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In 1975, on a remote hillside in postcolonial Up-Country Kenya, two five-year-old boys, one American and one Samburu, met and became inseparable friends for a period of 15 months. Colin and Sadiki's controversial postcolonial friendship was created through and marked by their invention of Kisisi, an original Swahili pidgin that was understood and shared by just the two of them.
Moving gracefully between intimacy and colonial relations, this study documents a rare case of child language invention that demonstrates striking linguistic and sociolinguistic competencies of young children. As the boys negotiate diverse linguistic ecologies and cultural spaces, they display their abilities as highly effective language innovators. Though the study took place 40 years ago, these examples have significant implications for the study of global cultural encounters prevalent in our increasingly diverse world. Part historic ethnography, part linguistic case study, and part a mother's memoir, Kisisi is a human story of irrepressible expressive creativity as the boys' quest for language equality creates a place for their friendship that transcends the existing language ideologies, marked colonial borders, and harsh inequities of economics, race and culture that engulfed all aspects of their daily lives.
List of contents
Acknowledgments ix
Map xiii
Prologue xv
1 Uweryumachini!: A Language Discovered 1
2 Herodotus Revisited: Language Origins, Forbidden Experiments, New Languages, and Pidgins 17
3 Lorca's Miracle: Play, Performance, Verbal Art, and Creativity 35
4 Kekopey Life: Transcending Linguistic Hegemonic Borders and Racialized Postcolonial Spaces 58
5 Kisisi: Language Form, Development, and Change 93
Epilogue 132
In Memoriam 137
Notes 138
References 146
Index 157
About the author
Perry Gilmore, a sociolinguist and educational anthropologist, is Professor of Language, Reading and Culture at the University of Arizona, USA. She is also Professor Emerita, and Affiliate Faculty at the Alaska Native Language Center, at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Gilmore is the author of numerous ethnographic studies and co-editor of major ethnography collections including, Children In and Out of School: Ethnography and Education (1982) and The Acquisition of Literacy: Ethnographic Perspectives (1986). Gilmore is the past President of the Council on Anthropology and Education, a major section of the American Anthropology Association.
Summary
Part historic ethnography, part linguistic case study and part a mother s memoir, Kisisi tells the story of two boys (Colin and Sadiki) who, together invented their own language, and of the friendship they shared in postcolonial Kenya.
