Ruto, tongue and the trouble with English

“Emi o ni ki Gambari ma sun rara, ki o sa ti mo kii iran baba mi.” This age-old Yoruba expression, loosely translated, concedes that a northerner may recite rara, a Yoruba praise form, but must not deploy it to exalt my lineage. If you searched beneath its cadence, you would see a subtle architecture of exclusion, a cultural instinct that draws boundaries even within shared spaces. Such impulses are not peculiar to Nigeria, or to Africa. They recur across histories and geographies, often disguised as preference but tethered to hierarchy.

Across Europe, we can find a classic example of this in Wales. For centuries, particularly after the Laws in Wales Acts and reinforced through the punitive practice of the Welsh Not, Welsh children were disciplined for speaking their own language. Advancement required abandonment. To progress, one had to acquire what was metaphorically called the “English head.” It was at once an admission of power and a surrender to it. However, the modern world complicates that assumption. Given that our present reality is one where Mandarin shapes markets, Arabic anchors faith, and Spanish spans continents, English no longer monopolises the grammar of progress.

What occurred in Wales was not a cultural accident, but a deliberate technology of power. Language was recast from a vessel of identity into a gatekeeping instrument, a means by which access to education, mobility, and dignity could be rationed. The sociolinguist Pierre Bourdieu would later conceptualise this as linguistic capital, the idea that certain ways of speaking are endowed with legitimacy while others are quietly disqualified. In such a system, accent becomes a credential, and fluency a passport into legitimacy. The consequence is not only the silencing of tongues but the internalisation of hierarchy, where speakers begin to measure their worth by their proximity to an imposed standard.

It is against this wider history that one must examine the recent diplomatic lapse of President William Ruto of Kenya. Addressing Kenyans in Italy, he mocked Nigerian speech, suggesting that Nigerians speaking English require translation. The remark drew laughter. It should have drawn reflection. When derision travels across African borders, it carries more than humour. It carries memory. Had such a statement emerged from a Western podium, the continent would have responded with unified indignation, naming it for what it would be called, racism. That it came from within Africa does not make it lighter. It makes it more troubling.

Kenya’s own intellectual tradition gives us a telling counterpoint. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, one of the country’s most formidable thinkers, spent a lifetime resisting linguistic imperialism. In his seminal work Decolonising the Mind, he argued that language is not just a tool of communication but a carrier of culture, memory, and identity. For anyone to abandon their language is to sever themselves from their past. That a Kenyan president would stand abroad and diminish another African people on the basis of accent suggests a dissonance between political power and historical consciousness.

This is why the question of language is never just about communication. It is about power, memory, and the architecture of self-worth. And Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s warning comes to bear again. Accent, in this context, becomes more than sound. It becomes a site of judgement, where difference is mistaken for deficiency. As a matter of factly, linguistic variation is not a failure of speech. It is the evidence of history at work within language, the imprint of geography, culture, and adaptation. Mocking it simply translates to misunderstanding the very nature of language itself.

The irony sharpens when one considers the internal diversity of English itself. Within the United Kingdom, intelligibility is not guaranteed. Glaswegians struggle with Aberdonian speech. Geordie, Scouse, and Mancunian accents frequently confound one another. Variation is not failure, but a natural condition of living languages. Singling out Nigerians for possessing an accent is a clear case of misunderstanding language at its most basic level. It is also to ignore the fact that Kenyan English, like all postcolonial variants, carries its own distinct inflection.

Nigeria, for its part, requires no validation in this domain. It is the home of Wole Soyinka, the first Black recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, writing in English yet built it on Yoruba cosmology. It is also the country of Chinua Achebe, whose Things Fall Apart reconfigured global literary consciousness. These are not accidents but evidence that language, even when inherited through colonial encounters, can be remade into an instrument of self-definition.

But what, in truth, is this English language that inspires such misplaced reverence? It is not an innocent medium. It is a historical construct, expanded through empire, trade, and coercion. The linguist David Crystal notes that English did not become global because of intrinsic superiority, but because of “the power of the people who speak it.” Power, not purity, carried it across continents. That distinction matters.

English today behaves with the appetite of empire. It absorbs, adapts, and often erases. It borrows from other tongues while positioning itself as the standard of articulation. French, once an agent of similar domination, now wrestles with “Franglais,” a hybrid it resists even as it once imposed linguistic conformity on parts of Africa. The cycle is familiar. The coloniser rarely welcomes being colonised.

In this global contest of tongues, loss is constant. Each time a language recedes, a worldview diminishes. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o reminds us, language carries the “collective memory bank of a people’s experience.” When speakers grow ashamed of their language, that memory begins to wither away.

President Ruto’s remark, therefore, is not trivial. It suggests a worrying trend, a discomfort with linguistic identity that seeks refuge in borrowed standards. Yet the world offers contrary examples. China advances without a linguistic apology. Arab nations conduct faith and diplomacy without surrendering Arabic. Spain does not measure intellect by English fluency. These societies operate from within their linguistic centres, not at their margins.

Africa must learn the same confidence. Yoruba possesses diplomatic nuance. Igbo carries poetic elasticity. Hausa possesses structural clarity. What these languages require is not foreign endorsement but deliberate investment through education, policy, and cultural production. Languages rise when they are used, taught, and dignified.