Uganda was declared a British "protectorate" (= colony) in the 1890s and held as such by the British East
Africa Company until thrown out in 1962 when Idi Amin seized control of the country. My friend Kenneth Tumusiime suggested to me that the Brits had "pretty much gotten what they wanted" by then, but lots of former colonial powers were being chased from the continent during that time. The sun had already achieved the ability to "set on the British Empire" by then.
That said, the English language remains the official language of Uganda and is taught in the public schools. This is partly historical and partly pragmatic. The Allies who won WWII were mostly English-speaking and mass communication was disseminating information at an accelerating pace, so going with the likeliest international language must have been a what the SoCal "Valley Girls" would soon contribute to the new worldwide parlance, a "no-brainer." As one Norwegian colleague once told me, "If I'd been raised on English, I have no idea what foreign language I'd have studied in school!" The Scandinavians ever put some effort into picking the most advantageous accent for their kids, so that a walk through Oslo or Stockholm can now sound like a sound track from the Oxford campus!
But language is hard to control. Like Jell-o, it shape-shifts to serve its needs on an amusingly local basis. Ugandans have more of a British accent than an American one, certainly, but they also speak 58 local African languages (my friend Kenneth speaks >ten of these) and there is a rich cross-fertilization going on all the time. Just as we English speakers steal words and phrases from other languages, I hear recognizable English words sprinkled into conversations that might otherwise be in Chinese as far as my brain can tell.
Over the past few weeks I have spent many hours in a boat with three Ugandans (Kenneth, Mugecis, and Ivan) who quite reasonably elect to converse in one or more African languages. I don't really know what actually "counts" as a language here, but there are fine-grain distinctions that carry considerable gravitas to the cognoscenti. Most dramatically, when we impulsively boated up to Kenneth's home fishing village by the Victorian Nile Delta, the townspeople initially began to run away (remember that the two rangers we traveled with were armed and demonstrably capable of arresting scofflaw fishermen -- a category that seems to include many adult males) until Kenneth called out to them in THEIR language. They did not recognize Kenneth as a native son (not initially), but his voice was instantly legitimizing and calming. A password! Suddenly, the previously-emptying village repopulated such that several hundred had coalesced to stare at the improbable vision before them: two peaceful Uganda Wildlife Authority rangers and one sunburned Mzungu!
In hindsight, this was both our first boat day and the moment we were handed the clue that we our project. The delta is usually shoebill HQ, but the extensive awareness of these fishermen yielded NO recent sightings! It seems likely that they would have remembered because gumako (shoebills) are regarded as a hex! Fishermen who encounter them have reduced fishing success thereafter. Sorry, but I'll have to see some clean data run through that regression.
In practice, Kenneth is thoughtful and inclusive about speaking English much of the time when I'm present. Other times, he plunges into easy conversation with our rangers and I suspect they are simply more comfortable not having to use a secondary language. I am intrigued as I try to imagine English being a second language for me -- try it, it's hard!
This brings me to today's intended topic: accents and local dialect idiosyncrasies that impair effective communication in ways often quite amusing. He understands my "American English" far more consistently than I understand his "Uganda:n British English," plausibly because there are more Hollywood films in Uganda than the reverse. We laugh frequently over what George Bernard Shaw quipped about America and England, "two countries divided by a common language."
Happily, ours is a bilateral cultural exchange. I think my best contribution to the Americanized fluency of Kenneth, Mugecis, and Ivan stems from the shock I experienced in learning that they were seriously under-utilizing the F word! Needless to say, I didn't want that shortcoming on my conscience, so I began working it smoothly into all sorts of conversations, typically eliciting hoots of jocular appreciation. While they still cannot drop "what the fuck!" into their speech without cracking up, there is now hope.
My struggle with Kenneth's accent and usage is sometimes more fraught. When we met with the Uganda Wildlife Authority's head of research I could not catch his name (this is routine for me...I'd need repetition if introduced to Joe Biden), so I asked Kenneth later and heard "Habat Keetee." I really tried to assimilate that answer by not responding with "WTF?", but after several iterations finally asked if he'd write it down for me. Herbert Kitiii. I repeated back, "Oh, HURR- burrt!" and Kenneth nodded patiently, "yes, Habat." Without the writing, my closest guess had been, " is he saying 'Ahmad'?"
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