AFRICANEWS

Kenya

Things spoken and unspoken

Language

When a language dies, the culture of its people dies with it. The case of the Suba language in Kenya is highlighted for its interesting political ramifications. .

More than chickens, goats, and sheep are butchered in the African market place. For social, economic and even political pressures, languages die too. Vivacious, tall, Duncan Okoth Okombo, professor of linguistics and literature at the University of Nairobi, recently in a wide ranging and reflective interview explained the case of the Kenya Suba, a Bantu groups which moved into the lake region of Kenya over two centuries ago.

Okombo affirms that he is "an Omusuba". People like Okombo have been rejuvenated in a wave of ethnic consciousness. His people's language, Olusuba, is one of the African languages listed as nearly dead in the 1992 Gabriele Sommer survey, included in the book language death edited by Mathias Brenzinge.

Okombo acknowledges his own inability to express himself in Olusuba but suggests that "there are other factors which can acquire greater prominence as symbols of ethnic identity, especially when the language factor gets weaker as a result of language shift." Along with Franz Rotland of the University of Bayreuth, Germany, Okombo has been involved in research regarding language death since the 1980s.

Rotland and Okombo wrote in 1986 about the Suba of Kenya, describing them as a strange case of "growing ethnicity with receding language competence." Today Okombo explains: "in a place like Kenya, the English language has itself penetrated what would otherwise have been perceived as the traditional domain for the local ethnic languages. The life of a language depends on the number of speakers that utilize it." Adds Okombo: "We are about the only continent on earth which conducts its national affairs in foreign languages."

What Okombo means is familiar to every middle class African living in the urban centres such as Nairobi where children born of "migrant families" do not speak the language of their parents. "The question could be asked whether such children can validly claim the ethnicity of their parents and if they can, on what grounds?" Okombo argues that the use of English in urban situations is a major contributing factor to language death, indeed impending death of many local languages.

This trend of children unable to speak their ethnic tongues is not confined to cities or towns, Okombo says. "You can be sure that even in places as rural and remote as Gwassi and Rusinga island, where I come from, English is gaining ground in non-official communicative domains, where it is spread interestingly not by visiting Englishmen, but by locals, as part of the unintended effects of the educational curriculum."

According to Okombo, the local primary school teacher will thrash the bottom of any child who speaks in his or her mother tongue! Villagers themselves believe that those who can speak a foreign language are obviously better. Consequently states Okombo, "we are talking about the eath or near death of many languages to those of our people belonging to generations adversely affected by the post-colonial linguistic and cultural transformations in our indigenous communities."

For such offspring Okombo says, "there only claim to the ethnic language or community in question is by ancestry or by history both of which may not have a significant place in a peoples consciousness. Until certain social-political concerns give them prominence, like we witnessed recently with the Suba of Kenya."

Faced with the need to make some political in-roads in Nyanza province, in 1992 the Kanu government of President Daniel arap Moi decided to play the card of ethnic consciousness more than at any other time in Kenya's History. The strategy was to encourage those who have some historical or even remote ancestral claim to Olusuba, to rise up and assert their independence from their Luo neighbours. Prior to 1992, Okombo admits that in Nyanza province people needed to know dholuo, the language of their Luo neighbours in order to survive in the market place.

"The Abasuba fishermen learnt Dholuo in order to sell their dried fish to the Luo; Abasuba girls marrying Luo men were forced to learn Dholuo, while the Luo girls who married Suba men taught Dholuo to their children," Okombo explains. This process of cultural assimilation "was strengthened by Christian missionaries and colonial administrators who conducted their affairs, including the teaching of literacy skills in Dholuo, Okombo adds."

The Suba nationality lon g presumed dead has recently been rekindled by presidential declarations creating a Suba district and a Suba division. Full administration apparatus has been established; a regional radio broadcast in Suba has been decreed, as well as the immediate production of educational materials in the Suba Language.

As of yet, the Suba have not shown a significant interest or change of heart. They appear to accept that their political fate is inseparable from that of the Luo community. Yet, if indeed there were a change of heart, one of its intended backlashes would be the encouragement of vicious political animosity with the Luo neighbours. This would mean new "tribal clashes" so well known in Kenya since 1990.

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