Very soon after he admirably resigned as the government spokesman in order to vie for the position of governor of Machakos, Alfred Mutua was seen on the news talking about what seemed to be, from his pronunciation, the ‘governortorial’ – or did he say ‘governatorial’? – seat.
Now, I’m no linguistic pedant, but I feel that this utterance of his needs a little critical attention, if only because we have a mere handful of months until the next Kenyan elections, and our newspapers need to know which adjective to use to describe our prospective governors. I can think of many adjectives – most of them unprintable in a quality publication like The East African – but rather I mean: how do we adjectivise ‘governor’?
The promulgation of our new constitution in 2010 was also the occasion of the promulgation of previously non-existent or dormant words into our country’s political vocabulary. The word ‘promulgation’ is itself a fascinating one, meaning ‘to bring to public awareness’. Probably, our pastoralists would be interested to learn that it stems from the Latin root, ‘mulgere’, ‘to milk’, with that Latin prefix, ‘pro-’, meaning ‘forwards’. Alternatively, they might not give a damn, aware as they undoubtedly are that our laws historically extend less well to pastoralist communities. Consequently, to ‘promulgate’ derives from, literally, ‘to milk forwards/forth/publically’.
This ‘pro-’ is not precisely the same as the Greek ‘pro-’, meaning ‘rudimentary’ or ‘primitive’, which I suspect is the prefix we should assume is meant in that miracle of Japanese design, the ‘Probox’, which car would then translate as ‘primitive container’, which might seem appropriate to anyone who, like me, has ridden in one. We must hope that no other, more recent meanings of ‘pro’ were intended by the Japanese.
All laws tend to be promulgated in some manner: through Hansard, via gazette notices, on government websites or at press conferences, and/or, in the case of momentous laws, ceremoniously by the president, whether or not in the presence of Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, who was certainly himself promulgated by the Kenyan government on that peculiarly militaristic day in August 2010.
In this case, I don’t of course mean that we milked Mr Bashir, although we did, it must be admitted, pull on some ICC teats by presenting him; rather, I mean that we ‘brought him forth into the public gaze’, promulgating, as some have suggested, an international illegality at precisely the same moment that we promulgated our principle set of laws. But there we are, and this article is about individual words and not the literary device of irony or that very political frailty, gross hypocrisy.
Yet for now we must leave all discussion of teats, and return to Dr Mutua, who is keen to contest for the role of governor of Machakos county, which happens to be both a place I admire and where other big name contenders hope to become governor. One of the first demands that we should perhaps make of any high-profile public official – with or without the required degree-level qualification – is that she should know her own name and her title.
In Dr Mutua’s case, we all know his present pre-nominal title since he has resigned: he is simply ‘Doctor’ Mutua, following the award of a PhD by the University of Western Sydney – a very green part of a very brown country, which is precisely opposite of what Machakos county is. But should he become governor, we should require him to be able to refer to his new office with some proficiency, the sort of language proficiency one might expect from a senior sitting official and a former government spokesman.
Unfortunately, neither ‘governortorial’ nor ‘governatorial’ will do. Of course, Dr Mutua is only being used here as an example, as he uttered the word; indeed, there must be many prospective governors who, in addition to not knowing their counties’ boundaries, infrastructure, populations or rainfall, have no idea how to adjectivise the noun, ‘governor’.
‘Governor’ stems from the Latin, ‘gubernare’ (‘to steer’), but even further back from the Greek, ‘kybernaein’ (again, ‘to steer’). In their Enlightenment desire to construct from scratch a classically rational nation state, the early Americans – by which, I don’t mean their dispossessed evictees, the Native Americans, but rather those who landed in Massachusetts in 1620 and who terminate in the awfulness of Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney – retained the full Latinate feel of the noun and constructed the foul adjective ‘gubernatorial’. So, when he was governor, Romney possessed, much to the dismay of many, gubernatorial powers emanating from his gubernatorial seat or governorate.
‘Gubernatorial’ might have been the word that Dr Mutua was clutching at but, quite rightly, couldn’t bring himself to utter. Quite rightly, because it is a deep, eighteenth-century Americanism and very specific to the USA as a nation. It is a word not used anywhere else, not even by non-US Anglophone journalists when they refer to things relating to US governors. Since we are not at the heart of the ancient Roman Empire and therefore will not be electing ‘gubernators’, but ‘governors’, this is additional reason for us not to use, here in Kenya, the ugly and pretentious adjective ‘gubernatorial’.
My argument is equally true of America, perhaps, but there we are, and they have already had this odd word for over two centuries, so let them keep it, much as they are welcome to keep their awful sports and cuisine. Further, who could possibly argue that Kenya is a ‘classically rational nation state’ requiring the slavish importation of Latinisms, or that it can be such a state with our admirable-yet-hodgepodge constitution?
Here in Kenya, we may be more judicious than our American friends, aware as we are that the English word ‘governor’ not only comes from the Latin, but does so in the 13th century via the Old French word, ‘governer’; ‘governer’ is ‘governor’s’ most recent precursor, and not ‘gubernator’, which anyway sounds like a terrible sequel to an Arnold Schwarzenegger film.
Schwarzenegger was also a California governor, by the way, and the mind boggles at how he might have pronounced any of the words mentioned in this article. But all this is by the bye. The long and short of it is that in the shift from ‘gubernator’ to ‘governer’ and ‘governor’, the Latin ‘b’ sound became the French ‘v’ sound and spelling, which in turn determined the English pronunciation and spelling, and if there’s one country you can trust to be very clear about its language, it’s France, with its somewhat right-wing Masonic and tediously prescriptive-purist Académie française.
As we are a resourceful country that can neologise creatively through Sheng, coining politically valent words such as ‘unbwogable’ (Frankensteined wonderfully from, respectively, Old English
Accordingly, instead of Dr Mutua being invested with ‘gubernatorial’ power, let us resolve to have him – or, as they say, the ‘best man or woman’ – invested with ‘governorial’, ‘governoral’ or ‘governoreal’ powers. Let us, that is, adjectivise from the noun that we really use (‘governor’) rather than from a dead noun that we and indeed nobody else, including anyone American, uses (‘gubernator’).
The final question then becomes, Which of these should we use, ‘governorial’, ‘governoral’ or governoreal’?, which decision will be entirely governed (geddit?) by which of the three alternative adjective suffixes we choose to conjoin with our noun: ‘-ial’, ‘-al’ or ‘-eal’. All three are in effect the same suffix, meaning ‘relating to’ or ‘belonging to’. I should firstly like to discard ‘-eal’, not for etymological reasons as such, but for reasons of awkward phonics.
That is, if we were to use the word ‘governoreal’ there would be a very real danger that many speakers would embarrass themselves by pronouncing it in the following manner, ‘governor-real’ – because the last four letters look like an existing word – implying that there’s a genuine and a false governor, much as many suggested in 2007 that we had a genuine and a false president. Of the two remaining alternatives, I would also discard the suffix ‘-al’, as it is closer to the Latin than, as it were, the Latin passed through French.
The suffix ‘-ial’, however, comes to us from the Latin via French – as the noun ‘governor’ itself does – and so I would strongly recommend that we start using the word ‘governorial’: a) because both the noun and its adjectivising suffix have similar diachronic routes through language history; b) because it simply looks and sounds better (vague, I accept); c) because it partners well with the already-established and perfectly sensible ‘senatorial’, which we will have to use, the noun in which (‘senator’) also comes to us from Latin via French.
Of course, there are logical counter-arguments in favour of ‘governoral’, which nevertheless remains an ugly word with a terminal ‘-oral’ that might, conceivably, evince giggles, especially if our politicians were to be spotted – heaven forbid – on Koinange Street. For instance, we also use, and will continue to use, the word ‘mayoral’, the noun in which (‘mayor’) also comes to us from Latin via French, but which clearly uses the more fully Latin suffix, ‘-al’.
Probably, though, ‘mayoral’ thrived simply because ‘mayorial’ sounds clumsy, which is the very reason I suggest that we, similarly, choose the excellent ‘governorial’ over ‘governoral’, the ugly-sounding equivalent of the pleasant-sounding ‘mayoral’. But there we are, and the price of maize is not affected. So, ‘governorial’ it is.
Any journalist or politician who uses the word ‘gubernatorial’ is, I propose, unfit to call himself or herself a writer or to stand for elected office. Just say the first part of the word: ‘guber’. ‘Goober’, which in Canada is a peanut. It sounds silly, doesn’t it? Alfred Mutua – who is not a peanut – is seeking governorial office, and there’s an end to it, whether my spell-checker likes it or not. But what does my spell-checker know about word-formation, as it’s a slave to the programmer?
Which brings me back to that very early, pre-Latin Greek root of the word ‘governor’, ‘kybernaein’, which is also the fundamental root of the prefix ‘cyber-‘ (relating to computer systems), as in ‘cybernate’ (‘to control by computer’) or (because we are discussing Kenyan politics) ‘cybercriminal’.
A Brave New World is coming. After 2013, following our Biometric (read, computerised) Voter Registration and the like, we will have elected our new officials, which leads me to end with a warning: despite what certain etymology-obsessed newspaper columnists might imply, the meaning of words never inheres in those words themselves, but only in those words’ connotative utterance in specific socio-historical contexts, which can massively change.
‘Governor’ in ancient imperial Rome would have implied ‘direction’, ‘control’, ‘authority’ and ‘dictatorship’ from above; and yet, because of its surrounding definitions within our constitution, ‘governor’ for us seems more true to its gentler Greek root, ‘to steer’, with the governor being a mere guide, a helmsman amongst a larger crew, a public servant beholden to his or her constituents.
Whoever you elect, never let your governor bully you and tell you what to do: his power is not in the imperial Roman tyranny of The Word of the Ruler, but rather that power is very differently invested in us, the people, through the power of those countless excellent words that we democratically elected to adopt and enact in August 2010: our new Kenyan constitution, of which we are the millions of authors.
Further, prior to their election, we must expect our governors to provide us with countless of their own words, in yawn-inducing speeches and haphazardly-conceived policy manifestoes. We must hold them to their words, and if they fail to convert them into just action on the ground, we should silence them by voting them out.
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