Swahili on the Road
How did Swahili become an East African lingua franca? It was not by accident.
In March 1960 Julius Nyerere – then leader of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) – sat down with former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt on her roundtable discussion programme Prospects of Mankind. The topic was ‘Africa: A Revolution in Haste’. Although he found himself in a sympathetic circle of interlocutors, Nyerere was asked to defend the ‘readiness’ of African peoples for independence. Good-humoured but resolute, he replied: ‘If you come into my house and steal my jacket, don’t then ask me whether I am ready for my jacket. The jacket was mine, you had no right at all to take it from me … I may not look as smart in it as you look in it, but it’s mine.’ With a simple analogy, Nyerere swept aside the argument that decolonisation was happening too quickly. And though this defence was delivered in composed and commanding English – the language of his degrees at Makerere College in Uganda and Edinburgh University – the language that Nyerere championed at home was Swahili.
In 2021 UNESCO designated 7 July as World Kiswahili Language Day. Swahili is the first African language to be given such a distinction. The date was chosen to mark the decision made by TANU in 1954 to adopt Swahili as the language of its independence movement. Founded by Nyerere two days earlier on 5 July 1954, TANU was Tanganyika’s nationalist party. Over the course of the 1950s TANU demanded – and ultimately achieved – independence, Tanganyika becoming self-governing under the British Crown in 1961, and a full republic with Nyerere as president the following year. At his independence address in December 1961, Nyerere thanked Queen Elizabeth II in English; henceforth, the nation would be built with Swahili.
On the road
Swahili’s centrality in independent Tanganyika was not inevitable. For centuries, it was just one of the region’s more than 120 languages, its speakers concentrated along the Indian Ocean (or, ‘Swahili’) coast. But in the mid-19th century, as demand for ivory and enslaved people expanded, local trade routes in central Africa became incorporated into a global network centred around the Indian Ocean. Caravan routes carried Swahili from coastal ports to interior market towns as an East African lingua franca.
The 19th century also brought orthographic changes to Swahili. Written for centuries with a modified version of the Arabic script, by the middle of the century Swahili’s European partisans had begun the slow process of its Latin standardisation. Starting in 1864, schools run by the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa on Zanzibar took in formerly enslaved children and produced a series of handbooks that, decades later, would be adopted by the British colonial regime as the basis of its administrative Swahili. This established the foundation for the language that is now taught in East Africa and beyond as Standard Swahili, or Kiswahili Sanifu.
As the UN recognised in 2021, Swahili today is a global force, spoken (in all its varieties) by more than 200 million people. It is a national or official language in Tanzania, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda, as well as a working language of the African Union, the East African Community, and the Southern African Development Community. Such is Swahili’s postcolonial force that it has been described by the linguist John Mugane as a ‘linguistic tsunami’, a behemoth the success of which has come at the expense of other East African languages such as Chagga, Sukuma, Bondei, and Zaramo. How did Swahili come to inhabit this powerful position?
Ujamaa
Following the establishment of TANU in 1954, Nyerere and his fellow organisers crisscrossed Tanganyika territory, delivering speeches and encouraging people to join the movement. Addressing his audiences in Swahili, Nyerere later remembered requiring an interpreter on only three occasions (in the Mwanza region near Lake Victoria, for example, Sukuma was found to be more effective than Swahili). TANU made the language central to the fight for independence and, following its achievement, to Tanganyikan nation building. (The country officially became the Republic of Tanzania after the 1964 union with Zanzibar.)
Swahili’s importance was implicit in the philosophy which Nyerere chose to guide Tanzania’s postcolonial path, the concept of ujamaa. A Swahili word meaning ‘familyhood’, it is often glossed as ‘African socialism’. In a 1962 essay, ‘Ujamaa: The Basis of African Socialism’, Nyerere described the ideals embedded within the term: ‘We, in Africa, have no more need of being “converted” to socialism than we have of being “taught” democracy. Both are rooted in our own past.’ The basic unit of the family, and the care that one took for its members, was to be extended to the nation, the continent, and, indeed, to ‘the whole society of mankind’. In his 1967 Arusha Declaration, Nyerere laid out a programme exemplifying his understanding of the ujamaa philosophy, based on self-reliance, egalitarianism, rural development, and Pan-Africanism. Swahili became the language not just for the dissemination of ujamaa ideals: it was a crucial component of its work. The language itself was a means of minimalising factionalism and ethnic tensions, while facilitating the collective labour necessary to build the nation.
The Swahili taught in classrooms and during TANU-organised literacy drives was the standardised version that had been slowly consolidated over the previous century. Even today, Tanzanians have a reputation for speaking Kiswahili Sanifu (‘proper’ Swahili), in contrast to the dialects spoken in, say, parts of Kenya or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Although the nationalist movement under Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya also embraced Swahili, its role in Kenya’s postcolonial politics has been more ambiguous than in Tanzania. There are many reasons for this. Tanganyika’s colonial status – held, unlike British East Africa, under a League of Nations mandate from 1922 and, after 1946, as a UN trust territory – meant that Britain felt some pressure to support the use of Swahili in its colonial administration. The presence of a larger European settler population in Kenya entrenched English more deeply there and the violence accompanying the Mau Mau rebellion (as compared to Tanganyika’s relatively peaceful transition to independence) created fertile ground for postcolonial ethno-linguistic tensions.
The concerted championing of Swahili by Nyerere as a central part of nation-building created a strong association between the language and Tanzanian identity. In Kenya one might encounter a Swahili-infused language wholly divorced from the institutions of state and school, the vernacular language known as Sheng. Originally spoken by young people in Nairobi, Sheng (a rearrangement of the syllables of ‘English’) combines elements of Swahili, English, Arabic, and other Kenyan languages. Nevertheless, Swahili does play an important role in Kenyan social and political life. As the author Binyavanga Wainaina reflected, one encounters ‘three Kenyas’ on Nairobi’s busy sidewalks: ‘City people who work in English making their way home; the village and its produce and languages on the streets; and the crowds and crowds of people being gentle to each other in Kiswahili. Kiswahili is where we meet each other with brotherhood.’
‘Tanzaphilia’
By the late 1960s Swahili was increasingly associated with Tanzania’s position in world politics. The Kenyan-born, US-based scholar Ali Mazrui wrote an article in 1967 titled ‘Tanzaphilia’ in which he sardonically described what he regarded as the self-indulgent fascination of Western intellectuals with Tanzania and its eloquent president. It was, Mazrui wrote, ‘to the credit of Tanzania that she has managed to command the varied loyalties and affection of a wide range of external admirers’, from the US state department to ‘Western Marxists’.
But Nyerere never surrendered to the role of tame international darling. Though Tanganyika’s fight for independence had been largely non-violent, Nyerere acknowledged the necessity of force to remove the intractable white supremacist regimes of southern Africa. When the Organization of African Unity (OAU) – precursor to today’s African Union – was formed at a conference in Addis Ababa in May 1963, Nyerere assured his fellow heads of state that ‘we [in Tanganyika] are prepared to die a little for the final removal of the humiliation of colonialism from the face of Africa’.
Tanzania became a staunch supporter of the liberation movements developing in southern Africa, donating land in its central Dodoma region as a training camp for the armed wing of South Africa’s African National Congress. Nyerere broke diplomatic relations with Britain in 1965 over the latter’s handling of Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence, and offered Dar es Salaam as headquarters for the African Liberation Committee, an organ of the OAU that channelled support for independence movements around the continent. Because of this, thousands of people from southern Africa learned Swahili during stays in Tanzania, and many more looked upon the language as that of a steady ally.
In 2018 South Africa announced a new curriculum for Swahili in its schools to ‘promote unity on the African continent’, another example of Swahili’s long history as what the anthropologist Johannes Fabian has called a ‘language on the road’. The course of that road has traversed 19th-century trade routes, entered 20th-century classrooms, carried Julius Nyerere on his political ‘safaris’, and forged connections across Africa.
Morgan J. Robinson is Associate Professor of History at Mississippi State University and author of A Language for the World: The Standardization of Swahili (Ohio University Press, 2022).
