Kisetla and the Linguistic Management of Intimacy in Colonial Kenyan Homes

In his essay "The Language of Command and the Command of Language," the

anthropologist Bernard Cohn famously argued that language acquisition

was key to imperial control in colonial India. Yet just across the

Indian Ocean, in British colonial Kenya, settlers rarely learned

indigenous languages. Instead, they spoke“KiSetla,” a creolized version

of Kiswahili, in settler homes. Neither settlers nor the African men who

worked as domestic servants in these homes spoke Kiswahili as a native

language. Why, then, adopt this confusing and foreign dialect? Building

on the insights of Ann Laura Stoler, I argue that KiSetla helped defuse

the intimacy involved in relationships between white women and their

male domestic servants by creating near constant frustration and

miscommunication. I examine a collection of cookery books designed by

and for colonial Kenyan housewives, showing how they scripted a dominant

white femininity and a submissive African masculinity. The use of

Kisetla thus allowed settler women to erect and enforce racial

boundaries within the intimate space of the home