Once upon a time, our mother-tongue was, supposedly, ‘less than’…
Just before I returned to the UK from holidays, I met one of my high school classmates for afternoon tea. She works at the magnificent KICC. She took me to the rooftop to view the legendary beautiful city under the sun. We were so happy to see each other, but as if on cue we spoke to each other in English.
Then, (as if experiencing a light bulb moment), we switched to our mother-tongue. We collapsed in laughter when we realised just how well we knew and spoke the language. With nostalgia, we reminisced how we were not allowed to speak it in school.
In high school, (a catholic missionary girls-only school set in some beautiful grounds in the magnificent Rift Valley), it was a criminal offence to speak in any vernacular or Kiswahili, unless it was during a Kiswahili lesson. We were forced to speak in English at all times whether we wanted to or not.
If anyone was caught speaking a single word of the offending vernacular or dialects, they were made to walk around wearing a wooden rectangular slab around their necks, the infamous monitor. It happened to me and it was the most humiliating thing. One of the monitors of the monitor had overheard me say ‘sijui’ [I don’t know] to a question and issued the monitor there and then. ‘Sijui’ is not even an offending word, it’s just how we speak (see – Beloved Kenya, Sand sea and sun), and they knew it too.
The black coloured slab had the words ‘mother tongue speaker’ inscribed in bold white chalk. To offload the monitor, you had to catch someone else speaking their mother-tongue and pass it on. I walked around for hours listening to deathly silences before someone sneezed in their mother-tongue and I passed it on. I just didn’t care, I just wanted the thing off my neck.
Arguments never ensued because it was too difficult to argue in English as well as you would in your mother-tongue. We simply accepted the monitor and went on the hunt. Serial offenders were handed down harsher punishments like slashing overgrown grass, digging and planting trees in the school farm. Chronic serial offenders were handed down much worse punishments like scrubbing the ablution block – bear in mind this was a girls-only school, teenage girls no less – there were times in the month you didn’t want to be cleaning that block. Believe me!
It disturbs me now that we didn’t question this practice; we did not fight as hard as we fought for extra portions of badly undercooked ugali and overcooked meat. We had been brainwashed to think that the only way we could amount to anything was by speaking nothing but English.
Speaking in our mother-tongue did not make us ‘less-than’ or inferior, but the oppressive Irish headmistress [a nun we’d baptised without water Jemima – pronounced Jeymaima] implied so. In those days, our self-esteem was so low we wouldn’t trust our natural instincts to do what came naturally: for example – one day my friends and I were caught at the seminarians’ quarters by the headmistress, and instead of running away like most people would, one girl pulled her sweater over her head to conceal her identity and stayed rooted to the spot. It took Jeymaima, who ruled with an iron fist, one sleek motion to reveal her face and shame her into the next decade.
Besides the monitor, there were other humiliating practices, like the divide and rule practice where Jeymaima would parade girls who, in her colonial mind, came from English speaking families (? Huh ?), and present them as of superior intellect. Girls from non-English speaking families (double huh??) who, as far as Jeymaima was concerned, would undoubtedly live a life of servitude to the superior girls, and were unrelentlessly put down. This was a psychological warfare waged on girls who in most cases had never spoken English in public.
If Jeymaima had visited any of the villages we came from, she’d have been more humane. In my primary school, teachers spoke nothing but their mother-tongue and didn’t give a rat’s arse for anyone who didn’t understand it. They also taught by translating words from English to the mother-tongue e.g. dog is ngui… repeat.
Understandably, the first year of secondary school was hell for the majority of the girls. It was practically impossible to articulate things in English when you were thinking them in your mother-tongue. The battle was constant – translate stuff in your head as you speak and listen. We became dull because telling humorous stories in English did not have the same ring to it as when told in mother-tongue or kiswahili. Some stories had to wait until the end of term to see the light of day.
The upside to this was that Jeymaima for all her disrespect of Kiswahili or any other non-English language never bothered to learn any of it. This worked to our advantage. Since most of our parents could not understand a word out of Jeymaima’s mouth – she spoke like a robot on speed – we acted as translators. So just imagine an offender having to translate to a jury what the prosecutor is alleging! Lost in translation does not even cover it.
Today I take backhanded compliments like “your accent hasn’t changed one bit”, or “you still speak fluent Kikuyu and Kiswahili” gladly, because I know once upon a time some feeble-minded colonisers tried to discredit our languages and make them less than.
There’s nothing wrong with speaking fluent English, there’s everything wrong with pretending you don’t have a mother-tongue. And when I see a president’s son reading in Kiswahili, albeit badly, or presidential candidates addressing rallies in their mother-tongue, I don’t think of this as tribalism but
We should be proud.
We should, however, try to recite readings from memory than a mobile phone…. just saying!
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