The books that line the shelves of the McMillan Memorial Library in Nairobi reflect the interests of their original owner. The spines of Governing Without Consensus or Economics and Empire 1830-1914 can be spied from where I sit. This is the second-oldest library in Kenya and until 1958 it was open only to whites.
Outside the library, among the vendors selling mandazi, a type of fried bread, you hear a language that reflects this complex colonial past. Sheng, or Swahili-English, is a mixed language born from a barrage of lingua francas. It is a living language that changes every day with new slang from the slums and the buckling and reshaping of English or any of Kenya’s myriad indigenous languages. Sheng is a language unafraid of its own metamorphosis. It is the
