A newspaper reader reads the opinion pages of the Daily Nation.
Earlier this year, a number of my beloved readers tabled a motion before the editorial ombudsman to remove my work from this page through impeachment, citing gross misconduct. The gravamen of their remonstrance was that their consumption of my weekly fare was undermined by frequent encounters with unfamiliar words and expressions, which warranted recourse to their dictionaries to stay afloat.
Stephen Wainaina described the obstructive words as ‘pompous language', which, he decreed to be ‘a hindrance' . ‘Name withheld' bluntly accused me of impunity, insofar as I unaccountably get away with abusing basic rules of communication. My dear editors, to whom I pledge total, direct and everlasting loyalty, were fingered, for not discharging their primary mandate of discouraging heavy use of vocabulary in favour of communication, thereby permitting flagrant exhibitionism.
Proving that there are no friends in Nairobi, Githuku Mungai, the insightful, indefatigable commentator with whom I have been in correspondence since time immemorial, took the opportunity to stab my exposed back, basically affirming that he has to look up everything he reads. Et tu, Brute?
I appreciate the platform I have to engage with readers near and far, and try my best to make a useful contribution to public discourse. Far from aiming to discombobulate readers, I endeavour to explore the wonderful possibilities of language and expression. Naturally, this being a national publication with international reach, I must do so in English, the official default language of globalisation. None of the feedback even suggests that I have employed words that are meaningless, do not exist, or are offensive in any manner whatsoever.
Intellectual engagement
My understanding of the matter is that the stimulus animating discomfitted readers is of a piece with a general national tendency to silence by lexicographicide. Because our education system grossly underrates pedagogy, increasingly disengaged and unmotivated teachers have butchered learning into depressingly tedious punishment. Thus, school is essentially a purgatory of excruciating ennui, where both learners and teachers are obliged to survive through perseverance and formulate a dedicated mechanism for passing examinations.
The burning of books after final examinations, a cherished tradition in certain schools, is not just the expression of a nascent proclivity for subversive pyromania – even if the same animus often spills into burning of school facilities - it is also a perverse ritual to inaugurate the formal expiry of the inclination to learn, read or perform any form of intellectual engagement.
Those who read are assigned pejorative appellations, and intellectual discourse stigmatised as mere conceit in service of pure futility. Those implicated in the production and procurement of ersatz credentials are united in vehemently deriding the idea of professional qualification, skill certification, or requirement of basic competence. They perceive them as superfluous barriers to access with respect to the lucrative benefits of employment, given that the work demanded in consideration is utterly invisible in this scheme of (mis)understanding.
Many musicians cannot tell a bar from the seedy venues where perfidious promoters contract them to perform, professors use ancient cyclostyled text to deliver obsolete lessons, architects design structurally precarious, abysmally unimaginative and exorbitant buildings, sculptors proudly exhibit traumatising, grotesque installations as faithful representations of heroic figures, lawyers recognise ‘injunct’, ‘inciteful' and other atrocious neologisms, and editors are under pressure to compel writers to write a few simple words expressing a few simple ideas, to cater for the astonishingly limited attention span and mental capacity of the mythical median reader who, nevertheless, is eternally dissatisfied.
Mandated vocabulary
Contempt for standards is turning our culture into a fertile womb where the seeds of comprehensive collapse are germinating. We struggle to certify anything, to certify demands a robust affinity for certitude; truth, in a land where lethal decoctions frequently bear stamps of quality assurance, approved high-rise tenements tumble like a stack of straws in a gentle breeze, the living and thriving are also happily dead and buried, and sundry charlatans have the run of the place.
Because of universal secondary education, every household in Kenya has access to the latest edition of advanced English learner's dictionary. English should so alienating. Are these readers faithfully plugged into the zeitgeist of our cultural free-fall? Taban Lo Liyong narrates the chronicles of a writer whose work was stifled by sales-conscious editors, and a control-obsessed government.
He aspires to become a dictator of an island, and to produce the Zed dictionary, which initially contains all 50,000 words of the language, to be issued to every citizen. At the end of every year, the dictionaries would be recalled, revised to remove 500 words, and new ones provided. The dictator's policy is to decree exclusive expression in mandated vocabulary and install technology in all public spaces for the detection and deterrence of proscribed words (and grunts).
Lexicographicide is the title of Prof. Liyong’s story, and denotes the extermination of words and meaning. Although it has been classified under absurdist literature, colliding with its manifestations under the guise of disenchantment with the use of perfectly legitimate vocabulary suggests that Liyong foretold our headlong dive into an absurd future.
The writer is an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya
