Swahili is the most spoken language in Africa, with over 100 million speakers. It is a Bantu language believed to have originated from other languages, mainly Arabic, due to historical interactions between Arabs from the Middle East and East Africans.
Swahili has a global presence in radio broadcasting and on the internet that no other sub-Saharan African language can match.
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.
Swahili words and speech have appeared in hundreds of films and television series, including 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, such as Simba (lion), Rafiki (friend), and Pumbaa (puppet) (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, wealth, and political power associated with global languages such as Mandarin, English, or Spanish.
But 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.
Once just an obscure island dialect of an African Bantu tongue, Swahili has evolved into Africa’s most internationally recognized 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 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 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 role 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 have 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 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 language 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 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 the language 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.
Source: theconversation.com