Marking a multicultural birthday as Utamaduni Day makes my list

The Turkana Tourism and Cultural Festival is celebrated at Ekalees centre in Lodwar, Turkana County, on August 17, 2019. Culture includes all aspects of our lives. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Culture is a broader phenomenon than the usual dresses, dishes, dances, songs and other performing and decorative arts that we associate with it.
  • Since societies are always changing, our cultures should also be changing in response to the social changes, if they are to remain valid and viable.

Thursday this week, my family had a grand celebration in Kikambala, Kilifi County, just north of Mombasa.

My “Kivyere”, the mother of my daughter-in-law, was celebrating a landmark birthday that qualified her for admission to the venerable order of the truly Wise Elders.

The endearing coastal term “kivyere”, used of fellow parents-in-law, comes from “-vyaa”, a slightly archaic form of the Kiswahili verb “-zaa” (give birth).

I am sorry I cannot regale you with the details of the party, for two reasons.

First, my Kivyere and her people are an emphatically private and quiet-living family, and I know the publicity of a detailed narration of their activities in our popular column might discomfit them.

Secondly, I was not able, for a variety of reasons, to travel “home” to the Coast and attend the celebrations in person.

You and I can, nevertheless, share a few insights into my family affairs, for two humble but profound reasons.

The first is that I wanted to share with you my genuine appreciation and celebration of my beloved Kivyere, a truly remarkable woman who, together with her family, has contributed immensely to my “enjoyment of life”, especially in these recent years.

APPRECIATE DIVERSITY

Obviously, however, Kivyere is not alone. In her and through her, we celebrate the distinguished brigade of other like-minded strong women who are certainly contributing more to the shaping of our society than all the (mostly male) orators and pontificators of our pulpits, parliaments and boardrooms.

One particularly touching aspect of Kivyere’s party, for example, was that she chose to have as her special guests her former schoolmates at Kahuhia Girls High School in Murang'a County.

I was touched by the fact that my Kivyere, born and bred in Coastal Kilifi, studied at Kahuhia, still values the experience.

This brings me to the second reason why I am telling you about our celebrations.

This is the national and, indeed, transnational cultural outlook with which my generation was raised and taught to live.

Scholars call this by various names, like pluralism, multiculturalism or even globalism, meaning that we are citizens of the world.

But in our specific application of it to our lives, I prefer to call it creative inter-culturalism.

This means that we accept the fact that we live in a borderless environment of a limitless mix of ways of living, or cultures.

So we have to pick and blend our ways with extreme awareness, alertness, intelligence and courage.

WHAT IS CULTURE?

But our main problem lies in our ignorance of the true meaning and importance of culture.

Let us clarify a little on this before we suggest the creative inter-cultural approach that we mentioned earlier.

To begin with, culture is a broader phenomenon than the usual dresses, dishes, dances, songs and other performing and decorative arts that we associate with it.

Nor is it necessarily restricted to “things of long ago”, or of “ushagoo/mashambani” (rural areas).

To rehearse an oft-quoted definition by Taban lo Liyong, culture is the way we live.

I expanded on this in my own 1992 definition of culture as a system of “ways in which a given society identifies, regulates, sustains and reflects itself”. Culture thus includes all aspects of our lives.

Location, territory, language and history mark the identity aspect of our culture. The regulation aspect covers systems like faith, beliefs, customs, politics and governance.

Sustenance refers to the way we produce, distribute and share our life necessities, like food, clothing and shelter. The literary, decorative and performing arts are the reflective aspect of culture.

IDENTITY

Thus, we all need to know who we are, both as individuals and as a society, regardless of whether we live in a residential area in Southern Nairobi, a mtaa (an inner-city quarter), or a manyatta in Samburu.

Equally importantly, we have to know how to relate to one another and behave towards one another in families, worship places, neighbourhoods and other shared spaces.

We thus formulate, learn and observe the conventions of relations and interactions. This is what makes us cultured people.

This implies that culture is dynamic. It is not a static, fossilised “given”, on to which we are expected to cling.

It is, rather, a framework within which we adopt and adapt the best from all that surrounds us and apply it to our personal and social needs.

Since societies are always changing, our cultures should also be changing in response to the social changes, if they are to remain valid and viable.

When my Kivyere and I were growing up, for example, our societies in East Africa were in a state of flux, bringing together individuals from diverse backgrounds to form new entities, such as Kenyans, or East Africans, transcending the ethnic entities of the precolonial period.

SOCIAL INTERACTIONS

We thus had to adopt new cultural norms, based mainly on our educational backgrounds, to identify, regulate, sustain and reflect our new societies.

In our encounters, whether professional, political or romantic, we relied on our common languages, our common education and our common economic structures (the Community spirit) to enable us to relate adequately.

It may not have been perfect but it worked, and that is why people like Kivyere and I are still celebrating our widely diversified intercultural families.

I have a hunch that the main ingredient in our cultural approach was that we put ethnicity very low on our list of priorities.

We acknowledged our different regional origins, but we realised that these mattered very little in our relationships.

My Kivyere’s hubby and best friend conveyed to her my personal love and birthday wishes. I call this gentleman, a fellow UDSM (Dar) alumnus, “Nyawana” (fellow father-in-law) because he comes from Kisumu, where we also have a home.

FOSTERING HARMONY

This, for me, signifies the enriching beauty and power of our barrier-breaking new culture.

The Utamaduni (culture) that we recently celebrated should mean Ungwana (appropriateness). It should focus primarily on those aspects of our relationships that positively address and reflect our changing societies.

Have a bright, creative and cultured new year.