No Hurry in Africa by Brendan Clerkin Read Free Book Online Page A

English used as a lingua franca among the more educated people, especially in Nairobi. Many Kenyans I met, who had only attended primary school, could speak several languages. Multi-lingualism is a fact of life for them. They would put in the shade those of us who struggle to learn a second language.
    However, in the remote area where I was living, a lot of people spoke only the Akamba tribal language (called Kikamba), with perhaps a few words and phrases in Swahili. The Akamba have a bit of a hang-up about speaking Swahili, going back to the days when the coastal Swahili people traded the Akamba as slaves to the Arabs. A minority of rural Kenyans can speak limited English, but hardly anyone living in the area around Nyumbani had mastered the language of the old colonial power. Most of the people with whom I became friendly were the ones able to converse in English, like Nancy, Nzoki, Kimanze, and Mwangangi among others.
    Swahili is an easier language to speak than Kikamba, partly because of the range of learning materials in it. As it is understood throughout East Africa, I devoted myself to learning Swahili instead of the Akamba tribal language. As languages go, Swahili is fairly easy to learn, and I picked up quite a bit early on. Sometimes, others would tell me Kikamba or Kikuyu tribal words, and then they would laugh when I garbled three languages in one sentence by accident. The problem was that it somehow all turned into ‘African’ in my head.
    After a month or two, I was conversing in simple functional situations entirely through Swahili. Often, when conversing with Kenyans, if my Swahili or theirs was not up to it, there would be someone else on hand who could translate between English and the tribal languages, or between English and Swahili. Sometimes though, I simply had to shrug my shoulders in bewilderment. At other times, the lines would be crossed quite literally. I recall an occasion when I was using an old ‘wind-up’ telephone. The operator kept me talking for ten minutes enquiring about my life history and, by the time I got through, the line was hopelessly crossed, making communication impossible in any language.
    Time and technology move on, and mobile phones began to appear in the hands of Kenyans after I arrived. Nobody ever had any phone-credit in them, so they ‘flashed’ whomever they wanted to ring. When I first heard the term, I pictured a woman standing on a hill, lifting up her skirt and catching the eye of the friend she wanted to contact. In fact, ‘flashing’ means they wait until your phone beeps and then hang up—time after time, incessantly and rather pointlessly. Even without the aid of any phone-credit, though, every tiny bit of gossip races up and down and back again among the Akamba faster than a Nairobi taxi crashing a red light. They love to gossip; it is part of their amiable nature.
    In Akambaland, I had discovered probably the only race of people outside Donegal and Derry who say ‘yes’ for ‘hello.’ It made me feel at home! They also said ‘good morning’ at any time of day at all—even as I was retiring to bed for the night. There were other examples of linguistic confusion. They would say strange things like ‘I am coming’ as they walked away from me, and used peculiar and perplexing English phrases such as ‘I met you absent’—which means that you were not there when he or she called, and ‘I walked the wrong number tomorrow.’ Your guess is as good as mine as to the meaning of that one.
    An Akamba wrote a letter to the Daily Nation newspaper (Kenya’s Irish Independent) in October complaining that it was a conspiracy against their tribe that the English alphabet has a letter ‘h’ when the Akamba are incapable of pronouncing it correctly. Insecurity with the ‘h’ sound means they often say ‘he’ for ‘she,’ and ‘she’ for ‘he.’ Like the Japanese, they pronounce ‘r’ as ‘l’ and’ l’ as ‘r’; also ‘f’ as ‘p’ and