Post by aeichener on Dec 8, 2005 16:16:38 GMT 3
I have grown increasingly, hmmhmm, bored with the content of Jukwaa. It is almost all about politics, sometimes laced with politics, and very occasionally interspersed with politics for a change. OO used to write about many more things in his blogs; that is what made up their high quality and their widespread appeal.
But of course, this webboard is not an exclusive OO outlet; he only started it. It is what its writers make of it.
The usual response quip in Usenet (and over the 'Net in general) to such a petulant complaint as mine is "Well, just write about it yourself, and don't wait for someone else to do it." So, I'll heed the imaginary advice, and choose a topic of my own. Especially since the Nation fora, which I usually frequent, are presently so slow (and often downright inaccessible) that a chameleon in comparison appears quick as a cheetah.
My topic is English. I have frequently wondered why the East African countries (including the Great Lakes) show such marked differences (the construct of a corpus of "East African English", as the Chemnitz-based research group around Josef Schmied attempts for the last 10 years, is just that: a fairly artificial construct). Why is it that Ugandan and Malawian writers so frequently display a better command of English than their Kenyan colleagues? Better here does not mean "different" nor "characterized by different characteristics"; it indeed means, simply and plainly "better" as in "more good". Why does Philip Ochieng's language appear just pretentious and blustering (and often inept, as when he tries to insert Latin phrases in his ramblings, and almost always lands flat on the belly, for the many orthographic and grammatical blunders in his Latin snippets), while Charles Onyango-Obbo (Ugandan) is plain good, and Mputhumi Ntabeni (South Africa) impresses us with both brilliance and depth?
I do not want to ascribe such differences to tribe alone (or, in the speak of today's political correctness in academia and NGO-space, to ethnic affiliation and heritage). There exist already too many old corny jokes about "Apollodor Horatio Wilberforce Otieno", his three-piece suit and pretentious English, jokes which are just that: old and corny. I see no innate language characteristic of Dholuo, Dhopadhola, Acholi etc. pp. that would enable their speakers to grasp and handle English better and more subtly than, say, Kiembu or Ogiek native speakers. If you know a linguistic explanation however, let me hear of it.
Is education at fault, then? Of course, it always has to be. If in doubt, blame the education system. If still in doubt, blame colonialism and neo-colonialism. While at it, blame specifically IMF and World Bank. It's all their fault, and you are the victim.
But let's dig a bit deeper. I shall start with a poignant witticism of Mputhumi Ntabeni, which however is every bit as applicable to Kenya. Its light-footed, elegant, self-deprecatory ease should not fool his readers over its depth and accuracy; and Heinrich Heine himself - the master of such ironic style - could not have expressed it better than Ntabeni with this self-characterization:
"A misunderstanding occurred somewhere as he was looking for an education and all they could do was to train him. After that he left in a despairing mood for the city of Port Elizabeth where he re-invented himself."
What Kenyans get in school is mostly training. One of the tenets of having attended a prestigious national school is, of course, to deny exactly that. Starehe forms mind and attitudes, and not just imparts knowledge. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, I am not sure whether some teachers like the one in "Dead Poets' Society" still exist (I sincerely hope they do), but I doubt that they are able to shape the intellectual style of their schools today. The main aim of Kenyan schools presently is to dispense certificates, and to place themselves up in the hierarchy of competition. How many students got their "A"s this year, and did we fire enough lowly "B" candidates right before the exams to tipple the scales of average? Certificates of chances, which - of course - are worth ever less, the more of them float the market. Then there is the exam rat-race itself. I thought that the French national obsession with central exams and respective placements on a ranking list was already something unique, one of those gallicisms that make them stand apart from the lowly commoners outside the hexagon (such as successfully marketing underwhelming wines with overwhelming prices); but Kenyans beat them easily there.
And tell me about just one secondary school where there is (if only optional) good and thorough native language education (what some speakers, a bit derisively, call "vernacular", from the high seat of their four-wheel-drive when they are visiting the relas in shags). And no, Kiswahili does *NOT* count as native language, outside the coast area. Sorry OO - but you know that I am right here. English is a true secondary language for some (I admit), but only for few, and their number certainly is not higher in Tanzania, Uganda or Malawi than in Kenya.
Why is, then, that a sensible and warm-hearted newpaper article such as "Social revolution can end domestic violence" by Okeng’o Bwo’biria in the "Standard" of 8th Dec 2005, is written in such an incredibly dry, drivelling and lifeless English? Does he appear as dusty, crinkled and dried when he speaks Kiswahili, Dholuo or Sheng (the latter of course only if he be young enough and still in touch)? Probably not. Why then the English preference for emptiness, stilted style, nominal constructions all over, and as few verbs as possible? Why the option for boredom instead of liveliness? Why abstraction in lieu of down-to-earth examples? Why these ubiquitous long, meandering sentence constructions which menace to choke the last drop of substance, like vines killing their tree ? Why such a hideous phrase as "We need to re-strategise on how to disseminate information on how to resolve social conflicts especially within family units." Can't someone just *cane* the guy?! After all, we learn though pain ("pathos mathei"); and your primary school headmaster was maybe, as we realize now, not _entirely_ wrong with his heavy-handed approach.
Why is it that an intelligent femme-de-lettres like Wambui Mwangi (associate professor of political sciences in Toronto), who has been a book-worm since her earliest childhood days (as she proudly proclaims on her own blog, thus I don't spill any secrets by stating so, mind you), lapses into a vile post-modernist jargon and gibberish every time she tackles any abstract topic? And immerses herself in an "English" so fraught with abstraction, so replete with Butlerisms and the latest jargon fads, that any substance successfully hides behind the smoke screen? That any real original thought immediately vanishes in a hole in the ground like a naked mole-rat?
Lastly, let's have a look at a not-so-kenyan Kenyan, the writer Binyavanga Wainaina (if you did not already know him from "Kwani?", you probably looked twice at the name; his family is rooted west of the border). His English is lively, expressive, and warm, subtle and forceful just as necessity may command it, and of course free from regional mannerisms unless he *chooses* to employ them (and he usually makes a good choice). He touches ground in every sentence, and because he touches ground and has a firm footing, he has a stable position to observe the stars. He has, in other words, grown roots in this language. How he did it, I do not know for sure (but we know what he wrote about himself: "For most of my life, I have lived inside the pages of fiction. I fell in love with novels at 7, and never looked back").
Reading alone however does hardly suffice, and reading too much of too bad, is even a counter-indication (we are what we eat, as Wambui Mwangi has nicely proven with her linguistic junkfood experiment, to her own detriment). But what I do know is what Wainaina wrote in his article "Discovering home" (incidentally, it won him fame and the Caine Prize; I always marvel when literary juries choose somebody worthy, probably out of sheer happenstance):
"We are quiet for a while. English was a mistake. Where I am fluent, she is stilted. I switch to Swahili and she pours herself into another person: talkative, aggressive, a person who must have a Tupac t-shirt stashed away somewhere."
Why?
Just why, stilted? The young self-assertive Maasai girl to whom B.W. talked, after all had all the English education she could have at St. Teresa's Girls, and not less of it than in Kiswahili, presumably...
Alexander
(on the ground, unstilted)
But of course, this webboard is not an exclusive OO outlet; he only started it. It is what its writers make of it.
The usual response quip in Usenet (and over the 'Net in general) to such a petulant complaint as mine is "Well, just write about it yourself, and don't wait for someone else to do it." So, I'll heed the imaginary advice, and choose a topic of my own. Especially since the Nation fora, which I usually frequent, are presently so slow (and often downright inaccessible) that a chameleon in comparison appears quick as a cheetah.
My topic is English. I have frequently wondered why the East African countries (including the Great Lakes) show such marked differences (the construct of a corpus of "East African English", as the Chemnitz-based research group around Josef Schmied attempts for the last 10 years, is just that: a fairly artificial construct). Why is it that Ugandan and Malawian writers so frequently display a better command of English than their Kenyan colleagues? Better here does not mean "different" nor "characterized by different characteristics"; it indeed means, simply and plainly "better" as in "more good". Why does Philip Ochieng's language appear just pretentious and blustering (and often inept, as when he tries to insert Latin phrases in his ramblings, and almost always lands flat on the belly, for the many orthographic and grammatical blunders in his Latin snippets), while Charles Onyango-Obbo (Ugandan) is plain good, and Mputhumi Ntabeni (South Africa) impresses us with both brilliance and depth?
I do not want to ascribe such differences to tribe alone (or, in the speak of today's political correctness in academia and NGO-space, to ethnic affiliation and heritage). There exist already too many old corny jokes about "Apollodor Horatio Wilberforce Otieno", his three-piece suit and pretentious English, jokes which are just that: old and corny. I see no innate language characteristic of Dholuo, Dhopadhola, Acholi etc. pp. that would enable their speakers to grasp and handle English better and more subtly than, say, Kiembu or Ogiek native speakers. If you know a linguistic explanation however, let me hear of it.
Is education at fault, then? Of course, it always has to be. If in doubt, blame the education system. If still in doubt, blame colonialism and neo-colonialism. While at it, blame specifically IMF and World Bank. It's all their fault, and you are the victim.
But let's dig a bit deeper. I shall start with a poignant witticism of Mputhumi Ntabeni, which however is every bit as applicable to Kenya. Its light-footed, elegant, self-deprecatory ease should not fool his readers over its depth and accuracy; and Heinrich Heine himself - the master of such ironic style - could not have expressed it better than Ntabeni with this self-characterization:
"A misunderstanding occurred somewhere as he was looking for an education and all they could do was to train him. After that he left in a despairing mood for the city of Port Elizabeth where he re-invented himself."
What Kenyans get in school is mostly training. One of the tenets of having attended a prestigious national school is, of course, to deny exactly that. Starehe forms mind and attitudes, and not just imparts knowledge. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, I am not sure whether some teachers like the one in "Dead Poets' Society" still exist (I sincerely hope they do), but I doubt that they are able to shape the intellectual style of their schools today. The main aim of Kenyan schools presently is to dispense certificates, and to place themselves up in the hierarchy of competition. How many students got their "A"s this year, and did we fire enough lowly "B" candidates right before the exams to tipple the scales of average? Certificates of chances, which - of course - are worth ever less, the more of them float the market. Then there is the exam rat-race itself. I thought that the French national obsession with central exams and respective placements on a ranking list was already something unique, one of those gallicisms that make them stand apart from the lowly commoners outside the hexagon (such as successfully marketing underwhelming wines with overwhelming prices); but Kenyans beat them easily there.
And tell me about just one secondary school where there is (if only optional) good and thorough native language education (what some speakers, a bit derisively, call "vernacular", from the high seat of their four-wheel-drive when they are visiting the relas in shags). And no, Kiswahili does *NOT* count as native language, outside the coast area. Sorry OO - but you know that I am right here. English is a true secondary language for some (I admit), but only for few, and their number certainly is not higher in Tanzania, Uganda or Malawi than in Kenya.
Why is, then, that a sensible and warm-hearted newpaper article such as "Social revolution can end domestic violence" by Okeng’o Bwo’biria in the "Standard" of 8th Dec 2005, is written in such an incredibly dry, drivelling and lifeless English? Does he appear as dusty, crinkled and dried when he speaks Kiswahili, Dholuo or Sheng (the latter of course only if he be young enough and still in touch)? Probably not. Why then the English preference for emptiness, stilted style, nominal constructions all over, and as few verbs as possible? Why the option for boredom instead of liveliness? Why abstraction in lieu of down-to-earth examples? Why these ubiquitous long, meandering sentence constructions which menace to choke the last drop of substance, like vines killing their tree ? Why such a hideous phrase as "We need to re-strategise on how to disseminate information on how to resolve social conflicts especially within family units." Can't someone just *cane* the guy?! After all, we learn though pain ("pathos mathei"); and your primary school headmaster was maybe, as we realize now, not _entirely_ wrong with his heavy-handed approach.
Why is it that an intelligent femme-de-lettres like Wambui Mwangi (associate professor of political sciences in Toronto), who has been a book-worm since her earliest childhood days (as she proudly proclaims on her own blog, thus I don't spill any secrets by stating so, mind you), lapses into a vile post-modernist jargon and gibberish every time she tackles any abstract topic? And immerses herself in an "English" so fraught with abstraction, so replete with Butlerisms and the latest jargon fads, that any substance successfully hides behind the smoke screen? That any real original thought immediately vanishes in a hole in the ground like a naked mole-rat?
Lastly, let's have a look at a not-so-kenyan Kenyan, the writer Binyavanga Wainaina (if you did not already know him from "Kwani?", you probably looked twice at the name; his family is rooted west of the border). His English is lively, expressive, and warm, subtle and forceful just as necessity may command it, and of course free from regional mannerisms unless he *chooses* to employ them (and he usually makes a good choice). He touches ground in every sentence, and because he touches ground and has a firm footing, he has a stable position to observe the stars. He has, in other words, grown roots in this language. How he did it, I do not know for sure (but we know what he wrote about himself: "For most of my life, I have lived inside the pages of fiction. I fell in love with novels at 7, and never looked back").
Reading alone however does hardly suffice, and reading too much of too bad, is even a counter-indication (we are what we eat, as Wambui Mwangi has nicely proven with her linguistic junkfood experiment, to her own detriment). But what I do know is what Wainaina wrote in his article "Discovering home" (incidentally, it won him fame and the Caine Prize; I always marvel when literary juries choose somebody worthy, probably out of sheer happenstance):
"We are quiet for a while. English was a mistake. Where I am fluent, she is stilted. I switch to Swahili and she pours herself into another person: talkative, aggressive, a person who must have a Tupac t-shirt stashed away somewhere."
Why?
Just why, stilted? The young self-assertive Maasai girl to whom B.W. talked, after all had all the English education she could have at St. Teresa's Girls, and not less of it than in Kiswahili, presumably...
Alexander
(on the ground, unstilted)