Luhya Articulation stereotype

 

By Luseka Waliaula

Catherine Kasavuli was a renowned Kenyan journalist and a sweetheart to many who loved her for her fluency and articulation. In December 2022, the curtains closed on her life. In the words of one journalist, she had a face, a voice, and a soul for TV. Many have eulogized her and taken turns in dissecting her life. The comments are in all forms and shapes; from the utterly insensitive ones to the really nice ones.

In a fundraiser, a speaker mentioned that it never occurred to him that Kasavuli was Luhya. He felt that she was too eloquent a speaker and too elaborate to be Luhya  Anyone who was coming to Kenya for the first time would have concluded that being Luhya was a condition where one had issues with articulation. It seems unbecoming to take personally issues said in passing, especially about a soul already departed. Well, sometimes, when statements are left unaddressed, they end up being used as a yardstick to measure reality.

Perhaps we should take a walk in this land of the Luhya to understand, articulation, English, and other related things. The Luhya are one of the Bantu language groups of East Africa. The Bantu story is believed to have begun in the Cameroon-Congo Forest. They are said to have moved along, taking different routes till some went as far as the East African Coast. Their ‘cousins’ went south and ended up occupying the southern part of Africa. So, linguistically speaking, an eastern Bantu like a Kamba and a western one like a Kuria or a Luhya are almost the same.

Of course, some people have alternative views but that is the one that sticks out on the discussion. Narratives about Africa have always had different angles. There is the angle of the likes Ludwig Krapf and the Leakeys. The explores who are famed for being the first ones to discover things about Africa that Africans themselves had lived with since time immemorial. 

“The falls had a name given to it by locals, Mosi a Tunya, meaning smoke that thunders,” one netizen said in response to a YouTube story about the Victoria Falls

                                    mosi a Tunya 

There could not be better statements to dissect the lines in these angles of African stories. A comment about English fluency in a Luhya funeral and another one about one of the most famous water falls in the world. What could they possibly have in common? Well, an underlying ideology perhaps. One that uses fluency in a foreign language to gauge people. A tone that sets forth the assumption that when you are African you need someone or something foreign to make you whole. Your smoke that thunders sounds better by another name. Your fluency in this foreign language shades you of your identity, or so they say.

 Linguistics and politics aside, could it be true that because of how our stories have been told, we outsource our identity and acceptance? Are we using lenses left to us by our former colonial masters to make sense of our identity? 

“Why won’t we stop complaining and move on?”, critics would ask, haven’t the colonial masters been gone for too long?’’ They may have left but apparently some of us are holding onto the past so much. The social media space in this country has never been short of memes and jokes modeled on ethnic stereotypes. Perhaps we are looking at ourselves and others based on stereotypes that were formulated to help the divide and rule system of governance. We see people from other communities as being lesser beings. We need to consider this if we have an interest in challenging some of this cliché stereotypes that have almost become acceptable. This is the only way we can reduce instances where people think being fluent from some communities is ‘unthinkable.’