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{
    "id": 1537755,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1537755/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 253,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. (Prof.) Kamar",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 33,
        "legal_name": "Margaret Jepkoech Kamar",
        "slug": "margaret-kamar"
    },
    "content": "reading a storybook the way we read from books because of the distractions that come with using telephones like social media and all sorts of things that interrupt. Therefore, having a library is something very important. As I support this Bill, I want to make a few comments and additions that I wish the Senator can add as we congratulate her. One is that one of the objects of this Bill is to establish libraries in each county. There is a need to encourage libraries to be situated in every ward. I want to persuade her to re-word there so that it reads, “Establishing libraries in each county with at least one library at the ward level.” This is because it is easy to make a library free access, but if you have to pay to travel from the farthest corner of Uasin Gishu County to Eldoret to the library, nobody will come and yet we want to encourage everybody to know the use of a library to research and read materials. Therefore, I encourage establishing libraries in each county with the aim of establishing at least one in a ward. That will improve the reading culture. The other thing that I like, which one Senator has talked about, is that this will be an area where we will be able to preserve our cultural heritage. I would also like an amendment on this to bring in that we are not only going to preserve, but develop our cultural heritage. This is to ensure that the research part of it will help us develop more. Currently, our culture has been distorted completely because we were destroyed during colonialism. We were made to believe that our cultures were a disaster and witchcraft. We were told that it was backwardness. Therefore, we need to redevelop and reconstruct the cultures that we have. We may go beyond preserving and develop our cultural heritage. Thank God that in our high schools, we have the music festivals. It has brought back the indigenous songs, rhymes and way of dressing, something that we have lost completely. We need to bring those ones back. There is one aspect that this development should also address. I suggest that we need to develop our languages. Apart from developing the cultural heritage, we also need to develop our languages. There was a time when the Minister of Basic Education said that children should learn English, Kiswahili and mother tongue. That could not be implemented because nobody knew how to teach mother tounge, including the teachers. So, we need to redevelop our languages. If anything, we should have dictionaries that move our languages to either English or Kiswahili so that we are able to build them. It is a heritage that we cannot afford to lose. We cannot afford to lose the different dialects that we have in this country. The library that will be researching on our cultures and heritage should also research on the different languages and dialects that we have in this country. They should build not only storybooks because they will need to research on the stories that were told during our days, but develop dictionaries that can give us the meanings of most of the words. Our languages were very rich. They were not only straightforward statements being made, but were sayings and proverbs. All of them are being lost. Only documentation and this kind of libraries that Sen. Korir is promoting can bring this back anything that was destroyed. I say this because I sit in the Pan African Parliament (PAP) and this year is the African year for culture and reparations from the colonialists."
}