese at Soka University in Tokyo in 2000, I discovered that the order was subject-object-verb. So, Japanese has SOV. But this is just a different permutation, the ingredients of the sentence are the same.

In the Sunday Nation of June 12, 2022, your columnist Chris Hart said rather tentatively that gossip “.…might even be the reason we invented language in the first place.” I have myself said elsewhere that I subscribe to the theory that Homo sapiens invented language to gossip and tell stories. And let’s accept that gossiping is a kind of storytelling.

We have previously talked of grammar as it pertains to the sentence. I want to say that these brainy ancestors of ours also formulated the grammar and the aesthetics of storytelling.

When I taught the MA class, we would compare and contrast the two autobiographies: Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father and Wangari Maathai’s Unbowed. And I would try to convince my students that Obama was not only a better writer, he was also a better storyteller. Why? Because the former American president belongs to a country with a rich reading culture. Maathai lived and died in a country with a poor reading culture, which unfortunately explains our bad English.

Henry Indangasi, Professor Emeritus, Department of Literature, University of Nairobi