A Trip to Bookpoint

I went into Bookpoint yesterday looking for two books: Tom Mboya's The Challenge of Nationhood, and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga's Not Yet Uhuru. (Uhuru translates to independent or free.) Both Mboya and Oginga Odinga are among the most important Kenyan historical figures.

Both of these books are written in English. As is nearly every book in Bookpoint, perhaps the premier bookstore in downtown Nairobi.

English is the language of education in this country; it is the language of elites. Politicians give elaborate, technical speeches in English and then offer summaries or calls to action in Swahili. Kenya's middle and upper classes prefer to raise their kids in English. Swahili and Kenya's other 42 languages are not languages of mobility.

Walking the streets of Nairobi, however, you'll hear that Swahili is still used as an informal language. People of all walks of life, from the ones wearing fancy business suits, to the visitors from the village, all find Swahili as a more casual way for people to talk to each other.

But just because people talk Swahili, it doesn't mean they read it. Throughout primary and secondary school, students are taught all subjects in English and the books they have to read are in English. (Exception being Swahili, of course.) The Swahili newspaper, Taifa Leo, is mostly ignored. A co-worker says he doesn't know enough Swahili to read it, though he speaks to most of his friends in Swahili.

After a bit of searching, past the aisles of books from American and European publishers, along the back wall filled with books on medicine, self-help, cooking, and fiction, you'll find in the right-hand corner a couple shelves of books from local publishers. I found Mboya's book and was told that Oginga Odinga's book was now being republished or reprinted.

I was just about to leave when I found books written in Swahili and Kikuyu. Unlike the English books, which sit on shelves, these are stacked out of the way, on the top of another bookshelf. Of the 50 or so different titles, six or seven were written in Kikuyu. The remaining books can be divided into four categories: books required for primary/secondary school (15 or so books), random literature (10 books), detective stories (five books), and children's books (10 books).

Unable to resist, I picked up the following books: Kilio cha Haki (The Cry of Justice), Kaburi Bila Msalaba (The Grave Without a Cross), Mkaguzi Mkuu wa Serikali (The Government Inspector by Nikolai Gogol), Shamba la Wanyama (Animal Farm by George Orwell). The Swahili books are also cheap: two to three bucks, brand new.

More expensive is the book Kizuizini (In Detention, $8). It's a new book from a new publisher, Kwani? They've recently begun publishing books from African authors—mostly Kenyan, but also seem to have a thing for the Nigerian author, Chimamanda Adichie, republishing three of her books. Their most interesting work has been a literary journal that they've put out three times in the past. Collections of poetry, short fiction, articles, biographies, and art.

Kizuizini is, of course, published in Swahili. The homepage of Kwani? claims that it's the first book to be published in Swahili in Kenya in 17 years. That might very well be true. Kwani?, following the lead of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, has advocated for authors to embrace the language that average Kenyans actually speak, instead of depending on Western languages. That would mean Swahili. (In the third volume of the Kwani? journal, they specifically pushed for Sheng, a Nairobi dialect.)

But English is firmly entrenched as the language of high education and high culture. Many Kenyans don't care to read Swahili and complain that writing Swahili is too difficult. That's due to the priority that the Kenyan school system gives to English over Swahili. And that seems unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

A trip to Bookpoint ten years from now will still show English books completely dwarfing other languages. As a linguist from the University of Nairobi told me, “English is an African language. That's the reality.”