How Kiswahili became the soul of African folks

Last year, Unesco proclaimed July 7 as the World Kiswahili Day. The celebrations happened last week for the first time under the theme “Kiswahili for Peace and Prosperity”.

Languages are a means of communication and more. They symbolise identities and cultural heritage, too. Moreover, they form circuits of value, where philosophies of their speakers disseminate to others of elsewhere. Each language is a portal to another dimension, where reality and knowledge can be experienced alternatively.

This is true of Kiswahili, too. With roots among us, Kiswahili is today spoken widely across the region and beyond.

Picture this: the world has 8 billion humans. Africans make up 1.25 billion of this population. Out of this, a quarter of a billion of them understand Kiswahili. I mean, the current population of Swahili speakers is estimated at 250 million, and growing! As the century advances, more and more Africans are acquiring this vital language of Africa.

Just last week, the government in Uganda endorsed Kiswahili as an official language. Apart from Kenya and Tanzania, Uganda is the other original member of the East African Community (EAC).

Kenya and Uganda have always used Kiswahili as their national languages and de facto official languages alongside English. However, in Uganda, Kiswahili has taken a very long time to be accepted formally.

Granted, the language has been taught at Makerere University and used in military training colleges across Uganda for years, but the recent turn of events will see it spread deeper and faster among the masses.

Using education systems of a country to support official languages is more sustainable and posts better results in terms of diffusion and sustainability. By making Kiswahili a compulsory subject in schools, Uganda is plying a road well travelled and one that aided post-Independence Kenya to raise her Kiswahili literacy levels.

In 1974, the father of the nation Mzee Jomo Kenyatta encouraged our lawmakers to adopt Kiswahili in the National Assembly. This became a major booster to the postcolonial development of the nation, cultural nationalism and our national language.

In 1984, Kiswahili received another booster when President Daniel Moi introduced the 8-4-4 curriculum. It made Kiswahili a compulsory subject at both primary and secondary levels of education. Kiswahili became a major examinable subject in national exams at the end of both levels.

On November 12, President Uhuru Kenyatta underscored the legacy of his father by facilitating the adoption of the Kiswahili versions of the Standing Orders of the National Assembly. Kenya now has a bilingual approach to records of the august house.

This mix of political and educational support has worked for Uganda, Kenya and even Tanzania.

TACIT SUPPORT

Were it not for the tacit political support Mwalimu Nyerere gave the language after the Arusha Declaration of 1967, Tanzania would have faced challenges of uniting the 130 ethnicities that form the cultural base of her cherished nationhood.

Apart from education and legislation, ideologies of regional integration, coupled with resurgent PanAfricanism, have contributed to the spread of Kiswahili to the rest of Africa.

For instance, South Sudan and Rwanda have since joined the pioneer East African countries in EAC. They have both adopted Kiswahili and entrenched it in their educational domains.

Both lands view the matter as a fulfilment of their obligation as EAC members as well as demonstration of their Panafricanism. The recent inclusion of the Democratic Republic of Congo will make the language more robust from the shores of Indian Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean.

Kiswahili is one of the official languages of the DRC and is widely spoken in the eastern parts of the country. It is spoken across Burundi, too.

In Ethiopia, Addis Ababa University has entered into a pact with the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania recently to co-teach Kiswahili to Ethiopian students.

Tanzanians have been instrumental in such initiatives and are the ones supporting the Southern Sudanese in introducing Kiswahili to schools in Juba since 2019.

Few Kenyans know the systematic lobbying Tanzanians made under their then President Jakaya Kikwete for the AU to adopt Kiswahili as an official language for its operations in 2004.

Fewer yet know how robustly the late John Magufuli championed the spread southwards of Kiswahili. Kiswahili was adopted by many southern African countries in 2019 under his leadership. As the head at the Southern African Development Community before his demise, his government encouraged South Africa, Botswana and Namibia to entrench Kiswahili in their school systems.

Mozambique already has a large community of Swahili speakers to its north, including the current President Felipe Nyusi. A clip did rounds on social media last week, showing him celebrating Kiswahili fluently.

Farther afield, in West Africa, Ghanaians teach it in Accra at the University of Ghana. The university has a robust Swahili Section with several local Swahili scholars.

I am thinking of Dr Sarah Marjie, Dr Josephine Dzahene-Quarshie and Dr Felix Sosoo, who founded the lively Swahili Students Association (Swasa), inspired by the PanAfrican spirit of Kwame Nkurumah, a known early supporter of Kiswahili as a continental lingua franca.

Indeed, the language has a brilliant future nationally, regionally, continentally and now globally. With its spread outside the continent, automatically spread will be also in the literature and arts that it weaves with wonderful ease and gait.