African languages

At a loss for words

About half of the 6000 languages spoken in the world are under threat of disappearing forever. Matthias Muindi talks to an African family that has lost its mother tongue.

WHEN asked about his ethnicity, 10-year-old Jeff Machogu has no reservations. "I'm a Luo," he says.

His father, Robert Oduol, one of Kenya's top journalists, just shakes his head as Jeff's younger brother, Roy Odhiambo, screams in the background: "I'm also a Luo."

The boys are convinced that their family is Luo -- Kenya's second-largest ethnic group -- because they speak the language, observe the community's customs, and have a rural home near Lake Victoria, the Luo heartland.

The boys' father knows otherwise.

"My family," he says, "is descended from the Suba ethnic group, a community that fled to Kenya and Tanzania fearing political persecution in Uganda in the 16th century.

"Therefore," he continues, "Jeff and Roy are Suba, a fact they don't know yet."

Oduol has not told them of their true ethnic background -- he doesn't want them to develop an identity crisis at a young age.

But when he does reveal their ethnic origins, it will be as inconsequential as it is symbolic -- the Suba are extinct, courtesy of two centuries of assimilation by their more aggressive neighbours, the Luo.

The result has been hybrid Luos such as Oduol -- fluent in Luo, with Luo wives and names -- who cannot speak their extinct mother tongue, practise their culture, or pass their own history on to the next generation.

The fate that has befallen Oduol's people is similar to that of 15 other ethnic groups in Kenya.

Currently, 500 to 600 of Africa's 1400 or so languages are in decline, with 250 under immediate threat of disappearing forever, according to a recent report by Unesco (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation).

Nigeria and East Africa (Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania) are two areas that have the most moribund or seriously endangered tongues.

Of these, Kenya's indigenous languages appear to be faring the worst.

With 16 languages on the death list, Kenya far surpasses neighbouring Uganda, where six languages are under threat, and Tanzania, where eight languages are soon to disappear.

Unesco not only confirms the demise of the Suba language and eight others, but has issued a red flag for four more groups whose identity and language will soon disappear if authorities don't do something fast.

The other dead languages are: Oropom, Lorkoti, Yaaku, Sogoo, Kore, Segeju, Omotik and Kinare.

Two other languages are classified as "seriously endangered": Dahaalo, spoken in Kenya's coastal area, and Burji, which is being wiped out in the northern district of Marsabit.

Only pockets of Burji speakers reside in Marsabit. Most were killed and thousands fled following ethnic violence in 1995.

Experts consider a community's
language to be "endangered" when at least 30 percent of its children no longer learn it.

The languages El Molo, Bong'om, and Tiriki, spoken by a sub-tribe of the populous western Kenya Bantu Luhya community, are also endangered.

Although El Molo -- Kenya's smallest community, occupying some of the remotest parts of northern Kenya -- is isolated from outside influence, fears are that the culture is on its way out.

Frequent raids by nomadic tribesmen from southern Ethiopia, together with disease, have left the El Molo people teetering on the brink of extinction.

Matters have been made worse by sustained assimilation through raids and intermarriage by their more populous neighbours, the Turkana.

Larger groups near the tiny community of the Tiriki have laid similar siege.

Two populous sub-tribes of the Luhya community, the Idakho and Maragoli, as well as the Nandi, have been fighting to linguistically obliterate the Tiriki for most of the last 50 years.

This is by means of intermarriage, encroachment on Tiriki land, and encouraging Tiriki to seek employment outside their homeland.

The loss of Africa's indigenous
languages does not surprise Ezekiel Alembi, a linguistics lecturer at Nairobi's Kenyatta University.

"The current socio-economic systems in Africa mean that some of the languages can't survive for long," he says, pointing an accusing finger at urbanisation and a lack of parental guidance. "These two are the biggest threat to diversity of languages."

Jared Diamond, an American physiology professor at the University of California, says the loss of language can mean the death of a culture.

"Languages carry the culture, the literature and the music of that particular community," he says.

Because language is the vehicle of culture, Diamond says, when a people lose their language they tend to lose their cultural identity and often end up demoralised, with a low image of themselves. This then has an impact on their ability to earn a living.

Wanguhu Nganga, a Kenyan politician who has researched issues of ethnicity, blames the loss of local language on intermarriages, ethnic fights and the penchant by the government for multi-ethnic languages such as English and Kiswahili.

These, he says, have been promoted at the expense of the vernaculars, especially in urban areas, ensuring a slow but steady eradication of local languages.

It is a situation Robert Oduol knows all too well. For him, the exit of his Suba ancestors has meant a loss of his cultural identity and history.

"Language is one of the cornerstones of any culture and society," Oduol says. "It cements the unique identity of a group, its history, and expresses that particular group's concerns and needs in its vocabulary.

"Sadly I don't have that," the father says, pointing out that he doesn't "have any Suba folktales to tell my kids". -- Gemini News

*Nairobi-based journalist Matthias Muindi currently works for Africanews, an online feature service.