Blame It on God: He Started the “Confuse”

“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.”

I know we read these lines sometimes in passing, but hold on one minute.

Imagine that scene. It’s not the same as meeting someone for the first time, because you have the benefit of the knowledge that who you are meeting is human. But Adam? I mean, was he surprised? Say, what was the first word that came out of his mouth when he saw God…since he had never seen him before? One would think God said, “Surplurs!”…but I digress.

Aha! Language. What language do you think God used to communicate with Adam at that moment? I am 100% sure it wasn’t a subset of the Luhya subtribe in Kenya called Isukha. When those guys greet you, you might think it’s a declaration of war, because of the forcefulness of the articulation combined with the word itself, and we have not even tackled body language!

I have a feeling that the first language was a Bantu language…and that’s all I am going to say. You can find space to defend your language elsewhere. That reminds me. A couple of years back, marketing Guru Seth Godin posted on his social media the word, Sawuboona. He said it means, “I see you”, not at a “hi” level, but at a deeper level of presence and connection.

Sawuboona

Kenyans went berserk, calling “motivational speakers” — as they thought Seth Godin was — all manner of names. We motivational speakers have indeed suffered and still do. They said that he was corrupting their loose lingo “Sawa Bwana”, meaning “It’s okay, boss”, to something he didn’t know. They bashed the man for a week. Meanwhile, Seth didn’t even know what was going on. Now, that’s bliss, isn’t it?

Imagine someone being angry at you and you have no clue. You could even meet him or her (hopefully it’s not your spouse), and you are totally oblivious that they are steaming inside with anger, ready to blow up…and that’s where another language comes in…body language. That will be another article.

So I reached out to Seth Godin through his Gmail address and informed him of what was going on. I explained as best as I could what “Sawa Bwana” means in Swahili, thinking I would earn some points with this white man. I was shocked. He wrote back graciously and said he actually meant sawuboona just as he had written it. Meanwhile, autocorrect tells me that I meant to write “sawbones”, not sawuboona, but I am ignoring it.

(Come to think of it, is autocorrect an intruder, a companion or an eavesdropper? To get your answer, write your Bantu name in Microsoft Word and let autocorrect suggest a better one.)

Sawuboona was not a Swahili word that Kenyans thought Seth corrupted or used ignorantly, but an isiZulu word that means, “I see you,” Seth explained. I was floored. I rushed back to social media like a little kangaroo out of its mother’s pocket to sensitise “My fellow Kenyans”, as Uhuru Kenyatta fondly used to say. Nobody had the vocabulary to apologise to Seth. They instead moved on to another victim.

A funny, totally disconnected thought: kangaroos can pocket even without clothes.

No Movement Without Language

Speaking of language, I once heard a missionary preach and tell the story of the day his car was stuck in the mud in the middle of nowhere in a foreign country. Not knowing what to do and how to communicate (even sign language can be misconstrued for something else in some cultures), he got out of the vehicle and started shouting, “Halle-Luhya!” Could that have been Adam’s first word by the way? I don’t think so, I told you the language was a Bantu language.

Anyway, the locals heard the man and shouted back, “Hall-Luhyas!” Then there was a back and forth of Hallelujahs as the crowd gathered and helped him out. Language is that powerful, even with just one word. Repeated words are another thing altogether.

I wonder if God had to repeat any word to Adam, by the way. You know the way you tell a child as clearly as you can to do something, and they reply, “Eh?” or “Huh?” Did God have to do that with Adam?

Some repeated words depend on the physical location and topography. Like the animation I watched, where a character spoke and heard the same word come back to him. It was an echo, but he didn’t know. So he shouted back, “Shut up!” That’s the same word that came back. You can picture the scene and guess how long that took.

Reading Prayers

Now, God, communication and language. You must have heard of a paper in Pakistan that used ChatGPT to do a feature article and forgot to delete the last prompt by AI. I have always had a problem with people who read prayers. Say, is God big on authenticity?

You know, if people are using AI these days for examinations, I won’t be surprised if people are enlisting ChatGPT to write prayers for them. We are desperate to be heard by God, and we have been taught about prayer for decades. I am sure ChatGPT can give you great prayer points. What you are missing is the original language, and it wasn’t Greek.

One thing that I suspect, though, is that prayers became a problem just after the Tower of Babel debacle. I mean, everyone had one language—the Bantu language I presume. The communication with God was a direct call because the same language was used horizontally and vertically. Then, the Bible uses a very funny word to describe God’s intervention.

God an Author of Confusion?

God said, “Let us go and confuse their language.” Can you believe that? I always thought God is not an author of confusion, and yet here we are. The very languages we are using to communicate today are confused! Literally! No wonder we are told speaking in English is not a sign of intelligence. It’s true. It’s a confused language. More than one foot is feet, but more than one boot is not beet!

I also have a sneaky feeling that the Tower of Babel debacle was the origin of comedy! I kid you not. Picture this, you are communicating with someone in a language you both understand, and then out of the blue, they start speaking in a funny way…say, like a Nilote…and they are serious! People must have fallen off of their cranes and ladders in stitches…and I can just see God smiling in satisfaction. Very sneaky, Father God.

It reminds me of growing up in village schools where “speaking vernacular” was an abomination. There we were, having been brought up communicating in a confused language that is our mother tongue! Then, someone forced us to speak English. Words whose meanings we did not even know.

So, when we were teasing or harassing each other, you would hear phrases like, “You can’t me.” That’s a direct translation from a Bantu language meaning “I am too good, you could never defeat me”.

I know what you are thinking, “That’s shorthand in speech.” Whatever. You get the point. Now, there was a student from Tanzania who had a do-not-use-vernacular problem in class. He wanted to go for a short call and for the life of him, didn’t know how to get permission from his teacher. What would he say?

“Mwalimu, you see me…chololololo,” he said.

I said T for ToK, not T for Tok!

The good thing about communication is that we can piece together the context, and verbal and non-verbal cues to pass a message across. Preachers tell us that God only responds to faith. Eh! You mean if I frown, it won’t add urgency to my prayers?

Now, we have people who have trouble pronouncing some words. “I leally rove you.” I won’t mention names, but you know yourselves. Meanwhile, this is not even funny. There is a very sad story in the Bible of some Nilotes who got into trouble because of pronunciation.

They had been trapped at a crossroad and their enemy didn’t know who they really were. Thus, they smartly designed a test. If you wanted to survive, all you had to say was “Shibboleth”. Whatever that means is not the point. The point is that for their lives, these people could never pronounce the word correctly. They kept saying “Sibboleth.”

And they died because of that.

Today, we still have people who cannot say “fish.” I just imagine that they cannot be satisfied until they say fees. So, if they are catching fish in plural, I honestly do not want to be on their guest list.

But at the end of the day, language is a critical component of our existence. Even ants communicate. It’s always a joy to know that the message you had in your heart got to the other person’s bosom through language.

It reminds me of a preacher and an interpreter. The preacher had a slight joke that he knew once cracked would bring smiles upon the faces of the congregation. So, he went ahead and told the joke, taking a considerable amount of time.

The interpreter used fewer than ten words to interpret, but the impact was humongous. Whereas the preacher expected chuckles, the congregation were in uncontrollable stitches, some with tears in their eyes.

As they were having lunch, the preacher asked the interpreter why they laughed that much. He told him, “You took so long to tell the joke. I shortened it. I just said, ‘The preacher has cracked a joke, please laugh.’”