WHEN you find yourself at a wedding discussing how more than 800 people have been killed and more than 250,000 kicked out of their homes for having certain ethnic origins, you know there is something terribly wrong
In these times, when belonging or not belonging to a particular tribe can be the difference between not being dead or being seriously dead, what chance does a person like me have? I was born to a Luhya father and a Taita mother, but I speak the Kikuyu language of Kiambu, where I was raised.
Daily life is a constant kaleidoscope of languages for those of us who are of mixed ethnic heritage. We must gauge what sort of street or village we are in and, like a chameleon, speak the “correct” tongue.
Supposedly cosmopolitan Nairobi has now been Balkanized, with whole neighborhoods turned into exclusive reserves of certain tribes.
Many of my friends have now resorted to taking crash courses in the dialects of the tribes indicated on their identity cards, “just in case it comes in handy.
clipped from: www.nytimes.com 