Swahili, Schools, and Decolonisation
One of my favourite ways to kill time on long-haul flights is to try to learn a bit of the language of wherever I am going. Of course, you will not learn much, but even thanking a shopkeeper in his or her mother tongue will score you some points. In that spirit, on a recent interminable journey from New York to Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, I spent an hour or two having at it with Swahili.
I did not expect it to avail me much. Like all Sub-Saharan African states, Tanzania maintains the old colonial language as one of its official ones. It is only logical. Most nations in the Global South did not exist before Europeans showed up, so for better or worse, the only common language is the one they brought. Many list native tongues as co-official, but these are generally imposed by the dominant tribe, as foreign to the majority as the European ones (and often more resented).
Even in states like India, where a large minority of people speak Hindi, citizens who come from different heritages would rather adopt a neutral lingua franca than have their neighbours impose theirs. I actually tried my hand at Hindi for a few weeks before going there, but that did me little good in the south of the country. In Africa, where nations are typically divided into dozens or hundreds of tribes, there is usually no viable alternative to English, French, or Portuguese.
To my surprise, however, I discovered that the language spoken fluently by most people across Tanzania is, in fact, Swahili. It was particularly noteworthy given where I was, two hundred miles inland. Swahili was born on the East African coast, the bastard child of Arab colonists and local Bantu tribes. Its very name means “of the coast” in Arabic (interestingly enough, this is cognate with the Sahel region south of the Sahara), and nearly half its vocabulary would be familiar in Oman. But a century and a half ago, people deep in the Serengeti never would have heard it, save for during unwelcome visits by ever-tenacious Arab slavers.
In the 1880s, the world changed when new colonisers arrived. The Germans, perhaps taking their cue from the Dutch, were perfectly happy to govern in the local dialect. Across the vast territory of Deutsch-Ostafrika, children were required, for the first time, to go to school to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. All this was in Swahili, the language having been standardised and set to the Latin alphabet by the mustachioed white interlopers. It is telling that, to this day, the Swahili name for such institutions is shule, from German.
The growing popularity and imprimatur of imperial legitimacy helped Swahili catch on throughout the region. By the mid-20th Century, there was even a “Settla” dialect in use by whites in Kenya and Northern Rhodesia, adding yet another pinch to the linguistic blend.
When Tanganyika gained independence in 1961, making Swahili a bona fide national language was among the new government’s chief priorities. It was, perhaps, an ironic choice. After all, Swahili is itself a colonial language, developed by the Arabs and spread to most of the country by the Germans. The Zanzibar dialect was chosen as the official one after black revolutionaries in that island sultanate rather brutally saw off the Arabs there and joined newly-reminted TanZania (while most foreigners stress the final syllable, locals stress the first two).
Since then, Tanzania’s language policy has been one of the world’s more remarkable linguistic success stories. In half a century, a government that struggles with much else that it is supposed to do has created a national language. And it looks to have staying power. Swahili speakers enjoy broad access to news and entertainment; of all African languages, Swahili benefits from the widest availability of online tools like software, spellcheckers, translators, and even Wikipedia articles.
My Kilimanjaro guide told me an old joke ran that, when a man gets drunk, he forgets English; but when he gets really drunk, he forgets Swahili, and remembers only his tribal language. Today, tipsy Tanzanians of a younger generation typically speak Swahili better than their tribal tongue.
Swahili became an official language of Kenya in 2010 (alongside English), and is widely used in Uganda, Burundi, and the eastern Congo. It helps that it, like other languages born as creoles (including Afrikaans and, to some extent, English) is quite easily to learn, its grammatical quirks having been ironed out by generations of adults learning it poorly as a second language. Even the Chinese community in Dar es Salaam reputedly speak it well, (which, as a former resident of New York’s Chinatown, is really saying something).
So, Swahili’s success is impressive, giving millions of people a viable alternative to carrying on the legacy of imperialism in their daily lives. But is there a lesson in it for other countries? The answer may be disappointing.
Some nations, like Vietnam, had ancient histories well before white men showed up; others, like Indonesia and Malaysia, already had a lingua franca. But in Africa, while a handful of post-colonial states (e.g., Ethiopia, Zimbabwe) do have one group that makes up a majority, almost all of them are ethnically and linguistically balkanised. As we mentioned earlier, most people would rather speak a neutral European register than have someone else’s imposed on them. This is especially true in places where memories of mistreatment by other locals are more recent and more lurid than anything elderly people still remember about the Europeans.
And of course, any consolidation campaign today will run against the tide of globalisation. Most people take pride in their mother tongue. But learning a new one is hard, and people who do devote their free time to that will almost always opt for the professional and cultural opportunities of a major world language. And in the process, they make them their own.
Most Kenyans speak some Swahili, but Tanzanians make fun of them for speaking it badly. Many prefer English, the language of hit music, Hollywood movies, and lucrative jobs in tech and tourism. Angola does a lot of business with Brazil; Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, is the largest Francophone city on earth. Depending on how you measure, the largest Anglophone one is either Delhi, India or Lagos, Nigeria.
Still, one might argue, even if global languages are more practical, surely there is value in promoting local ones for cultural heritage and national pride. Few people will speak Swahili outside East Africa, or Kreyòl Ayisyen outside Haiti, but could not the same be said of Dutch or Norwegian?
It is a valid point. But, as I have observed elsewhere, every hour you spend forcing a kid to study a heritage language comes with an opportunity cost. And that cost can be more easily borne by a kid growing up in Leiden or Oslo or Cardiff than in Nairobi or Port-au-Prince.
Linguistic change takes time, but since the end of the Middle Ages, it has all tended in one direction. Peru and Mexico used to be vast patchworks of linguistic diversity; so did China. The way that today’s world languages have spread has often been unpleasant, and the decline of any language is a loss. The success of a few like Swahili is admirable. But if, a hundred years from now, everyone is more easily able to understand one another, would that be such a bad thing?
