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.
Julius Nyerere carried by crowd following the conclusion of the Constitutional Conference in Dar es Salaam, 29 March 1961. The National Archives. Public Domain.
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