ktravula – a travelogue!

Are Bicycles Back?

One of the responses, that made sense, given in response to some of my regular complaints that bicycles haven’t become more ubiquitous as an effective and efficient means of transportation was that nobody cares about them. It made sense at the time because the evidence supported it. At least as far as Lagos was concerned, there seemed to have been a general consensus that public (or private) transportation in vehicles were the only viable means of transportation.

It also made sense in light of little regard by the city planners to the presence of the few number of bicycles currently on the road: palm wine sellers, elderly (Hausa?) men with scant regard for our “civilisation” on wheels, and occasional young men with all the time in the world. If people didn’t have a place to ride their bicycles, why would they buy it? Or, if they bought it, why would they risk riding it outside where they can be knocked down by an impatient Lagos driver?

Things, today, seems to have changed however. In the last couple of weeks, my attention has been drawn to the presence of many more bicycles on Lagos roads than I observed before. Young men (and sometimes women), professionals, and everyone in-between, seem to have finally come around to their use, perhaps in the final acceptance of its pragmatic utility in the face of the intractable city traffic. I have been taking their pictures, and will continue to do so.

This development is a good thing, which only means a few more things must happen:

Lagos MUST create better pathways for cyclists to ply. Except one is part of the elite club of cyclists who ride in groups every weekend, followed usually by an ambulance or a private car to protect their rear, most cyclists today are not safe on the road. Most of them ride on the opposite side of the road so as to see oncoming traffic. It is smart, but that’s still not safe enough, nor is it where bicycles are meant for.
Following the first bullet point, Lagos MUST amend its traffic laws to create clear instructions for cyclists, at least on large highways. But first, let’s fix #1

I was thinking, today on the way back from work, how nice it would be if thought was actually put into planning the city. The middle lane of the Lekki-Epe Expressway, where street lights are erected, is wide enough. One wonders how nicer it would have been if it had been well planned to include a cycling lane, protected on each side by the same wire mesh used to prevent people from illegally crossing the highway.

There is a heavy presence of Chinese construction/interest on the continent today. It’s not hard to imagine a Chinese company being very interested in a contract to create a network of bicycle lanes around the city. If advertising stations have to be put along the paths to make the money back for the state, wouldn’t it at least have been worth it? I decide eventually that I’m a linguist, and this is probably not my job to think about things like this. That why we voted a governor into office!

I got a new bicycle myself, last week, gifted to my by my erstwhile employers as a thoughtful parting gift. I haven’t yet found the need to ride it, or an avenue, or a reason capable of convincing my wife that I’m not embarking on a suicide mission. But the possession delights. Now to the harder work of making the society take serious the health and safety of all city riders.

Multilingualism, Tourilingualism

One of the things that fascinated me about Kenya – though it shouldn’t, since we share a similar trait in Nigeria – is the robust multilingualism of its streets.

The peculiarity of the Kenyan experience is that there are at least two (actually, mostly three) layers of common languages with which citizens can communicate before they get to the local language (L1) on the fourth rung. On the top is English, which – through colonialism across the continent – has become the default language of contact, official business, and school. However, unlike Nigeria where the local language has seen a fast retreat, Kenya has another layer covered successfully by Swahili. Swahili is a trade language which originated from the coast, consisting of elements from Arabic, and a Bantu language of contact which no longer has an original indigenous speaking population. The third layer is what’s called “Sheng”. It is the closes to Nigerian Pidgin, and it’s used, mostly among young people, as a way to interact within the first two languages, and the local languages of the fourth layer. That fourth layer is the most fractured, just like in Nigeria. It is where the local languages flourish in different colours: Luo, Kikuyu, Kikamba, Kalenjin, Maasai, among many others. According to Ethnologue, there are about 68 languages spoken in Kenya.

But no, what fascinated me the most is not the use of these many languages, with pride, by people around the country and in the schools, and government offices (though that already offers a stark contrast to the current Nigerian educational policy where local languages are no longer even offered as subjects in our high schools, leading to a future language extinction and cultural attrition. That was saddening enough.) I was more fascinated by the acquisition – in spite of this already complex linguistic situation – of even more languages by many Kenyans working in the informal sector, in order to make more money from foreigners wanting to go on a Safari. It turns out that the presence of foreigners from Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, India, etc in the country has created a demand for tour guides fluent in any of these languages as well as the local rules and survival guides needed for a successful expedition. Smart business consideration in the face of this huge demand then necessitated the existence of formal and informal schools where locals can acquire sufficient competence in these languages enough to earn foreign exchange for their tour-guiding efforts. Within the one week of my stay in Nairobi, I spoke with at least two people – one a cab driver, and another a seller of artworks at the Maasai market – who claim to have become fluent in Spanish and German respectively, which had helped them earn more money as tour guides of visiting foreigners. A fascinating discovery.

Swahili itself has already achieved international appeal, especially in Black America. For some reason, over several decades, the language imagined to be spoken by ALL of Africa has, for a while, been seen as Swahili. And from Lionel Ritchie’s Hey Jambo Jambo to Michael Jackson’s murmurs in “Liberian Girl”: Nakupenda pia, Nakutaka pia, penziwe (I love you, I want you, my love), to the famous Malaika song by Mariam Makeba and Angelique Kidjo, and even to the Kwanzaa holidays of African American families, Swahili already made its way into the international mind as the only umbrella African language. Taraji P. Henson’s middle name is Penda, the Swahili word for “love”. What’s next then, perhaps, is an enrichment of that language’s own home environment with this intermittent tourilingualism that brings with it a colourful open door.

In the end, everyone wins, mostly. For years to come, Nairobi (and the rest of Kenya, as a result) will become more multilingual, and visitors – by some luck – will also learn to speak some Kiswahili as a way to interact with their new host environment. No one is threatened, and both parties learn something of the other. Rather than a depletion of the linguistic heritage of this magical place, we have an addition, certainly in economic but also perhaps also in cultural dynamism. We may not be able to say the same for the fauna, of course, but let’s take baby steps, shall we?

More Pictures from Strathmore

Here are more pictures from my talk and from the beautiful Strathmore School campus, featuring students, staff, a priest, open spaces, a classroom, buildings, the library, sports venues, and the famous East African acacia tree.

At Strathmore School, Nairobi

On Wednesday, October 14, 2015, I was a guest of the Strathmore School, a private school in a suburb of Nairobi called Lavington. It is a sister school to Whitesands School in Lagos where I currently work. They are both founded on a similar academic/religious philosophy, both cater to singular sex students, and both are day schools with members of staff, and students, from different religious and cultural backgrounds, and both offer the educational curriculum of the host countries. Strathmore is the first multiracial school in Kenya, founded in 1961 to bring together a young country towards a set goal of a more egalitarian future. Similar sister schools that cater to girl children are the Lagoon School in Lagos and the Kianda School in Nairobi. The name, according to the history of the school, comes from the Scottish word for valley, “strath”.

My visit to the school was engineered by my employers in Lagos as a way to share ideas between the two schools, giving me a chance to compare the students and school environment in the two cities, and finally to provide a chance to interact with the students especially on issues of career, talent, and passion. After all, I was visiting Kenya as a blogger finalist of a prestigious journalism award. Wouldn’t it be nice to give a talk to the students about how I got to where I am, how I’ve navigated my own life and vocations, and how they can also develop their talents and passions towards the future? I had looked forward to it all through my stay in Kenya, so finding myself on the campus a day before my departure was quite appropriately gratifying. It would have been equally nice, had there been enough time, to visit the Strathmore University which I’d also heard great things about. But it was located at a different part of town and time wasn’t sufficient.

The school surprised in the size of its campus, the school bus, the lush and extended vegetation, and the number of trophies won over the years for many athletic and swimming competitions, the relaxed confidence of the students, the huge and spacious library, but not very much else. The teaching environment, staff camaraderie, healthy eating cafeteria, voluntary mid-day Mass, boisterous, mischievous, but very confident students, and a range of teaching staff who love their work all reminds of Whitesands and the teaching and working culture there. Most of the differences are differences between Kenyan and Nigerian educational systems. In Kenya, for instance, the system is a 8-4-4 as opposed to our 6-6-4 system. In Kenya, the primary school lasts for eight years, although many people have been advocating for it to change. There’s one other notable difference though, which I’ll remember for a while: Swahili is taught as a subject, and is also used by students (and staff) in the school premises without raising any elitist eyebrows.

Strathmore School also combines the primary and the secondary schools, so students graduating from there only have the university ahead of them. Whitesands, however, is a purely secondary school, catering to just the six years of high school. This allows for a concentrated effort at students within a particular time in their lives. It probably explains the small space needed for all our activities in Lagos, while Strathmore spreads out over many acres of land. The land area accommodates two lawn tennis courts, a grass field wide enough to be divided into three separate standard football fields at any time, an indoor swimming pool, a religious shrine to the Holy Mary, and a number of administrative buildings, including classrooms, a chapel, and a hostel for university students who have nowhere else to stay in town. It also has an extensive parking lot where one can see two to three buses with the name “Strathmore School” written boldly on them, among other staff vehicles. It also has a bicycle rack for members of the administrative staff who want to use it.

My talk to the students went great. I spent some time first with the junior boys who charmed me with many of their curious questions about me, my family, my work, my school, Nigeria, and my language, among many others. Then, at 11am, the senior boys gathered for a talk that I’d put together, tracing the trajectory of my life’s work from early child curiosities to adulthood, Fulbright, writing, teaching, linguistics, and my future plans. Their questions were equally substantive, but also very engaging. They knew of Nollywood and wanted to know if it reflected Nigerian cultural attitudes, they wanted to know my opinion on political issues, they wanted me to share ideas of how to choose a career, they wanted to know more about my blog, photography, writing, etc, and at least one person wondered whether I played basketball. Even after the talk, before I was whisked away to Mass, a few more of them came to me to ask a few more things that bothered them as teenagers trying to navigate the world of career and vocation.

I left the premises of the school by 1pm after a lunch that was both filling and refreshing. One of the many topics I had broached with the students and staff was the benefit of creativity, passion, and persistence. I referred to our publication of students’ creative work called The Sail, and hope that something similar will take root at Strathmore at some point in the future. My experience with the boys show that not only are they capable of doing this and more, they are also willing to try. This, after all, is the most exciting, most creatively energetic, time of their lives when most life skills are first conceived, then honed as time goes on. For students brought up in the legacy of science education, most of them will eventually focus on science and technology. What I made clear however is how experience has shown us that you can be a writer or a creative person in spite of what you study in school.

I’ve now returned to Lagos, and here’s a sentence from an email I received from the principal of the school, a kind and warm host, Mr. John Muthiora, who had been my guest at the CNN gala, and whose help made my visit possible, and pleasant: “Your visit excited quite a bit of interest in writing among the boys and teachers alike.” I know, for a fact, that this is a heartwarming response that will delight me for a very long time to come.

Writer Sightings: Ndinda Kioko

This week: Ndinda Kioko


http://writersightings.tumblr.com/post/131822352375/ndinda-kioko-is-a-current-grantee-of-the-miles

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