Journey to being plain (2)

I’ve always been asked what tribe I am, mainly because I don’t possess what would normally be called tribal attributes. I speak differently, look nothing like people from my ‘community’, heck, I don’t even speak the language. People have a field day trying to guess, and I don’t blame them; you see Kenyans are bred to find identity in their tribal affiliations that’s why even politicians squander public coffers and when accused retreat back to their tribal cocoons saying its they that are being persecuted.

A famous saying goes that “mwacha mila ni mtumwa, na mkosa mila ni mfungwa”, and this I have been reminded ad nauseum. I actually never realized I didn’t speak my mother tongue till I went to boarding school and heard children my age speaking it so effortlessly. I was puzzled! Weren’t adults the only ones who had mastered this? I wondered. It didn’t help much that all of my grandparents died when I was really young so we never really went upcountry…that coupled with the fact that we were born and raised in Mombasa didn’t help matters much.

And so the taunting began…but atleast there were kids from Nairobi who were just as clueless as I was…and coming from Mombasa…I got away by regaling them with tales of the Indian Ocean vast and vicious, telling them how at night beautiful women would rise from the sea to ensnare men and take them away never to be seen or heard of again.

Ironically, although I went to boarding school in the highlands of central province, it was a CRIME to utter even one word of Kikuyu lest you “spoil” your accent!

And so whoever would dare mention an innocuous word like “Ngai” as an expression of shock would have to wear a stinky bone christened “Monto”. Consequently, you had to pass it on to anyone else who thought the no-mother-tongue-rule was a laughing matter. Names would be scribbled and those who wore it twice in one day would be made an example to the rest of us…let’s just day the caning was enough to drive the fear of God into all and sundry.

Come high school and the guessing game began. “Are you sure you’re kikuyu? You look and sound coastal when you speak Swahili (though by then I had adopted the skill of mixing sheng with English slang so as to mask the Swahili accent). And oh this went on and on till I cleared high school. To date I’ve been called Nigerian, Luhya, Somali and a whole gamut of tribes I have no recollection of. Well, it didn’t bother me much till the post election violence when suddenly I got a new tag…vote stealer

Then it finally sank in that like many kids born and bred in urban areas, I only spoke two languages well. Nairobi being cosmopolitan, I knew of friends who didn’t even speak Swahili and had the option of taking it as a language in high school along side French, German or Spanish. It didn’t matter though, as long as you had one name that showed your parents or grandparents hailed from a certain section where mist and a snow capped mountain were it’s main features…you were just a vote stealer like the rest of “your people.”

What struck a chord though, was that for the first time, I started to look at my friends along tribal lines. I’d have those “Oh my gosh, so and so’s second name is …which means they are….but geez, they sure look nothing like people of his/her community” moments. Kenya was now polarized along tribal lines and depending on what name you possessed, you were termed an enemy of democracy.

Then the weirdness gained momentum, even my own cousins who grew up upcountry started to put their two sense in the whole debate. My siblings and I were seen as “traitors” somewhat because we didn’t possess the collective tribal identity. We, together with a couple of other way older cousins who were also born and brought up here and didn’t speak a word of kikuyu as well, were now labeled “waswahili.”

Funny how one of them now has a daughter who is a “Swahili” just like us.

Moral of this rather dull story is, only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches. We constantly criticize (me included) thinking we are better, or could have handled the situation better had we been the ones facing it. We take the moral high ground, using religion and unfounded bias to justify our stance when it suits us. We condemn adulterers yet we fornicate, we point fingers at those we perceive to be morally deficient as if we are both judge and jury. We forget only God can judge because He alone is infallible and beyond prejudice.

What goes around comes around it is said, sooner or later you’ll look back and say, “I wish I didn’t say anything…here I am caught up in the same maze.

Kibali