Habari kutoka Nairobi

In the very likely event that you, dear reader, do not understand a word of Kiswahili, beyond the phrase hakuna matata (no problem, don’t worry) as popularised in the 1994 Disney movie The Lion King, Habari kutoka Nairobi simply means, greetings from Nairobi.

By dint of circumstances, not of my making, I find myself in the Kenyan capital for the very first time and for far longer than I had intended.

I am on my way to Cape Town from Accra through Nairobi for the Africa Oil Week conference from October 3 to 7, 2022. I left Accra on Saturday night. But Providence had other ideas.

The very late arrival of Kenya Airways flight from Nairobi to Accra, and therefore, subsequently, from Accra to Nairobi meant we missed the connecting flight to Cape Town.

We were told the next available flight was Monday night at 9pm – almost 40 hours after we touched down at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.

Silver lining

Well, every cloud, they say, has a silver lining, so I had to shrug off my not-so-mild irritation, take advantage of my forced city break, hit town and discover what Nairobi has to offer.

After all, it was my first visit not only to Kenya but, indeed, to any part of eastern Africa, which is quite a shame, especially when I have read so much about the area, its political history and its geopolitics, including studying Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Weep

Not Child, a set novel for my ‘O’ level Literature-in-English course between 1984 and 1985.

After being literally comatose all day, out of tiredness, I was perked up and ready to explore the city’s night life.

A flurry of calls back home to friends who had already been here, revealed that the westlands area of Nairobi was a nice and trendy place to hang out. Indeed, I enjoyed quite a pleasant solo nocturnal expedition into urban Nairobi.

It is Sunday night, as I pound away on my laptop in my hotel room, and tomorrow, I plan to get all ‘touristy’ and hit the streets again, having done some internet-based research on some of the things to do in Nairobi.

By the time I catch my flight in the evening, I believe I will be able to safely tick Nairobi off my bucket list.

But I will definitely come back again one day when my ‘susu’ box allows me, and I may even hike up Mount Kenya and travel down to Mombasa to explore its legendary beaches to complete my Kenyan experience.

Kiswahili factor

If there is one thing that surprises me about Kenya, apart from the fact that they drive on the left side of the road – a hangover from British colonialism, like several other former colonies – it is that Kiswahili is an official language alongside English.

Having studied linguistics in my first year at university, where the notion of African official languages were discussed, this phenomenon quite struck me.

Every inscription on Kenyan public signages is written in both languages. So are the inscriptions on their currency notes. I found this both refreshingly interesting and remarkable.

At the airport, for instance, I immediately picked up the word karibu as meaning, welcome, not just from the signages around, but also from the taxi drivers and tour guides who accosted me for business as I made my way to the hotel transfer bus outside the airport terminal building.

In Kenya, Kiswahili has been the national language since 1964 and the official since 2010 per its new constitutional arrangements that year, after several debates and experiments.

Kiswahili is a compulsory subject in all Kenyan primary and secondary schools. In fact, as the lingua franca of the Africa Great Lakes and other parts of eastern and southeastern parts of Africa – with about 150 million speakers – it was adopted as one of the working languages of the African Union in February this year.

Of course, like so many African countries, including Ghana, Kenya is made up of several ethnic groups, each with their own language, and with the interplay of factors along sensitive politico-religious fault lines.

However, they found it expedient to ‘upgrade’, so to speak, their national language, Kiswahili, to official language status even though as argued in a 2014 paper by Iribe Mwangi and James Michira, both of the University of Nairobi, this was not without its challenges and a great deal of further work needed to be done for the policy to realise its objectives.

Ghana situation

I remember clearly a class session during my first-year Linguistics course at the University of Ghana back in 1988, when the subject of national and official language, including whether Ghana should have an indigenous language as an official language alongside English, came up.

It was agreed by all that Twi, in all its variants, was clearly the country’s national language.

However, one student strongly and vehemently disagreed with Twi being made an official language. His emphatic argument was that Ashantis, in particular, were arrogant and contemptuous of other ethnic groups in Ghana, therefore to elevate their language to official status would further entrench that.

In his view, therefore, we should stick with a foreign language that was neutral to all, regardless.

More than three decades after that class discussion, I am sure there are many who hold the gentleman’s view, perhaps in stronger terms, and unfortunately so.

Sadly, it is a testament to how far we have come in nation-building and ethnic cohesiveness, especially within the context of the brittle ethno-politics of our Fourth Republic.

I do not believe this subject will gain any traction in quite a while because of the sensitivities and passions it can inflame.

African languages matter

Of course, the global reality of the 21st Century is that we cannot jettison English or French from official African communication in a hissy fit simply because they were instruments of colonialism.

However, it is also jarring that the only language in which some Ghanaians and Africans can hold a conversation is in a foreign language.

In an article in the March 15, 2022 edition of the New African magazine, the journalist, Victor Olodukun, refers to a language crisis as elderly native speakers of African languages die out and an increasing number of African parents prefer to communicate with their children in English or French rather than in their local languages, which he describes as “linguistic snobbery of the upwardly mobile and not too upwardly mobile Nigerian and African elites”.

As he rightly argues, language goes beyond communication and is also “… a repository of values, customs, culture, and history.

In short, language is the embodiment of who a people are.”

The Kenyan example, whatever its challenges, inspires me because an indigenous African official language speaks to a formal acknowledgment of, and pride in, something that is emphatically indigenous to Africa.

This properly implemented alongside other important measures, goes a long way to emancipate oneself from mental slavery, as the late Bob Marley urged in Redemption Song, even if he sang it in English.

Next week, watch out for a belated postcard from Cape Town.

Rodney Nkrumah-Boateng, Head, Communications & Public Affairs Unit,Ministry of Energy, Accra. E-mail: rodboat@yahoo.com