Actually Patrick, I agree with you. Kenya can become a nation now that it is a state. And it is true that Julius Nyerere pulled out a feat that created the Tanzania today. Then we need to watch Sheng’ become in the next 50 years, our 'de facto' national language. It will have enough vocabulary, music and visual art to lay the foundations of a distinct culture very much like Kiswahili did at the eastern coast of Africa. There are very many dialects of Kiswahili at the moment. And so for Sheng. Are we ready for Sheng’ fashion? Best Regards, Jimmy Gitonga Web Software Design and Development LinkedIn: Jimmy Gitonga | Twitter: @Afrowave ______________________________________ Web: afroshok.com <http://afroshok.com/>
On 5 Apr 2019, at 2:39 AM, Patrick A. M. Maina <[email protected]> wrote:
I disagree with your assertion that Kenya will "never" be a nation and here's my reasoning: There are different ways that countries and/or nation-states can form and not all of them are organic. Conquests (via wars or colonization) are historically valid (albeit ethically controversial) methods of artificially creating or consolidating countries. Nation-states can also be artificially created after the artificial countries have been formed, through strategic cultural engineering to introduce a new source of common "cultural" identity over time (the easiest route being a language that is linguistically compatible with preexisting languages).
Tanzania is a great example of successful cultural engineering in Africa. Mwalimu Julius Nyerere had the brilliant foresight to strategically position Kiswahili as a unifying language - which pre-emptively solved the problem of tribalism in a country that had over 100 ethnic groups. Tanzania is now enjoying the benefits of being a strategically engineered nation-state (e.g. fairly stable, issues based politics).