By Munene Kilongi
If unga ran for the country’s top seat in this year’s general elections, both frontrunners would be beaten hands down. This has triggered panic in government circles because the main opposition party has warmed its way into the heart of unga and both ‘parties’ are now threatening a revolution at the ballot.
Food prices have risen and unga maize meal – the nation’s favorite – has gone AWOL on eager Kenyan plates and many are not happy. Gloomy faces can be seen hovering around local shops as supplies run out. While the neighborhood posho mills have gone silent due to shortage of corn to mill.
Ugali, a cake made from maize flour keeps our gastronomic palate humming. This tummy-filling mound of energy is the national bread. Now ordinary folks have taken to scrumming, tussling, and, wrestling over the little that can be found in supermarket aisles. As scheming government officials who have caused the artificial shortage are now buying the commodity at a higher price from overseas ‘brokers’ and then subsidizing the same unga which is in short supply in the country.
With Kenyans at their wits end over this staple’s shortage it was refreshing to read of another angle on unga. A friend on social media posted about the ‘migration journey’ of the word unga into our local lingo.
It started with an obscure farmer’s organization. The Uasin N’gishu Growers Association. Set up by white farmers before the First World War, the flour milling enterprise packed the maize flour in two- kilo bags with the legend U.N.G.A plastered on the side.
This got me thinking about the odd ways names weave their ways into our national psyche and into the official books, even if they don’t necessarily make sense. A little town on the road trail between Nyahururu County and the distant Maralal town was known as the “remote route”. But the locals could not pronounce the English word. The town is now known as Rumuruti.
Deep in the picturesque bundus of Rift Valley there lived a white man only known to the locals as Corporal Peter. Being a peculiar feature in this area his name became a point of direction for travelers. The area is called, Kapropita.
One time on an assignment in the dusty market center known as, Karendi, on the peripheries of Nairobi County, I asked my guide what the name meant. He pointed at some invisible border lines not far-off. Karendi marks the rear end of the posh Karen borough and the beginning of Kiambu County. Formerly it was known as Karen End.
The people of Kiambu County in Central Kenya remember a time white settler farmers used to play a strange game with a ‘creaky’ name at the only stadium around. As much as they tried they could not vocalize, Cricket. Today the stadium is known as kirigiti.
Not even our country’s name has been spared from this mangling of tongues and words. Kenya is a mispronunciation of the Kamba word Kiinya, which means mountain, by European explorers and colonialists who were the first westerners to see Mt Kenya. A baffling turn of event because white people pronounce Kenya as, Kinya.
It’s not English words that get us all twisted — even African words. Most places in the country boast Maasai names because our erstwhile pastoralist brothers have been wandering all over the nation for ages. One time they grazed their herds on a breezy region which they named enaiwurwur (windy locality). But the population that peoples this area could not utter the tongue-twister. The region is now called Nyahururu.
At another place the Maasais found themselves among numerous donkeys that pooped everywhere and they called it ilmur “place of donkey droppings.” The locals who could not juggle the wording settled on the name, Limuru.
Recently, our talent at conjuring peculiar words got us recognition in the ninth edition of the Oxford dictionary. The brash and ubiquitous bicycle and motorbike taxis that are our perennial frenemies are now recognized globally. They first gained notoriety at the Kenya-Uganda border town in Busia County where they ferried passengers across both countries. They’d compete for passengers shouting:
“Border! Border!” We now call this pocket-sized speed demons, Boda Boda taxis.
The clash of nasal western accents and the fast African tongue with an occasional commingling of Hindu and Arabic words thrown into the mix has led to the conjuring of abracadabra names.
But it’s the insistence on communicating in English – which has been the official language of instruction for decades – that is the source of this confounding mash up of words.
When agricultural officers taught local farmers modern ways of growing potatoes, they spoke to them in English even though the farmers were illiterate. And the person instructing them is a local who, like them, cannot pronounce some words concisely.
They were taught to plant:
“One here! One here!” The farmers heard, “waru here! waru here!” And that’s how Kenyans came to identify potatoes as, waru.
Back to unga. Our appetite for ugali has been known for ages. Nearly half a century ago, a South African Miller noticed how we ate copious amounts of this meal and he built an unga mill in the fertile lands of the Rift Valley.
Run by a water turbine fed by the fast flowing Sosiani River, this thingamajig mesmerized the Nandi people who couldn’t stop talking about the turbine. From that time on the locality became known as Turbo.
the peculiar kenyan 