A language that lives beneath another

Kirundi is my first language. Not the one I write in — that is French, always, since the love letters of my classmates at Ngagara, since the first school papers that smelt of chalk and sweat. But Kirundi is the language in which the world first beckoned to me. My mother’s language when she called me for the meal. My father’s language when he told us the story of the sacred drums of Muramvya. The language of the proverbs my grandmother slipped between two cups of coffee, as if the ancestors were speaking through her without her having to raise her voice.

I say “first language” rather than “mother tongue” on purpose. Because French too became maternal — in the sense that I received it from school, from books, from the world I was meant to be integrated into. Two mothers, then. Two languages, two visions of the world, two ways of building a sentence and, as a result, a thought.

What is strange about Kirundi is that I never lost it, even when I no longer practised it. It remained there, beneath the French, like a second skin that time had not worn away. When I come back to Bujumbura, it rises up all at once, effortlessly, with its tones, its noun classes, its particular way of never going directly where it wants to go. And it is precisely this — this way of never going directly — that taught me everything about writing.

Kirundi never says things directly. That is its greatest literary lesson.

The greeting that contains a whole philosophy

Let us begin at the beginning — or rather, at hello. Because the way a language says hello tells everything about what it thinks of human existence.

In English, we say “good morning”. It is fine, economical, practical. “Good” + “morning”. You are wished a good morning. It is a wish oriented toward the immediate future, a polite hope, a minimal social contract.

Mwaramutse → literally: "you slept well — you got up on the right side" | English: "good morning"

Look at the difference. Kirundi does not wish you a good day. It begins by making sure you slept well. It is interested in the night you have just crossed. It recognises that the passage from night to day is not trivial — that to sleep is an act of trust in the world, and that to wake is a small victory that must be saluted.

And then the expression “to get up on the right side” — which we also have in English, but as a frozen metaphor, an empty formula — in Kirundi it is alive. It reminds you that the morning is a choice: one can get up on the right side or on the wrong side. The language invites you, from the very first word of the day, to choose.

Amakuru ? → literally: "what news — what is happening in your life" | English: "how are you?"

Ni meza → literally: "it is good, it is beautiful" | English: "I'm well"

Look again: in English we ask “how are you?” — a question about a state, a condition, abstract and disembodied. In Kirundi we ask “what news?” — a question about a story, about a narrative, about what has happened in your life since we last met. The other is not a state to be assessed. They are a story in progress.

And the answer: “it is good, it is beautiful”. Not “I am well”. Not “I am fine”. But “it is beautiful”. As if being well and finding the world beautiful were the same thing. As if health and aesthetics formed a single word, a single reality.

This observation changed me as a writer. It taught me that the most everyday words, the most banal formulas, carry a whole vision of the world. That choosing one word over another, in French, is never trivial. That “he walks” and “he advances” do not say the same thing about a man, that “night falls” and “evening descends” do not paint the same sky.

The language of the detour

Kirundi is a language that does not like right angles. It prefers curves, circumventions, implications. A language that says things sideways, through image, through proverb — because it knows that frontal truth wounds, and oblique truth penetrates more deeply.

This is what is called indirect speech. In the Burundian tradition, you do not tell someone that they have been wrong. You tell them a story in which a character has been wrong, and let them make the connection themselves. You do not say “you are greedy”. You say:

« Even the fish that lives in the water is always thirsty. »

This sentence — which I heard a thousand times in my childhood, which Marie-Louise Sibazuri quoted in the note she wrote me after reading my manuscript — names no one directly. It speaks of a fish. It speaks of water. And yet, if someone says it while looking at you, you know exactly what it means. Truth arrives by ricochet.

This mechanism of indirect speech completely transformed the way I write. I learned, thanks to Kirundi, that the best way to touch a reader is not to tell them what they should feel. It is to tell them something that will make them feel it all by themselves. Not to write “he was sad”: to write “he looked at his father’s hands without recognising them”. Not to write “the city was dangerous”: to write “the streets had emptied by noon and the dogs no longer barked”.

That is the detour. That is the fundamental lesson of Kirundi: never go directly where you want to go. Take the longest path, because it is the longest path that passes through the reader’s heart.

Do not write “he was sad”. Write “he looked at his father’s hands without recognising them”.

Tones: when a syllable changes everything

Kirundi is a tonal language. That means that the same syllable, pronounced high or low, can radically change the meaning of a word. An inflection, a pitch — and “friend” becomes “enemy”. “Peace” becomes “war”. This is not a metaphor: it is the very structure of the language.

For years this characteristic seemed to me a linguistic curiosity — the kind of thing one notes in a phonology class and forgets. Then I understood that it was a fundamental lesson in writing, perhaps the most important one Kirundi gave me.

In English, there are no tones. But there is something analogous: rhythm, punctuation, syntax, the placement of words within a sentence. And each of these elements can entirely transform the meaning of a sentence, exactly as tone transforms a word in Kirundi.

Compare these two English sentences:

“He loved her, he knew it.”

“He loved her. He knew it.”

The same semantic content. Two different punctuation marks. And yet, the comma says something fluid, continuous, a natural self-evidence. While the full stop introduces a gap, a distance — as if between love and the awareness of love, there were a space, a hesitation, something that had happened in the interval.

Kirundi taught me to hear the music of French and English sentences. Not only their meaning — their music. The fact that a long sentence creates an expectation, and that a short sentence following it can break that expectation like a gong. The fact that repetitions create an incantation. The fact that silence — blanks, dashes, ellipses — is as much part of the text as the words.

I did not know how to put these intuitions into words before linking them back to my mother tongue. It is Kirundi that helped me understand that languages do not only communicate information — they perform states. They make what they say exist.

« A language is not just a tool of communication. It is a vision of the world. A way of thinking, feeling, dreaming. A connection with the ancestors who have spoken this language for millennia. »

— Keza Ndenzako, character of Kidal, breaking point

Words that do not exist in French or English

In every language there are words for which other languages have no equivalent. These absences are the most instructive. They show what each culture has judged important enough to deserve a proper word — and what the other culture has judged secondary enough not to have one.

Here are a few of those Kirundi words that taught me something about French and English — and about their gaps.

Ubwitonzi — inner gentleness, the peace of oneself with oneself, the quiet wisdom

There is no English word for this. We say “serenity”, “inner peace”, “wisdom” — but none of these words captures the idea exactly: that quality of someone who needs no noise, who wears their calm like an invisible garment. When I tried to describe the father in my novel — that legendary silence, that way of locking himself in a leaden muteness that forced others to reflect — I realised I was searching for ubwitonzi in English. I did not find it. I had to construct the image.

Umuganuro — the royal sowing festival, the ritual of renewal

This word is not merely the name of a ceremony. It carries within itself a whole cosmology: the earth, the king, the community, the cycle of seasons, gratitude towards Imana. To translate it into English would require a whole paragraph. The novel contains a scene that evokes the Umuganuro — and I had to decide: do I translate, or do I leave the Kirundi word in the text, like a foreign pebble in the English language, to force the reader to stop and search?

I chose to keep the word. This decision — to keep untranslatable words in their original language rather than domesticating them — is as political as it is aesthetic. It says: this reality exists. It has its name. That name does not belong to you, and you will have to make the effort to approach it.

Impeshi — the small dry season of January-February

English says “dry season”. Kirundi has a precise word for this small, brief season between two rains — that pause in the Burundian climatic calendar, that respite which is not quite summer but resembles a parenthesis of light. This word taught me that English generalises where Kirundi particularises. That to give a proper name to something is to make it exist more fully.

Umumenja — originally “traitor”, later twisted to designate the victims of 1972

This word is a linguistic trauma. The Micombero regime used it to designate the Hutus killed or disappeared in 1972 — transforming the word “traitor” into the name of the victims, and the victims into culprits by the sole magic of a designation. This semantic reversal — this violence exerted by a word — taught me something about language that I would never have found in a rhetoric manual: that words are not neutral. That they can kill. And that the writer who claims that words are only words has never lived in a country where they have been used as weapons.

To keep untranslatable words in their original language is a political decision as much as an aesthetic one. It says: this reality exists. It has its name. It does not belong to you.

Ubuntu: a grammar of humanity

There is in Kirundi — and more broadly in the Bantu languages — a philosophical proverb that contains, on its own, a grammar of the whole of humanity. A proverb I learned very young and that took years to unfold all its consequences in my thinking and my writing.

Umuntu agirwa n’uwundi — a person is a person through other persons

This is the principle of ubuntu, that word which now circulates around the world but whose philosophical force few have truly measured. In Western thought, the dominant mode is Cartesian, individualist: “I think, therefore I am.” I am first myself, and my relations to others come afterwards, added to that already constituted self. Ubuntu says the opposite: you exist only because others exist. You are not an island. You are defined by your relationships, not by yourself.

This difference in philosophical grammar had immense consequences for my writing.

In Western literature, the classical hero is an individual — he struggles against the world, against others, against himself. His interiority is the main theatre of narration. The other characters often exist as surfaces onto which his psychology is projected.

In the Burundian narrative tradition, carried by Kirundi, the main character exists only in his relations. He is defined by who he is to others — son, brother, neighbour, member of a community. His identity is relational, not individual. Solitude, in this vision, is not a glorious romantic state: it is a wound. The exile — the umwimukirira, the one who has left his land and finds no new one — is not a romantic hero. He is someone lacking ubuntu. Someone who has not yet found the others who would allow him to exist fully.

In The Song of the Shores, I tried to build a narration that holds both. The novel is written in the first person — that very Western, very novelistic “I” — but the child-narrator exists only in the network of his relations: his father who silently carries the weight of the Ganwa aristocracy, his mother who silently carries that of the 1972 massacres, the blended sibling group of more than a dozen children, the neighbours on the plot, the voices of the neighbourhood. His identity is built by friction with all these others. He is not alone in his own story.

Ubuntu taught me to write an “I” that is not alone.

« You are not an isolated, autonomous, self-sufficient individual as in Western thought. You are not an island. You are part of an uninterrupted chain that goes back to the ancestors and forward to the children not yet born. »

— Keza Ndenzako, character of Kidal, breaking point

Silence as syntax

There is something Kirundi does better than any other language I have learned: it knows how to keep silent. And it taught me that silence is a syntax — a way of arranging the elements of a sentence, a discourse, a life.

In the Burundian tradition, silence is not the absence of speech. It is a form of speech. My father, in my novel, is described as a man whose leaden muteness forced those around him to reflect on their actions. This silence is not a void — it is a presence. It says something that words would say less well. It says: I will not speak, and this refusal to speak is in itself a message you will have to decipher.

I grew up in a family where ethnic questions were an absolute taboo. My parents never uttered the words “Hutu” or “Tutsi” in front of their children. This silence — I understood much later — was intentional, strategic, charged with both love and fear. It was a way of protecting us from a poisoned heritage. And it was also, paradoxically, a way of telling us: these words exist, they cause harm, and our silence around them is our way of opposing them.

The novel was born, in part, from my attempt to name what had not been named. To go and inhabit the silence of my parents in order to understand what it contained. To write what their love had chosen to keep quiet.

This lesson — that silence says something, and that the writer must learn to read silences as much as words — is perhaps the most precious that Kirundi gave me. In French or English, we are often tempted to say everything, to make everything explicit, to leave no blank in the narration. Kirundi taught me to leave spaces. To trust the reader to fill in what I left empty. To understand that the strongest emotion often arrives in the intervals, not in the words.

Silence is not the absence of speech. It is a form of speech. My father taught me that. Kirundi confirmed it.

The language of mist: Kirundi and metaphor

I would like to end with something more sensory, less analytical. With the mist.

Burundi is a country of mist. Not always, not everywhere — but in the hills of Muramvya where my father was born, in the heights of Kayanza where my mother was born, the mist comes in the morning like a veil of milk laid upon the world. It blurs contours, turns trees into silhouettes, drowns distances. In the mist, everything is present but nothing is distinct.

Kirundi is a language of mist. It does not draw sharp contours — it suggests, it envelops, it leaves things half-visible. Mist is not a flaw of the language: it is its aesthetic. Things half-said, truths approached sideways, emotions expressed in proverbs rather than declarations — all this creates a writing that resembles the morning mist on the hills of Muramvya.

Since I have been writing in French, I have tried to introduce this mist into a language that naturally prefers clarity. I am not seeking to write obscurely — I detest needless obscurities. But I seek not to say everything. To leave certain things in the half-light where they are more true than under harsh light. To trust the image where analysis would miss its target.

That is why the first chapter of the novel opens on a description of Muramvya at dawn — the ibigabiro, the sacred trees, the morning mist sliding across the valleys like a protective veil. It is not only a landscape description. It is a declaration of method. I tell the reader: you are entering a language that prefers mist to clarity. That says things sideways. That lets the mist do its work.

« In the green hills of Muramvya, at the centre of Burundi, life seemed to be a poem written by Imana, the God of the Barundi. The morning mist slid over the valleys like a protective veil, wrapping the region in a solemn calm. »

— The Song of the Shores, Chapter 1

This sentence, I wrote in French. But it was Kirundi that dictated it.

Writing between languages

I am not a bilingual writer. I am a writer who lives between two languages. And the difference matters.

The perfectly bilingual person masters two separate codes and switches between them fluently. The writer between languages — myself, Kourouma, Adichie, Mabanckou — does not have two separate codes. He has a single writing, built on a substratum where the two languages mingle, hail each other, enrich each other and sometimes clash. That writing is not perfectly at ease in either of the two languages. It is, to itself, its own language.

What Kirundi taught me about French is not, ultimately, a series of rhetorical techniques. It is a way of holding the language — with more lightness, more respect for silence, more attention to music and image, more mistrust of too-perfect transparency. It taught me that words are never innocent. That “how are you” and “what news” do not ask the same question about human existence. That a father’s silence can be more eloquent than any speech. That the morning mist on the hills of Muramvya is an aesthetic, an ethics, a poetics.

And perhaps, above all, it taught me this: one only writes truly well from where one comes. Not by imitating the language one admires, not by trying to erase one’s traces of origin. But by assuming them. By bearing them proudly like a music beneath the words.

My French has Kirundi beneath it. And that is precisely why it sounds the way it sounds.

One only writes truly well from where one comes. My French has Kirundi beneath it. That is precisely why it sounds the way it sounds.

— B. Claude Ntahuga

Brussels, May 2026

Short Kirundi glossary of this article

Mwaramutse → literally: "you slept well, you got up on the right side" | English: "good morning"

Amakuru ? → literally: "what news in your life?" | English: "how are you?"

Ni meza → literally: "it is good, it is beautiful" | English: "I'm well"

Umuntu agirwa n'uwundi → literally: "a person is a person through others" | English: "ubuntu — philosophy of interdependence"

Ubwitonzi → literally: "inner gentleness, quiet wisdom" | English: "deep serenity — untranslatable in a single word"

Umuganuro → literally: "royal sowing festival" | English: "ceremony of renewal — untranslatable"

Impeshi → literally: "small dry season of January-February" | English: "particular season without equivalent"

Umumenja → literally: "traitor — then: victims of the 1972 massacres" | English: "politically twisted word"

Umwimukirira → literally: "the one who has left his land and finds no new one" | English: "permanent exile"

Ibigabiro → literally: "sacred trees, guardians of the ancestors' secrets" | English: "ceremonial trees"

Intore → literally: "royal warrior-dancers" | English: "ritual dancers of the kingdom"

Imana → literally: "God of the Barundi — also: chance, grace, destiny" | English: "creator God in Burundian cosmology"

Keywords: #Kirundi #Bilingualism #Language #AfricanWriting #Literature #Burundi #Ubuntu #TheSongOfTheShores #Proverbs

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