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The streets of Nairobi’s Central Business District are heavy with the smell of tear gas. It is July 11, 2024, and the youth are protesting against corruption and poor governance, the tail end of the largest non-partisan, tribeless mobilisation in Kenyan history. It has been a couple of days of demonstrations and the crowd is weary and fearful of the police. Arbitrary arrests and abductions have become a daily reality for protesters and activists, and as time passes, police officers now outnumber the demonstrators, leaving only the die-hard Gen Z at the frontlines.
Barack, a 26-year-old Nairobian involved in the protests, rallies his group to deliver their usual motivational speech. As with most communication by youth during these protests, the speech is in Sheng. “We don’t want the cops or the government to understand us,” Barack explains.
An urban language born in Nairobi, Sheng blends English, Swahili, various Kenyan languages, and elements of foreign languages. Unlike other slangs, Sheng functions as a full-fledged language. In certain areas of Nairobi, multiple generations express themselves almost exclusively in Sheng. It adds a unique dimension to Kenya’s intricate linguistic landscape, where the two official languages, English and Swahili, co-exist with 40 ethnic languages. What sets Sheng apart is its ever-evolving, fast mutating nature: each generation and neighbourhood in Nairobi crafts its own version. That quality makes Sheng a powerful tool for resistance.
A few kilometres from the protests, in the Buruburu neighbourhood, Duncan Ongweno sits in his home, engrossed in his four-decade-long project: the Go Sheng dictionary. Duncan, a lively man in his fifties, speaks assertively in refined English, his piercing eyes fixed on you and his mind jumping from one subject to another. You would never guess he is a chronic insomniac who rarely gets more than three hours of sleep a night. Since the mid-1980s, Duncan has been relentlessly documenting Sheng words as they emerge, become mainstream, and are forgotten in favour of new ones. The Go Sheng dictionary is the most extensive archive of Sheng – a language that is central to Kenyan identity yet, paradoxically, is unwritten.
“Duncan built, by himself, an archive of one of our languages so that those who come after us can find it in the multiple forms it has adopted over time. It is a matter of public interest,” says Dr Joyce Nyairo, art and culture researcher and former programme officer at the Ford Foundation. Sheng symbolises unity and resistance for many, but its changing nature makes it difficult – some would say impossible – to capture. Yet, for Duncan, tracing a language whose essence is fleeting became a life mission.
The origins of Sheng can be traced back to the 1950s, during Kenya’s colonial era. Under British rule, colonial authorities constructed single-room dwellings in Nairobi for male workers building the railway. The city was restricted to settlers, and African workers required permits to enter. They commuted to visit their families in the “reserves” – a term the British used to describe the rural areas to which Africans were confined. At the time, Kenyans spoke exclusively their ethnic languages, while the British promoted English and Swahili. To avoid travel costs, railway workers began moving their families into these single-room dwellings, using curtains to divide the cramped living space they now shared. Children growing up in these tight quarters began creating new words, blending the different languages they knew or heard, in order to communicate without being understood by adults. Today, new Sheng words continue to emerge in Nairobi’s poorer areas, where young people share confined spaces with their families and seek ways to communicate without older generations catching on. Sheng also offered a unifying language for people from different tribes who converged in Nairobi’s low-income areas in the 1960s in search of work. To bridge communication gaps, they created new words by blending their mother tongues with the languages imposed by the colonisers.
Duncan was born and raised in South B, a middle-class African neighbourhood in Nairobi in the 1970s. At home, his parents – migrants to the city – spoke Dholuo, their ethnic language. However, Duncan spent most of his time outside the home speaking Sheng with friends from various tribes. While English and Swahili were taught at school, they were rarely used in daily interactions. “Sheng was my main language,” Duncan reflects. As a child, he was fascinated by languages. Every December, during family gatherings upcountry at Christmas, he would listen as relatives shared stories, speaking bits of Kenyan languages and Ugandan or Tanzanian languages from the places where they had lived. “Sometimes, when my aunts, uncles, and parents didn’t want us kids to understand, they would incorporate words borrowed from other languages. I’d try really hard to figure out and remember those words. And then sometimes, I’d stop and think… wait a minute, that word exists in Sheng!” Duncan realised that Sheng, this language he spoke daily with his friends, could be a gateway to other languages. “Through Sheng, I was able to interact with people from different backgrounds and languages because it borrowed words from everywhere!” However, there were no resources to study these words – Sheng wasn’t written or formally recognised. His fascination grew stronger, and in 1984, he began documenting Sheng words in a notebook, collecting words from his own generation (those born in the ’70s and ’80s) and those created by the next through family, friends, and acquaintances. “I did not want these words to get lost,” he says.
Until the end of the ’80s, Sheng was extremely segmented, and its spread was localised and slow; words would emerge in different areas of Nairobi and remain confined to those areas. Multiple versions of Sheng co-existed. “Words are created by kids playing in the same estate,
And spread through neighbourhood schools. You have to wait until the holidays and the inter-regional football tournaments for the word to cross over into another neighbourhood,” says Duncan.
Duncan continued to compile his dictionary even after he moved to India in 1994 to study computer science. He would receive new words in India by post from family, friends, and neighbours. “My friends and I were ’70s and ’80s babies, so we spoke the same Sheng. But then, as kids born in the late ’80s started contributing, I began collecting new words. That was exciting. This is how I discovered the word Ngori for example, which in the ‘90s meant trouble, or difficulty”.
Sometime in 1996, Duncan returned home from a walk to find that his book, which held over ten years’ worth of documented words, had been shredded by his dog. “I felt so stupid. As a computer scientist, I should have put these words in my computer!” The same year, Duncan recreated the dictionary digitally, and in 1997, when the internet reached the town in India where he was studying, he moved the dictionary online and Go Sheng was born.
Duncan moved back to Nairobi in 1999 and started a job at Africa Online, the largest internet service provider in Africa, very conscious that it would give him free and unlimited access to the internet to curate his dictionary. He put his contact information on the website, and words began pouring in, mostly from Kenyans in the diaspora, as internet access was still too expensive for most people living in Kenya. “I would work during the day, and at night, as soon as I got home, I would spend hours reviewing words and improving the digital features of the dictionary,” says Duncan.
From the ’90s onwards, radio significantly accelerated the spread of Sheng, as did matatus, Nairobi’s notorious public transport vehicles – crowded music-blasting minivans and buses creatively painted with the faces of famous figures (Beyoncé, 2Pac, even Fidel Castro). Variations of Sheng from different areas of Nairobi began melding together, giving birth to one rich Sheng language: “Dandora matatus, Ngong matatus, western Nairobi matatus would all stop in town, and manambas [matatu touts] from different areas in Nairobi would scream words, and these words would be carried by travellers back home,” Duncan explains. “Kenyan music also blew up around that time, popularising words from certain areas,” adds Duncan.
To keep up with the rapid pace with which new Sheng words were being created, Duncan established an account-based system to source new words. To contribute a word, a user had to create an account and provide their geographical location, helping create a map of Sheng across Nairobi. Since Sheng was not officially recognised as a language, verifying the existence of the words was a challenge: “Of course, people would say, ‘This is not a real word. This doesn’t exist.’ So I had to find a way to verify that these words were used or had been used! Not an easy task with such a changing language” explains Duncan. He implemented a cross-verification system: when a user contributed a word, an algorithm would check their location and, based on the area’s population density, determine the number of verifications required to confirm the word.
In 2005, Duncan left Africa Online to join the World Bank. His new five-digit salary did not deter him from his passion, and he continued working on the dictionary during restless nights. While Duncan worked late into the night to document Sheng, the language kept recreating itself in the streets of the capital, influencing the lives of new generations.
Stoneface Bomba, a young man from Mathare, a poor informal settlement in Nairobi, witnesses the creation of new words and variants of Sheng every day. Stoneface earned his nickname because he never used to smile. He was depressed about life in Mathare: “I never saw anything to smile about,” he says. In 2018, he left Mathare for the first time in his life to watch a movie in a mall with a group of youths from his area: “I remember we watched Black Panther. It opened my eyes, this experience was liberating. It was the first time I saw that side of Nairobi, with good houses, good roads. The life there was so different. We lived in the same world but in very different ways. I left there feeling empowered and wanting to do more for my community.”
One thing that was demoralising for Stoneface was that no media was addressing the youth of Mathare in Sheng, the language they felt comfortable in, de facto excluding them from certain spaces and information. So, in 2020, Stoneface cofounded Until Everyone Is Free, an all-Sheng podcast about imperialism and decolonisation. For Stoneface, Sheng is nothing less than a language of freedom.
“If the youth are forced to express themselves in a language they don’t feel comfortable with, like English or Kiswahili, they just lose confidence. When people express themselves in a language they feel comfortable with, you see magic happening: the ideas, the laughter, you feel alive! Other languages were imposed on us, they are the colonisers languages,” Stoneface explains. While church, school, the government, and the media address Kenyans in English and Swahili, parents at home prioritise passing on their mother tongue – their ethnic language – to their children. Amidst this linguistic confusion, Sheng grew organically out of the need of Kenyan youth to define their own identity, outside of the realm imposed by authority, colonialism or tribal belonging. Sheng, Stoneface believes, is an organic language that evolves and recreates itself daily. “Every afternoon, the largely unemployed youth of the community gather at the ‘baze’, the hangout spot in the ’hood, to talk, make music, and during these moments, new Sheng words are crafted. You might think we’re idle, but that’s where the magic happens,” says Stoneface.
If initially Sheng predominantly adopted its grammatical structure from Swahili, new forms of Sheng are moving further away from Swahili. They play with structure and twist words in ways that make them unrecognisable unless you know them. These new forms have new names to differentiate them from standard Sheng, like Shembeteng from Kayole or Shengtezzo from City Cotton.
“We don’t want to get stuck in the old Shengs, we constantly recreate,” explains Stoneface. This never-ending evolution makes Sheng nearly ungraspable to outsiders – and it is meant to be this way. Sheng is the code language of the youth in informal settlements, who continuously craft new words to communicate without being understood by the authorities. “Here in Mathare, the Nyumba Kumi (community representative) gives information to the police about so-called trouble makers. So we speak in Sheng, so that we are not understood by them, or the cops,” explains Stoneface. You often find that words related to law enforcement change more rapidly in Sheng, like police or firearms, and have multiple synonyms across different generations.
The career of Julius Owino, better known by his stage name, Maji Maji, is emblematic of the resistance and freedom role that Sheng has played in Kenyan history. Despite being in his late 50s, Julius is fluent in Sheng and speaks it with his two children. He is popular amongst the youth, who see in him a charismatic ally in the shaping of a new urban identity. In 1998, Maji Maji moved to Dandora – “Dii” in Sheng, an underprivileged area of Nairobi where Sheng is predominantly spoken – to train as a rapper. He practised at the famous hip hop hub Mau Mau Camp, named after a militant African nationalist group in Kenya which fought against British colonial rule in Kenya in the 1950s. “At that time, Sheng was stigmatised and treated as an underground language associated with crime and unconventional ideas. Older generations especially looked down on it,” recalls Maji Maji. Even today, some academics and politicians continue to vilify Sheng, accusing it of undermining the learning of other languages.
In 2002, Maji Maji and Gidi Gidi, another rapper from Dandora, brought Sheng into the spotlight with the release of the song Unbwogable – a Sheng term they created by borrowing the Dholuo word bwogo (to scare) and adding the English prefix un- and suffix – able to it to give “unscarable” or “unshakeable”. The song was a massive hit, to the point where it was adopted by the National Rainbow Coalition, the main political opposition party at the time, which later went on to win the elections. The song came to symbolise the end of 24 years of Daniel arap Moi’s authoritarian rule. “This song gave people a common attitude and united the entire country,” remembers Maji Maji.
After pausing his musical career in the early 2000s, Maji Maji was approached by a Dutch group looking to fund youth engagement and media projects in Kenya. In 2007, they created Ghetto Radio, Kenya’s first fully Sheng radio station, which was funded by the Dutch government for two years. At the time, most stations played pop music and broadcast exclusively in English or Swahili. “We lacked a media that spoke like us and represented us. I wanted a radio that speaks about our lives, our issues, [that would] amplify our voices and play our music,” says Maji Maji.
In the aftermath of the post-election violence that followed in the wake of the 2007 polls, resulting in the deaths of at least a thousand people and the displacement of hundreds of thousands, Ghetto Radio was the only station that spoke directly to perpetrators of violence. During a time when speaking a language associated with a certain tribe could get you killed, Ghetto radio addressed everyone in Sheng. Robert Ochola, a former news reporter at Ghetto Radio, recounts how his life was saved by speaking Sheng. He had just interviewed a woman at the height of the violence in 2008 when a gang confronted him, demanding to know his name to determine his tribe. He spoke to them in Sheng, was recognised as a Ghetto Radio presenter, and the gang let him go.
When Dutch funding for Ghetto radio ended in 2009, Maji Maji sought support from brands, but faced resistance due to the negative reputation of Sheng in Kenyan society. “Advertisers dismissed Sheng as mere ‘ghetto language’ and didn’t see any commercial value in its speakers. Agencies asked me to soften the language and change the station’s name, but I always refused,” Maji Maji explains. Then, in 2011, during a Coca-Cola campaign that pitted radio stations against each other for advertising, Ghetto Radio achieved the highest conversion rate, prompting brands to recognise its value. By 2013, the first Sheng-language advertising billboard appeared in Nairobi, marking a turning point for the language. Maji Maji knew he had helped change the game for good.
As Sheng became more mainstream, Duncan’s website also started gaining more traction and attracting greater interest. In 2007, Duncan met Billy Odidi, a presenter at the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation. Impressed by Duncan’s work, Billy invited him to appear on Metro FM every Friday to share a “Sheng word of the day”, leading to a surge in traffic on the website. To keep the dictionary up-to-date, Duncan implemented a costly incentive system, offering contributors five shillings worth of credit for text messages for each word submitted. This initiative was entirely funded by Duncan’s salary from the World Bank. During this time, the website attracted over 200,000 daily visits: “People were very excited about the website,” says Duncan.
In 2008, Brown Gal, a popular night show host, dazzled by the website’s success, began using it as a platform for discussion on her show. In 2009, a breakthrough came when Dr Joyce Nyairo, then a program officer at the Ford Foundation, discovered the website. “I was immediately fascinated by what Duncan had done – he was bringing Sheng in spaces where otherwise it didn’t belong,” she recalls. By 2010, Duncan had secured a six-year funding grant from the Ford Foundation, allowing him to establish an office and hire 14 full-time staff members to expand the website.
“It took me an hour and a half to convince Duncan to apply for the grant. Duncan was extremely suspicious of funding, worried that the website might be used for monetisation or other purposes. For him, it was more of a mission than a business venture,” Joyce explains. For her, Duncan’s personality was central to the success of the project. “Duncan is special because he is able to include others – he is by definition a mentor. He turned Go sheng into a community project,” she remembers.
Shortly after receiving the grant, Go Sheng expanded its community involvement by translating important documents into Sheng, such as the 2010 Kenyan Constitution and the 2012 Tuvuke campaign to prevent election violence. In 2013, Duncan decided to leave his job at the World Bank to focus entirely on Go Sheng. He began attending WAPI (Words and Pictures) events at the British Council in Nairobi, where many prominent Kenyan artists, including Octopizzo, Kaligraph Jones, and Jua Kali, emerged. There, he documented new Sheng words that arose, noting, “Sheng and Kenyan music are closely related, they grow together. A lot of Sheng words have been created by musicians themselves. By attending these events, I was at the forefront of Sheng creation.” He recorded each event, developing a separate passion for videography, and he used the samples of the music to illustrate word pronunciation on the website: “Because Sheng is a very tonal language, providing an example of pronunciation was essential.”
As Sheng ambassadors, both Duncan and Julius had to devise sophisticated strategies to balance between the old and new versions of Sheng. The Ghetto radio team adopted a strategy aimed at “balancing” between “mainstream” Sheng and its new variations. “We maintain a 40–60 per cent rule: 60 per cent of ‘basic Sheng’, the established Sheng that has withstood the test of time and comes from past generations, and 40 per cent of new Sheng variations, deliberately created to conceal meaning.” To achieve this, they hire directly from the communities where their target audiences live and guide them through a process they call assimilation: “We want them to bring the Sheng from their area, but we need them to be understood by the rest of our audience. So we spend a few weeks discussing different topics with them, teaching them mainstream Sheng, and helping them strike a balance.”
Despite this effort, some younger Kenyans who speak the newer variants of Sheng do not consider the old, established form to be “real” Sheng. “On Ghetto Radio, they don’t know Sheng; they speak an old people’s language… Sheng is a Gen Z thing,” says Zoppre, the 21-year-old social media figure who popularised one of the new variants of Sheng, Shengtezzo. It’s as if Sheng ceases to be Sheng once it becomes widespread and mainstreamed.
Despite the mainstreaming of Sheng, the Go Sheng dictionary has struggled in recent years. Funding for the dictionary ended in 2016, leading to the closure of the office and the dispersal of staff. “Everything in the dictionary took a beating in the absence of funding. I am the sole developer now, although my son has stepped in to help me keep the dictionary alive. He wants to take over. But for now, we are barely keeping it afresh,” laments Duncan. His son, also in IT, helps him with coding the website and sourcing new words.
In Africa, funding interests from donors in the Global North shifted from the arts and culture to environment and climate change, making it difficult to secure grants for the dictionary. The Kenyan government does not seem interested in funding the project. In 2016, Duncan tried to obtain an ISO designation – a standardised code that formally recognises languages and dialects globally – for Sheng. However, he was told that “Sheng is not a language, only a slang of Swahili”. Duncan disagrees: “Someone who speaks Swahili in Tanzania wouldn’t understand a conversation in Sheng!” An ISO code would legitimise Sheng as a distinct language, opening doors for its preservation and study.
Duncan’s next plan is to move the dictionary to AI: “It will be self-running, and I won’t have to work as much,” he says. When Duncan faces criticism for trying to formalise a language whose essence lies in its rapid mutation, he brushes it off: “In some areas of Nairobi, some people are born speaking only Sheng; they have never spoken anything else.” For him, the attempt to document this language represents a full recognition of these individuals. Dr Joyce Nayiro agrees, “The young people who claim we should not write down Sheng will change their mind. Talk to them in 10 years and they will be nostalgic. Sheng defines who we are as Kenyans throughout the years.” For Duncan, it is foremost an intimate calling, a battle: “It’s my life’s work. It is very important. Language is the eyes through which you see people.”
