Ngwatilo » culture http://www.ngwatilo.com to hold on to Tue, 08 Jun 2010 19:27:27 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 2006-2007 neema@ngwatilo.com (Ngwatilo) neema@ngwatilo.com (Ngwatilo) posts to hold on to Ngwatilo Ngwatilo neema@ngwatilo.com No no http://www.ngwatilo.com/wp-content/plugins/podpress/images/powered_by_podpress.jpg Ngwatilo http://www.ngwatilo.com 144 144 Ngwatilo grows older. http://www.ngwatilo.com/2008/12/04/ngwatilo-grows-older/ http://www.ngwatilo.com/2008/12/04/ngwatilo-grows-older/#comments Thu, 04 Dec 2008 09:40:21 +0000 Neema http://www.ngwatilo.com/?p=77 What is my life for?

At this particular moment.

Where do I want to be when I’m 30?

I’ve been away. It is not an apology. I’m being an actress now for a TV Drama that will hopefully come to a tube near you in the coming year. – well, it will if you’re in East Africa region. It’s crazy. You work like a dog and then you go home to sleep. I’ve bawled for an hour straight to shoot enough material for a scene that will take probably all of 3minutes. I’ve drank probably 10 liters of water to shoot probably 15seconds worth of material, I have worn painful heels for longer than I want to say…and the list is severely edited.

So, I’m not allowed to see “The rushes” – the edited scenes – while we’re shooting, which basically means I’ll be as shocked as any other person when I see the thing on TV; but I’m told it looks good. more to the point, I know I have a knack for this thing.

I love poetry,

I miss making music (cause its been a minute).

It occurs to me that performing music is performing poetry and is playing a character and making something on a page, words and melodies, alive. Perhaps I am plotting my own return to music without knowing it myself.

Perhaps i’m mustering the incredible belief in oneself it takes to do anything new and worthwhile on this earth. Or allowing myself to live into it, or become it? I’m a nervous wreck about the possibility that I might not be able to be this amazing person. (ok, we’re getting really sensitive here) there are a million posers and I’d hate to be one of them. But perhaps I’m more afraid that I am supercalafragalisticexpialidocious [(c) Mary Poppins] and I don’t know how I’m going to get there from my current self.
You’ve heard this before. I’m not pasting it below for you. lol. for me. HA!

Marianne Williamson, author and lecturer

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

— Marianne Williamson (A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles)

She’s Gorgeous, that Marianne.

Yea, ok, so I’m an artist. But given the direction the arts are going, I have to be among the thinkers as well, the administrators and marketers who create concepts and things for you to desire… like Jipange this Saturday. Me I want to say (as I return to Bantu language sentence construction) that if the Jipange Generation “concert” is nothing but a “concert” – someone missed the ball entirely. It’s nice to get people together in a safe space to enjoy music and each other, but it does not teach anyone to Jipanga, nor does it necessarily allow them the opportunity to think about Jipangaring.

And folk need to Jipanga. vibaya yaani.

Entertainment is a wonderful thing. Art is a beautiful meaningful thing. Culture is the way you teach yourself to be. Me I care more about the latter two.

It’s possible for an artist in my position to find themselves impotent, because the place that they would love to write, sing or offer whatever for doesn’t know how to read/hear/watch it, respond to, value, or absorb it. It is at that point that the artist with their heart set on that particular goal, must also teach their audience/market how to desire their work, and be fulfilled by it in the manner described above.

I met a superqualified dude the other month who deals with Fire safety. like, his whole purpose in recent years has been around Fire Safety. Clearly he did this outside the country of kenya. I don’t know if there is a legal code, and doubt that it is particularly binding. Thinking if it was, A hella lotta people would owe Gava money. Even the public doesn’t take fire safety stuff seriously, cause their government doesn’t seem to. (How fast did you leave the building that one time a fire alarm went off?!)

Basically, the guy has to make a job for himself in kenya. He has to teach us (Gava and the public) that we need his skills, that we ought to pay him so much for his kind of work, (meaning that he would need to show that the cost attached to not heeding him is X ksh…)

Even me (Kenyan ebonics i tell you) I have to show you that I am the one you’ve been waiting for. just chill.

Oh, big up to Spark Africa for their encouragement and support to me as an artist, to Kenya as a nation of mostly Young People who need to Jipanga. When you go to the concert. Check out their tent for some serious ways to JiPanga.

]]> http://www.ngwatilo.com/2008/12/04/ngwatilo-grows-older/feed/ 0 Kenya: Mother Tongue and Cultural Identity (on rotation http://www.ngwatilo.com/2008/09/02/kenya-mother-tongue-and-cultural-identity-on-rotation/ http://www.ngwatilo.com/2008/09/02/kenya-mother-tongue-and-cultural-identity-on-rotation/#comments Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:24:53 +0000 Neema http://www.ngwatilo.com/?p=31 Kenya: Mother Tongue And Cultural Identity The East African Standard (Nairobi) http://www.eastandard.net/ OPINION February 24, 2007 Posted to the web February 26, 2007 Egara Kabaji Nairobi The World Mother Tongue Day was marked on last week on Wednesday, February 21. Unfortunately, there was no significant event organised to mark the day in Kenya. The newspapers, radio and TV stations were equally silent yet the question of the place of mother tongue is an important pedagogical issue of our time. The role of language in defining a nation's cultural identity is critical in a post-colonial multilingual state. It is unfortunate that the colonial experience has made it difficult for us to come to terms with our past and draw strength from the mother tongues as source of our cultural spring. Modern education has also set us on a path of self-denial and flight from who we are in terms of language and culture. The more "enlightened", the more we are unlikely to identify with our languages and culture. In my line of duty, I have encountered many people who consider communicating in our languages as a sign of primitivity. Others wrongly equate communicating in our mother tongues to tribalism. Nothing is far from the truth. The obvious fact, however, is that anybody ashamed of his language creates a void in himself. Before the advent of colonialism, our mother tongues were the languages through which we expressed our culture. Through these languages, we told folk stories, sang and dreamed. In the evenings, as darkness engulfed the environment, children would retreat to their grandmothers' or mothers' huts to be told and to tell tales. Literature was delivered in a language that never isolated any one of them. For failing to mark the World Mother Tongue Day, we may be confirming that the colonial war against our languages was won and the situation is irreversible. The war was waged in various stages. Christian missionaries were the first to arrive, followed by colonial administrators. They came to "civilise the natives" and hence the first move was to wage a war on our languages and culture. They launched a sustained cultural imperialism campaign that they hoped would bring about the death of these languages. The effects of this war are visible in our inability to mark such an important day. The colonial anthropologists, historians and sociologists who attempted to study African cultures and languages were shrouded by myths. Celebrating mother tongue day would have given us the opportunity to demystify these myths and create a new awareness; in Ngugi wa Thiongo's words, move the centre. Kenya is lucky to have 61 languages. All these are fortunately living languages. Apart from speaking a myriad of mother tongues, every Kenyan is expected to speak Kiswahili. Thus, to many, Kiswahili is their second language if the individual is not a Mswahili or did learn Kiswahili as a mother tongue (first language). Kiswahili, no doubt, occupies a prestigious position. Being a national language, each and every Kenyan is expected to speak it. Nevertheless, it took the Kenyan government from 1963 to 1986 to realise that Kiswahili should be a compulsory language at both primary and secondary schools. The introduction of 8-4-4 education system was a blessing for Kiswahili by marking it a compulsory subject in primary and secondary schools. Kiswahili is also the mother tongue to many urban Kenyans. It is also inevitably the language of instruction in nursery and lower primary in towns and cities of Kenya. The prestigious position of Kiswahili is, indeed, assured. Apart from being a lingua franca in Eastern Africa, it is now the seventh most spoken language in the world. Apart from the major mother tongues, others are confined to the periphery. Very little print and electronic publishing is done in these languages. This is partly because of the colonial legacy. When the British colonialists introduced English in Kenya, they suppressed the use of other languages. No wonder English is curiously also a language of prestige. To speak and read English bestows the individual with some degree of prestige and "Englishness" which implies being "educated". It is the language of social mobility and economic interaction. Mother tongues (other languages other than Kiswahili) are sometimes referred to as languages of the catchment areas in Education. The fact that mother tongues are never taught after primary three, renders them vulnerable to extinction. A report tabled recently at an international conference in Kenya warned that thousands of indigenous languages might disappear in this century. In many of the indigenous Kenyan languages other than Kiswahili, very little research has been done. These languages have very little written in them. At best, one can only find a poorly translated Bible with numerous grammatical, structural and orthographic problems. It is clear that traditional knowledge found in these languages which include secrets of medicine and how to manage land in environmentally sustainable ways have never been known to the world. The process of globalisation is promoting the use of English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and other European languages at the expense of our languages. We are more comfortable writing and speaking in these languages than our mother tongues partly because they are languages of our intellectual upbringing. The restoration of right place of mother tongues can only be realised through government policy formulation that will see to it that commercial publishers venturing in publishing and popularising reading in our mother tongues are given incentives to do so. Progressive policies will inspire attitude change towards our languages and "brainwash" our people to feel proud speaking their languages. The bottom line is that if the government does not intervene, some Kenyan mother tongues are bound to die at a great cost. Copyright © 2007 The East African Standard. All rights reserved. P.O.Box 30080, Nairobi, Kenya 254-2-540280/1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9, 254-2-540370/8/9 Ripped from http://www.mail-archive.com/africanlanguages@yahoogroups.com/msg00464.html ]]> http://www.ngwatilo.com/2008/09/02/kenya-mother-tongue-and-cultural-identity-on-rotation/feed/ 0