chelangat

Cherop nudged the male passenger in front of her and signalled him to open the car window. It was a torrid afternoon. The air outside was dry and still. She had sat in the car for twenty minutes and sweat beads had begun forming on her face. She kept adjusting and readjusting her face mask, pulling it forward sometimes as though to create room for air circulation. She let loose her braids that she had secured with a band at the back of her head, pulled out a flimsy scarf from her handbag and fanned herself with it. There were only three of them in the car, waiting for one more passenger to arrive before the van would leave for the SGR terminus located in Mombasa’s Miritini area. And soon, she arrived. A short, plump and fair skinned woman. Visible parts of her face shimmered from foundation. She who wore a long bulky blonde weave that fell on her back.  Cherop could not help wondering how Mombasa women managed to comfortably wear weaves in such hot weather, considering she had more...

  When one month ago Prof. Ngugi made his acceptance speech in Gikuyu after being the 31st recipient of the Catalonia International Prize for his distinguished and courageous literary work and his defense of African Languages based on the notion of language as culture and collective memory", people talked. People talked as they were wont to do. People talked because the good professor was not addressing a council of elders somewhere in Limuru but was addressing the government of Catalonia in Gikuyu. While a few people hailed him, many more others scoffed at him. And in the latter's disapproval was an almost amusingly repressed disdain that had me thinking that there had never been a more illuminating moment about how little we regard our African Languages today. And it occurred to me that the Catalonian government knows something that we do not. That to allow people to express themselves in their own language is to give them dignity. Because really there is not a language that...