Gentlemen, let's say you're at the Agricultural Society of Kenya show, dancing in an overcrowded mess-hall built for the British airforce, the DJ interrupting every song 3 times to yell "Mo' fiyah!", and the girl you've been dancing with bats her eyelashes and asks you to flash her. What do you do?
The correct answer is that you take your cell phone out, call her number and quickly hang-up before she answers so that she gets your phone number without you getting charged. That's all she was asking you to do. This, after all, is Kenyan English, where the double entendre has yet to be discovered. The motto, repeated at every commercial break, for the leading TV station is "Turning on Kenya". I guess it's possible that re-runs of late 90's American sitcoms elicit a different response here than they do back home, but more likely, the executives at NTV have no idea what they're saying.
The evolution of words, and word use here, would delight a linguist. English is usually introduced by the church, the school, the office, or more recently, the NGO. Once the words are set free among the population, though, there's really no predicting how they'll be used.
Take the evolution of the word "gender". At some point, the youths in Dol Dol must have been educated on gender equality. This came to be abbreviated as "gender", as in "Make sure there's gender at the HIV training." However, because in this relatively misogynistic society gender equality really means inviting more women than you otherwise would, the word "gender" has come to mean "women", so "Make sure there's gender at the HIV training" can be read as "Make sure there's women at the HIV training." When Mwenda and Joseph go cruising for ladies, they say that they're "Off to find gender", and when they think they've found someone for me, they say that they want to introduce me to "a gender named Ruth".
Similarly, "mobilize" must have been introduced by NGOs, but now it's bled into everyday English. If you want to go out at night, you mobilize your friends. If you want to organize a party, you mobilize your resources. The nadir for this came when girls "mobilized" themselves to go to the bathroom together.
Other linguistic quirks come from the fact that English is the last language people learn. Because Kenyans are taught in school that the only greeting in English is "How are you?" (which follows the pattern of Swahili, Maa, and a lot of other tribal languages), if you say "Hello", you'll usually get "Fine, fine" as a response. The limited vocabulary probably accounts for the constant use of the phrase "So many" in response to quantitative questions, even ones that really require a specific numerical answer. How many times have you visited Dol Dol? So many. How many banks are there in Nanyuki? So many. How many fingers are there on your hand? So many. How many ways can a Kenyan answer such a question? Just one.
