By PHILIP OCHIENG
Posted Saturday, March 10 2012 at 21:36
Posted Saturday, March 10 2012 at 21:36
The word maranda may have the same semantic vicissitudes as the word Luo. Originally, Luo (or Lwo) was totally negative in meaning.
It acquired positive importance only after the first person to be called Lwo had scored a certain feat.
Koma, a son of Ruoth (King) Kuku of Didinga — the original Luo home – was nicknamed Lwo because he was extraordinarily indolent and dastardly.
My mother tongue still retains this negative lacing of the word Lwo in such words aslworo (fear or cowardice) and jalworo (a lily-livered individual).
Yet one day Koma-Lwo surprised everybody by provoking the deeply feared Lang’o neighbours – the ancestors of Kenya’s Maasai — and singlehandedly dispatching them.
In the process, he even captured a daughter of Lukok (Ole Kok?), the lworo-inspiring Lang’o chief, brought her to Didinga and was even allowed to keep her as his wife.
From that event, Koma’s epithet Lwo began to be associated with heroism. Like Arya, Lwo came to mean a noble follower of cattle (and fish), whence the verbs luwo (to follow and look after), luwo (to follow and understand) and lupo (to follow and catch).
From this event, too, lworo spawned lwor (“fear” in the sense of “respect”) and jalwor (a courteous person).
Koma-Lwo succeeded his father as ruoth and his son succeeded him as Lwo II. But it was Lwo III who — following a bitter court feud — led a splinter group from Sudan to Nyanza.
They called themselves Jokajok because, as Lwo III explained, he had entrusted his whole extremely dangerous adventure south-eastwards to the Lwo god Jok.
Thus, in Dholuo, the line between lwor (“deference”) and lworo (“dread”) is very thin. They both mean “fear” or “awe”.
But the one denotes awesomeness and the other awfulness. Yet, as Malcolm X remarks in his autobiography, the God of Ezra and Nehemiah may inspire more fear than reverence.
To which God, then, does maranda owe its semantic fortunes? To the Luo, the word remains essentially negative.
Maranda means atavism, barbarism, boorishness, ignorance, illiteracy, philistinism, primitiveness. It refers, in a word, to practices that defy all our latter-day concepts of progress.
As Asenath Bolo Odaga tells us in her book Dholuo-English Dictionary, maranda also refers to “wantonness” and the “… pleasure[s] of the seamy side of life …”
With the recent arrival of a self-righteous and highly addictive Christological doctrine from Europe,maranda also now means any belief or practice which contradicts European culture.
Thus, at Alliance, we often teased our classmate Nelson Auma Ochieng of Bondo. Wasn’t it a contradiction in terms for him to have come to Alliance from Maranda?
But why was the school given a name so degrading, especially since the school might be associated with Jaramogi Oginga Odinga — that early beneficiary of classroom tuition — that later luminary of Kenya’s nationalism?
The point, however, is that words (in all languages) often move from one meaning to the very opposite. And last year, the wordmaranda began to acquire significance in exact opposition to backwardness.
Jamaranda is now very busy doffing the mantle of nescient barbarism to don, instead, that of academic excellence.
Perhaps we have here the inventors of the technologies which Mugo Kibati will soon parade to prove the success of our Vision 2030?
I don’t know to what Maranda owes this revolution in academic fortunes. However, I know this: Knowledge always lurches away the more you think you are close to it.
Thus knowledge can be urged forward only by that Socratic spirit which humbles the mind into awareness of its permanent ignorance and disciplines both the teacher and the student into mutual assistance in an all-out struggle to banish ignorance.
That is perhaps what the headmaster, Boaz Owino, his staff and his students have seen — the need to pursue knowledge with vigour and discipline, but with humility and dedication to society.
ochiengotani@ke.nationmedia.com
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