Rewriting Francis Imbuga’s (1986) Lialuka lia vaana vaa Magomele

Abbreviations: PxPy means Page number and Paragraph number.

Imbuga’s one and only Lulogooli work leaves you asking why he did not do more, capturing the best of language use, inserting humour and well portraying community change of the time.  Spiced with illustrations, the story well captures family relationships, the core Logooli rite of passage (circumcision), community change (takeover by Christianity, City jobs, a car in the village) and more.

As he writes, Imbuga well twists the letters to a native’s best taste; elisioning if need be and always affixing “-nga” or “nga” at verb ends. Perhaps that goes well with much input of direct speech. But to an L2, about four decades later, much would need explanation, many words ambiguous. 

A scanned pdf cover page design of the book

Were it not for some cases, Imbuga does recognize that vowel length affects word meaning.  The many double vowels and single vowels show that. However, it is not observed well as Imbuga fails to recognize this in several other words throughout the read: “gagenda [gaageenda]” (p6p1), “vanina [vaaniina]” (p6p2), “valohiza [vaaloohiza]” (p10p1). 

Object and subject pronoun morphemes, key for word building and meaning deduction, Imbuga overlooks. Both the second person object and subject/object second persons plural are represented by “mu”. See words; “mulanwa” [you will drink] (p30p1), “yamujiiba” [(aamojiiba) he answered her] (p30p1)

Same to first person subject, object or its plural. That Imbuga leaves unclarified. Word “Nimwolizi [(ninmwoolizi) While my eyes closed] (p28p6) does not identify singular person pronoun morpheme. Word “Vondegeleeye [(vuunlegeeleli) It has overpowered me]” (p17p7) has plosive “nde” replacing “n+le” affricative. 

Cases of over agglutination are seen where words are found to have more than one meaning/root word. Often this is when a preposition or a conjunction is connected to a next word as in the words: “nologendo [na lugeendo]” (p6p1), “chokogenyia [kia kugenynya]” (p18p1). In over-separation we have example words: “ni vakatsa ni vikaaye [nivaakaiza nivaikali]” (p24p6) and “mu mulimi [mumulimi]” (p28p3).

And on the use of “r” allophone, /l/ has been constant, observing the traditional “write “r” if preceded by e/i and “l” if preceded by a/o/u in a word. This rule Imbuga does not apply to the many random “l’l” instances. The “l’l”, /l:/, is shortened LvLv [allophonic rvrv]. Word “ilyigingil'la [liigiingilila]” p26p3 would pass as [liigiingirira] by the rule. To avoid the discrepancies in writing, structure opts for singular “l” (“r” allophone) only. 

More about the changes in rewrite can be seen in the new work, having considered structural word format that would not affect Imbuga’s story flow and language depth. A great grandson of Imbuga in Europe, unaware of raw speech, using a dictionary, can read well and appreciate the beauty of the story told by a talented Logooli writer with many famous books on his name.