In 2017, Anita Nderu was put on blast by fans after grappling with the national language during an interview with viral sensation ‘Githeri Man’.
Some called her ‘arrogant’ for allegedly pretending she didn’t know Kiswahili language while others accused her of trying to be foreign.
In her defence, Anita said that she grew up in Eldoret but was not exposed to English, an explanation that subjected her to more trolling.
In a recent interview on The Wicked Edition, Anita explained that all they spoke in their house was English and the schools she went to English was the primary source of communication.
“I’ve done my best to learn the language I can understand the language. I can speak it but I don’t sound the way you are supposed to sound if you are speaking the language…. How I was raised, the schools I went to was never in my control it is where your parents put you it’s the things you learnt,” she explained.
As for Sheng, the slang language was outlawed in their house after her brother referred to their dad as ‘buda’ (dad) but he heard it as ‘punda’ (donkey), an insult.
“The reason why we never learned sheng when we were growing up is that my brother once referred to my dad as ‘buda’ but my dad heard it as ‘punda’ and he got really angry and he was like ‘Have you just called me a donkey?’. And then my brother was like ‘No no no its buda, its sheng for dad.’ And my father was like ‘Its official in this house we don’t speak anything else aside from English’. That is where all that started. All we spoke in the house was English so I never got to learn sheng,” she revealed.
Victoria Kimani
Victoria Kimani is another celebrity who has disclosed that she cannot speak Kiswahili because she grew up in the USA and relocated to Kenya at 16.
“I was born in the US, as the last born in a family of three. My parents were preachers in the US, they still are….I grew up in the US and I first came to Kenya when I was 16. But I went back to the US after staying here for about two years. I can understand a bit of it but cannot speak,” she told The Nation.
On social media, Victoria later explained that she had tried learning Kiswahili but became demotivated because people mocked her for struggling with it. She went on to tell fans that she will not go to ‘Gumbaro’ school simply because of their taunts, they should learn to accept her with her poor Swahili.