Once just an obscure island dialect of an African Bantu
tongue, Swahili has evolved into Africa’s most internationally recognised
language. It is peer to the few languages of the world that boast over 200
million users.
Over the two millennia of Swahili’s growth and
adaptation, the moulders of this story – immigrants from inland Africa, traders
from Asia, Arab and European occupiers, European and Indian settlers, colonial
rulers, and individuals from various postcolonial nations – have used Swahili
and adapted it to their own purposes. They have taken it wherever they have
gone to the west.
Africa’s Swahili-speaking zone now extends across a full
third of the continent from south to north and touches on the opposite coast,
encompassing the heart of Africa.
The
origins
The historical lands of the Swahili are on East Africa’s
Indian Ocean littoral. A 2,500-kilometer chain of coastal towns from Mogadishu,
Somalia to Sofala, Mozambique as well as offshore islands as far away as the Comoros
and Seychelles.
This coastal region has long served as an international
crossroads of trade and human movement. People from all walks of life and from
regions as scattered as Indonesia, Persia, the African Great Lakes, the United
States and Europe all encountered one another. Hunter-gatherers, pastoralists
and farmers mingled with traders and city-dwellers.
Africans devoted to ancestors and the spirits of their
lands met Muslims, Hindus, Portuguese Catholics and British Anglicans. Workers
(among them slaves, porters and labourers), soldiers, rulers and diplomats were
mixed together from ancient days. Anyone who went to the East African littoral
could choose to become Swahili, and many did.
African
unity
The roll of Swahili enthusiasts and advocates includes
notable intellectuals, freedom fighters, civil rights activists, political
leaders, scholarly professional societies, entertainers and health workers. Not
to mention the usual professional writers, poets, and artists.
Foremost has been Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. The
Nigerian writer, poet and playwright has since the 1960s repeatedly called for
use of Swahili as the transcontinental language for Africa. The African Union
(AU), the “united states of Africa” nurtured the same sentiment of continental
unity in July 2004 and adopted Swahili as its official language. As Joaquim
Chissano (then the president of Mozambique) put this motion on the table, he
addressed the AU in the flawless Swahili he had learned in Tanzania, where he
was educated while in exile from the Portuguese colony.
The African Union did not adopt Swahili as Africa’s
international language by happenstance. Swahili has a much longer history of
building bridges among peoples across the continent of Africa and into the
diaspora.
The feeling of unity, the insistence that all of Africa
is one, just will not disappear. Languages are elemental to everyone’s sense of
belonging, of expressing what’s in one’s heart. The AU’s decision was
particularly striking given that the populations of its member states speak an
estimated two thousand languages (roughly one-third of all human languages),
several dozen of them with more than a million speakers.
How did Swahili come to hold so prominent a position
among so many groups with their own diverse linguistic histories and
traditions?
A liberation language
During the decades leading up to the independence of
Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in the early 1960s, Swahili functioned as an
international means of political collaboration. It enabled freedom fighters
throughout the region to communicate their common aspirations even though their
native languages varied widely.
The rise of Swahili, for some Africans, was a mark of
true cultural and personal independence from the colonising Europeans and their
languages of control and command. Uniquely among Africa’s independent nations,
Tanzania’s government uses Swahili for all official business and, most
impressively, in basic education. Indeed, the Swahili word uhuru (freedom),
which emerged from this independence struggle, became part of the global
lexicon of political empowerment.
The highest political offices in East Africa began using
and promoting Swahili soon after independence. Presidents Julius Nyerere of
Tanzania (1962–85) and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya (1964–78) promoted Swahili as
integral to the region’s political and economic interests, security and
liberation. The political power of language was demonstrated, less happily, by
Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (1971–79), who used Swahili for his army and secret
police operations during his reign of terror.
Under Nyerere, Tanzania became one of only two African
nations ever to declare a native African language as the country’s official
mode of communication (the other is Ethiopia, with Amharic). Nyerere personally
translated two of William Shakespeare’s plays into Swahili to demonstrate the
capacity of Swahili to bear the expressive weight of great literary works.
Socialist overtones
Nyerere even made the term Swahili a referent to
Tanzanian citizenship. Later, this label acquired socialist overtones in
praising the common men and women of the nation. It stood in stark contrast to
Europeans and Western-oriented elite Africans with quickly – and by implication
dubiously – amassed wealth.
Ultimately, the term grew even further to encompass the
poor of all races, of both African and non-African descent. In my own
experience as a lecturer at Stanford University in the 1990s, for instance,
several of the students from Kenya and Tanzania referred to the poor white
neighbourhood of East Palo Alto, California, as Uswahilini, “Swahili land”. As
opposed to Uzunguni, “land of the mzungu (white person)”.
Nyerere considered it prestigious to be called Swahili.
With his influence, the term became imbued with sociopolitical connotations of
the poor but worthy and even noble. This in turn helped construct a Pan African
popular identity independent of the elite-dominated national governments of
Africa’s fifty-some nation-states.
Little did I realise then that the Swahili label had
been used as a conceptual rallying point for solidarity across the lines of
community, competitive towns, and residents of many backgrounds for over a
millennium.
Kwanzaa and ujamaa
In 1966, (activist and author) Maulana Ron Karenga
associated the black freedom movement with Swahili, choosing Swahili as its
official language and creating the Kwanzaa celebration. The term Kwanzaa is
derived from the Swahili word ku-anza, meaning “to begin” or “first”. The
holiday was intended to celebrate the matunda ya kwanza, “first fruits”.
According to Karenga, Kwanzaa symbolises the festivities of ancient African
harvests.
Celebrants were encouraged to adopt Swahili names and to
address one another by Swahili titles of respect. Based on Nyerere’s principle
of ujamaa (unity in mutual contributions), Kwanzaa celebrates seven principles
or pillars. Unity (umoja), self-determination (kujichagulia), collective work
and responsibility (ujima), cooperative economics (ujamaa), shared purpose
(nia), individual creativity (kuumba) and faith (imani).
Nyerere also became the icon of “community brotherhood
and sisterhood” under the slogan of the Swahili word ujamaa. That word has
gained such strong appeal that it has been used as far afield as among
Australian Aborigines and African Americans and across the globe from London to
Papua New Guinea. Not to mention its ongoing celebration on many US college
campuses in the form of dormitories named ujamaa houses.
Today
Today, Swahili is the African language most widely recognised outside the continent. The global presence of Swahili in radio broadcasting and on the internet has no equal among sub-Saharan African languages.
Swahili is broadcast regularly in Burundi, the DRC,
Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland and Tanzania.
On the international scene, no other African language can be heard from world
news stations as often or as extensively.
At least as far back as Trader Horn (1931), Swahili
words and speech have been heard in hundreds of movies and television series,
such as Star Trek, Out of Africa, Disney’s The Lion King, and Lara Croft: Tomb
Raider. The Lion King featured several Swahili words, the most familiar being
the names of characters, including Simba (lion), Rafiki (friend) and Pumbaa (be
dazed). Swahili phrases included asante sana (thank you very much) and, of
course, that no-problem philosophy known as hakuna matata repeated throughout
the movie.
Swahili lacks the numbers of speakers, the wealth, and
the political power associated with global languages such as Mandarin, English
or Spanish. But Swahili appears to be the only language boasting more than 200
million speakers that has more second-language speakers than native ones.
By immersing themselves in the affairs of a maritime
culture at a key commercial gateway, the people who were eventually designated
Waswahili (Swahili people) created a niche for themselves. They were important
enough in the trade that newcomers had little choice but to speak Swahili as
the language of trade and diplomacy. And the Swahili population became more
entrenched as successive generations of second-language speakers of Swahili
lost their ancestral languages and became bona fide Swahili.
The key to understanding this story is to look deeply at
the Swahili people’s response to challenges. At the ways in which they made
their fortunes and dealt with misfortunes. And, most important, at how they
honed their skills in balancing confrontation and resistance with adaptation
and innovation as they interacted with arrivals from other language
backgrounds.
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