BOOK NOOK: ‘The Colourful Bead Necklace of My Mother Tongue’ by Lorna Sempele

‘The Colourful Bead Necklace of My Mother Tongue’ by Lorna Sempele. PHOTO| COURTESY

What you need to know:

  • The Siyiapei village adventures are real as she details them from the moment she alights from a Matatu seven kilometres off Narok Town, walking by the perpetually running stream through the dusty path to Yeiyoo’s home.
  • The rich descriptions leave you with great mental images of everything she says, so striking they grip you like her grandmother’s thick fermented yoghurt flavoured with powdered embers of the Osenetoi or Oloirien tree and honey.
  • Do you have feedback on this story? E-mail: [email protected]

Like the rich cultural glimpses of growing up detailed in Mugo wa Gatheru’s autobiographical novel A Child of Two Worlds, Lorna Sempele’s book is an award winning biographical take of her efforts from childhood to adulthood to learn her beloved Maa language and pick every word she could while living and interacting with relatives and community at large.

A GIRL IN LOVE WITH HER PEOPLE

The Colourful Bead Necklace of My Mother Tongue is not the story of a Maasai girl born and bred in Maasai land as you would expect.

It is the story of a girl in love with her people, their culture, language and everything that defines them and how each of these moments becomes a pious attempt to form a colourful bead necklace of the Maa language.

Sempele’s attempt to glean as much of her mother tongue as possible sets off her real-life story in her ancestral home just outside Narok Town when she came to visit her grandmother for a few weeks over the school holidays.

The step-daughter of a German-born optician, the occupation of the stepfather meant the family moved a lot across the country, from Kericho, Nakuru to Nairobi.

This made her multi-lingual like many Kenya children in urban areas, speaking Swahili and English more than their mother tongue.

Yet, Sempele craved for a language neither spoken at home nor out there in her multi-cultural school wherever that was, where her parents had set camp.

FIGURATIVE MASTERPIECE

Sempele takes you through one of the best descriptive eloquent writing you do not read often, rich and so effective in her figurative accounts you can actually taste the creamy crumbs, enjoy the Maasai yoghurt kule naaoto, make threads from sisal, engage in her childhood games, feel the scorching embers against a bare thigh in the take-it-like-a-man game, balance a 25-litre jerry can of water horizontally on the back with her or feel the loving warmth of her grandmother’s bear hug whom she fondly referred to as yeiyoo (mother) .

She writes, “Yeiyoo, yeiyoo (mother, mother) I would call as I flung myself through the old wooden door that served as the entrance to her home, as well as to her small shop from which she sold groceries to the small group of Siyiapei residents, many of whom were relatives.

Wherever she was, she would turn her wide, plump body towards me, swing her large arms wide open, and give me that smile that was worth a million goats, revealing a large gap between her two front teeth”.

It is not hard to see why the Colourful Bead Necklace of My Mother Tongue won the 2016 International Language Autobiography Award.

GRIPPING ACCOUNTS

The Siyiapei village adventures are real as she details them from the moment she alights from a Matatu seven kilometres off Narok Town, walking by the perpetually running stream through the dusty path to Yeiyoo’s home.

The rich descriptions leave you with great mental images of everything she says, so striking they grip you like her grandmother’s thick fermented yoghurt flavoured with powdered embers of the Osenetoi or Oloirien tree and honey.

You can actually taste it with her. In each of these instances she is picking up Maa words one at time to form the most beautiful language necklace she adorns today with pride and gives her the distinctive identity of a Maasai woman.

Each chapter, sentence and paragraph details the language-picking process with impeccable expressive patches. 

AXIS OF MAA GIRL SUBJUGATION

In between, Sempele takes you with her through the story of her life and not just her innocence years when both boys and girls were the same, playing the same games and sharing the same ogre stories around the fires of “the three old men”, but also glimpses of adulthood when gender roles in a highly culturally sound community begin taking shape.

Soon, keeping and managing the house and domestic duties take over as young girls learn from their peers and older women. The innocence of growing up gives up its ghost for a whole new reality.

From her high school days to University years, the reality of a young person who craves to converse in her dearest Maa language in high school like her peers who speak their Kalenjin or kikuyu animatedly and unabashedly to the University corridors where for three years she never came across another Maasai girl.

Even the Maa boys are very few and in between and not as interested in her dearest language or even her. She feels lonely and teary. The pain and axis of a Maa girl’s subjugation by the society are laid out in redolent alacrity from female genital mutilation that the urban nomadism of her family saves her from, early marriage and preference of a boy over a girl in education that will make you feel the girl’s emancipation in pastoralist communities of Kenya is still a job incomplete.  

It’s a transfixing read worth every second you move with Sempele from every adventure, description or sketch about her personal life.

Not the story of an activist but the life laid bare of a woman in love with her language and her culture and a colourful language bead she just want to continue forming and keep intact.

SOCIAL INTERACTION PROMINENCE

Sempele’s award-winning autobiography clearly agrees with the Essay Concerning Human Understanding where John Locke reaffirms that at birth the child is born with a tabula rasa, a blank slate that experiences over time inscribes knowledge. She also indirectly restates Lev Vygotsky’s Social Interactionist Theory that stresses the prominence of social interaction in language development and that culture and environment are imperative in language learning from early childhood.

Her vivid, beautiful and rich descriptions remind you of Michael Anthony’s book Green Days by the River that captures the vibrant facets of Caribbean life. The Colourful Bead Necklace of My Mother Tongue will leave you with a nostalgic desire to weave your own language beads by wearing your mother tongue with pride, unapologetically.  

Do you have feedback on this story? E-mail: [email protected]