How The House Nigger Compares Or Contrasts With The Field Nigger.

Disclaimer — for purposes of this article, neither house nor field niggers carry any criminal tag. They are both victims of their circumstances.

The famous American duck test:

"If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck", also holds when testing for house and field niggers. Fortunately, it has nothing to do with skin colour tonation, if anything, several darker-skinned niggers pass for the exclusive house type.

Recently, Nairobi county authorities shut down a bar that reportedly practised a racist-driven two queues system at their entrance, one for whites and Asians, and a second one for blacks. 59 years after independence, this is sickening and now causes us to go down memory lane for further examination.

A bit of history helps our course here. In August 1619, the first English North American slave ship landed in Jamestown, Virginia. The passengers, able-bodied black men and women, got sorted and processed into domestic and field slaves by their respective masters. It was a fete repeated as many times as the ships docked with new slaves. And the competition between the house and field niggers came into being.

Back here at home, the colonialists borrowed the script from across the Atlantic and the Indian ocean to create an enduring culture of home guards, ayas, shamba boys and other carders befitting their purposes.

With the exit of the White man from government, the house niggers went a notch higher and took the reigns of power amidst a sprinkling of freedom fighters.

The house niggers, past and present, are known for their distinct English accents, mannerisms and choices. As much as they could, save for skin colour, they have minimised speech variances between themselves and the white man.

The field niggers display a marked contrast with the house niggers. Their spoken English borrows heavily from their mother tongues—generating distinct verbal variations that are collectively termed as 'shrubs' by the well-spoken house niggers. Sample some of them—Kirometa for kilometre, kiff for give, broncha for brochure, siptaal for hospital, and ochupy for occupy. Creole of sorts.

The field niggers take every disadvantage encountered in their stride and find comfort in multitudes while house niggers prefer to socialise in exclusive establishments where the saying: "money talks and bulls**t walks", is not always true. Many times, successful field niggers or their offspring have their applications to join exclusive places turned down or delayed for years on end, save for when they are of obvious strategic value.

The house niggers have a brother code that helps to keep them winning in the resources war. For the field niggers, just as it is for piranhas, there is an assured safety in numbers as is epitomised by the boda boda fraternity's all-for-one and one-for-all spirit.

But our topic was about how they speak English. House niggers speak it as taught by the English man. Field niggers speak it by consensus having learned it from another field nigger who never got it right the first time.

There is a third kind of nigger, one in between the two types already discussed. Their spoken English is somewhat in between both types but with contrasting degrees on a continuum of—totally off house niggerish—to totally off field niggerish. This is where all the fake-it-till-you-make-it kinds linguistically and socially are found. They go as far as mixing American and British accents in one sentence whilst punctuating them with distinct Kenyan shrubs and grammatical mistakes. And they feel nothing about it. It is what it is.

The unapologetic niggers believe that because English came to us by ship, then they must never be judged harshly, given that they already speak their mother tongues perfectly. Everyone in Kenya is a polyglot.

Of the three niggers, where do you place yourself, considering that English is not your first language and that you must sit for TOEFL anyway, should you go abroad?

Let us learn to accept everyone as a compatriot, shrubs, warts and all.