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This penchant for quoting Shakespeare by local speakers explained |
Many Kenyan speakers have been known to have a penchant for quoting European cultural and political leaders in their speeches and not Africans. If they are not quoting Shakespeare, they are likely to quote such great statesmen as Abraham Lincoln, J.F. Kennedy, and Winston Churchill among others. In this article, Kennedy Buhere writes that the speakers are not entirely to blame. The thrust of his argument is that the West take the utterances of their leaders — whether evil or good leaders — seriously as to keep records of them.
Educated Kenyans have been exposed to the thoughts and actions of European thinkers and politicians more than they have been to thoughts and actions of African thinkers and politicians — thanks to formal educational experience they have had.
All established secondary schools in this country have libraries whose shelves are filled with fiction and non-fiction works from Western civilisation. Great schools are full of fiction and non-fiction books in their libraries — books that European governments —mainly US and UK governments donated to the schools through USAID, UKAID and other agencies.
Students with interest in reading books outside those prescribed by the curriculum are to meet Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and George Orwell for fiction in school libraries; the students will also meet biographies on Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Booker T. Washington, J.F. Kennedy Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill to name but a few.
The student interested in public speaking is likely to meet full or extracts of speeches of Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, J.F. Kennedy, and Winston Churchill and other great European writers and philosophers in the school library.
For example, I first read J.F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech delivered upon his assumption of office in 1961 in a Kakamega High School in 1983. What is more, I also read his Profiles in Courage from that same library. It is in Kennedy’s speech that I first came across statement: “My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” a statement that politicians and other people quote times without number. I have not come across a more emotional statement urging people to be patriotic to their country than this.
Suffice it to say that thoughts of great men and statesmen from the West are easily available in books and now, on the internet. And some of the statements are pithy as to warrant quoting when appropriate to the occasion.
However, some of our politicians have made stirring speeches befitting the occasion they were speaking to. But the speeches are not readily available anywhere — not in books, not in the school libraries, not in anthologies of speeches.
Local writers and historians to blame?
Kenyan historians and textbook writers in English and Kiswahili textbooks have denied Kenyan students the opportunity to read the words of its leaders — judges, statesmen and stateswomen, legislators and private individuals — words that encapsulate diagnosis and solution policy problems they tackle on behalf of Kenyans.Apart from doing research on primary documents — speeches, Acts of Parliament, policy documents, letters, diaries, editorials and news articles in newspapers when writing history books — American historians reproduce actual words of the politicians, judges, journalists in speeches for use by students and general readers. In this way students are able to have firsthand feel of history. Some of these books have found their way in our school libraries.
Books on English grammar and what they call English language arts in the US education system have full or experts of great speeches which are used as teaching aids in English grammar, and composition. None of the books our students use for English grammar, composition have speeches by the founding fathers of this nation.
Public communication
A second reason why our leaders are not quoted is that most of them never took or take public communication seriously. For most of them, standing before an audience is not a solemn duty. Most never take celebratory occasions such as national days, burial ceremonies of men and women who have given exemplary service to this country, seriously.They never give deep thought to the things they say on these occasions.
In public speaking or rhetoric, there is something they call kairos or rhetorical situation — a situation in which something happens, or fails to happen, that compels one to speak out.
American professor of rhetoric, Lloyd Bitzer, argued that the rhetorical discourse that meet the situation “is a response to a situation, in the same sense that an answer comes into existence in response to a question, or a solution in response to a problem.”
We have had so many such defining moments in Kenya but the responses many of our leaders have made to them in words have either been perfunctory which means they never effectively provided verbal solution to the problem or if they were appropriate, were not recorded for wide circulation.Two of the greatest political speeches in Western political communications were during the burial of fallen heroes: Pericles’ Funeral Oration is a famous speech from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War and the Gettysburg Address, the latter by Abraham Lincoln. Both speeches affirm certain enduring values of organised society that is obligatory reading for students in basic educational institutions in the US and other democracies.
For us, funerals are a place to settle scores with our political opponents, regardless of the service the deceased has rendered to the country. We let ideal moments pass when we can, as a nation, continually re-affirm or redefine in stirring language, the goals, values and principles that hold or should hold this country together and the observance of which would make this country great.
Rising statement and women do not therefore have the benefit having read the gist of speeches that earlier men and women made to meet a problem — the speeches having originally been oral and therefore not transcribed for storage and future reference.
We have in effect lost a rich heritage of political or public discourse because our culture is essentially oral in nature. Nobody cares to keep or record stirring speeches and utterances that ably diagnoses and provides answers to a pressing public problem.
This is unlike in the West where every important utterance — whether originally written or spoken — is captured on paper or voice and recorded for future reference.
We don’t do it here. All that Kenyans have are proverbs — the distilled wisdom of our various cultures which Kenyan political leaders, recur to, when they are not quoting European thinkers and philosophers.
There is clearly a need to take public communication much more seriously than we have done in the past. The Ministry of Sports, Arts & Culture could in fact establish an award to honour any of our opinion an policy makers who have, in the course of making our democracy work, have advanced, in speech, the principles and values that define us a nation.
Kennedy Buhere is the Public Communications Officer at the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology.
You can write him at kbuhere@education.go.ke
SOURCE: TUKO NEWS
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