Kenya’s Proverb in Lubukusu and Ekegusii Languages: Empowering or Disempowering for Women and Girls.

Abstract

Research about the Kenyan women has primarily been conducted from socio-demographic perspectives. Such approaches, while important, are not exhaustive. Thus exploring socio-linguistic perspectives are important to fully understand the place and role of women in the society. Given that proverbs have the function of legitimizing certain role patterns and preventing those patterns from possibly being questioned, this study set out to investigate how Lubukusu and EkeGusii proverbs can empower or disempower women and girls and its impact on the achievement of Millennium Development (MDG) number three: gender equality. Language defines the position of women and in turn, encapsulates a society’s thoughts, beliefs and values. The fact that proverbs are part of people’s popular culture which includes language, it is important to know how these proverbs construct women and girls. Specifically, the paper examines how proverbs portray women, and effect on gender identity, how the meanings in the proverbs empower or disempower women and girls and the implications of proverb messages to achievement of MDGs. Using ethnography, a total of 30 proverbs were collected from five respondents aged between 60 and 75 years. The proverbs were analysed using the framework for language dominance by Lakoff, Zimmerman and feminist theories of the Radicals and Critical Discourse Analysis by Norman Fairclough. The findings indicated women are portrayed as inferior, worthless and weak are constructed in specific roles as domestic worker, wives and caretaker. Consequently, they are marginalized, discriminated in issues of decision making, participation, resource distribution and policy formulation due to the prejudice. Such discriminative proverbs slow the achievement of development goals. To realize the MDGs, there is need to eliminate or re-conceptualize some of the proverbs which reinforces gender parity also reform the language to suit the needs of the society.