O-Swahili

This essay explores the idea of Kenya as a linguistic contact zone from a creative writer's point of view and uses the ironic neologism 'O-Swahili', a term fusing Swahili and the Nilotic languages spoken in western Kenya, as an inspirational marker for the multilingual lifeworlds that intersect in contemporary Kenyan society where people typically learn to navigate their lives in at least three different languages. English, Swahili, and the more than sixty further languages spoken in Kenya do not constitute self-enclosed entities generating mutually exclusive worlds of meaning, but form a cultural and linguistic contact zone where multivocality is the order of the day and languages themselves are changed, reformed, revived, added onto, and sustained in new and vigorous ways. Swahili and English in Kenya exist as 'Viswahili' (rather than Kiswahili) and 'Englishes' (rather than English) and - together with a wide array of cultural syncretisms to be found in music and other forms of popular culture - testify to diversity rather than homogeneity. Literary creation in this contact zone becomes a struggle to articulate the ineffable and language becomes a space and vehicle through which the feeling of a story can be discovered, learned, experienced, and eventually moved (through sounds and gestures turned into words) so that the story and its life can be shared and also experienced across cultures

Kenya · Liminality · Linguistics · Neologism · Political science · Sociology · Swahili · Anthropology · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology