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Mother Tongues with a Western Accent — Indigenous Negotiations with English Language and Narratives in Kenyan Art

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Mother Tongues with a Western Accent — Indigenous Negotiations with English Language and Narratives in Kenyan Art Mother Tongues with a Western Accent — Indigenous Negotiations with English Language and Narratives in Kenyan Art EVAN MWANGI EMBERS OF THE KENYAN CULTURAL GROUP Chelewa Ufike promote their local culture by fusing their messages with M signatures of modernity.1 The name of the group, Chelewa Ufike, is the Swahili expression for ‘better late than never’ or ‘slow but sure’; and, true to their name, Chelewa Ufike seem to be determinedly but cautiously singing and dancing themselves to a global space by nourishing themselves on cultural practices seemingly foreign and antagonistic to local culture. In its performance of cultural songs in which it bemoans foreign- ness as its treats themes ranging from love and AIDS to cross-border trade, Chelewa Ufike members play drums with inscriptions of the Nike swoosh on them. Embedded in the group’s critique of loss of values due to cross- border trading with Tanzania would be expected a critique of the very global corporate culture that the Nike swoosh represents. Borrowed from a local proverbial expression that at once warns against hasty projects and vindicates steady progress, Chelewa Ufike’s name is not an endorsement of the Enlightenment notion of linear progress in which the African village would view its present condition as ‘backward’ and its desired destination to be unqualified westernization. Rather, it articulates the need for nourish- 1 Chelewa Ufike comes from the Tsimba Village, Mwambara Location, near the Indian Ocean coast of Kenya. I am grateful to Dan Teng’o and his colleagues at the Department of Literature, University of Nairobi, for sharing with me their oral literature fieldwork reports on this group. 76 EVAN MWANGI W ⏐ X ment between the local and the foreign for the society to achieve desired development without losing its cherished practices. The ambiguity that informs Chelewa Ufike’s articulation of cultural values using trendy symbols of globalization pervades cultural art-forms in Kenya in a way that calls for critical examination to correct the antago- nistic politics that takes sway in the discussions of decolonization. This article reads the ways in which various Kenyan texts in indigenous lan- guages nourish themselves on English, even when they disagree with im- perialism and colonialism that English cultural texts and language are seen in postcolonial discourse to promote. The discussion examines how Kenyan cultural expression exploits the tragedy of colonialism as a dis- cursive organizing point around which cultural freedom is articulated. We particularly reject the popular notion of local articulation as necessarily being adversarial to foreign expression by demonstrating that local African desires – including anti-Western gestures – are expressed through creations that exploit Western narratives. Promotion of African languages should not be accompanied by the suppression of English language; both sets of lan- guages should be developed for mutual enhancement. The analysis presented in this article is guided by Arjun Appadurai’s view that even in the smallest of societies, with the humblest of technologies and in the most desolate of ecological contexts, the relationship between the production of local subjects and the neighborhoods in which such subjects can be produced, named, and empowered to act socially is a historical and dialectical relation- 2 ship. In postcolonial Kenya, the impact of colonialism as an historical event can- not be ignored in the understanding of contemporary culture. Although Kenyan cultural practices are not completely delimitated by colonialism and Western cultures, they are informed by some of the values and narra- tives that interaction with the West has brought in its train since the infiltra- tion of British missionaries and colonialists in the late-nineteenth century. English language and narratives haunt African discourses, including those that overtly oppose English language and culture. Acceptance of the cen- trality of English language and narratives does not mean celebration of colonialism and the exploitation that the local communities suffered under 2 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minne- apolis: U of Minnesota P , 1996): 181. .
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