Not every ‘mwenza’ is colleague in the language called English!

Indigenous language users have their ways of expressing certain things and the rest of us need to follow suit.

Our own linguistic experience is often “irrelevant” and it shouldn’t overly influence us in our use of an alien language we have adopted. Short of that, we risk being accused of messing that language, or even its owners’ culture.

In Kiswahili, it is okay to say “mimi na wewe” (I and you). Say that in English and a language guru will reprimand you!

In English, the expression is “you and I”. A certain opinion scribbler in the tabloid closely associated with this columnist recently penned an otherwise superb piece in which he says in his intro: “There was a time when I AND MY BOSS…lost a whole day on account of our global trotting.”

An oversight? That can’t be, because “I and my boss” appears three more times in his nice article. A keener subeditor should have sorted that out and changed the expression to:“…My BOSS and I.”

And then, the same scribbler and his boss were, at some point, perturbed by the way some Wazungu, especially small children, would look at him and his boss with intense curiosity because they were dark-skinned!

Then, sometime later, as luck would have it, a group of US soldiers, which included a few blacks, appeared and, says the scribbler: “We could not resist the temptation to wave at our black COLLEAGUES who positively responded by waving back at us.”

Please note: our scribbling colleague and his boss weren’t soldiers. They were civilians, so the idea of referring to the US soldiers as colleagues is wrong. Why, your colleague is someone who is in the same profession or career, as you. Or, those who work with you in the same organisation. Even a fellow student, more so if you’re in the same school/college, is your colleague.

In Kiswahili, the word for colleague is mwenza, literally, an associate. But then, it is not specific to any type of association. Which is to say, mwenza, in the Kiswahili world, whoever you’re associated with, in whatever way, is mwenzako. Even your spouse (wife or husband) is mwenzako in Kiswahili, but when you switch to English, you can’t call them “colleague”.

It means, regarding our two globe-trotting compatriots (wenzetu), the black US soldiers were, to them, FELLOW blacks, not black colleagues! In Kiswahili, however, the black soldiers were, to the two, “WEUSI WENZETU”.

If the guys were members of TPDF, well, the expression “black colleagues” could pass muster.

Come Saturday, December 11, and Page 5 of Bongo’s senior-most broadsheet has a nice photo whose caption reads: “Tanzania...Newspaper Limited STAFF, (Ms) JS, feeds her colleague, KM, a cake…”

It is erroneous to refer to one person as STAFF. She is a MEMBER OF staff or simply an employee/ a worker. The noun “staff” refers to ALL the people employed by a particular organisation.

Again, in my possession is a November 29 copy of the huge tabloid from Nairobi that enjoys a sizeable readership in Bongo. In a story with the headline, ‘Justice still elusive for Baringo woman blinded by attackers’, the scribbler writes in Para 2 about one Ms Norah Moiben:

“For her, the fateful night will remain EDGED in her mind forever, having been left with a permanent disability, with many unanswered questions still lingering in her mind.”

Our colleague in the Land of Uhuru Kenyatta has mixed up his intended word, ETCH, with EDGE. The two words are homophones—they sound more or less the same but have different meanings and spelling.

Which is to say, the sentence should be written thus: “For her, the fateful night will remain ETCHED in her mind forever… (meaning, the traumatising incident will be ENGRAVED forever in her mind). The verb “edge” means something quite different. Check it out, reader.

Ah, this treacherous language called English!