Cultural Identity in a Globalised World: Navigating the Loss and Preservation of Self

I've always struggled with my own cultural identity, but it became more severe when I transitioned into adolescence. When I was 19, I experienced my first identity crisis and that’s when it truly hit me. I had never spoken my native tongue. Of course, I’ve improved since then, but as I was entering my twenties, I found myself constantly questioning who I was in the cultural sense. There were cultural practices within my ethnic background that I found deeply disturbing, even primitive, and for a long time, they prevented me from identifying with my heritage.

Let me give you a few examples. In my tribe, when a woman is about to marry a man and that man dies suddenly—yet there were plans in motion for the wedding—she’s "inherited" by the next brother. The children she bears will take the name of the deceased man, yet her actual husband is his brother. Another version of this is when a woman is already married and her husband dies, leaving her a widow. She too can be inherited by the deceased husband’s brother. Personally, I find this practice to border on sexual perversion. It’s emotionally and psychologically unsettling.

Here’s another example. In the old days, when a man wanted to marry a young girl, she could be married off as soon as her first menstruation appeared. The man would identify her, approach the father with his intentions and pay the dowry—all in the absence of the girl, without her knowledge or consent. Later, he would come with other men to grab her and take her to his home, where she would be forced to become his wife and bear his children for the rest of her days. And he could repeat this as often as he liked, because polygamy is legal under customary law, and many African societies uphold this as cultural legitimacy to this day.

Honestly? That’s the most disgusting practice I’ve ever heard. For the longest time in our culture, sex was believed to be something created exclusively for men’s pleasure. It was unheard of for a woman to admit that she enjoys sex or even that she desires it, even within the confines of marriage. It remains a taboo. Any woman who speaks about it openly is stigmatised, labelled, or shunned. While slavery and colonialism were undoubtedly horrific, I must admit that the civilisation that came with colonial influence introduced some sense of reform. When I hear Kenyans defending our culture blindly—without discerning between harmful traditions and meaningful ones—I find myself deeply disturbed. Because unless we make that distinction, we’ll never evolve.

Let me be clear: I’m not a feminist. But the practices our ancestors believed in were revolting, and I’m honestly relieved that some of them have been erased from modern life. That said, I’ve embraced grammatical Swahili, and while I don’t speak Dholuo fluently, I get by. I understand it better than I can speak it. At the end of the day, we live in a global village. I want to master all five of the languages I know: British English, Swahili, French, Dholuo, and Quranic Arabic. Fluency in all five would make me incredibly marketable and intellectually versatile.

I do support some aspects of our culture—particularly the wisdom, sayings, and proverbs found in Kenyan traditions. Those are the parts of our heritage that deserve to be celebrated and preserved. But the rest? The corruption, impunity, the government’s incompetence—it’s infuriating.

Now, here’s what truly troubles me. Kenyans tend to be defensive of cultural practices, even when they’re clearly harmful. Take child sexual abuse—it’s an epidemic in this country. There are far too many paedophiles hiding in plain sight, men who defend their desires without shame. A child cannot consent. She cannot comprehend the gravity of sex, the risk of STDs or early pregnancy. And once she’s pregnant, the man disappears. The severity of patriarchy and misogyny in my culture is maddening. That’s why I take our values with a pinch of salt. You can’t embrace it all without critical analysis.

We’re too fractured now. I don’t feel guilty about saying that. At the end of the day, we don’t even know who we are anymore. We are selectively African when it’s convenient and selectively progressive when it suits us. We’re neither here nor there. Just hanging—waiting for ethnocentric cultures to define what counts as progressive thought. And I don’t blame my people for this. Maybe if more of us were better educated—really educated—we’d be different. We’d grow intellectually, challenge norms, express new ideas, and construct a progressive society based on original thought, not borrowed ideologies. Something uniquely African, shaped by us.

The problem is, we haven’t figured out how to get there. And even if we began, neocolonialism would still lurk in the background, haunting us.

But still—I believe in collective effort. It’s not clear-cut, and it never will be. But it would take national, maybe even continental initiatives and open discussions to ask the tough questions: Where are we now? Where are we going? Where do we want to be? We must figure out how to get there, together. Africa is our land and we have a responsibility to preserve it and everything within it. Everyone has a role to play. If we all applied ourselves correctly, sincerely, and consistently, the improvement would be undeniable.

We need to dare to dream. We must encourage each other, affirm the value within one another, bring it to the fore, and shape the kind of society we want to leave behind for our descendants. That is how we reclaim and redefine African cultural identity.

The internet could very well be a tool of neocolonial dilution—but it doesn’t have to be. It depends on how we use it. With intellect, intention, and unity, it becomes the perfect tool to catapult this continent forward. We must be determined, focused, patient, and ferociously consistent. Only then can we begin to reclaim what was fractured, and to build anew.

We are the village. And the work begins with us.