Waste no time with ‘Sheng’

By JENNIFER MUCHIRI

Any celebration of Sheng in Kenya is a waste of time. The amount of time Kenyans spend arguing for the consideration of Sheng as a language is worrying since it could be spent holding more productive debate.

To begin with, Sheng is a class issue. You will not find children who live west of Uhuru Highway speaking Sheng. Those that propagate it do not speak it, and neither do their children.

We can argue for eons, but Sheng can never be institutionalised in the manner of West African Pidgin or Caribbean Creole, because it is nowhere near these two, either in form or usage.

For example, Sheng is transitory. It is temporary in places and times where and when used. Some of the Sheng words used in Kaloleni, for instance, may be totally different from those used in Kangemi to refer to the same thing. Furthermore, the words keep changing and what was used to refer to one thing three months ago is different today.

In West Africa, Pidgin is so institutionalised that it is used in offices, something that we can never expect of Sheng.

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Any debate we can hold on the possibility of promoting Sheng as a language is only idealistic. Due to our past as a British colony, we are still very much in love with English, and there is no time this language we were so generously bequeathed by our colonial masters will move, even slightly, to make room for the charlatan that is Sheng.

English is the preferred medium of instruction in our institutions of learning, and it is extremely worrying to see students imagining they can write compositions and term papers in Sheng.

Is it any wonder that children who attend private schools in the more affluent parts of the city speak and write better English than their counterparts in the ‘hood’?

The latter compete to see who boasts the latest Sheng ‘vocabulary’, yet they do not hold such competitions to determine who writes better compositions in the Queen’s language.

Children from upcountry, who have no idea what Sheng is or how it is used, barring challenges caused by mother tongue interference, also write better English than the urban children who use Sheng.

I have met university students, studying Literature, Linguistics, and Communication no less, who cannot construct a single grammatically correct sentence in English. When answering questions in class, they use a combination of English, Kiswahili, and Sheng. It is worse when they write because the work is incomprehensible.

The situation has been worsened by mobile phones, where young people try to hold a sensible conversation in 144 characters. The result?  We have more of am gr8t, lol, and al c u sun, finding their way into academic debates.

Soon (or should I say sun?), if advocates of Sheng have their way, teachers will be required to take courses in Sheng to enable them teach effectively.

Sheng may be wonderful lingua franca in the ‘hood’ but it cannot be used in class or office, or in intellectual debate anywhere in the world! Debate on this is, therefore, a question of those who know making an argument on behalf of those who do not know that Sheng can only take you as far as negotiating fare in a matatu, seducing an impressionable dame wa mtaa or deciphering Ngeli ya genge.

Dr Muchiri teaches Literature at the University of Nairobi.