The piece I did last week asking all to embrace the new ‘nakulombotove’ language had me almost lynched at the altar of public opinion. This week, we are running some of the feedback that we received from our readers from various platforms.
Peter Njau, an avid reader of this column emailed that ‘sheng is good, lyrical and poetic but doesn’t sound nice when used in the wrong context.’ ‘The new shade, shembeteng’, he added, ‘sounds silly and might be transient.’
Wanjiku Gatheru opined that the users of that language are just angry youths venting their anger-and the new speak will fizzle out soon. Only time will tell.
Kweyu Nijj was of dissenting opinion and argued that the emerging shade of sheng will eventually morph into a new language and we will have to learn it at some point.
Wanjeri the globetrotting girl from our hills said that she lost respect for sheng once she realised that most of its speakers have problems articulating themselves in other languages. In short, she was saying that the new shade of sheng might turn out to be the only language these kids know - which is quite unfortunate.
Nyanyuki Tito, a fellow columnist in this paper, threatened me with a strong rebuttal which I am yet to come across. Kamaley, my cousin, whom I didn’t know reads these pieces fined me a kanuthu of his favourite gin for supporting what he calls a mongrel of a language. Beth Ruga was of more sobering opinion: we folks of before computers are slowly becoming extinct in these fast-moving times. Waweru Jonathan reminisced that back in the day, when he used to live in Eastlands, youngsters used slang to make it hard for their parents to grasp what they were talking about. Now, all of us grown folks are now the parents being cut off by the new language and that’s why we strongly disapprove of it.
Why do I go with the last two opinions? When all of us old folks in the forties and fifties were shouting Moi must go back in the 90s, a new generation was born. That generation has now come of age-they are the kids bobbing their heads to music with earphones stuck deep into their skulls.
To them, Moi sounds like a distant tyrant, the way Napoleon sounded to us. They have literally come of age with the internet-reason why Sociologists call them digital natives or Generation Z.
Every generation has a conceit of itself which elevates it, in its own opinion, above that which comes after it. Our dislike for these internet natives is merely a representation of a common pattern in the human cycle of disliking, detesting, accepting, and then finally surrendering to a new generation. It has happened over history and is now happening with my generation.
The differences between the generations may be unsettling for now, but its history merely repeating itself, and everything will gradually fall in place. Soon, these kids speaking shembeteng will be everywhere sitting gravely behind corporate desks in jeans and running schools sporting Mohawks.
They will be managing our taxes and running the government wearing dreadlocks and taking our blood pressure while whispering ‘mzae,wacha nikupimeteng’.
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