Power cuts: three and counting. This is most baffling; Mr. Peter wasn’t even on campus during the first two. His abilities are even greater than I thought.
As we get back into the swing of things, the part of life that is returning to me slowest is Kiswahili. Apparently my brain is a sieve, because I remember very little of the first term’s lessons. But that’s by the by, and I hope that all of my vocabularly will boomerang back to me.
There are two things that one must know about Kiswahili, and ALA Kiswahili in particular:
1) Kiswahili has around 40 demonstrative pronouns. There are four in English. This, that, these, and those. Why does Kiswahili have so many more, you may ask. Well, it has seven nominal classes (different groups of nouns that follow different rules), and about six demonstrative pronouns in each one. Yep. 42.
Learning the nominal classes has been an emotional rollercoaster. The first one we covered contains all animals (and technically all protozoans and bacteriae as well). At that point, I was pretty optimistic about the language’s simplicity, imagining words would be grouped on a sort of animal-vegetable-mineral basis. How wrong I was.
Then we did the inanimate objects nominal class, which includes things like chairs, tables, and handicapped people (a source of great controversy and self-examination to many Kiswahili speakers. Mhmmm.) It also includes a brilliant way to insult people. In Kiswahili, you can add “ki” to the beginning of nouns, automatically making them smaller. Examples include: “I hate you, tiny boy!” or “Be gone with ye, miniscule farmer!”
After that came the trees, which turned out to be a separate from the other living things. This was really the turning point towards hopelessness. Trees have their own grammar class and rules?? Whyyy??? And to make matters worse, I discovered that the tree nominal class doesn't even include fruits. I spent a lot of time confusing orange trees and oranges.
And that’s as far as we’ve gotten. I can only imagine what the other three classes are. Maybe one is chapattis. I do hope so; I love chapattis. If anything deserves its own set of grammar rules, they do. Then again, the mystery of where the other fruits go still endures.
2) Happily, our teacher makes Kiswahili a delight. Bi Akala is a joyful, friendly, slightly matronly woman who teaches us as much about Kenyan culture as she does about her language. She is also a psychology instructor, and she taught health last year. This year, she teaches it vicariously through Kiswahili. Sometimes I think Bi Akala suffers from Wellness Education Withdrawal Syndrome.
Zweli left (sob!), but while he was here he brought a whole extra dimension to our class, partially because he used his newfound language skills for intraclass proposals, but partially because he was somewhat unaware of some social and sexual realities. Without a hint of compunction, Bi Akala boldly stepped in to fill in all of Zweli’s gaps in knowledge. I was impressed at how easily one can link Kiswahili to sex changes, STDs, and circumcision. Zweli was particularly boggled about the sex changes.
Yet even more wonderful is Bi Akala’s pseudo-maternal willingness to use somewhat sensitive topics during grammar demonstrations; she realises more than anyone else that humans should never feel awkward about human matters. Death anecdotes play a bigger part in Kiswahili classes than I expected. The clothing unit turned into Valentine's Day shopping advice. And you haven’t lived until you’ve had the M-WA nominal class explained to you via a discomforting yet funny story about expectant mothers.
None of those things truly explain the complete Kiswahili class experience though. To do that, I have drawn a cartoon with a few of last term’s memorable moments stitched together. It is also an attempt to show how one can mix marriage, life and death, and basic linguistics. It involves Bi Akala, Julia (who had some troubles at the beginning...), and myself.
You just made my day!
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