I Felt Most Kenyan Only After I Left Kenya
Funny thing: I felt most Kenyan only after I left Kenya.
Being outside made me see my own culture for the first time, and opened my eyes to how differently other people live. They call it culture shock. I call it culture awareness.
By culture, I don’t mean flags or stereotypes. I mean the everyday: the language you think in, the food on your table, how you greet people, how you raise your kids.
So I went deep into what people living between two cultures actually say. Non-native. Third-culture kids. Mixed-race adults. Expats who left decades ago.
The same lessons kept coming back. And the first one surprised me: most people don’t lose their culture by force. They lose it by trying to fit in.
They shrink. Less Kenyan here, less European there. Waiting for the locals to hand them belonging. That day never comes.
But the biggest regret, by far, was the language. Parents go “English only” so the kids will succeed. Then years later they want their children to speak the mother tongue, and the kids can’t, or won’t. By then it is almost impossible to get back.
The people who seemed at peace did something different.
They stopped trying to be “fully” one thing, and started owning both. Not half of two cultures. Fully both.
They kept it in the everyday — the food, the music, the small rituals. They taught their kids the language early. They built their people through shared life, not shared nationality.
They were not preserving their culture. They were curating it. Keeping what fed them, dropping the rest, and refusing to apologise for it.
For me, that looks like French, English and Swahili at the same dinner table. Ugali one night, a French gratin the next. Kenyan storytelling, alive in a French living room.
I am not losing my culture in France. I am building something new that did not exist before me.
So tell me: what is one thing from home you refuse to let go of, no matter where you live? I will go first: ugali, and a story that takes 20 minutes to reach the point.