Recalling the cane-wielding masters of a dying language

By John Kariuki

In my primary school days, teachers would use a lot of bombastic words that amaze me to this day.

The morning assembly was particularly favoured. "Numbskulls, nincompoops and nitwits!" a teacher would thunder.

"I’m on duty this week and I’m not joking!"

Their flair for the highfalutin was only rivalled by their enthusiasm to whack our meagre backs for the slightest mistake.

But as they say, English came by ship from colonial Britain with the real possibility that some of it spilled over in the high seas. There is also the likelihood that the language was liberally bastardised and Africanised on its long journey into the hinterland and teacher training colleges, hence our tutors’ grandiose words.

Tony Wainaina, a teacher, remembers his primary school teachers with nostalgia. They would collectively bastardise English with words (known as ‘vocos’) like swine, hogwash, skunk and gibbon. "We pupils would stare, wide-mouthed, at what we deemed as the hallmark of learning," Wainaina recalls.

"It took me years to discover that contrary to one teacher’s apparent learned poise, his oft-used words like Honolulu, Hong Kong and Wisconsin were actually place names!" he chuckles.

He recalls one particularly belligerent teacher who would deal with them "cacophonously and perpendicularly", with the ubiquitous cane.

Use of vocos

The poor pupils were ordered to ‘lie parallel to the world’ as he administering the cane. And occasionally, the teacher would administer ‘diagonal’ canes from the shoulder downwards, earning a nickname in the process.

Mark, an accountant, recalls the dim view his mathematics teacher in primary school had of him and his classmates. "The man would call us anything that came to mind in the belief that it made him sound learned," Mark remembers. They were often called porcupines, jiggers or hooligans.

Since then, Mark has found out that the teacher’s favourite word, ‘Hursquevana’, is actually the brand name of a power saw.

But one name, Bloody Mogothon, has eluded Mark’s comprehension to this day. In secondary school, one teacher would particularly stand out for his coinage and liberal use of ‘vocos’. We were either ‘banana heads’ or ‘psychomotors’ as far as he was concerned.

One day I wronged him and he posed: "Are you the new nut?" He must have wondered if I had suddenly gone bonkers. From that day some of the boys adopted the question and used it liberally.

A Kiswahili teacher in the same school coined the phrase ‘Kadamnasi unyo unyo’ or at least gave it a new meaning. In our school context, this phrase meant doing something wrong with disdain for all conventions. It was the teenage equivalent of the cheek by some of our leaders that a former American ambassador to Kenya, the late Smith Hempstone, likened to having "balls of a brass monkey" in his biography, Rogue Ambassador.

A dying social task

In the footsteps of our teachers, an enterprising head boy in our time coined the rather puzzling voco, "flaberbogorious dunderheads."

This was his way of describing Form Ones, aka monos. From this a classmate, Douglas, would coin the phrase, "Use your kayongoyutity". I think he meant using one’s head for he always pointed at his head when invoking this voco.

One drinking buddy from this charming and dwindling stock of real teachers gets inspired frequently. He is fond of urging people to use their "antipodes" (feet) and, occasionally, medulla oblongata to solve problems!

Are the modern tutors up to this grandiose and dying social task? Are we hearing vocos for the last time?