Word blender

What happens to identity when our language becomes a hybrid? The answer lies with the people.

- BENN JEFFRIES

The books that line the shelves of the McMillan Memorial Library in Nairobi reflect the interests of their original owner. The spines of Governing Without Consensus or Economics and Empire 1830-1914 can be spied from where I sit. This is the second-oldest library in Kenya and until 1958 it was open only to whites.

Outside the library, among the vendors selling mandazi, a type of fried bread, you hear a language that reflects this complex colonial past. Sheng, or Swahili-English, is a mixed language born from a barrage of lingua francas. It is a living language that changes every day with new slang from the slums and the buckling and reshaping of English or any of Kenya's myriad indigenous languages. Sheng is a language unafraid of its own metamorphosis. It is the product of a collision and the reimagining of what it means to be Kenyan.

In 1986, Martinican writers Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant examined their own language, Creole, in the manifesto Éloge de la Créolité (In Praise of Creoleness). Similar to Sheng, Creole is a mixed language but as the writers argue, it also transcends its obvious pragmatic function and renders and encapsulates the identity of a place and its people. The manifesto begins with the writers announcing themselves, "neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles".

In 1992, Chamoiseau's novel Texaco won the Prix Goncourt Prize for French literature. This was significant because the novel was heavily laced with Creole. This recognition of Martinican Creole's entwinement with French was to the horror of the Académie Française, an institution founded in 1635 and charged with the protection of the French language.