Listen to This Article Enhance your reading experience by listening to this article.

Many city-based families usually travel to the countryside to join relatives for merry-making during the festive season. This is a time to not only connect with kin but also expose children to cultures in the places where they have roots.

This is an invaluable experience, especially as the digital revolution has changed the way young people learn, interact and process information, and how they shape their worldviews. The place of traditional family and cultural values cannot be overstated.

The festive season, therefore, provides a rare opportunity for celebration of diversity through travel, interaction among various communities and age sets and education on their folklore.

Indeed, the preamble of the Constitution declares that Kenya is a nation of people who are proud of “our ethnic, cultural and religious diversity, and determined to live in peace and unity as one indivisible sovereign nation”.

This places diversity of culture and languages at the centre of our life as a nation. In his seminal book Decolonising the Mind, celebrated Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o highlights the importance of cultural pride, self-determination, and reclaiming cultural narratives as a means of resistance against cultural imperialism.

“In Decolonising the Mind, Ngugi considers ‘colonial alienation’, ultimately an alienation from one’s self, identity, and heritage, vis-a-vis linguistic oppression to be imperialism’s greatest threat to the nations of Africa,” says a reviewer. That is why we associate ourselves with two cultural events.

First is the three-day Luo Cultural and Sports Festival that began yesterday that will feature a performance of the Tero Buru, a traditional rural burial ceremony. The festival is a celebration of Luo culture in Kenya, across the shores of Lake Victoria and in the diaspora.

Tero Buru, a preserve of men, is an old ritual conducted when an elderly man dies in the Luo community.

The other event is an initiative by elders and youths from Gusiiland to preserve the Ekegusii language and foster the community’s cultural values and traditions.

According to those behind the campaign, the language — and indeed many Kenyan community languages — was being diluted by foreign influence.

Let us celebrate our diversity as we walk into the New Year.