'And who gave me back my heritage?'

Nyandolo, nindo otere
Nyandolo, nindo otere,
Nindo man e wang’ baba obi mana ka
Nindo man e wang’ mama obi mana ka
Nyandolo, nindo otere
Nyandolo, nindo otere

This song sent me on a journey down memory lane and up the inquiry lane at some point in time. A few years ago, I was woken up by a call from a friend who was in trouble. His seven-year-old daughter had been given an assignment to write a lullaby in their first language that was to be handed in the next morning. My friend’s problem was two-fold: 1. Though they were now living in Kenya, the local language was not spoken in their home, 2. He could not remember any lullaby in Dholuo, having lived and studied abroad for eleven years, despite living in the village all his life prior to this sojourn.

As I typed the words of the song for him, I wondered what else of his cultural traditions he had lost in the land of opportunities, the successful engineer that he is today. What happens to our cultural memory when we sojourn abroad? Do we need it or is it a dispensable inconvenience? After sharing this experience with one of my relatives who had also lived and worked abroad for many years, I am persuaded that cultural memory or lack of it is really a choice. My relative, unlike the engineer, sang lullabies and other Dholuo children's songs to her young children while they were in America and the children still remember them! The cultural identities we carry with us and perform in the diaspora are largely dependent on individual choices of identity performances. The key word here being ‘choice’. For a long time, as Africans, we have attended to translocations into perceptively superior world cultures by sacrificing of our indigenous cultures at the altars of these ‘global’ cultures, so as to be ‘modern,’ I want to believe that both my relative and my engineer friend are ‘modern’ but the former’s life is enriched by a heritage she has held on to and which she has allowed to define her and her children. This is the third leg on the footstool of the African’s life of tradition, formalized western education, and modernization.

I also wondered whether I was better off simply because I could speak passably fluent Dholuo, sing a few traditional songs and tell a few narratives, proverbs, and riddles in the same language. Had my friend lost something which I had retained? You see, I often sung these songs and others to my own children. I was reminded of this when recently my now adult daughter recounted her entertaining some young children in her court with a knee-tickling play-song I used with them when they were young. She went on to narrate how the children refused to let her go because they were having so much fun with the language and of course, the tickling!

Wan g’otonglo g’abila, njuklu njuklu, min akoko, Msere Nyardibo, dol mana ma!

I grew up in Cosmopolitan Nairobi, but the songs and other oral material were passed down to me by my mother. Speaking and singing in Dholuo gives me a sense of solidity within a specific group of people who have their unique worldview and terms of engagement with the rest of the world. This is the belonging I have, birthed from my heritage of Luo cultural identity, complete with its markers, which include the language, some cultural proprieties, and creative expressions. I had an opportunity about five years ago to adapt an American oriented LitClub curriculum to the Kenyan girl child. I took it upon myself to replace most of the suggested play songs with African play songs from the students’ ethnic communities and in their languages and I must say, they had more fun performing the latter. Why would this be so?

I am sure that when my mother sang to and told us the stories of Nyamgondho wuod Ombare, Apul Apul and Othinthin in Dholuo, she did not have her grandchildren in mind. She only cared about entertaining, soothing, and sharing precious moments with us. Yet, she passed on a cultural heritage that taught us the stories and beliefs of the Luo, unintentionally spurring us to pass the same to our children. Her presentations in the context of Luo traditional sensibilities and convictions carried me into the cultural pride of a distinct people that I still inhabit today, though I must admit it was not always so. I have the opportunity of not only continuing the performances, but now, equipped with academic critical tools, interrogate their significance to both present and future generations’ cultural identities. Many of us in this forum have that opportunity and responsibility. My daughter who works abroad most of the year with multinationals finds great pleasure in our video conversations in Dholuo, saying that outside this, she misses the language. What about my engineer friend? Did he not miss his mother tongue then or now? Does he have the right to deny his children this heritage that he has willingly surrendered? I am sure by now you can hear echoes of Ngugi wa Thiongo’s assertions about language as cultural identity.

Today, I also wonder what the engineer’s child’s homework, ‘done by her father’ may have meant to her. What sense did her teacher help her to make out of this simple song from her historical cultural roots that she has lost touch with? Did it present a totally different reality from the ‘rock- a- bye baby, on the tree top…,’ she had probably grown up with from English lullaby books and videos? Was it simply a task to be done and be done with? If she was in an English school abroad, would her father have chosen to source for a Dholuo song? Would it have been accepted as any other song alongside ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star…’ or would it be a song of the exotic noble savage to be ooed! over? Would this little girl reflect on Nyandolo and be thrown into some cultural identity crossroads by it? I know I was.

You see, years before I read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eyes, Sula, or Tar Baby, I already felt ugly as a young girl. What with growing up alongside Goldilocks, Snow White and Cinderella and later She-Ra, Wonder Woman and Bat Girl! I could not match their flawless white skin, soft, long, and red or blonde hair, narrow noses, or blue eyes. These anatomical peculiarities put me at psychological crossroads with my dark skin, kinky hair, large nose, and full lips. Pulling and pinching my nose in front of the mirror did not help! At school, in my country, I was still Pecola Breedlove amongst my fairer skinned classmates, all locals in this territory that was characterized by light-skinned women. Although they did not have the red or blonde hair or even blue eyes like the picture girls, their skin color was brighter than mine. Double tragedy, as an African, I was not beautiful, but even among fellow Africans I was at the lowest rung of beauty! But where did I get my skin colour from? Did it have alternative tales of beauty and pride?

By chance, I met Grace Ogot’s Oganda in The Rain Came in my mother’s library while still in primary school, and the reorientations of physical beauty began for me, although like Cinderella and Snow-White she also had a very slim waist. Fast forward. At the University, my dialogues with Grace Ogot, Mariama Ba, Buchi Emecheta, Micere Mugo, Flora Nwapa, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka, and a host of other African story writers within African mythologies, ideologies and sensibilities recast my view of self as an African. From the character descriptions, folktales and songs in these texts, images of a proud and unique ‘black’ cultural heritage emerged for me. I think this phoenix-like arising was clinched for me by Sedar Sengor’s first three lines: Naked woman, black woman/Clothed with your colour which is life,/with your form which is beauty! (Black Woman) A rebirth happened. My encounter with African aesthetics took me into the ancient sages’ intellectual minds, into the wily song composers’ hearts and into the proud women’s praises of their warrior sons and husbands. These flights into cultural histories restored a comfortable consciousness towards my ‘blackness’ that had been missing. The journey towards the finding of my ‘African’ self then began in earnest in the archeological digging of cultural narratives that present the Africanist epistemologies. I went back to the fireplace.

My most recent encounter with young students of African oral literature in one of the East African countries nevertheless made me wonder whether this is a lonesome journey that I am on. In fact, whether it is a journey without a destination in the first place. You see, they told me that African oral literature is outdated and should no longer be taught as it had been overtaken by writing and digital technology, even though these are essentially mere spaces for expressions. Further, they boldly asserted that African traditional cultures are primitive, and the girls even decried the fact that their young boyfriends are not as romantic as the young men in the Hispanic and Western telenovelas! You guessed right. I was not going to take this lying down! Without going into the specifics of the debates that ensued from this, I think got them to hear the echoes of my mother’s soothing voice in eight-year-old Zawadi Kanyyo’s 2020 TikTok video singing Nyandolo (https://youtu.be/vIUQ5WbUiU?si) as well as the old griot’s voice in the 2020s sounds and lyrics of Mamadou Diabate from Mali as he plays the kora in his YouTube video. The jury is still out there on whether the traditionally derived content on orthographic and digital spaces presents to them the connection with that heritage.

My heart bled for them because their eyes were closed to the fact that they also lived in the same jungles of our forefathers, with all the ogres and tricksters around them, albeit in different clothing! Their ears were deaf to the hundhwe bird singing caution to them from the spirited trees and they were too lazy to travel far far far away into the once upon a time of limitless possibilities!

You know, to date, I do not know what the word Nyandolo means, or even if it has a denotative meaning. But I know that I like its soothing sound and that it rhymes with nindo the Luo word for sleep. The deliberate choice of diction and repetition of the lines produce the desired lulling effect. The message contained herein is that as the baby sleeps, the adults should be awake, hence the command of all the sleep from their eyes to come to the baby! This for me, speaks of the purpose to entertain, instruct and lull to sleep, laughing in the face of one Burton talking about African performances thus: ‘Poetry there is none… There’s no meter, no rhyme, nothing that interests or soothes the feelings, or arrests the passions…. (Burton 1865: xii qtd. in Finnegan, 2012). The song not only connects me to my Luo roots, but to the academic field of phonological and semantic scrutiny. I can even fit this inherited simple lullaby into my mentors’ - Professors CJ Odhiambo and Peter Simatei- postcolonial, postmodern, and postmortem frames! Because of this, are my legs firmer on the ground of life as culture? Or have I gone too far into decoloniality, alterity, and the simulacra to ever retrace my steps to my grandmother’s ‘siwindhe? Do her stories, handed to me through my mother, speak of similar things as the ones from whose Aesop’s wisdom evolved?

As I mull over my French friend and colleague’s intellectual question to me after my presentation at an African oral literatures’ conference in Paris last year, my soul is still perturbed. She asked me, ‘How do you define ‘nature’ in your paper and how do the humans relate to nature?’ In my mother’s tales, the grass, the soil, the animals, the sun and man and a host of other things found on earth were part and parcel of one another, with intertwining lives. Can such an epistemology serve the world as it is today? Maybe that is the life that would suit me best as it is deep in my veins, instead of the cosmetically compartmentalized one that I mostly live today.

Conclusively, these reflections convince me of the power of the narratives around us, past and present. Inherently, our stories are more than recounted occurrences. They are our worldview, our ideologies, and philosophies. Our cultural traditions, beliefs and indigenous characters are identity markers inherited from the past, enjoyed in the present with their modifications and adaptations and preserved for transmission to future generations. A heritage handed down. But this must be restored first. The question is, who gives it back?

Well, I hope to sing Nyandolo to my grandchild.

Tinda!