Translingual Composing that Decolonizes the Mind: Evidence From Kenyan Hip-hop

This presentation will argue and demonstrate how translingual composing practices in Kenyan Hip-hop seek to decolonize Kenyan languages, minds and culture. I will argue that while many Kenyan Hip-hop artists compose their music using multiple languages, for Jua Cali, it is tied to his language and cultural decolonization work. Drawing from interview data, observation of his everyday language use, linguistic and multimodal textual analysis of his songs, I will demonstrate how he uses language in his music to raise awareness on the need to preserve Sheng, Kenyan urban youth language. While Sheng is now increasingly accepted and used in professional and educational contexts, this was not the case a decade or two ago. It was not only highly stigmatized, but also prohibited in schools and other professional settings. Jua Cali’s use of Sheng in his music compositions is aimed at challenging dominant language ideologies that emphasize standard language norms and treat languages as discrete, separate and hierarchical. Further, drawing from interview data, I will share the theorizing behind his song “Kuna Sheng,” to demonstrate how he imagined it as a public archive deliberately “composed” to preserve Sheng’s linguistic culture. The song also employs rhetorical strategies that seek to recover pre-colonial African oral archiving practices and other indigenous knowledge making methodologies. As such, Jua Cali’s multilingual composing practices are not only about language documentation and preservation, but also about linguistic, mental, cultural and knowledge decolonization. Given his status as a leading Hip-hop artist in Kenya, Jua Cali is a public pedagogue whose work has implication for language theory, methodology, pedagogy and policy. As such, the presentation will consider why his work and message is critically important for Kenya and Africa in general, particularly in the age of global spread of English and western neoliberalism.