OUR KIND OF ENGLISH: Can’t Swahili scribblers just stick to Kiswahili?

A headline for a sports story in a recent edition of a Kiswahili daily caused uproar in social media. It was about Bongo ladies’ national soccer team earning a ticket to ‘…nusu fainali na clean SHIT’. Of course, our colleague meant to write “clean SHEET”.

The media fraternity was particularly dismayed, not because such goofs don’t occur amongst us. They do. Colleagues were dismayed because this particular blunder shouldn’t have occurred at all—not in a Kiswahili newspaper!

We all make such mistakes often, and it’s only thanks to proofreaders that our readers never get to know how limited we can be. For instance, words that sound alike while bearing different meaning are our perpetual nemesis.

For my part, as I re-read my own pieces before filing them to my editors, I often discover I’ve written things like LOOSE in the place of LOSE; ITS instead of IT’S, etc.

There was so much rage over the ‘clean s--t’ headline, because few readers, if any, could see why the subeditor ventured to use an English expression in the paper that isn’t bi-lingual.

Kiswahili has such a vast and rich vocabulary that we don’t have to bother sweetening it using English—a language with which we’ve enough trouble, as it were!

While readers might pardon English scribblers whenever they mess, they won’t have mercy towards those who “trespass” into the language of our former colonisers for no sensible reason. Or, could it be due to the “I-also-know-English” mentality?

Well, this mentality might have been forgivable in the early post-uhuru days, not today when Kiswahili has grown into an important global language. People out there expect Bongo scribblers to offer them “pure” Kiswahili, for they correctly view our country as the undisputed cradle of this great medium of communication.

An otherwise great article, recently published in a major weekend paper, aptly demonstrates what Kiswahili scribblers shouldn’t do, for the risks are enormous, and could leave readers asking: why did he/she do it?

There’s a para in which the scribbler writes “mpiga DRUMS”. Question: why not mpiga NGOMA?

Elsewhere, our colleague criticises the so-called new generation musicians, whose concept of live performance is to hold a mike close to their lips that they move in synchrony with the song, pretending they’re singing, while the vocals would actually be from a CD!

After explaining this stage fraud quite clearly, the scribbler underscores it in brackets with the word LIPSINGING, instead of the correct one—LIPSYNCHING. Regarding the vocalists who accompany the lead singer, namely, “waitikiaji” in Kiswahili, he proceeds (quite unnecessarily) to provide in brackets what he believes is its English equivalent—“BACKING vocalists”. Nope, English for “waitikiaji” is BACK-UP vocalists.

Last word: To colleagues in Swahili media who are surely doing a wonderful job informing, educating and entertaining our people, my sincere advice is: stick to the beautiful and bountiful language—Kiswahili. If you’re intensely tempted to trespass to English, then, dutifully consult an English dictionary. Or, Google.

Ah, this treacherous language called English!

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