In Kenya's Sea of Tongues, Literary Possibilities Flow
The default assumption that one or two languages must prevail over the others keeps Africa’s literary landscape from harnessing the benefits of the rich linguistic culture present in the everyday, writes award-winning Kenyan author Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor.
Illustration by Mia Coleman
“But what of Kenyan English or Nigerian English?” I asked him. “Aren’t these now local languages?”
He looked at me, aghast. “It’s like the enslaved being happy that theirs is a local version of enslavement,” he said. “English is not an African language. French is not. Spanish is not. Kenyan or Nigerian English is nonsense. That’s an example of normalised abnormality. The colonised trying to claim the coloniser’s language is a sign of the success of enslavement. It’s very embarrassing.”
—Carey Baraka in conversation with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in The Guardian.
Nairobi lends credence to the myth that the sheer diversity of human languages is a result of madness. Here, in the city of my being—my birth, rage, and desire—we live on Babel’s ruins. It is midday, Tuesday, inside the micro-cosmopolis that is the Nairobi City Market. Originally intended for the exclusive use of European merchants and remade early in the twentieth century into the city’s main trading outlet, City Market eluded post-independence politicians’ attempts to seize the land on which it stands, and today, is an official national moment, a symbolic recognition made even more poignant by the polyglotism of the place.
Making a beeline to the meat section for tilapia from Nam Lolwe, the Dholuo name for the border-defying great African lake, I hear Kenya’s official languages, English and Kiswahili, alongside the many more unofficial ones such as Gujarati, Urdu, Gĩkũyũ, Luhya, Kamba and, increasingly, Somali. I hear, too, Yoruba, Igbo, and West-African pidgin amid the bustle and the hustle, the call and response of traders, customers, and their bounty. Arriving at the attenuated fish vendor who’s been in this place since the time of Methuselah, I hear him tease his Chinese customer, using Mandarin words for the assorted fruits of the sea before him.
There is something uncanny and magical about how languages behave in a space like this, how they are seized, or ease their way into the tongue. I listen to how words from different tongues alchemise themselves to enable exchange, trade, meaning, and information; how Mandarin blends with Kiswahili to re-connect and re-imagine worlds. It recalls Nairobi’s unbridled, open-souled embrace of fluidity, symbolised by its always-evolving relationship with Sheng’, a primarily English-Swahili vessel and convergence point for Kenya’s language worlds—nearly seventy, by most counts.
It was here, in this Nairobi, where I first met Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s story worlds: Weep Not, Child (1964), The River Between (1965), A Grain of Wheat (1967), and Petals of Blood (1977). In the pages of these works, I heard the myriad voices of our Kenyan home, infused with the emotions of a struggling-seeking people—a tapestry of desire, defiance, and belonging, steeped in memory and the hopeful intent of nation-building. Although I read the works in English, I did so as one who was also familiar with the cadences and transferences from the vast Kenyan linguistic landscape.
I was not aware, then, of the emerging debate surrounding the language of our stories, nor the marginalisation faced by those outside the Gĩkũyũ origin story, conflated for political reasons with the Kenya story. This was in the latter years of the regime of Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president projected as a national liberator. It was a season shadowed by the tragic suppression of those associated with the opposition and the legacy of the assassinated Tom Mboya, my family included. Our language, Dholuo, set our people apart from the rest of the Kenyan nation, making us the designated pariahs, scapegoats, and troublemakers.
Those books by Ngũgĩ became a lens through which I could begin to understand the character of power, the game of political shadows, and the nature of post-independence African relations. They helped make sense of the prejudices my family, along with others of the non-Gĩkũyũ ethnicity endured, revealing them to be outrages that were neither singular nor unique. Ngũgĩ’s characters—Njoroge, Waiyaki, Mugo, Mumbi, Warui, and Waitherero—became touchstones and lightning rods for the Kenyan situation, its silences, and growing unease with the discontents of the country’s Herculean endeavour to forge a unified nation out of over seventy-five disparate, relatively autonomous peoples mediating a national vision through English and Kiswahili.
Out of these, and similar stories by writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Buchi Emecheta, and Grace Ogot, among others, I could meet the Africa of our aspiration, and also despair. Books from the African Writers Series would shape my perspective of the notion of languages in Africa, as vessels through which stories travel to meet their people.
In those days, Ngũgĩ had yet to harden his stance on languages. He had yet to turn his back on English and accuse African writers on the continent, himself included, who write in English or other colonial tongues of wilfully cutting ourselves off from social and cultural memory accessible only, apparently, when writing in our indigenous African languages. Such writers, in what would become the Ngũgĩan view on African literature, were both victims and participants in linguistic famine—a larger set of historical processes through which successive administrations slowly starved African languages of the constant tending needed to keep them alive.
Decades later, with two novels in English behind me and a third on the way, I concede that Ngũgĩ makes a compelling point. Language is, indeed, a means to memory and literature is a powerful way to access, preserve and transmit memory, gifting future generations a sense of being longer than their own lifetimes. Yet, I also worry that we risk underestimating the remarkable nature of creativity and the way African languages absorb and magnetise diverse influences. This appropriative sensibility is a result of the multilingual settings in which our languages developed, gifting us the superpower of code-switching as circumstances demand. In this setting, English and other colonial tongues are just languages, no more or less exceptional than the rest.
“Outside, it turned dark, the harsh California sun fading into dusk. Ngũgĩ tapped the table. “In Gĩkũyũ, this is metha,” he said. “Where is this word from?”
“Kiswahili,” I said.
“And where do the Swahili borrow it from?”
I didn’t know.
“From the Portuguese,” Ngũgĩ said. “This is how languages work; they borrow from each other.”
“Is it possible to have multiple first languages?” I asked. “I’ve been thinking of English, Kiswahili, Sheng’ and Dholuo as all being my first languages, since I speak all of them with native fluency.”
“I think,” said Ngũgĩ, “you are lying to yourself.”
—Carey Baraka versus Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, continued.
So, what if the problem is not one of first language versus not, official versus other, indigenous on one side and colonial on the other? What if the problem is that we have accepted the limiting Western framework of linguistic hegemony, where language is singular, coincides with and reinforces regional and national identity and borders, and must be kept pure of external influence for it to serve its role of unifying people within?
Rethinking the problem in this way allows us to look beyond the choices of individual writers and to resist simplistic binaries that, while compelling, do not reflect the historically dynamic, pluriversal, and multicultural settings from which African literature emerges. It allows us to imagine possibilities of a landscape in which languages are not in competition with each other but instead, are shaped and reshaped through interaction with each other. In this landscape, with its immense array and diversity, its echoes in so many lyrical tongues, the Ngũgĩan notion that writing in English means continuing the neocolonial relations we often complain about is a claim one sits with uneasily.
But if turning our backs on so-called colonial languages isn’t the answer, then what is? A good start might be finding new ways to describe Africa’s language zones. Terms like Lusophone, Anglophone, Arabophone, and Francophone simply do not suffice. Interrogating these labels was one of the sources of inspiration for the Macondo Literary Festival, which I co-founded with the journalist Anja Bengelstorff. For four years, the festival has invited writers, audiences, scholars, and others to converge around ideas and provocations in hopes that what will emerge is a fresh, collective African origin story that can hold our complex imaginative, linguistic diversity, geographies, and contradictions in the same frame, without homogenising. Themed around Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott’s “The Sea is History”, the 2024 festival aimed to explore Africa’s linguistic confluences and the continent’s dialogue with the waters and maritime imagination. At the Macondo Baraza, a cool, sheltered meeting place, we curated an intentional space for Kiswahili—the most widely spoken language on the continent—creating room for scholarly discourse, creative exchanges, and side conversations on the poetics, history, and cultural resonances of the language.
Kiswahili emerged as a language of multiple dialects through the interaction of East African languages and Arabic, borrowing from Indian, Portuguese, and Persian along the way. It has been expressed in Devanagari, Arabic, and Roman scripts, and underwent standardisation at the hands of competing European missionaries, with the English prevailing in the end to produce Kiswahili Sanifu, standard Kiswahili, which post-independence leaders accepted and promoted. Today, over a thousand years later, this language still connects people living around Africa’s great lakes region and the Indian Ocean—what we referred to as the Swahili Sea, or Ziwa Kuu, at the festival. Like Ziwa Kuu, Kiswahili is in constant dialogue with its surroundings, shaping them as much as it is shaped by them.
Does this complex history diminish the Africanness of Kiswahili and its potential as a means to memory, or does it enrich and further propel it? Has Kiswahili been corrupted by its appropriation into Sheng’ in urban Kenya? Or does Kiswahili’s history not suggest that language, like art, is an ever-evolving canvas, continually reinterpreted by the hands that shape it and the tongues that taste it?
Kiswahili nonetheless suggests that another way to think about languages is through the landscapes that most shape their histories, words, sounds, and rhythms—desert, forest, savannah, coast, delta, valley, archipelago. This could ease anxieties about linguistic hierarchies and purity, which seek to save African languages through isolation from interactions and linguistic phenomena shaping the rest of the world. Landscapes as linguistic zones can help us envision a literary model that values fluidity, cacophony, and babel, allowing us to make the most of the polyglossia prevalent not only in Nairobi and Kenya, but much of the African continent.
Similarly, translation shines another complementary path. Acclaimed translator Wangui wa Goro has long asserted that translation can tap into the continent’s rich literary culture as translators ferry not just words but worlds from one locale to another. Likewise, the eminent Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne describes translation as transmutation—a sacred act of transforming socially and culturally situated meaning for it to be legible in other linguistic contexts. It closes the distance between two or more seemingly different groups of humans, according to Diagne.
Yet, translation as a creative, literary act remains an underappreciated practice. While reliable statistics are hard to come by, translation appears a largely marginal activity, with more weight given to immediate commercial viability over long-term social and cultural value. For instance, much is still made about how there has yet to be an authoritative translation of Things Fall Apart, considered one of the greats among great African novels, from English into the author Chinua Achebe’s native Igbo. This situation speaks to how publishing cycles, along with our policies, institutions, and economies, are intimately tied to the ancient, monolinguistic regime. For now.
Will it change?
Perhaps. But it requires a Pan-Africanist vision deeply rooted in an embrace, rather than an aversion to multilingualism. For questions about language and African literature are not separate from historical and philosophical questions about who we are, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going.
