“Mwacha mila ni mtumwa”: a proverb in the context of evolving identities

Although proverbs are cherished for their elegant brevity, wit, and their perceived truths, they possess an inherent unfairness. Proverbs oversimplify our experiences and cast a broad, unyielding judgement on those who do not conform. This is despite the fact that the truths that they bare are always incomplete. This is also why it is easy to find a proverb that contests what another one proclaims: while “great minds think alike”, also “fools seldom differ”, and so on…

The popular Swahili proverb “Mwacha mila ni mtumwa” [He who abandons his culture is a slave] is an interesting example of these partial proverbs. This one is often wielded by older generations as a critique of younger ones. It has been deployed against me very frequently as a chastisement for my not pledging allegiance to a certain ethnic group, my father’s, especially during our tribally charged general elections. It has also been employed against me by zealots who discover, to their great dismay, that I have not even bothered to master any of my parents’ dialects, save for a few phrases that should be sufficient to ask for a glass of water. The proverb is also beloved by those who insist that I must swim within certain religious currents, lest I live to regret it.

Cultural and linguistic ties are the bedrock of identity not just in Kenya but also across the world. “Mwacha mila ni mtumwa” serves as a poignant commentary on the implications of cultural and lingual dislocation among the Kenyan youth today. It decries the phenomenon of cultural abandonment, that I allegedly embody. This phenomenon is increasingly observed amongst the members of the Millennial, Z and Alpha generations who struggle to communicate in their indigenous tongues and seem indifferent to their historical narratives, traditions, communal affiliations, and the local cultural tapestries that shaped the lives of their predecessors.

This critique is especially crucial in the Kenyan context, where ethnic identity takes centre stage in Kenya’s vibrant political discourse. For the same reasons, following appointments by the new incumbent president, the KOT (Kenyans on Twitter) Twitter verse is now awash with rather cynical and unsettling memes about “Yamune” — a Kalenjin greeting — becoming the standard salutation on job application cover letters. This new flavour of social commentary by memes is poignant as the Incumbent president seems to have a disproportionate preference for his tribesmen while making appointments in government.

To the older generations, the growing inability of the Kenyan youth to speak their indigenous languages signals a de-evolution. To them, every successive generation is more culturally impoverished than the preceding one. It is as though the younger generations are letting go of the conduit through which communal knowledge, wisdom, values, and social norms were transmitted, and thus, any “Mwacha mila” experiences an erosion of cultural memory and the reality of rootlessness. These older generations also view this phenomenon as a severing of the umbilical cord that links them to both the younger generations and their ancestors in the past. Languages and cultures, they contend, provide a sense of continuous identity across time, and therefore this verdict of a pernicious cultural dislocation is severe.

The proverb also uses the particularly damning word “mtumwa“, a slave, to highlight the solemnity of the verdict. The word imports that cultural dislocation is tantamount to slavery. By being detached from their cultural-lingual umbilical cord, the youth have therefore become slavishly susceptible to the uncritical assimilation of foreign cultures and worldviews, akin to the gruesome dehumanizing campaigns that were historically conducted by Europeans, Arabs and Americans on African people. The uncomfortable reality is that the world still remains awash with currents of cultural imperialism, long after the slave trade and colonial eras. Without the anchoring influence of tradition and cultural heritage, the Kenyan youth are thus adrift, risking the dilution of their indigenous identities and the reshaping of their value systems disproportionately by dominant views that are alien and adversarial to their ancestry.

Therefore, the proverb “Mwacha mila ni mtumwa” serves as a clarion call for a cultural resurgence. It underscores the imperative for the Kenyan youth to reclaim their cultural heritage, rekindle the flame of their mother tongues, and reacquaint themselves with their historical narratives and traditions. This will enable them to assert their linguistic and cultural autonomy and preserve the pluralistic Kenyan cultural mosaic.

However, as with all proverbs, this one also misses the mark. It overlooks a crucial aspect of the current generational shift: the deliberate construction of a new form of identity by the Kenyan youth, one that is cosmopolitan, digitally grounded, and more globally oriented. This new identity is not an act of cultural surrender but an organic, proactive adaptation to the realities of a world where geographical, political, and cultural boundaries are increasingly blurred.

In this era of rapid globalisation and digital interconnectivity, the youth are developing ways of forging a common, plural, and inclusive identity. Unlike previous generations that mostly enacted their lives within local communities, today’s youth must engage in global conversations almost daily and consume and contribute to a shared pool of global cultural content in real-time. Teenagers born in Mombasa with the privilege of access to global digital spaces share more in common with their fellows living thousands of kilometres away in Birmingham or Beirut than with their neighbours who may have been locked out of the technological revolution by the shackles of poverty. They communicate predominantly in English, a language that bridges them to the wider world, not out of disdain for their mother tongues, but out of necessity in a globalized world that was only recently liberated from the British Empire.

Moreover, Kenya’s vibrant history of intermarriage and interethnic exchange has made the current generation harder to align into neat tribal groups. Whenever a new friend from my high school wanted to know what tribe I belonged to, I always enjoyed the guessing game as they traversed across the long list of ethnicities that they found at the school we love the most. Many of them required a detour across both Bantu and Nilotic tribes before landing upon a reasonable guess, a testament to the reality of ethnic ambiguity that I inhabit.

I am the son of a Luo Man from Kano and a Kamba woman from Kangundo, who migrated to Kakamega to raise their children among the peaceable Maragolis and Isukhas. Parts of my family speak Dholuo, and others speak flavours of Kiluyia, Kikamba, Kikuyu, Kimeru, Logoli or a mix of all these and many more. And so it is not uncommon for a niece of mine to be chastised for some silly misdemeanour in Kikamba, then summoned to the dinner table in English, and sent off in Kiswahili to do the dishes, all while an uncle of mine chats away in Español with some business associates: a language that he swears gives him more fluency than English. If you visit our village homestead on a well-attended Christmas gathering, you will find a nation, not a tribe. So, can I truly define myself by my father’s singular tribe, and declare that I am Luo and nothing else?

When talking amongst ourselves nationally, we the youth have also combined all the languages at our disposal and created “Sheng”, a beautiful, rapidly evolving Swahili-based creole that gives us a common, inter-tribal identity. A sentence in sheng such as “Arif wa mjengo aliget ngori venye makarao walimpata na msupa wake mboch akichafua rada kingwai wakiwa majaba” [My construction worker friend and his girlfriend who is a house-help got into trouble with the cops for smoking cannabis while chewing khat] combines multiple linguistic elements from English, Kiswahili, Kikuyu, Kalenjin, Dholuo, and Kamba, and showcases the innovative lingual approaches that the youth deploy to unify themselves, despite their disparate ethnic backgrounds. Some of my friends are also embarking on a daunting project of translating scientific works to Kiswahili, with the goal of enriching the language with new words from other African languages by avoiding the transliteration of technical terminologies.

These approaches are surely not a negation of our heritage, they are an expansion of our identity. The youth are fusing the old with the new, creating a unique cultural amalgamation that is truly their own. Through WhatsApp and Facebook groups, KOT wars, TikTok trends, the ‘bash’ (party) culture, memes, modest high school and campus chamas, and many other recent social artefacts, the youth continue to carry forward the values of community, respect, and resilience ingrained in them by their diverse cultures. They are not turning their backs on their roots; they are growing new branches. They are not becoming slaves to foreign cultures; they are becoming active participants in national and global cultural exchanges. Their peculiarities are not marks of cultural decay but testaments to cultural evolution.

The proverb “Mwacha mila ni mtumwa“, like many others, encapsulates only a partial picture of a more complex narrative. As Kenyans stride into an increasingly dynamic future, each emerging generation will appear to deviate from the values held by its predecessor, and the predecessors will wax poetic about the good old days. However, it is crucial for the older generations to appreciate that youth are navigating a new world characterised by rapid transformations and intensifying global interconnectedness. This new world necessitates innovative approaches to construct fresh identities and establish novel connections. While these approaches may deviate from traditional norms, it is important to embrace the understanding that the youth are not simply abandoning their cultural heritage, but, in fact, they are contributing to the enrichment and expansion of Kenya’s multifaceted cultural tapestry. Their actions should not be seen as a loss but as a transformation towards a more inclusive and progressive cultural identity. Theirs is a new cultural order that is responsive to the realities of its time.