Kenya: Language and the Search for a Coherent National Identity

Abstract Kenya is only forty-three years old as an independent, republican nation-state. It is a plural society that encompasses within its boundaries a diverse population of ethnic nations. Contemporary Kenya, like other nations of Africa, is engaged in a search for cohesion, unity, and a collective identity as a modern nation. This quest shapes its general policy of cultural and linguistic pluralism that recognizes the rights of all languages and cultures of the communities found within state boundaries. In this type of situation, language plays a central role in defining or mediating the ongoing formations and expressions of social identity. Individuals have complex multiple identities, involving region, language, socio-economic class, gender, and political and economic factors as well as religious and ethnic ones. Kenyan ‘national’ identity is necessarily a recent phenomenon because the idea of ‘Kenya’ as a country is a modern construction, invented purely by European imperial and colonial interests. Forged from at least forty-two different ethno-linguistic groups, their members have retained strongly grounded, localized identities which primarily are defined in terms of language, but also through claims to specific physical spaces, external community linkages, economic roles and practices – all within new boundaries and altered ways of life.