The schools have closed for the longest holiday of the year.
For the so-called urban dwellers, some children have been taken upcountry to spend time with their extended family and, hopefully, to learn a bit about their cultural roots.
This is happening when, for the first time ever, a majority of Kenyans – at least those below 35 years – are nearly 100 per cent literate. So, over and above the list of books prescribed in the term report, many parents are buying fiction for their children, though it has become difficult to know which other good books are out there anymore.
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My concern is not about those who would rather keep the little ones around, ration TV and video-game time, and divide their days between reading, playing and catching up with home peers. My heart goes out to another growing category that worries that every time the children go upcountry, they lose their command of the English language and supposed urban “sophistication”.
For this latter group, African languages rank low and can only be seen as a blot on the kind of exotic lifestyle they wish to cultivate in their children’s lives. This is not about parenting, which I am obviously not an expert in. It is about our sense of self-worth.
Many of us were brought up in a system tailored to cast aside autochthonous African ways. Those of us who went to primary school in the countryside were taught – by the school system, no less – to hate our languages. I remember in one school you were handed a rectangular cardboard disc if caught speaking your mother tongue. In other schools, one wore an ugly sisal gunny-sack vest inscribed “I am an idiot”.
On top of that badge of idiocy, you received a beating not too dissimilar to what young people in a neighbouring country face for dancing to tunes that defy totalitarianism. Not even Swahili was spared. The focus was not improving our command of English, but rather demonising local tongues until they became something to be ashamed of.
Later in high school, students from Nairobi and other big towns formed a fifth column of respect not because they performed better, but because they had a kind of exotic sheen far removed from our supposedly rustic village mannerisms.
They played basketball almost exclusively, as we associated their backgrounds with NBA stars we watched on TV. During inter-school events, they gallivanted around with the beautiful girls from neighbouring schools.
This deeply ingrained self-hatred, as it were, is still alive long after the gunny sack is gone. Today, many believe it is a mark of honour to be unable to speak one’s mother tongue. If you do something foolish, someone will tell you to quit ushamba (farm manners) – a euphemism for exhibiting your people’s ways. Don’t even get me started on accent.
To be honest, I am not entirely free of this syndrome myself. While I now relish traditional African foods, there is no love lost between me and githeri. We ate so much of it as young children that it feels wrong to spend money on it. Neither do I miss coffee harvesting, primarily for my frosty relations with chameleons. I once fell off a mango tree and sprained my hand after someone lied there was a chameleon above me, yet he had only seen a ripe mango he wanted for himself, which is really a story for another forum.
Those grounded in African literature will appreciate its efforts to debunk the myth that what is foreign is necessarily superior. Nigerian writer Ike Oguine’s A Squatter’s Tale exposes the lie that life for Africans is smooth sailing in America.
Long before Ngugi wa Thiong’o launched his campaign to decolonise African minds, the Harlem Renaissance in early 20th-century America showed that even as Africans back home drowned in rivers trying to cross to the West, those already there were forever trying to belong. In Native Son, Richard Wright likens African identity in America to a rat cornered in a house, about to meet its death.
Such works are an eye-opener to those who will not touch a “Made in Kenya” item yet worship anything imported. This attitude is not unique to rural folk. Early Post-independence Kenyan leaders swore by European standards. They wore Savile Row suits as badges of worth – perhaps because they had never heard of Toundi in Sembene Ousmane’s seminal novel, Houseboy. Toundi insults his father and goes to work for a foreigner, moving from one abusive employer to another until, by the time we meet him, he is literally rotting before he dies.
Make no mistake, I am all for people learning foreign languages. I am learning two myself. What I oppose is the kind of mental slavery that conflates everything local with mediocrity. As one Todaro taught us, development is not all about steel-and-concrete jungles. Save for a few outdated practices, Africans had much to teach the world – particularly the Ubuntu spirit. Yet we have perfected our place in the world as what V. S. Naipaul calls mimic men, the kind of people Caribbean writer George Lamming portrays in In the Castle of My Skin. A people far from London but who cannot accept themselves or be proud of who they are, despite knowing fully well that everyone else is already taken.
Today, we even trace our development trajectory along Western lines. But Europe’s rise was propped up by colonising Africa. So, who are we going to colonise so that our journey can nicely mirror that of Europe? Planet Mars?
A meme has been trending on Kikuyu social media about a man called Waing’a. When we were young, we sang in church that we would never again go back to Waing’a’s place. We thought Waing’a was the devil, or Satan. It turns out he was a Gikuyu medicine man, the kind that had healed society’s ailments with herbs for thousands of years before contact with Europe.
The song, it seems, was meant to discredit Waing’a for failing to cure new diseases such as measles. So people who didn’t get help from Waing’a went to mission hospitals, got modern medicine, and were healed. They then went home singing that they would never again set foot in Waing’a’s compound. So much for cultural engineering!
It is not my place to tell anyone how to live. But given that younger generations are more perceptive of the cultural value of their people’s ways, teach them all you want, but do not disallow them to love their roots.
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By Henry Munene