We should not sit back and watch our mother tongues wither and die

For a long time, I was totally opposed to calls for the teaching of mother tongue to school children in early childhood, arguing that to do so would run counter to the tenets of national cohesion. I reasoned that if vernacular languages are not given prominence, the forces of negative ethnicity will naturally wither and perish. But I soon realised that my arguments were based on ignorance about the role that language plays in the cognitive development of the child, and the need to give it a universal rather than parochial perspective.

I only started realising that I was mistaken when, at a company retreat, a brash young fellow took to the microphone to urge his audience to speak the English language all the time, arguing forcefully: “Surely nobody speaks vernacular at home!” Nobody bothered to answer him and he probably went home to regale his wife with the narrative of how he had silenced his bosses with his sagacity. But even before that, I had been harassed by doubts about the wisdom of allowing my own young family to converse almost exclusively in sheng once they started school. By so doing, they forgot even the few Kikuyu words they had learnt as toddlers.

It is a fact that very few members of the young generation can speak their mother tongues fluently any more. The most affected are the so-called millennials — those born between 1980 and 2000. Most of them cannot converse intelligibly in their mother tongues for there is too much interference from the English they learnt in school and the sheng they grew up with. At this rate, it will be no surprise if some Kenyan languages start disappearing steadily and eventually become extinct — maybe not in our lifetime, but possibly in the next 100 years or so.

History is replete with languages which died, some because their speakers became subsumed in other cultures, others because their users were annihilated from the face of the earth. Who, except a few Catholic priests celebrate arcane Mass in Latin today? Who knows what Sanskrit of ancient India was all about? Closer home, the Suba had a language all of their own, but it is now almost extinct. So are the Elmolo and Ogiek languages. In other words, languages can, and do, disappear.

All these things may have crossed the mind of a nominated member of Nairobi County Assembly, Ms Silvia Museiya, when she reportedly drafted a motion for debate by the county assembly requiring all public nursery schools to include lessons in mother tongue in the curriculum. It is not clear what the MCA had in mind exactly, but apparently, if such a law is passed, all the tots will learn vernacular from parents or relatives at home so that when they go to class they can recite what they learnt to their classmates.

The whole idea sounds rather goofy, and may not, in fact, be practical, but the premise is certainly inspired. The dear lady is worried that indigenous languages in urban areas are fast disappearing and something must be done to save them. This makes sense because if young people do not learn their mother tongue at home, where else will they do it? She only gets it wrong by suggesting that they should identify with an African language and culture to minimise Western cultural influence. In my view, the ascendancy of sheng is the real culprit, not Western cultural imperialism.

What is in a language, one might ask. If people can communicate well in any language, why bother with mother tongue at all? Wouldn’t Kenya be a better place all around if everyone can actually communicate in one national (Kiswahili), and one official language (English)? Why not leave mother tongue to those in ushago who cannot speak either of these two languages? After all, almost everyone understands some form of Kiswahili even if it has been so distorted by sheng as to be unrecognisable. Indeed, one can say that sheng is now so embedded in communication that it has become a second national language.

In my own puny way, I have long differed with the foremost Kenyan cultural icon, Prof Ngugi wa Thiong’o, over his views on the need to preserve indigenous African languages, but my quarrel has mainly been about the contradiction between what he preaches and the language in which he does so. However, it is easy to see what he has been about all along. We Kenyans are gradually losing our cultural identity by shunning our own languages in favour of those of our former colonisers.

There is nothing as disheartening as listening to a fellow Kenyan struggling to communicate in mother tongue and coming out like a transplanted mzungu lost in a linguistic maze. There is nothing as stupefying as to try and decipher what a Kenyan is saying while trying to imitate an American after a couple of weeks in the United States. Not only is it irritating, it is also extremely demeaning. By all means, let us seek ways to restore our lost glory by rediscovering our mother tongues.